The Good Apprentice Read Free

poison. You ought to die of shame, you ought to be punished, you ought to be in prison, people like you should be put away. May you pay for this with your life’s happiness. I hope that you will never be forgiven and that people will turn from you with horror, I hope and pray that you will never be happy again. My only consolation is that you will never recover from the drugs to which you are addicted, their effects are irreversible, you have destroyed your mind and will live the life of an idiot, tormented by fantasies. I wish my hatred could kill you. I curse you, I condemn you to a miserable haunted life. The claws which I drive into you now will never release their hold.
    Jennifer Wilsden.
     
     
    This letter from Mark’s mother arrived soon after the inquest. Edward thought of writing to her to say that whatever misery she wanted to curse him with was less than what he felt now and would for ever feel. However he did not write. Another similar letter arrived from her in the following week, then another. It was now March. Mark had been dead for nearly a month.
    Edward was entirely occupied with his misery, he had no other occupation. He took the tranquillisers and sleeping pills prescribed by the family doctor. He slept as long and as often as possible, he longed for sleep, unconsciousness, blackness, the absolute absence of light. He found it difficult, indeed pointless, to get up in the morning; curled up, hiding his head, he lay in bed till noon. There was nobody he wanted to see, and nothing he wanted to do except sleep and, when this was impossible, read thrillers. He avidly and quickly read dozen after dozen of the coarsest trashiest most violent thrillers he could lay his hands on. It was at least an occupation to go as far as the library or to the secondhand bookshops in Charing Cross Road. He could, in his state, have readily used pornography too if he had known how to get it. He wandered around Soho and looked into the windows of sex shops and at the photos outside strip joints. But he had not the nerve or particularity of will required to enter any of these establishments. He brooded over the cover pictures of terrible little magazines which had been soiled by eager hands, then slouched guiltily on, afraid of being visible. He wandered a good deal in London, vaguely hoping he might be run over. He stood in underground stations and watched the merciful tube trains thunder in. He did not visit pubs or bars. He had no desire for alcohol, and his old drug was now nothing to him; he could not imagine how he had ever wanted it. All that belonged to a childish phase which he could so gladly and easily have given up, which would be an incident in his past, were it not that now nothing of it could be left behind, he was arrested forever in the place of his crime. Something blood-stained and heavy would travel on with him always, through all of his life. How does one live after total wickedness, total failure, total disgrace? The plough had gone over him and he was dismembered. Grief and remorse were pale names for his condition. He recalled the innocence he had once had which he would never have again; and how happy he had been not so very long ago when, not knowing how blessed he was, he had carelessly thrown away all his possibilities of good. Oh why could not the past be undone, since he regretted it so bitterly and so sincerely? One momentary act of folly and treachery had destroyed all his time. He had no time now, only the dead task of passing the hours, there was no live time, no future, he hated everyone. He especially hated Sarah Plowmain, who had brought it all about by that homicidal seduction in her suffocating Sibyl’s cave. Sexual desire had left him, he could not conceive of feeling it again. The craving for pornography was something else, and even that was dull and lacked intensity. His fantasy life was deadened, he had become an obsessive machine, mechanically afraid of the police and of men in white