A Closed Eye Read Online Free PDF Page A

she seem. In a dress which she privately disliked, Harriet prepared to go out with Mr Lytton, rather reluctantly, as she was tired and a little depressed. She was looking at her face in the mirror when Merle entered her room and stood with her back conspiratorially to the door, her hands spread out on either sideof her. There was a smudge of cigarette ash on the bodice of her black dress.
    ‘I hope you know what this is all leading up to, Hattie,’ she said.
    ‘Yes,’ said Harriet, even more tired and depressed. ‘I suppose I do.’
    ‘Well, all I ask is that you do the right thing. Daddy and I aren’t getting any younger, you know. We’d like to enjoy life while we still can. I’ll soon be fifty, Harriet.’
    ‘So will Freddie,’ said Harriet, which was ignored, though registered.
    ‘I can’t work for ever,’ Merle went on. ‘And Latif definitely wants the flat. We can get a good price from him. We want out, darling, don’t you see?’ She began to cry. ‘He’s a good man. And he’s besotted, although he doesn’t show it. And not everyone … Although it’s faded a lot …’ She was crying in earnest now, ashamed of herself, bitter with impatience. ‘Oh dear,’ she sobbed. ‘I can’t go down like this. I’ll have to stay up here. Don’t keep him waiting, darling.’ She took Harriet in her arms and kissed her, leaving a smear of damp on the girl’s cheek. Then she sank down on to the bed, put her head in her hands, and wept.

H ER PARENTS , no longer Mother and Father, but Merle and Hughie, in deference to their almost exact contemporaneity to her husband, released the flat and the shop to Latif, were largely compensated, and decamped to Brighton. Why Brighton? It was a place they remembered from the old days, when weekends were spent at the races, or taking a spin along the coast to Rottingdean, or dancing at the Grand. They were unprepared for the stony wind-blown shopping precinct, and the greatly increased traffic, and the conference centre where they remembered a skating-rink. But Brighton meant so much more to them than its new and odd appearance: it meant youth, their own youth, and their little car, and the light going on in the blue evening. It meant the last year before the war, when there was nothing to spoil their pleasure. They had decided on Brighton before going down to see it, fearful perhaps of any changes that might remind them that they were no longer young. Eventually they hired a chauffeur-driven car. The auspices were good: the sun shone from a clear autumn sky, and their driver was cheerful. It was wonderful to see how Hughie recaptured some of his old confidence away from the shop, how he bought them all gin and tonics at the Grand, shot his cuffs and surveyed the promenade. The driver, Norman, a good-hearted man,guided them through the afternoon, waited for them outside shops, conveyed estate agents to and from properties which they rejected with a moue as old-fashioned.
    Finally, just as the light was going, they found the flat, in a new block overlooking the promenade and the now mysterious sea, so placid, so uninteresting under the extinguishing darkness that covered it. Both exclaimed with delight at the dainty kitchen, the two, admittedly small, bathrooms, the balcony, the glass doors. ‘We’ll take it,’ they said simultaneously, were driven back to the office, signed the cheque with the assurance of their new-found solvency, and insisted on vacant possession within the month. They wanted to be in by Christmas, which they dreaded. They dreaded change, and Harriet’s leaving, for she was a dear good girl, and her marriage, which might well turn them into grandparents before they were ready, was, although an accomplishment of a sort, still something of a surprise. They knew so few people. But they would join a bridge club, even if it meant their having to play bridge, and they would find a few restaurants, and get themselves known somehow. They usually managed to