Free The Beast by Hugh Fleetwood

money for the bus and train fares there and back. She glanced at herself briefly in the mirror in her bedroom. And then, smiling slightly, trying to move as slowly as possible, she walked around the whole apartment, as if saying goodbye to it. She looked at her own bare room, that had only a bed, a chest of drawers, a wardrobe and the mirror in it; she went into her father’s room, that was furnished as sparsely as hers, except that it had a double bed in it; a relic of the days, twenty or more years ago, when she had had a mother, and her father a wife. She went into the dining room, with its shiny marble floor and its shiny wooden table and its great bowl of dried flowers on the shiny wooden sideboard, where she and her father ate together in the evening. She went into the living room, with its three blue wire-legged armchairs, and its one blue wire-legged divan, where she and her father watched the television in the evening—and from whose windows she could, if she had wanted, have looked out over the pine trees to the crowded, noisy beach. And lastly, she went into the spotless white kitchen, where she prepared her ownand her father’s meals; and from whose windows, that faced away from the sea, and from which one could see the road that cut through the woods to the city, just three days ago, while she had been washing the floor, she had seen a flame-coloured car stop, and pick up a girl in an orange T-shirt …
    She closed her eyes for a second. Should she have phoned the police, she wondered. But what was the use? After all, she hadn’t actually seen the driver’s face, after he had got out of the car with such strange gallantry to open the door for the girl, and she obviously didn’t remember the number, and it would be a terrible thing if she did call the police and help get a perfectly innocent person into trouble. Added to which, if she had told the police what she had seen, they would have come here and disturbed her and might even have wanted her to go out; and they would surely have ruined these last two days, in which her whole time—apart from the essential cleaning and cooking—had been dedicated to preparing for her last lesson. And she couldn’t have let anything interfere with that. Tomorrow, maybe, she would think things over more clearly, and come to some decision. She might even call Padre Enrico and ask his opinion. If, of course, tomorrow …
    She opened her eyes, and looked at her watch, and left the kitchen. She was a little early, but it didn’t really matter, she decided. She would walk more slowly through the pinewood to the road, and say goodbye to the trees, too. After all, there would be no more Thursday afternoons from now on.
    It was always an effort to open the front door; always the feeling that the air, the sky, the whole outside might sweep over her and drown her made her pause for amoment, and bite her lips. But it was always an effort and a feeling that she enjoyed. And today she enjoyed it more than ever before; more than she could ever remember having enjoyed anything. She stood there, with her white gloved hand on the door knob, and trembled with anticipation , with a sense of joy, of ecstasy almost, for a full minute before finally taking the plunge. And when she did push the door open—very conscious that it might be the last time she would do so, at least for quite a long time—and saw the grey-green umbrella pines beneath her, and felt the vast, nearly visible wave of summer heat engulf her, she wanted to cry out and shout to the whole world that she was here, and that the world should take notice of her; plump, white, Antonietta Misseri, whose thirtieth birthday it was today, and who was going out to her last lesson.
    She walked slowly down the steps to the sandy ground—her father was a forest warden in the presidential reserve, and their apartment, in the private wood, was built over a garage that housed fire-fighting equipment—and tried to remember exactly when