To Indigo by Tanith Lee (read along books txt) 📕

then you’re off to write some story. Some rubbish. How’d you know they’ll publish it? They didn’t want the last one.”

“No.”

“Oh, but you go on. You have your own little way. I don’t know why I bother to come to bed. You sit and read, or scribble, or you’re in the lounge typing till midnight. I can’t even watch TV in there. And it’s been two weeks since we last – since you know what.”

I put down the book and looked at the back of it, unseeing. I couldn’t say to Lynda that I found her by now unappetizing. That I really needed to be – well frankly very ready – before I could make love to her. And to make matters worse I’d had a bit of a thing about a woman at work. She was a few years older than me, quite pretty and very happily living with a man. Obviously I’d been aware I stood no chance, but I’d enjoyed her being there, working with her. We got on well, saw eye to eye on a lot of things. She’d read a story of mine published in one of the magazines and praised it, (I published under my real name then). She said I shouldn’t be working in the library at all. About five days before my row with Lynda this woman, I won’t put her name, had been transferred to another branch nearer her home. She was delighted to go. I’d wished her well. I’d kissed her cheek and shaken her partner’s hand. She said they’d be looking out for my first published crime novel.

“Lynda, I’m tired.”

“Not too tired to scribble. Not too tired to type and turn the lounge into your office. Paper everywhere. Books. A tip.”

“Lynda…”

“Oh, shut up!” She surged to the door. “You do the bloody washing-up. I’m going to bed. You…” She paused. “You can sleep in the lounge.” We had no couch. She meant on the floor or in a chair. “You can go to hell!”

I got up. Although we fought, somehow I had never really lost my temper. It was as if, even for rowing with her I had to be in the right frame of mind. But now I was.

“Fuck off to bed, then,” I shouted. “And if you want to go to your aunt’s so much just fucking go. In fact I’ll go. I’m leaving. Get out of the way…” I pushed past her.

Now she ran after me into the bedroom. “What are you doing?” she bleated. But she could see. I was shoving a few clothes into a bag. Next I went to the bathroom and got my shaving stuff and toothbrush. “What?” she kept saying, “What?”

But I didn’t speak to her again until I was at the front door. “Right. What you do, Lynda, is up to you. If you’re still here when I come back we can discuss it. But I hope you won’t be.” The flat was rented. She always had most of my wages to date and all her own. She would manage.

She said, crying now, her glasses dripping tears, pitiful and revolting, “What shall I do?”

“Whatever you like. Fuck off. That’s the best thing.”

I went out and downstairs and let myself into the street. It was after ten at night and raining. I felt a gust of relief flare through me, like raw cool oxygen. As if I could breathe again. It was less getting away from her than escaping the surge of potential violence I’d sensed suddenly present inside me. I have never physically hurt a woman. That night I felt I might have done.

One of the fellows from work was in the pub I ended up in, and he let me sleep on his sofa. “Good thing Jenny isn’t here tonight. She’d never put up with it.”

When I went back to my own flat two days later, crestfallen and feeling rather bewildered, Lynda had gone. She had left me a four page letter, written in her over-ornamented handwriting with plenty of misspellings and wrong grammar.

The gist was she had her Pride. Her father had always told her that if a man didn’t want her she must not want him, And she could see I no longer loved her, so she would indeed be “going up to Auntie’s.” She had taken her things, “like you would expect me to.” Actually she had taken quite a few of mine also, including some of my books – dictionaries and a thesaurus. She couldn’t possibly have wanted them. She must only have wanted to deprive me of them, I assumed, as I’d seemed to prefer them to her. Which of course I had.

Her father called me the night I left the flat, migrating back to my parents’ house for a brief stay, as I sorted out my financial affairs. “A great pity,” he sternly told me. “I always thought of you as rather a steady chap. I wouldn’t have let her marry you, Roy, if I hadn’t.”

I apologised for not being what he had believed me to be.

One wonders sometimes how often one has had to do that.

Since then I’ve never seen Lynda again. I never saw the other woman, from the library, again either. She was a bit like Maureen, not to look at, more her manner, although her accent was better and her voice not quite so musical or warm.

When Harris Wybrother had driven away I sat in my kitchen in Old Church Lane. I’d made some filter coffee, bought that day, an indulgence I don’t often allow myself. There were some chocolate biscuits too, and I ate four.

Something had puzzled me about Sej’s flat in the roof. Only I hadn’t quite realised what at the time. Now it had come to me.

The apartment had many things in it that were quite large, such as the piano, not to mention the couches that could be transformed to beds. And there were things that would have needed either careful packing or delicate