Ellis Peters - George Felse 07 - The Grass Widow's Tale Read Online Free PDF Page A

be right about her,” said Bunty reasonably, “and they could still be wrong.”
    “Not a chance! It all blew up in my face to-day. For good.”
    “There may be more to be said for her than you think now. You may not always feel like this. You and she may make it up again, given a little goodwill.”
    “No!” he said with quiet violence. “That’s out! She’ll never have the chance to let me down again.”
    “Then—at the risk of repeating myself—there
are
other girls.”
    He wasn’t listening. No doubt he heard the sound of her voice quite clearly, just as those blue-circled, burning eyes of his were memorising her face, but all he saw and all he heard had to do with his own private pain. Bunty was merely a vessel set to receive the overflow of his distress.
    “We only got engaged ten days ago,” he said. “God knows why she ever said yes, she had this other fellow on the string all along. Whatever she wanted out of it, it wasn’t me.”
    “It happens,” said Bunty. “When you commit yourself to another person you take that risk. There isn’t any way of hedging your bet.”
    “She hedged hers pretty successfully,” he said bitterly.
    “She wasn’t committed. And you’re better off without her.”
    So softly that she hardly heard him, more to himself than to her, he said, “Oh, my God, what is there in it, either way?” His hands clenched into white-knuckled fists on his knees. She thought for a moment that he was going to faint, and instinctively put out a hand and took him by the arm, no hesitant touch, but a firm grip, tethering him fast to the world it seemed he would gladly have shaken off in favour of darkness. It brought his head up with a jerk, his eyes dazed and dark in that blanched face. They stared steadily at each other for a moment, devouring line and substance and form so intensely that neither of them would ever be able to hide from the other again, under any name or in any disguise.
    “Look,” said Bunty quietly, “you’re not fit to drive any distance to-night. Go home, fall into bed, sleep her off, drink her off if you have to, get another girl, anything, only give yourself a chance. It isn’t the end of the world… it had damned well better not be! You’ve got a life before you, and it isn’t owed to her, it’s owed in part to the rest of us, but mostly to yourself. You go under and we’ve all lost.”
    She wondered if he even knew that she was at least twelve years older than he was. She had begun by feeling something like twenty years older, and now she was no longer sure that there was even a year between them. This was no adolescent agony, but a mature passion that shook the whole room, even though the babel went on round it, oblivious and superficial, a backcloth of triviality.
    “It
is
the end of the world,” said the young man, quite softly and simply. “That’s what you don’t understand.”
    The clock behind the bar began to chime with an unexpected, silvery sound.
    “Time! ” called the barman, pitching his voice on the same mellifluous note. “Time, gentlemen, please!”
    She spent an unnecessary few minutes in the cloakroom, tidying her hair and repairing her lipstick, not so much to escape from him as to give him every chance to escape from her if he wanted to. Men are much more likely than women to repent of having said too much and stripped themselves too naked, and it might well be that now, having unloaded the worst of his burden, he would prefer to make off into the darkness and never see or think of her again. But when she stepped out from the lighted doorway, under the silver stars of the sign, he was there waiting for her, a slender, tense shadow beside the low chain fence of the car park. She felt no surprise and no uneasiness.
    “Have you got transport? Then may I give you a lift home?”
    “It’s out of your way,” she said equably. “I live in Comerford, and I imagine you’re heading for the M.6.”
    “It won’t add more than