Ice in the Bedroom Read Online Free PDF Page B

getting away somewhere where there was a spot of squalor.'
    'That's right. I thought I'd be able to swing it here by going the round of the local pubs and having the peasantry bare their souls to me. Thomas Hardy stuff. Not a hope. At the end of a week all I had discovered about these sons of toil was that they were counting the days to the football season so that they could start in on their pools again. Makes one sick. No help to a woman. Why are you looking at me like a half-witted sheep?’
    'Was I?'
    'You were.'
    'I'm sorry. It's just that when Sally Foster was telling me about this new binge you were contemplating, I had an idea. I believe I've got the very spot for you. Castlewood, Mulberry Grove, Valley Fields.'
    'Where's that?'
    'Just outside London. I doubt if you could find a greyer locality. The man who lives next door to me keeps rabbits.'
    'Oh, you live in Valley Fields?'
    'That's right. Castlewood's next door to me on the other side. And it's vacant at the moment and fully furnished. You could move in tomorrow. Shall I fix you up with the rabbit-fancier? He's the house agent.'
    'H'm.'
    'Don't say "H'm!"' 'I wonder.'
    'I wouldn't. Strike while the iron's hot is my advice.'
    But Miss Yorke insisted on relapsing into thought, and Freddie scanned her pensive face anxiously. On her decision so much depended. For he was convinced that if he could only get Sally on the other side of the garden fence that divided Peacehaven from Castlewood, he would soon be able to alter the present trend of her thoughts with the burning words and melting looks he knew he had at his disposal. He had lived in the suburbs long enough to be aware that the preliminaries of seventy per cent of the marriages that occurred there had been arranged over garden fences.
    Leila Yorke came out of her reverie.
    'I hadn't thought of the suburbs. What I had in mind was a bed-sitting-room in Bottleton East, where I could study the martyred proletariat and soak in squalor at every pore.'
    Freddie yelped like a stepped-on puppy.
    'Bottleton East? You're off your onion…I mean, you have an entirely erroneous conception of what Bottleton East is like. It's the cheeriest place in England. I sang at a Song Contest there once, so I know. The audience was the most rollicking set of blighters you ever saw. Never stopped throwing vegetables. No, Valley Fields is the spot for you.'
    'Really grey, is it, this outpost of eternity?'
    'Couldn't be greyer.'
    'Squalor?'
    'It wrote the words and music'
    'Gissing!' exclaimed Miss Yorke, snapping her fingers. Freddie shook his head.
    There's very little kissing done in Valley Fields. The aborigines are much too busy being grey.'
    'I didn't say kissing. I said Gissing. George Gissing. He wrote about the suburbs, and it's just the George Gissing sort of book I'm aiming at.'
    'Well, there you are. Didn't I tell you? You can't miss, if you string along with George Gissing. Ask anybody.'
    'He was as grey as a stevedore's undervest.'
    'Very stark. I've always said so.'
    'Widgeon, I think you've got something.'
    'Me, too.'
    'The telephone's in the hall. Ring up that rat-catching friend of yours, the house agent fellow, and book me in at this Castlewood hovel, starting tomorrow. And—correct me if I'm wrong—I think this calls for another half-bottle.'
    'Me also.'
    'Make a long arm,' said Leila Yorke.
     
     

 
    5
     
    IN the whole of London there is no interior more richly dignified—posh is perhaps the word—than the lobby of Barribault's Hotel in Clarges Street, that haunt of Texas millionaires and visiting maharajahs. Its chairs and settees are the softest that money can provide, its fighting dim and discreet, its carpets of so thick a nap that midgets would get lost in them and have to be rescued by dogs. It is the general opinion of London's elite that until you have seen the lobby of Barribault's Hotel, you have not seen anything.
    Some forty hours after Freddie Widgeon's visit to Loose Chippings, the quiet splendour