The Temporary Read Free

motion snagged Francine’s gaze and with the sudden latent shock which signals the imminence of danger she fell from her reminiscences and plunged back into the present moment. She understood from his wild, loping walk that it was a deformed man, his hunched body flailing sideways like that of a crippled bird. As she watched, he struck off into the grass and began running in circles, light footed and graceful, as if he were dancing; then he stopped and gazed beatifically at the empty sky, flinging out first one arm and then the other in a seed-sowing gesture. He looked up, and before she could contrive to glance away he had caught her in his sights and begun lumbering over the grass towards her. Immediately Francine left her seat and started walking quickly towards the park gates. Her heart thudded and strained ahead, alert for the sound of footsteps behind her, but when she reached the road and looked back she saw the man standing beside the empty bench, talking and waving his arms wildly. She crossed quickly, grateful for the firm body of traffic which now lay between them. In the distance she could hear a telephone ringing.
    Francine lived at the end of an isolated terraced row on Mill Lane, a long road which dangled like trailing spaghetti from the concrete jaws of Kilburn. The outer side wall of the building gave on to a tangled brace of railway tracks, which lay some way down in a wide incision stretching far away towards the cupped palm of the city like an arm of exposed veins, and which gave the house the precarious appearance of a cartoon character sauntering over a cliff. She had for almost a month been occupying the basement flat, which she had found in response to an advertisement in a newspaper. Janice, who had placed the advertisement, lived there with her. The flat was the fourth Francine had rented in the past year, and although lately she had begun to find certain aspects of Janice’s behaviour far from ideal – in fact, altogether hypocritical – the loftier hopes for the arrangement which she had harboured when first she had moved in had so far prevented her from mentioning them. Janice was undoubtedly the sovereign figure in the history of her flatmates and although, once the first worship of unfamiliarity had faded, Francine had begun to see how she would scale and conquer this more sophisticated range, she required time to accustom herself to its greater challenge.
    Before she came to live with Janice, Francine had shared a flat in High Barnet with two other secretaries. Her stay with them had been the briefest of all her tenancies, but she found herself occasionally looking back on it with a vague longing for the home which had included amongst its luxuries the ease of feeling contempt for those with whom she shared it. In return for the condescensions her sense of her own superiority had permitted her to make, Lisa and Michele had admired her unflinchingly, and when she announced her intention to move to a location more central to her expectations, had encouraged her to do so with the selfless wistfulness of plain sisters. Francine rather missed their easy company now, for at least they had all been going out to work, and she had enjoyed watching their eyes widen as she told them of her adventures in the City after their dull days at the local estate agent. Janice only did two mornings a week at a boutique in Hampstead, where she seemed to earn enough not to need anything else and was always getting free clothes, and when Francine came home in the evenings Janice would never ask her anything about her day. In fact, she often seemed to have forgotten that Francine went to work at all, and would say things like, ‘So where have you been today?’ Francine would tell her and she would say ‘Again?’ or ‘Still?’ and look vaguely sympathetic. Of course, on the days when Janice had to go in she would always make such a drama out of it, and would be in the bathroom for hours so that the mirror