The Defector Read Online Free PDF Page B

shouldn’t I be?”
    “Because you much prefer Charley,” his wife said.
    “But I don’t show it,” he maintained.
    “I just find Davina rather difficult.”
    “She was never any trouble,” his wife reminded him.
    “It can’t have been easy being Charley’s sister.”
    “Well, yes, but she never made an effort, did she? And look at the fuss she kicked up when Richard broke it off. Didn’t come near us for over a year. Who is this fellow she’s bringing along don’t tell me she’s going to take up with a Pole. “
    “We’ve got to be very nice to him too,” Betty said firmly.
    “It would be marvelous if she got married and settled down. I wish she wasn’t so tied up in that dreary Ministry job. These career girls never seem to get married.” He gave a mischievous laugh.
    “I should think you’d had enough weddings with Charley,” he said.
    “You’re hopeless,” his wife said.
    “You’d forgive Charley anything.”
    “I think it’s time Davina forgave her too,” he said.
    “After all Richard was no damned good. Perhaps it’s a good thing they’re coming both together. Did you tell her Charley would be here?”
    “Yes, I did,” Betty Graham said.
    “She said she didn’t mind; she said she’d be glad to see her, actually.”
    “Then let’s hope it all goes off well. I don’t want the weekend spoilt. They don’t come down that often.”
    “No,” she said.
    “I’m sure it will be all right. Now finish that drink and we’ll have our lunch. I arranged for Mrs. Dixon to come in and cook over the weekend. I don’t want to spend my time in the kitchen.” After lunch, she went into the garden with the wicker trug over her arm, and cut flowers to put in the girls’ bedrooms. Long sprays of forsythia arched among the daffodils; she was clever with flowers and had always arranged them. Even when she was alone in the house and Harry was at sea during the war, Betty Graham kept the vases filled, as if she were preparing for him to walk through the door. Their only son had been killed in the Fleet Air Arm, long after the war had ended. He was only twenty; that was when she began to look old. They had grieved, she and Harry. Arranging a big bowl of forsythia in Davina’s bedroom, Betty Graham remembered how differently her two daughters had shown their feelings at their brother’s death. Davina was twenty-four, and Charley seventeen. The love child of the immediate post war, when she and Harry took up their life again, not expecting that she would have a pregnancy at forty-two Charley had wept and clung to each of them in turn; they had been a trinity of sorrow, she and Harry and their younger daughter. Davina had looked grey for weeks, but they never saw her cry. She had never shown her feelings; that was the reason she and Harry found it difficult to love her as much as Charlotte. She smiled quietly, thinking how Charlotte had been impossible for the little girl to say; she had shortened her name, and she was Charley to everyone who knew her. What a pity that Davina was so different. And then when Richard asked her to marry him, and she seemed so happy and outgoing at last that had been terribly difficult for them all. She put the memory aside and carried a vase of flowers into her younger daughter’s room. It would be lovely having them together for the weekend. She did hope the Pole would fit in. Brigadier White didn’t like going to see the Home Secretary. He avoided it whenever possible, sending a deputy to make the routine report. He considered the incumbent of the principal post at the Home Office to be a liberal intellectual, who disapproved of him and his department and frustrated him when he most needed support. In White’s opinion he was soft. He was an abolitionist, which the Brigadier thought ridiculous, with the crime rate, and especially violent crime, murder, armed robbery and terrorism, on the increase every year. White believed in death as a deterrent. It was also much