Free The Man Whose Dream Came True by Julian Symons Page A

‘Don’t go away, I have so many more questions.’ She asked some, and then Mrs Bennett put a question or two, but the spirit refused to respond.
    ‘We may as well call it a night,’ Widgey said. There was the sound of chairs being pushed back. Mrs Harringron took away her hand. As often happens when lights are turned on after darkness, the blinking faces looked guilty. Mrs Harrington was flushed. ‘It’s strange that it becomes difficult when you reach a really interesting point.’
    Widgey rolled and lit a cigarette. ‘Why should they answer if they don’t want to?’
    Mrs Bennett agreed. ‘They don’t want to know about our lives. Why should we expect to know everything they think and do?’
    The conversation continued in this vein. Widgey went out and made them all a cup of tea. They dispersed, the Bennetts first, then Mrs Harrington and Tony. Her room was number eleven, on the floor below his. She opened the door, turned back to him, took his hand.
    ‘I want you to know that I’m grateful.’
    ‘What for?’
    ‘You were so sympathetic. I know you must think I’m foolish.’ Her hand still held his, she had moved inside the room and it followed that he was now standing inside the doorway.
    ‘I don’t think anything of the sort.’
    ‘Come in.’ The injunction was not necessary for now he was quite certainly in the room. He closed the door. Around Mrs Harrington there hung always some curious scent, rather like low-lying mist clinging to the ground on a damp morning, but in the bedroom this heavy cloying smell was thick, as though he were in the lair of some powerful animal.
    ‘Look.’ She extended her arm, pointing, and for a moment he was absorbed in the spectacle of the arm itself, revealed as the sleeve of her dress moved up, a fine thick object against which the gold bracelet gleamed. The arm appeared to be pointing at the bed, but now she moved away from him and returned with a framed photograph which she pushed into his hand. It showed the head and shoulders of a tight-faced man whose brow was corrugated by a frown. What was he worried about?
    ‘Harrington.’ She spoke reverentially.
    Tony returned the photograph to its place beside the bed. Beside it stood another, of a pleasant large house standing in considerable grounds. ‘Is that your home?’
    ‘Yes. It’s William and Mary. Very pretty, don’t you think?’
    It was more than pretty, it was tangible evidence of large sums of money, which he saw suddenly adhering to her.
    ‘Harrington was a passionate man. I am a passionate woman.’ He was overpoweringly conscious of her nearness. The scent of her somehow gave the ordinary bedroom the atmosphere of a hotel room used by dozens of men and women for sexual purposes.
    ‘Oh, Tony, Tony.’
    ‘Violet.’ In the moment before being enclosed by those plump white arms be thought: I am lost. Then the arms clasped him firmly and bore him back on to the bed which creaked, and even swayed disturbingly, under their weight. Her mouth opened like a sea anemone and sucked him in.
    He went quietly up the stairs to his own room at six o’clock the following morning. Violet had told the truth in saying that she was a passionate woman.

Chapter Three
     
    He spent much of the next two days in her company. They walked round the town together, went round the country in her solidly elegant Rover. Tony drove, and it was a pleasure to be behind the wheel of a car again, but at times he felt like a chauffeur.
    ‘In this village there’s a nice little antique shop as you go in on the left, just stop there will you,’ she would say, or ‘I don’t think we’ll have lunch at the Blue Peacock, it’s no good, just take us on to the next village like a dear boy.’ Not simply a chauffeur, but a chauffeur-cum-gigolo, for her manner towards him had become distinctly proprietorial, expressed in the requests she made for him to perform small services like getting her scarf and cigarettes. He did not mind her