Rose in Darkness Read Online Free PDF

and picks up his car.’ ‘Oh yes, of course, the man and the car,’ said Rufie. Assured by Etho that it would all turn out to be a bit of private nonsense on Sari’s part, he had given it little further thought; only how was she going to get out of all this stage-set, poor love? He suggested craftily: ‘You said he’d given you his number. Why don’t you ring and hurry him up?’
    ‘I tried but I keep getting the wrong people. The number’s all blurred with the rain.’
    ‘Oh, what a bore!’ He tried to make things easy. ‘You’re sure this wasn’t all a nightmare, love? I mean, a sort of dream—’
    ‘But it happened when I wasn’t asleep,’ said Sari.
    ‘Yes, but... Well that does look very much like your Halcyon in the car park,’ said Rufie. ‘I saw from the sitting-room, its nose sticking out from the shed.’
    ‘Well, of course it looks like my Halcyon. His was a Halcyon too. I told you.’ She shrugged. ‘Well, he’ll turn up some time. Meanwhile—what?’
    ‘If you can’t go out, we’d better ring round some of the chums to come and have lunch. Except of course, we haven’t got anything to eat. I’d go down to the delicatessen,’ said Rufie, using another of his words, ‘but I’m flat broke, myself.’
    ‘I’ve got a bit stashed away in my wiggy-bank but I simply must hoard it.’ The marmalade hair-do was a source of enormous expense since nobody could achieve its incandescent effect but a terribly special man who most unfortunately lived and worked in Rome. ‘A couple more weeks and I’ll simply have to go to Luigi. Would Nan bring some vittles?’ The heavenly part about Nan was that she seemed to be always in funds.
    ‘One rather tickly doesn’t want to ask Nan again.’ Particularly was yet another of the words. ‘I mean, she brought it last time and the time before, and she always contributes.’ All those lovely chicking sangwidges, he recollected.
    ‘She runs them up herself in the kitching,’ said Sari. But the chicking sangwidges were a joke against himself.
    Sofy would be no good. She was currently resting and even flatter broke than usual. ‘I do think it’s hard on her, poor old Sofa. She’s got to stay fat because nowadays she only gets fat-girl parts, but there aren’t all that many fat-girl parts going; and she has to spend a fortune stuffing herself with food she can’t afford, to keep herself in work she doesn’t get.’
    ‘What about Charley?’
    ‘Virryvirry good oideah,’ said Sari in a stage Indian accent subtly tinged with Scouse. Charley, she remembered, had sworn to himself to spend today swotting up for his medical exams, but she knew how all too easy it would be to tempt him from this path. ‘And Pony?’
    So Rufie rang up Nan again and Pony, and settled back with Sari over more black coffees on the immense long studio couch. ‘The minute I get paid for my sketches, we’ll stand Nan a terrific meal at the Cellier du Thing, to make up for all this scrounging.’
    ‘Or a presie. What could we sell,’ said Sari, looking round the room, ‘that would buy Nan a really gorgeous presie?’ She knew a girl who was madly covetous of the sequin monkey pants....
    They fell to planning the presie. Rufie might design a simply outrageous hat, what about that?—something that would really do something for Nan’s image which, let’s face it, was just a shade, well a deep dark shadow in fact, too twin-set-and-pearls. They could make it together. Sari had one of those rather smelly Japanese parasols which would do splendidly (without the handle of course) for the brim, and then with holes cut out between the struts. And into the holes, one could push plastic chrysanthemums, masses of bronzey and yellow chrysanths, just right for the Japanese theme, or was that China?—and make a sort of crown of them too; and in fact in summer Nan could use real fresh ones, dashing off to the loo now and then if it was a hot restaurant or anything like that, to renew