Free The Gigantic Shadow by Julian Symons Page A

sensation so strange that it gave him a sort of intoxication of pleasure, and pity was joined to the sensual and idealistic love he felt for her. At such times she would talk wildly of committing suicide. Looking with affection at the wretched room in the Cosmos she would say, with no apparent consciousness of absurdity, that it was the nearest thing to home she had ever known.
    On one such occasion he began to laugh. She turned on him fiercely. ‘Oh, you’re a fool. You’re just a fool, Bill Hunter. You’re so proud of having been in prison. You think you know it all, and the fact is you don’t know anything.’
    He shrugged, as a substitute for saying that if she liked to believe that she was welcome to do so.
    ‘Do you understand what it is to have the things you love destroyed?’ she asked. ‘I had a dog once, a spaniel puppy named Troy. I loved that dog more than anything. When I came home from school after my mother died, I was thirteen then, I found that Daddy had had Troy put down. He’d bitten some neighbour’s brat who had been teasing him. What do you think of that?’
    Hunter shrugged again, to suggest politely that he thought nothing at all of it.
    ‘It seems silly to you, I expect. You’re the kind of cold-blooded bastard that it would seem silly to.’ And she asked again, ‘Do you understand what it is to love someone and hate them at the same time?’
    He said slowly, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone before you. And I don’t want to hurt you. If I ever do, it will be by accident.’
    During the conversation they had been lying on the bed. Now she rolled over and, burying her head on his chest, began to cry. He tried to raise her head, but she would not look at him. He stroked her black hair. It was some time before she lifted her head from his chest. ‘You don’t want to hurt me. You really mean that, don’t you?’
    ‘But of course I do,’ he said wonderingly.
    ‘You’re the first one.’ She clung to him, weeping, in an ardour of self-abasement that made her kneel and kiss his hands and feet. ‘I love you,’ she cried out despairingly, as though she expected contradiction. ‘I really love you. What do you want me to do to prove it? Ask me and I’ll do it. Anything, anything.’
    On the following day she talked to him about her mother and father. ‘You know I said you were the first one who didn’t want to hurt me. It wasn’t true. My father never wanted to hurt me. He did hurt me, but he never meant to. He was Norman Hales. My mother was Mary Hales.’
    ‘I seem to remember your mother’s name,’ he said uncertainly. ‘But I don’t know why.’
    ‘Christ, you are an ignorant bastard. Where were you brought up?’
    ‘For ten years I was brought up in prison,’ he said mildly. Then he remembered Mary Hales. It was as though a membrane covering and checking the flow of memory broke with the words. He saw again the hall into which they were marched every Thursday for film shows and concert parties. There was always something furtively exciting about those Thursdays. It was not simply that the darkness provided opportunities for exchange of news and the passing of tobacco, but that the two hours during which they were out of their cells always held, for Hunter, an illusion of freedom. In fact nothing ever happened on these Thursdays, there was never any riot or attempt at escape – and if there had been the attempt must have failed, for the hall was packed with warders – yet about those two hours of pretended normality there was undoubtedly the uneasy smell of spurious freedom. It was on one of the Thursdays that Mary Hales, a pretty, fragile blonde, had come down, sung some songs and done a comic sketch as part of a show called – what had it been called now? – the West End Follies. The men had talked about her and the other women, making as usual vivid use of their imaginations. She came back clearly to his mind, a small woman with a pleasant, unremarkable