Mr. Gwyn Read Free Page A

did.
    The girl then went off, walking in that slightly ship-like way that fat people have of walking, but first she smiled at Jasper Gwyn as she said goodbye, with a radiant light in her eyes, with her magnificent lips, her white teeth.

8
    Yet winter seemed pointlessly long that year, and the fact that he woke up early in the morning, sleepless, in darkness, began to offend him.
    One day, when it was cold and raining, he was sitting in the waiting room of a clinic, a number in his hand. He had persuaded the doctor to prescribe some tests—he claimed he didn’t feel well. A woman with a full shopping cart and a soaking-wet umbrella thatkept falling down came and sat beside him. An old woman, with a rain scarf on her head. She took it off at some point, and in the way she smoothed her hair there was something like the remains of a seduction interrupted many years earlier. The umbrella, however, continued to fall in every direction.
    â€œMay I help you?” asked Jasper Gwyn.
    The woman looked at him, then said that they ought to have umbrella stands in the clinics on rainy days. Someone, she added, had only to remove it when the sun returned.
    â€œIt’s a sensible argument,” said Jasper Gwyn.
    â€œOf course it is,” said the woman.
    Then she took the umbrella and laid it down on the floor. It seemed like an arrow, or the edge of something. Slowly a puddle of water formed around it.
    â€œAre you Jasper Gwyn or just someone who looks like him?” the woman asked. She did it as she searched for something small in her purse. As her hands rummaged in it she looked up to be sure that he had heard the question.
    Jasper Gwyn wasn’t expecting it, so he said yes, he was Jasper Gwyn.
    â€œBravo,” said the woman, as if he had answered a quiz question correctly. Then she said that the scene on the wharf, in Sisters , was the best thing she had read in recent years.
    â€œThank you,” said Jasper Gwyn.
    â€œAnd also the fire in the school, at the beginning of the other book, the long one, the fire in the school is perfect.”
    Again she looked up at Jasper Gwyn.
    â€œI was a teacher,” she explained.
    Then she took two candies out of her purse, they were round, citrus-flavored, and offered one to Jasper Gwyn.
    â€œThank you, no, really,” he said.
    â€œCome on!” she said.
    He smiled and took the candy.
    â€œThe fact that they’re lying in the bottom of my purse doesn’t mean they’re disgusting,” she said.
    â€œNo, of course not.”
    â€œBut I’ve noticed that people tend to think so.”
    Jasper Gwyn thought it was just like that, people are suspicious of a candy found at the bottom of a purse.
    â€œI think it’s the same phenomenon that causes people to be always slightly distrustful of orphans,” he said.
    The woman turned to look at him, astonished.
    â€œOr the last car in the Tube,” she said, with a strange happiness in her voice.
    They were like two people who had been at school together as children, and now were reeling off the names of their classmates, bringing them back from enormous distances. A moment of silence passed between them, like a spell.
    Then they began talking, and when a nurse came and announced that it was Mr. Gwyn’s turn, Jasper Gwyn said he couldn’t right then.
    â€œYou’ll lose your turn,” the nurse said.
    â€œIt doesn’t matter. I can come back tomorrow.”
    â€œAs you wish,” the nurse said coldly. Then in a loud voice she called a Mr. Flewer.
    The thing seemed totally normal to the woman with the umbrella.
    In the end they found themselves alone in the waiting room, andthen the woman said that it was really time to go. Jasper Gwyn asked if she didn’t have to have a test, or something like that. But she said that she came there because it was a warm place, and it was exactly halfway between her house and the supermarket. Besides, she liked looking at