A Perfectly Good Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

enough to progress to a second bar of it.
    It was only as she called in on her room to return the soap to her own sink that she found the envelope he had slipped under her door. The vigour with which he had flicked it through had sent it almost entirely beneath her bedside rug, where it might have lain hidden for weeks. She snatched it up. It was addressed to Dorothy, Pink Bedroom. Inside was a black and white postcard of the Mermaid Chair in Zennor church on the back of which he had simply written, Write to me! And his new, grim-sounding address in Portsmouth.
    All she knew of Portsmouth came from Mansfield Park . Austen’s evocation of the crowded, genteel poverty of Fanny Price’s home was fairly off-putting and she suspected time and two world wars had made the port less appealing still.
    She dropped his towel where she stood, hurried to the ugly Victorian sewing table that had always served as her desk, and wrote to him at once. She wrote four sides of Basildon Bond, what in effect was her first ever love letter, although its tone was almost as guarded as their earliest conversations had been because merely saying things and committing them to paper, where others might read them, were so different. Then she dumped the towel in the twin tub and hurried up to the village letter box. She liked the thought that the letter would soon be travelling upcountry on the same train line that was already carrying him. By the time her mother drove back from a trip into town with a friend, carrying a box of groceries from the Co-op, Dorothy was almost cheerful.
    His answer came within the week. He had made a mistake, he wrote, left on impulse and now was in a kind of hell, missing her, the landscape, their walks. Her letter, he said, was precious and she must write more even if he was sometimes kept too busy to write back.
    So of course she replied. She had always suspected her letters were like herself: calm and possibly not very interesting. She wrote accounts of her tasks, of news from the village, of developments at the mine or at the Sunday School, where she had started to help out – inspired by him – and didn’t feel she could drop out of now that he had gone. She began to keep notes in an old exercise book in her room of things to remember to tell him, things she had seen or that people had said. But she was careful not to write too often. She wrote every other Friday – the day he had gone – and she continued to limit herself to two pieces of Basildon Bond.
    But he wrote back to her only that once. For a while she did not mind. She convinced herself he would write if he could and she enjoyed writing the letters anyway; it was the most creative and thoughtful she had allowed herself to be since leaving school. But after three long months of unanswered letters, she dared entertain the suspicion that his first reply had been no more than sensitive politeness, humouring her, and that proved a poison to her hopes and she let their non-correspondence cease.
    Then Henry Angwin startled everyone by getting engaged. His fiancée was from the county’s wealthy middle. Her father was a farmer too and when he had died and her brother inherited the farm, which was near Chacewater, she had taken a job as a cashier at Truro cattle market, which was how Henry had met her. He joked he had bought far more store cattle than he could afford over the last weeks in the effort to muster the courage to ask her out.
    Since Dorothy’s parents had long been as his own, it was only natural that he should bring the girl to visit. The two of them came for Sunday lunch, of course, and were given the best china and Dorothy made them a summer pudding.
    Jane was perfect for him; pretty, healthy, clearly a hard worker and a thoroughly nice girl it was easy to imagine befriending. She was nearer his age than Dorothy was, in her late twenties perhaps, and seemed so entirely fitting a partner for him Dorothy wondered how she could ever have imagined