Stories Read Free Page A

the papers. Recently several men of George’s generation had married young women. One of them had fathered a son at the age of seventy. George was flattered by the newspapers, and told Bobby a good deal about his Ufe that had not come up before. He remarked, for instance, that he thought his generation had been altogether more successful about this business of love and sex than the modern generation. He said, “Take my son, for instance. At his age I had had a lot of affairs and knew about women; but there he is, nearly thirty, and when he stayed here once with a girl he was thinking of marrying I know for a fact they shared the same bed for a week and nothing ever happened. She told me so. Very odd it all seems to me. But it didn’t seem odd to her. And now he lives with another young man and listens to that long-playing record thing of his, andhe’s engaged to a girl he takes out twice a week, like a schoolboy. And there’s my daughter, she came to me a year after she was married, and she was in an awful mess, really awful…. It seems to me your generation are very frightened of it all. I don’t know why.”
    “Why my generation?” she asked, turning her head with that quick listening movement. “It’s not my generation.”
    “But you’re nothing but a child,” he said fondly.
    He could not decipher what lay behind the black, full stare of her sad eyes as she looked at him now; she was sitting cross-legged in her black glossy trousers before the fire, like a small doll. But a spring of alarm had been touched in him and he didn’t dare say any more.
    “At thirty-five, I’m the youngest child alive,” she sang, with a swift sardonic glance at him over her shoulder. But it sounded gay. He did not talk to her again about the achievements of his generation.
    After the wedding he took her to a village in Normandy where he had been once, many years ago, with a girl called Eve. He did not tell her he had been there before.
    It was spring, and the cherry trees were in flower. The first evening he walked with her in the last sunlight under the white-flowering branches, his arm around her thin waist, and it seemed to him that he was about to walk back through the gates of a lost happiness.
    They had a large comfortable room with windows which overlooked the cherry trees and there was a double bed. Madame Cruchot, the farmer’s wife, showed them the room with shrewd, non-commenting eyes, said she was always happy to shelter honeymoon couples, and wished them a good night.
    George made love to Bobby, and she shut her eyes, and he found she was not at all awkward. When they had finished, he gathered her in his arms, and it was then that he returned simply, with an incredulous awed easing of the heart, to a happiness which—and now it seemed to him fantastically ungrateful that he could have done—he had taken for granted for so many years of his life. It was not possible, he thought, holding her compliant body in his arms, that he could have been by himself, alone, for so long. It had been intolerable. He held her silent breathing body, and he stroked her back andthighs, and his hands remembered the emotions of nearly fifty years of loving. He could feel the memoried emotions of his life flooding through his body, and his heart swelled with a joy it seemed to him he had never known, for it was a compound of a dozen loves.
    He was about to take final possession of his memories when she turned sharply away, sat up, and said: “I want a fag. How about yew?”
    “Why, yes, dear, if you want.”
    They smoked. The cigarettes finished, she lay down on her back, arms folded across her chest, and said, “I’m sleepy.” She closed her eyes. When he was sure she was asleep, he lifted himself on his elbow and watched her. The light still burned, and the curve of her cheek was full and soft, like a child’s. He touched it with the side of his palm, and she shrank away in her sleep, but clenched up, like a fist; and her hand,