The Lake of Darkness Read Free Page B

slightly stunned silence into which gratification gradually crept. Mrs. Urban took her hand from the door and came slowly back, her eyebrows rising and disappearing into her thick, blue-rinsed fringe.
    Martin laughed awkwardly. “I can’t quite believe it myself yet.”
    “I thought you were going to tell us you were getting married,” said his mother.
    “Married? Me? Whatever made you think that?”
    “Oh, I don’t know, it’s the sort of thing one does think of. We didn’t even know you did the football pools, did we, Walter? Exactly how much did you say you’d, won?”
    “A hundred and four thousand, seven hundred and fifty-four pounds, forty-six pence.”
    “A hundred and four thousand pounds! I mean, you can’t have been doing the pools very long. You weren’t doing them when you lived here.”
    “I’ve been doing them for five weeks,” said Martin.
    “And you’ve won a hundred and four thousand pounds!Well, a hundred and five really. Don’t you think that’s absolutely amazing, Walter?”
    A slow smile was spreading itself across Walter Urban’s handsome, though somewhat labrador-like, face. He loved it, the consideration of how to make it multiply, how (with subtle and refined legality) to keep it from the coffers of the Inland Revenue, and he loved the pure beauty of it as an abstraction on paper rather than as notes in a wallet. The smile grew to beaming proportions.
    “I think this calls for some sort of congratulation, Martin. Yes, many congratulations. What a dark horse you are! Even these days a hundred thousand is a large sum of money, a very
respectable
sum of money. We’ve still got that bottle of Piper-Heidsieck from our anniversary, Margaret. Shall we open it? Wins of this kind are free of tax, of course, but we shall have to think carefully about investing it so that you don’t pay all your interest away to the Inland Revenue. Still, if a couple of accountants can’t work it out, who can?”
    “Go and get the champagne, Walter.”
    “Whatever you do, don’t think of paying off the mortgage on your flat. Remember that tax relief on the interest on your mortgage repayments is a concession of H. M. Government, of which a single man in your position would be mad not to take advantage.”
    “He won’t keep that flat on, he’ll buy himself a house.”
    “He could become an underwriting member of Lloyd’s.”
    “There’s no reason why he shouldn’t buy a country cottage
and
keep the flat.”
    “He could buy a house and have the maximum twenty-five thousand mortgage …”
    “Do go and get the champagne, Walter. What
are
you going to do with it, dear? Have you made any plans?”
    Martin had. They weren’t the kind of plans he considered it would be politic to divulge at the moment, so he saidnothing about them. The champagne was brought in. Eventually they sat down to the casserole, the inevitably overdone potatoes, and a Black Forest cake. Martin offered his parents ten thousand pounds which they graciously but immediately refused.
    “We wouldn’t dream of taking your money,” said his father. “Believe me, if you’re lucky enough these days to get your hands on a tax-free capital sum, you hang on to it like grim death.”
    “You don’t fancy a world cruise or anything?”
    “Oh, no, thank you, dear, there really isn’t anything we want. I suppose you’d, really rather we didn’t tell anyone about it, wouldn’t you?”
    “I wasn’t thinking of telling anyone but you.” Martin observed his mother’s look of immense gratification, and this as much as anything prevented him from adding that there was one other person he felt obliged to tell. Instead he said, “I’d rather keep it a secret.”
    “Of course you would,” said Walter. “Mum’s the word. You don’t want begging letters. The great thing will be to live as if nothing whatsoever out of the way had happened.”
    Martin made no reply to this. His parents continued to treat him as if he had earned