Free The Beast by Hugh Fleetwood Page A

it was that she had stopped going out for any but the most special reason, such as her lessons. But she couldn’t, really. It was something that had just crept up on her, without her noticing it. When she was small, she had gone out to school quite normally, and had even gone to have an ice-cream once in a while with her school-friends. They had lived in the city then. And as she had grown up, she had known a boy who lived in the same palazzo—a bespectacled, shy boy—and she had gone to the cinema with him sometimes on a Sunday afternoon. And obviously, since her mother had died and she had told her father she didn’t want him to get a maid, even if they could have afforded one, she went out every day to do theshopping. What was more, until she was about twenty-three or -four, she and her father went to her aunt’s—her father’s sister—every October for two weeks for a holiday, and she had been perfectly happy there. But it was about then, she guessed—when she was about twenty-four—that she first started to feel that she didn’t particularly like going out of the house. It wasn’t that she was frightened—what was there to be frightened of?—nor that her father was particularly strict with her, or jealous of her; he had always said that he knew he could trust his Antonietta. No. It was just that absurdly, inexplicably, she began to feel that ‘outside’ wasn’t altogether real. It was absurd, and inexplicable . She had never even tried to explain it to herself, let alone to anyone else. But it was so. And once she had had that feeling, and identified it, it began to grow. And since outside wasn’t real—why go outside? She didn’t say anything to her father, but simply cut down her shopping days to one a week, and always murmured softly, when he sometimes asked her if she would like to go out to a restaurant, that she had a headache, or that there was something she wanted to see on the television; or simply that she preferred not to, and would prepare an extra nice meal for them both at home. By the time she was twenty-six she didn’t even go to church any more on a Sunday. She would phone the priest occasionally, and ask him to stop by and see her when it was convenient for him; and she would confess, on her knees, in the dining room. And then her father got his forest warden’s job, and they moved into the apartment in the pinewood. And that, for her, had been perfection. Now she had an excuse for not going shopping ever, because it would have involved travelling and carrying heavy bags, and she could reasonably ask her father to get everything they needed when hefinished work each day. He drove to the shops with the list she prepared for him.
    He didn’t seem to notice that she never went out; or perhaps he didn’t know. He was a quiet, good-natured, tree-like man himself, who only really loved trees, and he seemed to think it quite natural that his daughter didn’t want to carry heavy bags on the bus; and besides, after a day spent for the most part alone, he quite enjoyed going into Ostia, where he could stop at a bar and have a drink and maybe chat to people. Every Tuesday evening he went out to play cards, and on Sunday afternoons he went to a football match. Of course, sometimes he asked Antonietta if she thought of getting married, wondered why she didn’t go to the beach in the summer, congratulated her—he was fiercely anti-religious for such a gentle man—for not going to church any more, and pressed her to go on holiday with him. But she smiled off his questions, ignored his congratulations, and told him so convincingly that for her, life in this house was a holiday—and further, was sure he was quite happy at her aunt’s by himself—that she never gave him any reason to believe that his daughter was at all unhappy, or indeed in any way odd.
    Which she wasn’t, she told herself. She loved to stay at home, and while she saw no point in going out, since outside didn’t really