Eyeless In Gaza by Aldous Huxley Page B

know if you’re interested in lobster, Miss,’ a confidential voice almost whispered into her left ear.
    Joyce started violently; then managed, with an effort, to smile and shake her head.
    â€˜This is a line we can heartily recommend, Miss. I’m sure if you were to try a tin . . .’
    â€˜And now,’ Helen was saying, very calmly and in the same maddeningly feudal tone, ‘I need ten pounds of sugar. But that you must send.’
    They walked out of the shop. The young man at the cheese and bacon counter smiled his farewell; they were nice-looking girls and regular customers. With a great effort, Joyce contrived to be gracious yet once more. But they were hardly through the door when her face disintegrated, as it were, into a chaos of violent emotion.
    â€˜Helen!’ she said furiously. ‘Helen!’
    But Helen was still the young queen on her silver florin, a speechless profile.
    â€˜Helen!’ Between the glove and the sleeve, Joyce found an inch of her sister’s bare skin and pinched, hard.
    Helen jerked her arm away, and without looking round, a profile still, ‘If you bother me any more,’ she said in a low voice, ‘I shall push you into the gutter.’
    Joyce opened her mouth to speak, then changed her mind and, absurdly, shut it again. She knew that if she did say anything more, Helen unquestionably would push her into the gutter. She had to be content with shrugging her shoulders and looking dignified.
    The greengrocer’s was crowded. Waiting for her turn to be served, Helen had no difficulty in bagging a couple of oranges.
    â€˜Have one?’ she proposed insultingly to Joyce as they walked out of the shop.
    It was Joyce’s turn to be a profile on a coin.
    At the stationer’s there were, unfortunately, no other clients to distract the attention of the people behind the counter. But Helen was equal to the situation. A handful of small change suddenly went rolling across the floor; and while the assistants were hunting for the scattered pennies, she helped herself to a rubber and three very good pencils.
    It was at the butcher’s that the trouble began. OrdinarilyHelen refused to go into the shop at all; the sight, the sickening smell of those pale corpses disgusted her. But this morning she walked straight in. In spite of the disgust. It was a point of honour. She had said
every
shop, and she wasn’t going to give Joyce an excuse for saying she had cheated. For the first half-minute, while her lungs were still full of the untainted air she had inhaled outside in the street, it was all right. But, oh God, when at last she had to breathe . . . God! She put her handkerchief to her nose. But the sharp rasping smell of the carcases leaked through the barrier of perfume, superimposing itself upon the sweetness, so that a respiration that began with
Quelques Fleurs
would hideously end with dead sheep or, opening in stale blood, modulated insensibly into the key of jasmine and ambergris.
    A customer went out; the butcher turned to her. He was an oldish man, very large, with a square massive face that beamed down at her with a paternal benevolence.
    â€˜Like Mr Baldwin,’ she said to herself, and then, aloud but indistinctly through her handkerchief, ‘A pound and a half of rump-steak, please.’
    The butcher returned in a moment with a mass of gory flesh. ‘There’s a beautiful piece of meat, Miss!’ He fingered the dank, red lump with an artist’s loving enthusiasm. ‘A really
beautiful
piece.’ It was Mr Baldwin’s fingering his Virgil, thumbing his dog’s-eared Webb.
    â€˜I shall never eat meat again,’ she said to herself, as Mr Baldwin turned away and began to cut up the meat. ‘But what shall I take?’ She looked around. ‘What on earth . . .? Ah!’ A marble shelf ran, table-high, along one of the walls of the shop. On it, in trays, pink or purply