Free Original Sin by P. D. James Page B

stimulus and challenges of the office, the raucous life of the river. She had to live somewhere since she couldn’t live with Henry Peverell. But now she realized, in an overwhelming moment of revelation, that her life at West Marling would be insupportable without her job.
    She saw that life stretching before her in a series of bright disjointed images projected on the mind’s screen in a clicking, inexorable sequence: hours, days, weeks, months, years of unfulfilled predictable monotony. The small household chores which would give her the illusion of usefulness, helping in the garden under Joan’s supervision, acting as secretary or typing for the PCC or the WI, shopping in Tonbridge on Saturdays, Holy Communion and Evensong on Sundays, planning the excursions which would provide the highlights to the month, not rich enough to escape, with no excuse to justify escape, and nowhere to escape to. And why should she wish to leave? It was a life her cousin found satisfying and psychologically fulfilling, her place in the village hierarchy secure, the cottage her acknowledged property, the garden her continued interest and joy. Most people would think that she, Blackie, was lucky to share it, lucky to live rent-free (they’d know that in the village, that was the kind of fact theyknew by instinct), a beautiful home, her cousin’s companionship. She would be the less regarded of the two, the less popular, the poor relation. Her job, imperfectly understood in the village but magnified in importance by Joan, had given her dignity. Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn’t that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic? And she couldn’t find herself what Joan described as “a nice little part-time job” in Tonbridge. She knew what that would mean: working in an office with half-trained girls fresh from school or secretarial college, sexually on-the-make, resented for her efficiency or pitied for her all-too-obvious virginity. How could she lower herself to a part-time job, she who had once been confidential personal assistant to Henry Peverell?
    Sitting immobile with a glass of half-drunk sherry before her and staring into its amber glow as if mesmerized, her heart was in tumult, her voice crying wordlessly, “Oh my darling, why did you leave me? Why did you have to die?”
    She had hardly ever seen him outside the office, had never been invited to his flat at number 12, and had never invited him to Weaver’s Cottage or spoken to him of her private life. Yet for twenty-seven years he had been central to her existence. She had spent more of her waking hours with him than with any other human being. To her he was always Mr. Peverell, and he had called her Miss Blackett to others, Blackie to her face. She couldn’t remember that her hands had ever touched his since that first meeting twenty-seven years ago when, as a shy seventeen-year-old fresh from secretarial college, she had come to Innocent House for her interview and he had risen smiling from his desk to greet her. Her typing and shorthand skills had already been tested by the secretary who was leaving him to get married. Now,looking at the handsome scholarly face and into his incredibly blue eyes, she had known that this was the ultimate test. He had said little about the job—but then why should he? Miss Arkwright had already explained in intimidating detail what would be expected of her—but he had asked her about her journey and had said: “We have a launch which brings some of the staff to work. It can pick you up at Charing Cross pier and bring you to work by the Thames—that is unless you’re afraid of water.”
    And she had known that this was the test question, that she wouldn’t get the job if she disliked the river. “No,” she said, “I’m not afraid of water.”
    After that she had spoken little, almost incoherent with the thought of coming each day to this glittering palace. At the end of the interview