Free The Dividing Stream by Francis King

had been frail, with mouse-blonde hair, a soft, almost inaudible voice and small hands which perpetually fluttered as she talked. But the smile, yes the smile; and the same douce, almost cloying, tenderness which at one and the same moment made him want to relax with a sigh and to run far away.… For both women his work was a mystic dedication to be spoken about as the wives of politicians speak about their husbands’ careers; whereas for Karen it was merely the source of holidays in expensive hotels, a town and country house, and the children’s education. Never for a moment did Karen flatter him with the thought that what he did could be done by no one else; but for poor Ethel, as now for Lena, that belief had been implicit.
    Not that he had ever really enjoyed being Ethel’s hero. Even as a young man, when the taste of adoration is kinder to the palate, he had often wanted to vomit up her sweet, uncritical devotion. And indeed, what had first attracted him to Karen, apart from her pathos, was precisely her refusal to find him impressive, as Ethel had done. Moreover her very scepticism had driven him up and up to heights which he doubted if he would ever have scaled with only Ethel to satisfy. All at once, on marrying Karen, his ambitions had swollen; for, whereas, with Ethel, it had been enough to have made a success out of his uncle’s business in Detroit, to own a six-bedroomed house and a comfortable Ford tourer, and to have a single coloured maid, under Karen’s grudging eye these achievements soon began to seem small. And so the business ceased to be a Detroit business, or even an exclusively American business; and with a strange mingling of joy and fear he had discovered in himself abilities which, because of the atrophying effect of Ethel’s praise, he had never known he possessed. Karen demanded so much, the most ingenious and reckless of deals winning from her no more than a ‘‘Not bad, darling”, that each success only served to make him struggle higher in the determination that one day he would really show her, one day she would really be impressed.… And he had come so much to enjoy the tireless pushing upward, that sometimes the thought of attaining this object would make him feel afraid. After that, what would be left? he would ask himself. Would life seem all at once empty?
    Ah, but the climbing so often made him feel giddy; and then, like the traveller in the desert who suddenly thinks nostalgically of tea in his suburban home (soggy toast, fruit cake and damson jam in a crystal dish), Max would think of the six-bedroomed Detroit house, of Ethel padding up and down stairs in slippers to ‘‘peep’’ at the sleeping children, of picnics, visits to the cinema, and holidays in a bungalow on the Cape. Perhaps he didn’t really wish to go back to these things any more than the traveller really wants to return to his suburb; but there were times when an intense, parched longing for them would fill his whole being. To return, only to return!
    As if to break from this craving, he got off the bed and thumbed through some of the letters and papers which Lena had arranged on his desk. The man in Vienna was obviously inefficient, perhaps should be sacked. What news from London? Rome—he’d have to go there.… Suddenly, a physical giddiness, the counterpart of the mental unease he felt as he turned the typed papers, made him clutch the side of the desk. Up and up, up and up.… He remembered how at one of his college initiations he had had to climb a pole blindfolded, while below the members of the fraternity had belaboured him with plimsolls, belts and rulers. He had seemed to climb for hours to escape from their encouraging shouts, their laughter, and their sharp, stinging blows; nor had he ever wholly escaped from them, since in the end they had pulled him down and told him that would do.… ‘‘ That will do’’; he had never heard Karen use the phrase.
    He wandered into her room and, as if