Neither Five Nor Three (Helen Macinnes) Read Online Free PDF Page A

to see me,” she explained, “and I’ve got to get things ready.” For a moment, she had the impulse to ask him to come; he’d know nearly everyone there. Then she decided against that. “Have you seen many of the old crowd?” she asked instead.
    “I just got in this morning.”
    “You mean, this is your first day in New York? Since when?”
    “Since 1945,” he admitted. “I was on leave here then, but I spent most of it in Colorado. I haven’t been in New York, properly, since 1942. It’s a queer feeling. I went down to Washington Square, today, just to have a look at my old apartment. It’s gone—nothing but a gaping hole and a lot of bulldozers moving in. And that building you were watching, what used to be there? I was trying to remember when you almost passed me by.”
    “It was a gallery. Art collections and things. Remember?”
    “And where is it now?”
    “Moved uptown. The city’s moving uptown.”
    “So I saw. No more trolley cars on Fifty-ninth, business offices on Park Avenue, the UN building towering over the East River, and Radio City settling into a respectable middle age.”
    “It must have been a frightening welcome for you.”
    “It’s what I get,” he agreed, “for thinking everything stood still while I was away. But actually it’s more exciting than frightening. It’s good to see people building. It’s good to see them confident.”
    “That’s what I keep thinking,” she said eagerly. “But some people go around talking about the country being in the grip of hysteria—the bomb, and spies, and all that. And I just can’t quite see how they can believe it, if they’d use their eyes and look around them. We may all be worried underneath, but you don’t get this kind of confidence with hysteria, do you?”
    He steered her safely across the double width of Park Avenue, circumnavigated a small flotilla of baby carriages and tricycles returning, with balloons flying, from a visit to the Central Park Zoo, and led her along a quieter stretch of side street to the neon signs of Lexington. “You’re very serious, nowadays,” he said, watching her face with a smile.
    “Not altogether, I hope.” She smiled back. “After all,” she reminded him, “I was only eighteen when you last saw me. That isn’t exactly a serious age.”
    “You still look very much the same, if you want to know. I’d have recognised you at once if it hadn’t been for the hat. Don’t you wear it on the back of your head any more? And what’s all this veiling for? Camouflage?” But there was a compliment in his voice, and she felt unexpectedly pleased. She looked at him, still smiling, but she said nothing. He seemed much older, much older than he ought to be. But she couldn’t tell him that. He had a quick glance for everything, everyone on the street, and not just for the prettiest girls either. He seemed—she wasn’t quite sure of the word: capable, perhaps. Capable and reliable. She almost laughed. Perhaps it was the uniform, she thought. Paul Haydn had been famous for his charm, in the old days, but reliable? Clever and erratic, they had said about him: life came too easily for him. It probably did, even now.
    His grey eyes were watching her. They were amused.
    “What’s the verdict?” he asked.
    She flushed a little. “You’re—you’re different,” she said lamely.
    “Is that bad or good?”
    Her colour deepened. She laughed openly. “I wouldn’t know.”
    “No,” he said, and he was serious again. There was a pause. Then he said, suddenly, “I heard in 1945 that you were married. To a man in the navy.”
    “Just gossip, Paul. But I am getting married, now.” She drew off the glove on her left hand, and said, “There it is.”
    “Very handsome,” he said, glancing at the ring, and then concentrating on leading her through the maze of traffic on overcrowded Lexington. “And is he?”
    “Of course!”
    “He must be a nice guy.”
    “Why?”
    “To make your face light