The Golden Straw [antikvár]

Emily Pearson cast her eyes around the bare room from which the last piece of furniture had just been tal^en out to the horse-driven removal van, and she asl^ed herself how they had ever been able to move about in that room or, for that matter, in the bedroom, or in the Idtchen, for the contents of the small house had filled the van. From where she was standing she could see through the uncurtained window into the road, where the driver of the van was urging his horse into motion with the flick of his whip. Thinking, That's that, she now took a key from her bag and walked towards the door; but there she stopped and turned, and again she gazed around the room. Was she sorry to leave this house? No. No. Yet she had been bom here, and she had lived happily here until she was sixteen, when her mother had died. She could say, too, that she had lived somewhat contentedly during the following two years. Then she had married Jimmy Pearson and had spent the first night of her married life in that bedroom over there. Marriage had startled her, frightened her. It wasn't as she expected it would be, full of tender loving, and evenings sitting by the fire, he describing his day at Parker's warehouse, and she responding by telling him about some of the customers at Madam Arkwright's, milliners. But it didn't turn out like that. He was dry, he would say, after a day in the warehouse, too dry for talking without something with which to oil his throat. True, he had invited her to go to the pub with him. But what did that mean? Sitting in the snug with women to whom she couldn't talk. It was as if they spoke a II