In the Flesh Read Free Page B

your pardon?'

     

      Helen had been at pains to keep her recounting of this story as uncoloured by her own response as she could. She was interested to know what Trevor would make of it, and she knew that if she once signalled her own stance he would instinctively take an opposing view out of plain bloody-mindedness.

     

     

      'He had a hook,' she repeated, without inflexion.

     

     

      Trevor put down his fork, and plucked at his nose, sniffing. 'I didn't read anything about this,' he said.

     

      'You don't look at the local press,' Helen returned. 'Neither of us do. Maybe it never made any of the nationals.'

     

    '"Geriatric Murdered By Hook-Handed Maniac"?' Trevor said, savouring the hyperbole. 'I would have thought it very newsworthy. When was all of this supposed to have happened?'

     

     

    'Sometime last summer. Maybe we were in Ireland.'

     

      'Maybe,' said Trevor, taking up his fork again. Bending to his food, the polished lens of his spectacles reflected only the plate of pasta and chopped ham in front of him, not his eyes.

     

     

      'Why do you say maybe?' Helen prodded.

     

     

      'It doesn't sound quite right,' he said. 'In fact it sounds bloody preposterous.'

     

     

     'You don't believe it?' Helen said.

     

      Trevor looked up from his food, tongue rescuing a speck of tagliatelle from the corner of his mouth. His face had relaxed into that non-committal expression of his - the same face he wore, no doubt, when listening to his students. 'Do you believe it?' he asked Helen. It was a favourite time-gaining device of his, another seminar trick, to question the questioner.

     

      'I'm not certain,' Helen replied, too concerned to find some solid ground in this sea of doubts to waste energy scoring points.

     

      'All right, forget the tale - ' Trevor said, deserting his food for another glass of red wine. ' - What about the teller? Did you trust. her?'

     

     

      Helen pictured Anne-Marie's earnest expression as she told the story of the old man's murder. 'Yes,'

    she said. 'Yes; I think I would have known if she'd been lying to me.'

     

     

      'So why's it so important, anyhow? I mean, whether she's lying or not, what the fuck does it matter?'

     

      It was a reasonable question, if irritatingly put. Why did it matter? Was it that she wanted to have her worst feelings about Spector Street proved false? That such an estate be filthy, be hopeless, be a dump where the undesirable and the disadvantaged were tucked out of public view - all that was a liberal commonplace, and she accepted it as an unpalatable social reality. But the story of the old man's murder and mutilation was something other. An image of violent death that, once with her, refused to part from her company.

     

      She realized, to her chagrin, that this confusion was plain on her face, and that Trevor, watching her across the table, was not a little entertained by it.

     

      'If it bothers you so much,' he said, 'why don't you go back there and ask around, instead of playing believe-in-it-or-not over dinner?'

     

     

      She couldn't help but rise to his remark. 'I thought you liked guessing games,' she said.

     

     

      He threw her a sullen look.

     

     

      'Wrong again.'

     

     

      The suggestion that she investigate was not a bad one, though doubtless he had ulterior motives for

     

    offering it. She viewed Trevor less charitably day by day. What she had once thought in him a fierce commitment to debate she now recognized as mere power-play. He argued, not for the thrill of dialectic, but because he was pathologically competitive. She had seen him, time and again, take up attitudes she knew he did not espouse, simply to spill blood. Nor, more's the pity, was he alone in this sport. Academe was one of the last strongholds of the professional time-waster. On occasion their circle seemed entirely dominated by educated fools, lost in a wasteland of stale