Free All the Beauty of the Sun by Marion Husband Page B

train, George remembered how a spark of anger had shown in Paul’s face, so quick that he might have been mistaken, although he was sure he was not because Paul’s voice was hard as he said, ‘My wife isn’t a child.’
    But she was, George thought; Margot had never been more than an eighteen-year-old child to him, immature, too quick to worship Paul, seeing only the boy in uniform, the wounded young officer who was kind and attentive and took such great care of her and their baby. In every respect, he had been a good husband. Every respect but one.
    He sometimes wondered what Paul had told Margot that terrible morning, when, still wearing the clothes he had gone out in the previous night, still stinking of the police cell, he’d taken her upstairs to their bedroom and closed the door behind them. What did a man say to his young, young wife when he had been caught buggering a man in a public lavatory? That he would go to prison; that the details of the trial would be printed in the local newspaper and that her neighbours would from now on cross the road to avoid her and put excrement through her letterbox along with their hate-filled letters? From his study George had heard Margot cry out, a thud as though something had been dropped; he had been holding Bobby, who had looked up towards this noise, his face crumpling as his mother began to howl.
    His son had been disgraced, then, and sent to prison; his daughter-in-law and grandson moved to her parents’ house across the road from his; and his neighbours and many of his patients had shunned him, affecting his living. He smiled to himself bitterly; Paul had owed him lunch, especially such a lunch he could no longer afford for himself.
    He thought of his home, Parkwood, the ugly house full of unused, freezing rooms his father had designed and built as a very young man. In those days the Harris fortune was still intact under his grandfather’s good management. His grandfather and father had both been architects; his father could draw anything, swiftly, with an uncanny, joyful perception; as a child George had thought him a magician for the way he could create a running, jumping dog from just a few strokes of a pencil. His father had adored Paul; the two of them shared the same skills. Perhaps Paul’s artistry shouldn’t have surprised him quite so much.
    Parkwood was on the outskirts of town, close to the park and cemetery. From Thorp Station he would walk the mile or so home through the evening’s empty streets. He would unlock his door, turn on the hall light, place his case down and hang up his coat and hat. In the hallstand mirror, he would see that his face was smutty from the journey and he would go into the kitchen to boil enough water to wash. He would make tea and drink it black because there would be no milk. He would light a fire in his study, one he had laid before he left for London, all ready to put a match to. Empty for two days, Parkwood would seem sullen in its cold dampness, showing only how shabby it could be; but everything would be all right once the fire was burning, the tea brewed, some toast made; everything would be just as if he had never gone away.
    George stared out of the window as the train sped through the Essex countryside. He had told Iris that he would put a lamp in his study window when he arrived safely home, bright enough so that she could see it from her bedroom. Perhaps her husband Daniel would be out administering at a deathbed and she would be free to slip from the vicarage, across the graveyard and over the road to his house, escaping quick and quiet as a ghost from a tomb. And she would be a little breathless when he opened the back door, shivering in the sympathetic moonlight, smiling. ‘I’ve killed him,’ she’d say. ‘I stove in his head with an axe.’ It was something she sometimes said, her blackest joke. Standing aside he would hold the door wide open. ‘Come