Kiss Kiss Read Free Page B

and how the
first page didn’t even begin in the nice way a letter should,
she began to get suspicious.
      
She looked away. She lit herself a cigarette. She took one
puff and laid the cigarette in the ash-tray.
      
If this is about what I am beginning to suspect it is about,
she told herself, then I don’t want to read it.
      
Can one refuse to read a letter from the dead?
Yes.
      
Well . . .
      
She glanced over at William’s empty chair on the other
side of the fireplace. It was a big brown leather armchair,
and there was a depression on the seat of it, made by his
buttocks over the years. Higher up, on the backrest, there
was a dark oval stain on the leather where his head had rested.
He used to sit reading in that chair and she would be opposite
him on the sofa, sewing on buttons or mending socks or putting
a patch on the elbow of one of his jackets, and every now
and then a pair of eyes would glance up from the book and
settle on her, watchful, but strangely impersonal, as if calculating
something. She had never liked those eyes. They were ice
blue, cold, small, and rather close together, with two deep
vertical lines of disapproval dividing them. All her life they
had been watching her. And even now, after a week alone in
the house, she sometimes had an uneasy feeling that they were
still there, following her around, staring at her from doorways,
from empty chairs, through a window at night.
      
Slowly she reached into her handbag and took out her
spectacles and put them on. Then, holding the pages up high
in front of her so that they caught the late afternoon light
from the window behind, she started to read:
T HIS NOTE , my dear Mary , is entirely for you, and
will be given you shortly after I am gone.
      
Do not be alarmed by the sight of all this writing. It is
nothing but an attempt on my part to explain to you precisely
what Landy is going to do to me, and why I have agreed that
he should do it, and what are his theories and his hopes. You
are my wife and you have a right to know these things. In fact
you must know them. During the past few days I have tried
very hard to speak with you about Landy, but you have steadfastly
refused to give me a hearing. This, as I have already told
you, is a very foolish attitude to take, and I find it not entirely
an unselfish one either. It stems mostly from ignorance, and I

am absolutely convinced that if only you were made aware of
all the facts, you would immediately change your view. That
is why I am hoping that when I am no longer with you, and
your mind is less distracted, you will consent to listen to me
more carefully through these pages. I swear to you that when
you have read my story, your sense of antipathy will vanish,
and enthusiasm will take its place. I even dare to hope that
you will become a little proud of what I have done.
      
As you read on, you must forgive me, if you will, for the
coolness of my style, but this is the only way I know of
getting my message over to you clearly. You see, as my time
draws near, it is natural that I begin to brim with every kind
of sentimentality under the sun. Each day I grow more extravagantly
wistful, especially in the evenings, and unless I watch
myself closely my emotions will be overflowing on to these
pages.
      
I have a wish, for example, to write something about you
and what a satisfactory wife you have been to me through
the years, and I am promising myself that if there is time, and
I still have the strength, I shall do that next.
      
I have a yearning also to speak about this Oxford of mine
where I have been living and teaching for the past seventeen
years, to tell something about the glory of the place and to
explain, if I can, a little of what it has meant to have been
allowed to work in its midst. All the things and places that I
loved so well keep crowding in on me now in this gloomy
bedroom. They are bright and beautiful