Free Five Roundabouts to Heaven by John Bingham

covetousness, and greed; but then, if you dig deep enough, right down below it all, you find the third skin, that of the essential, basic child, insecure, needing to be loved and to love.
    You can’t tell with people, you can’t tell, he thought miserably.
    “It’s true, darling,” said Beatrice again, in a choked voice, “you don’t love me. You’re terribly fond of me, I know. And I know you need me,” she said again. “I know you can’t do without me.”
    A little wave of pity approached the barriers Bartels had erected around his heart. He saw it coming, and watched its approach with agitation, and raised the barriers higher against it.
    She should never have married him, if she didn’t love him. It was not fair. Or if she married him, she should have been prepared to give and give. He would leave her. He had to leave her, because Lorna was lonely, and needed him, and he needed Lorna. Fundamentally, it would serve Beatrice right.
    She shouldn’t have married me, he repeated to himself. She shouldn’t have done it.
    Beatrice suddenly buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook because she was weeping properly now. But there was little sound except for the periodic sharp intake of her breath.
    She’s fighting against it, thought Bartels irrelevantly, trying not to make too much of a scene. That’s partly because she is English and partly because of her school training. It sticks, as Mr Chips said about Latin, some of it sticks. Blood and training. Some of it sticks; not all, but some.
    The wave was lapping round the barriers now, eating at the foundations, lapping and receding, and coming back with renewed vigour. He only had to get up from his chair and take two steps, and sit beside her and take her in his arms, and tell her she was wrong, and she would believe him because she wanted to. It would all stop.
    Beatrice said in a muffled voice: “I only try to do my best, darling. It’s not easy.”
    Pity, pity, pity.
    The fly in the wine glass, the daddy-long-legs at the window, the butterfly in the fire. With dread and a feeling of foreboding Bartels saw the wave top the barrier and surge down upon him, and for a few seconds struggled against it with a hopeless ferocity. Then the waters were around him and over him, and he knew that he had lost. He rose from his chair and went over to the settee. He moved slowly and heavily.
    I think that as he put his arms around her and told her that she was wrong, and that he did love her, there was already stirring within his mind, very faintly, and in an undefined form, the feeling that he might have to kill her.

     
    It was the next day, 14 February, that, in accordance with his fortnightly habit, Bartels called upon his aunt Emily. Aunt Rose, pugnacious to the last, had died some years before, and uncle James, lost and at sea without that dominating character, had been buried beside her scarcely a year later.
    But Cook was still in service, and greeted him in her usual sour manner, and told him that aunt Emily was at a séance but would be back in half an hour or so. He was hardly inside the door before he noticed a curious aromatic smell, half sweet, half acrid.
    “What’s that smell?” he asked.
    “You may well ask,” replied Cook ominously; she was a fat, pale woman, with dark hairs on her upper lip and a slight but disconcerting cast in one eye. She disappeared into the kitchen without further words.
    She had been with Bartels’ aunt for twenty-seven years, and there appeared no reason to believe that she would ever leave until his aunt died. There was a general understanding that his aunt would leave her what she called “a little something” in her will. Bartels remembered how sometimes, in the gentle, arch way his aunt Emily had of speaking, she would say in Cook’s presence, while he was still a boy:
    “There! What a lovely cake old Cookie has made for you to take back to school! What should we do without her? Never mind, Cookie knows she