Holiday Read Online Free PDF Page B

the table, ‘that her husband, hide-bound as he was, priggish, domineering, babyish, wasn’t without his virtues compared with some of the men she’d have to deal with.’
    Meg picked up her gloves, not quickly, said they should leave. They did not speak again until they were out in the street.
    ‘What’s the programme?’ he asked.
    ‘I’d better go to my flat.’
    ‘I’ve only just found you.’
    ‘That sounds like a bit from your friend Ibsen,’ she said cruelly. He laughed at that, because she was right. He judged this meeting to be crucial.
    ‘I don’t mind what we do,’ he said, ‘so long as we do it together.’
    ‘Commit suicide?’
    ‘Is that what you feel like?’
    ‘Not at all.’
    ‘I think we should go home, dress up, and go out drinking.’
    ‘Do you know what my father would say to that?’ she asked.
    ‘Uh, uh?’
    ‘Is that all your education has fitted you for? To get drunk?’
    ‘And what do you say?’
    She snatched her gloves off, half in pique. Now the two of them had crossed the road in a crowd, stood in front of the Council House, motionless among people who stumbled, raced past.
    ‘You’ve not answered my question,’ he began. In no hurry, she wrinkled her face, as if genuinely troubled, needing his assurance. He could not offer it. On a sunny evening he needed to worship, not advise.
    ‘Is something wrong?’ he asked.
    ‘You hardly know me.’
    ‘I’m proposing to remedy that.’ Immediately he regretted his flippancy. The Council House clock struck the hour with impressive noise, vibrating in the flagstones.
    ‘Six,’ he said. ‘Tell you what. Let’s be back here by eight.’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘You don’t want to see me, then?’ he asked.
    ‘I don’t mind. It’s not that. Oh, I don’t know.’ She flailed about with her gloves.
    ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Eight o’clock. Or somewhere else, if you like.’
    Now she stood composed, statuesque, but he would not have been surprised if she had wheeled and stalked off. She nodded.
    ‘Here?’ he asked.
    ‘Right.’
    ‘Eight, then.’ He held a hand out. ‘Goodbye, Miss Vernon.’
    Her eyes widened, met his, held steady, looked away. No trace of a smile answered his exaggeration of gallantry. She nodded, jerked the expressive gloves on, pointed, mumbled the number of her bus and made for it.
    He watched her, a tall girl, tossing her hair, looking taller.
    Against his expectation, she returned exactly on time, beautifully groomed. The square, less crowded, opened to her; men turned their heads and she walked proudly.
    ‘We’ll go up to the Country.’
    ‘I don’t drink much.’ She spoke diffidently now as if this small disclaimer implied something else, that she shouldn’t be here, that she regretted her promise.
    ‘Neither do I, for that matter.’
    When he complimented her on her appearance, making her look at their reflection in the long shop-windows of Market Street she barely acknowledged him. It was as if, in assuming these magnificent and suitable clothes, she allowed them to speak for her. This absent-mindedness of hers worried him in the next months. However interested he might be, or intense, however he exerted himself to amuse or even rile her, she offered him a bare eigth of her attention, and brooded on other matters.
    In the hotel she accepted beer; he was content to sit in a corner where he could watch her. There she seemed easier, talked about herself. She was twenty-one, in her final year at a training college, with a job already organized at a junior school in a good area of the city.
    ‘I know the headmistress,’ she said, ‘and my father’s solicitor to the Director of Education.’ He could not guess whether she spoke with or without irony. He decided, delighted, that she ought not to be so pale; the skin of her hands which were large and well shaped seemed almost transparent.
    ‘There’s something I ought to tell you,’ she had said, interrupting an anecdote of his about