The Little Stranger by Waters; Sarah

Author:Waters; Sarah
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101051764
Publisher: Penguin Group USA

I joined Caroline at the edge of concrete, and we chatted for a minute with the man she had been watching at work. He was a man I knew quite well; in fact, he was a sort of cousin of mine, on my mother’s side. He and I had shared a desk in the two-roomed council school I’d attended as a young boy; we had been good pals then. Later, once I’d started at Leamington College, the friendship had soured, and for a time he and his elder brother Coddy had rather persecuted me—lying in wait for me, with handfuls of gravel, as I came cycling back home in the late afternoons. But that was a long time ago. Since then he had married, twice. His first wife and child had died, but he had two grown-up sons who had recently moved to Coventry. Caroline asked how they were getting on, and he told us, in the ripe Warwickshire accent I could never quite believe had once also been mine, that they had gone straight into factory jobs, and between them were bringing home a weekly wage of over twenty pounds. I should have been glad to earn that myself; and it was probably more, I thought, than the Ayreses had to live on over a month. But still, the man removed his cap in order to talk to Caroline—though he looked more shyly at me, giving me an awkward sort of nod as we moved off. I knew that even after all this time it was queer for him to call me ‘Doctor’, but out of the question, too, for him either to use my Christian name or to address me as ‘sir’.

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