The Colour of Violence
Page 16
“But I…I can’t understand how you can go back to Dudley.”
“Because he’s so ill, that’s why. The doctors say it’s still touch-and-go.”
“He can afford to have trained nurses look after him.”
“George, you’re forgetting — he’s my husband.”
“You don’t love him.”
She looked away, biting her lower lip.
“Have you forgotten all you said, when I found you in that room?”
“How…how could I?”
“Leave him, Pat. Grab some happiness…”
“I couldn’t be happy, knowing that I’d deserted him when he most needed me.”
“You can’t be expected to sacrifice everything for him.
“And what sort of loyalty did he show you? Hermione had only to tell him you were with me and he was convinced you were committing adultery.”
“He’d every reason to think that. I’d been seeing you clandestinely. If I hadn’t visited you when I shouldn’t, he’d never have had to come to this flat to try and find me and he wouldn’t have been so terribly hurt. Don’t you see, George, every time I look at him and realise what he’s been reduced to, physically and mentally, I have to know that I’m responsible.”
“You’re suffering a totally unnecessary sense of guilt.”
She spoke despairingly. “I can’t leave him. Not…not while he’s still alive.”
He was forced to accept the fact that no words of his would make her alter her mind. Only Dudley’s death could release her from her self-imposed expiation. He returned from the window and slumped down in one of the armchairs. Gwen and he, Patricia and Dudley, all bystanders, had had their lives shattered. The police said that the man buried under the new motorway had been murdered by the gang and another man had been killed in a car crash because of them. One of the gang had died in the flat. All this suffering as the result of one crime and perhaps more that no one yet knew about. What was it that Hermione had once said? He didn’t write realistically about violence because he didn’t know its true colour. He knew that now. But did this new knowledge mean that from now on his writing would improve so dramatically that every one of his books would be a best-seller? He doubted it.
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