Edith’s Diary (32 page)

He found himself leaping up the stairs with the objective of taking a look at his mother’s room. Best to do it now, best not to be afraid of it. Cliffie stood up straight and walked in. The sculptures. Those two little kids’ heads. Why had she wanted to do something like that? Boring little beasties, Cliffie thought. And the typewriter, its blue paint and part of the metal worn away at the bottom corners, typewritten pages everywhere. Gosh! She would never touch the keys again. And it looked like she’d just got up from there.

‘All right, all right!’ Cliffie said aloud. ‘It’s not true!’ But his own voice frightened him, rather than helped. And what he had said was false. He knew that. His mother was gone, forever.

And the dictionary. And the diary. He saw the diary, the big brown thing on the corner of the desk, as usual. She had had that since before he was born, Cliffie thought, and he thought he remembered his mother saying so. His own birthdate would be there – all the stories, the things that had happened, the judgement of him would be there, written for all to see. Who
was
going to see it? Brett? Yes, maybe. His father was the type. His father would hold it against him, the little details his mother might have put down, the little bad things. Cliffie decided to keep that diary himself. Yes, dammit! And get it out now, he thought.

Cliffie pulled the diary carefully from under the stack of papers. The leather binding was starting to crumble at the top and bottom. It weighed more than he had thought it would.

He carried it down, carefully down the stairs, up the hall to his room. He had decided to put it in a back corner of his closet, the drawers in his chest of drawers being so weak now, they probably wouldn’t hold the weight without collapsing. Cliffie thought, as he pulled away a pair of sneakers, old socks, to make room on his closet floor, that he would never open this diary, never read anything in it. The idea shocked him, scared him. It would be worse than seeing his mother naked suddenly – something he certainly never had wanted to do, and never had done, even by accident. He realized that he had a respect for the diary and a fear of it also. He would take care of the diary, he decided, and this thought gave him comfort. He wouldn’t let anyone else look at it, ever. He had thought, a minute or so ago, that he could burn it now in the fireplace, maybe finish burning it before Norm arrived, at least finish burning it tomorrow. But even that took or would take a courage that he knew he hadn’t. No, much better to keep it hidden, to keep it from the others, other people. Maybe always. Maybe for all his life. He would never tell anyone that he had it. He would carry it around with him, hidden. Yes, even if he got married, his wife would never know. Somehow, he would manage that. Unless in some moment of extraordinary courage he would rip it to pieces and burn it.

There was a knock on the door, sound of the front door opening, a step. ‘Cliffie? – It’s Norm!’

Cliffie straightened up, half closed his closet door. Norm had arrived to take him to Washington Crossing. Cliffie opened a drawer and found pajama pants, couldn’t find the top, and snatched from the floor a different colored top he was currently wearing. ‘Right there, Norm!’

THE TWO FACES OF JANUARY

Patricia Highsmith

Introduced by Hossein Amini
 

Patricia Highsmith draws us deep into a cross-European game of cat and mouse in this masterpiece of suspense from the author of
The Talented Mr Ripley
.

Two men meet in the picturesque backstreets of Athens. Chester MacFarlane is a conman with multiple false identities, near the end of his rope and on the run with his young wife Colette. Rydal Keener is a young drifter looking for adventure: he finds it one evening as the law catches up with Chester and Colette, and their lives become fatally intertwined.

This special edition includes a foreword by the director and screenwriter of the film, Hossein Amini.

‘Highsmith is a giant of the genre’ Mark Billingham

‘The No.1 greatest crime writer’
The Times

THE GLASS CELL

Patricia Highsmith

Introduced by Joan Schenkar
 

‘The original, the best, the gloriously twisted Queen of Suspense’ Mark Billingham

Prison is no place for an innocent man.

Phillip Carter has spent six years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. On his release, his beautiful wife is waiting for him. He has never had any reason to doubt her. Nor their friend, Sullivan. Carter has never been suspicious, or violent. But prison can change a man.

‘One closes most of her books with a feeling that the world is more dangerous than one had ever imagined’Julian Symons,
New York Times Book Review

‘To call Patricia Highsmith a thriller writer is true but not the whole truth: her books have stylistic texture, psychological depth, mesmeric readability’
Sunday Times