A Pocketful of Rye Read Online Free PDF Page A

I haven’t a camera. It’s so touching.’
    Her eyes narrowed.
    â€˜I’m glad you like it, because we do.’
    â€˜Well, while you’re drooling over each other, have you any luggage? If so, I’ll get it.’
    â€˜A suitcase. In the guard’s van.’
    I left them together, found her case, then we set out for Craig Crescent. Frank offered to carry the case, which was no light weight, tried to bring me into the conversation, but without much luck. She was too busy with him, and apparently bent on excluding me. This vacation was going to be the greatest fun. They’d been set a competition at Cathy’s school to see who could bring back the best album of pressed wild flowers. A silver cup was the prize.
    â€˜Naturally I’m not wild about botany, Frank. But I’d like to win that cup. Just to put Sister Philomena’s eye out, the old hag, she always has her knife in me. And it’ll be terrific fun scouring the Overton woods, and the Longcrags too.’
    Frank agreed with enthusiasm, half turning to me.
    â€˜You’ll join us, Laurie.’
    â€˜Well … possibly,’ I said, distantly. ‘If I have time.’
    â€˜Of course you will. Now, here we are. You’ll come in and have tea. Joint invitation from Cathy and me.’
    â€˜No thanks. I’m expected at Davigan’s,’ I lied calmly and atrociously. I loathed the Davigans, and Daniel the son I particularly despised.
    â€˜Well …’ Frank said doubtfully. ‘If that’s so …’
    The Considine house was next door to Ennis’s property, a villa of the same size, with an adjoining unfenced garden which suggested intimate communications. I put the suitcase down at the front gate. Cathy was inspecting me with a critical, not quite comprehending yet definitely unfriendly eye.
    â€˜I’m obliged to you, porter. Was it too heavy for your delicate constitution?’
    â€˜A mere trifle. What have you inside? Coals or steel corsets?’
    â€˜Both, naturally. And a hair shirt. How much is the tip?’
    â€˜Pay Frank,’ I said. ‘I usually stand in for him when any physical effort is required.’
    As I took off I saw colour flood Frank’s face at this underhand reference to the few engagements I had undertaken on his behalf and I felt badly about it. I blamed her, of course, and swore I would have nothing more to do with her. Yet, walking home in a rage, my mind was exasperatingly full of her. When I’d had my tea I put a few deliberately offhand inquiries to my grandmother. Yes, she knew of the girl’s mother in a general sort of way. Mrs Considine was the widow of the late head draughtsman at Dennisons, comfortably off on a life pension from the shipyard, a stout, lethargic woman whom I now vaguely recollected moving slowly, bedizened in beaded black, to a front seat in St Patrick’s.
    â€˜So you’ve met her daughter?’
    â€˜For the first and last time.’
    â€˜They say she’s rather spoiled.’
    â€˜She’s the giddy limit.’
    Nevertheless, while I hated this little trollop in the brass-buttoned reefer jacket, I had fallen for her, stricken with the ridiculous anguish of an adolescent first love. When Frank came to the Bruce house next morning, without the slightest reference to my ill humour of the day before, my resolutions broke down, I agreed to go botanizing that afternoon.
    Nothing could have been more mistaken, more fatally damaging to my self-esteem. Never before, even in the worst discomfitures of a penurious youth, had I been made to feel so unwanted, not of course by Frank, but by her. Our few verbal exchanges, at first deliberately offensive, became towards the end of the expedition, heatedly hurtful, and I swore by my favourite saint – Augustine before his conversion – that I would never go out with them again.
    To assist them in their idiotic floral hunt they had roped in and