Free The Gigantic Shadow by Julian Symons

see, Bill, it’s life itself, what goes on here,’ she said. Once she angered him by saying that she wished she had had his experience of prison. He told her that she talked like a stupid child, that prison life was utterly destructive of everything decent and sensitive in the personality.
    She was unimpressed. ‘It doesn’t seem to have destroyed the sweetness and light in you, Mr Smith. Rather encouraged it, I should say.’
    There were days when the wild irrational gaiety which he thought of as her chief characteristic was totally absent, and was replaced by a morose misery that deeply touched him. On these days her physical appearance changed, the fine features became drawn and unnaturally pointed, and there seemed to be a pleading look in her eyes, as though she were asking him to procure for her something she knew to be unattainable. On days like these his presence seemed to bring her a sort of peace. They would not make love, but she would sit with her legs crossed on the bed and talk about her life at home, the way in which she had been spoilt by her stepfather, and how much she disliked Roger Sennett.
    ‘Daddy wants me to marry Roger. He makes me call him daddy, though he’s not my father.’
    ‘Yes, you told me that.’
    ‘It’s a good old family he says, he’s keen on that like most self-made men. You knew he was a self-made man, that’s what they call it, isn’t it absurd?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘His father was a barber, did you know that?’
    ‘No. Does it matter?’
    ‘It doesn’t matter a tuppenny damn to me,’ she said unconvincingly. ‘But it makes me laugh to think what he’d say if he knew about us.’
    ‘What would he say?’ he asked curiously.
    She shivered. ‘I don’t know. He’d – I don’t know. And Roger too. Roger would just go wild if he knew about you.’
    ‘He doesn’t know anything?’
    ‘If he did he’d kill me. Or you.’ She shivered again.
    ‘Why does your stepfather want you to marry him, if you don’t want to.’
    She bit a red fingernail. ‘It’s hard to explain. I’ve had a terrible life. I’ll tell you about it one day.’
    The statement seemed to him, from the viewpoint of his own life, naïve, absurd even. She said hotly, as though he had contradicted her, ‘It’s true. You can laugh, but it’s true. When I was eleven years old I ran away with a circus, didn’t come back for three days. Daddy almost went crazy, offered five thousand pounds reward, had the police out dredging canals and all that.’
    ‘He’s fond of you, then.’
    ‘He wanted a son.’ She spat out a bit of nail, looked at him out of the corner of her eye. ‘Divorced his first wife because they didn’t have any children – I mean, that was the real reason. He hoped my mother would have a child by him, but she never did.’
    ‘But he loves you,’ Hunter repeated. ‘I should have thought it might have worked the other way – he could have hated you.’ Again there was that sidewise glance, again he had the sense of something not said, of some meaning beneath the surface of the words.
    ‘Oh, he loves me all right.’ She paused. ‘In his own very special kind of way. He wants to own me, wants to run my life. Would you believe it, I don’t get an allowance, have to ask him when I want money. I’m twenty-three. Isn’t it just crazy, isn’t he a crazy man?’ She went on: ‘But I fool him. I get money. I do what I want.’
    ‘How do you mean?’
    ‘I’m here with you, aren’t I?’ The look she gave him was almost sly. ‘I hate him, most of the time. I hate him and want to hurt him. But then I love him, too. Or I like him. He’s nice. Do you understand that?’
    The fact was, as he readily admitted to himself, that he did not understand it or her, that the agonies of spirit she manifestly endured had to him no adequate cause. There were times when she clung to him weeping, and asking him not to let her go. To be regarded by a woman as a pillar of strength was to Hunter a