Love in Our Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

uncomfortably upright so as not to squash the cushions, looking hopefully at each other. There was an air of tension and anxiety in the room: it might have been a firing squad they were waiting for. It was almost as though each expected the other suddenly to produce the party—Rex and Tony and Willie and the rest of them—complete and in full swing out of a hat.
    â€œI hope they’re not late,” Alice said at last.
    â€œPerhaps they’ve forgotten all about it,” Gerald answered.
    Now that the day of the party had come he did not feel so enthusiastic. He couldn’t help remembering the amount they had spent on it and he wished that he and Alice could have spent the money quietly on themselves without all this fuss. Altogether, the scale of the thing, once it had been taken out of his hands, appalled him. The original idea of beer and sausages had been discarded entirely. Alice had not been at all impressed by the fact that a peer’s daughter did it that way. She knew by instinct that what went down well enough in Eaton Square would be the laughing stock of East Finchley. There were now sandwiches and sausage rolls, a bowl of fruit salad and a trayful of jellies, a large iced cake anda dish of salted peanuts. The beer—gallon upon gallon of it—stood on the floor in a great forest of bottles. It seemed impossible that fourteen human beings—that was the number it had now reached—who had already eaten a meal that evening could be expected to get through so much by morning. But there it was; and Alice kept getting up and going into the other room to reassure herself that there was enough.
    One reason for Gerald’s despondency was that he was suffering from a rebuff: it was only a slight one, but he couldn’t forget it. Tony’s remark about dressing up had worried him at the time. It had worried him still more as the date for the party approached. He saw the others surging into the room with a swish of silk dresses and ostrich feathers and the arctic glare of boiled shirts—and Alice and himself sitting there like a couple of school children in their day clothes. Finally, he had been unable to stand the uncertainty any longer. He had rung up Rex.
    â€œThat you, old boy?” he had said.
    â€œHow’s the world?” he had heard Rex answer.
    â€œI say, old man, don’t dress to-night,” he had said.
    And Rex had answered, “Go on.”
    That was all there was to it. But it had hurt; it had most distinctly hurt. It indicated that there was something intrinsically absurd in the idea of any party that he gave being good enough to dress for. He wished now that he had left things as they were and simply laughed it off, nonchalantly and at his ease, if anyone had turned up in the wrong clothes.
    Because the room seemed hot he got up and opened a window. A moment later Alice came back in, seemed rather surprised to find the window open, and shut itagain. Gerald said nothing. Then Alice went through to the dining-room to fetch the little Dresden shepherdess from the mantelpiece—it had been a wedding present—and set it on the Minitone piano in the corner: it looked better there. They avoided each other’s eye and tried to pretend they had not heard the clock strike. Secretly they began to work out plans in their minds for getting through that hecatomb of food in the next room. Then at eight thirty-two the front-door bell rang.
    Gerald got up and straightened his tie.
    â€œI’ll go,” he said. “You stop here and receive them.”
    It was Willie.
    He seemed even more astonishingly commonplace than usual. The suit that he was wearing was a very neatly pressed blue serge and with it he wore a narrow white collar. But there all merit ceased. His hair seemed shorter and more stubby at the back and longer and fluffier in the front than ever. His tie was a horizontal striped one of the kind that can be bought in any branch of the