Holiday Read Online Free PDF Page A

Fisher.
    ‘Well, God bless the lad,’ said Beardy.
    A voice over the public-address requested them to take their seats as the play would be resumed in four minutes’ time. They sighed.
    ‘I shall listen carefully in the second half,’ she said, slopping the lemon about in the dregs of her drink. ‘You’ve got me worried. I’d convinced myself this was like nothing on earth, and now you say . . .’ She really appeared to consider the point. Her shoulders seemed to screw, almost ugly, with the effort. ‘Put this glass down somewhere, Malcolm.’
    As Beardy turned his back, she announced,
    ‘Meg Vernon.’
    For a moment, he was nonplussed, as if she’d spoken in a foreign tongue.
    ‘Edwin Fisher.’
    ‘Pleased.’
    Malcolm was back, on escort duty. She bowed her head, old-fashioned, and stepped beautifully away. Fisher, ashamed to stumble in immediately behind them, searched the auditorium. When he found them, Meg’s hair seemed darker, less unusual, and she pointed, laughing widely, frivolously. Outside she had seemed serious, not humourless, capable of wit, but almost unhuman. He played with the neologism, because he could handle a little word, occupy himself with it, keep his head while he fought for equilibrium from that three minutes in the foyer when he’d been summoned to a presence. Now she laughed, and bounced, and poked a finger out, and could be criticised.
    He saw her a week later, by chance.
    Search in the telephone directory had no result, and he’d begun to recover from the impact of the first meeting when he nearly walked past her in the crowded centre of the town.
    ‘Oh, hello there,’ he said, turning to touch her arm.
    She narrowed her eyes, in the sunshine, slightly untidy, unready for him.
    ‘Edwin Fisher,’ he said.
    ‘Have you any more names?’ Now she sounded like a schoolgirl or a teaching miss.
    ‘Edwin Arthur Fisher.’
    People shoved past them for home at five past five, so that the two were forced apart. He chased her fiercely, under an arcade by a double pillar.
    ‘Come and have a cup of tea,’ he said.
    She looked at her watch, pinching it between thumb and forefinger, squinting again, and, hitching her shoulder-bag, acquiesced. In the tea-shop, dark with pannelled walls and bar-lights, they sat without speaking at a crumb-littered table. Now, make-up unrenewed, face smudged, she seemed at once more approachable and yet complex because he knew that a few minutes’ preparation could transform this breathless, dusty girl into a magnificent woman who’d fetched him over in the theatre. She was handsome, with fine eyes, a large mouth and head of dark auburn hair, purpled in shadow, fine and heavy as if cast. One finger had a blotch of ink; the second button of her blouse was lost.
    He ordered tea as the waitress swatted the table-cloth.
    ‘Were you going anywhere?’ he asked.
    ‘To my flat.’
    ‘And then?’
    ‘Then.’ She blew the echo away.
    ‘We’ll go to the pictures,’ he said, suddenly awkwardly, unlike himself.
    ‘What’s on?’
    ‘No idea.’ She laughed, said that was silly.
    ‘I don’t much mind. I could do with your company.’
    ‘You hardly know me,’ she said.
    ‘I don’t know you at all.’
    He began to tell her about himself, his job at the High School, his ambition to write a play. The waitress arrived; triangles of buttered bread, six assorted cakes on a cake-stand with doyley, tea, milk and sugar in metal containers. Each had a small pot of jam, one dark red, one orange. Pouring out the tea, she held the knob lid under the smirched finger, she paused, breathed in audibly, said,
    ‘I can’t go to the cinema with you. I’m not dressed for it.’
    The mind was made up and the certainty of intonation made her look older.
    ‘Neither am I.’
    ‘I noticed.’
    That held him up, almost shocked him though he could not have said whether it was because she criticised him, or because she thought clothes important. They began to talk about