The Lonely Read Online Free PDF

the London train to Birmingham and the north when it came through at eleven. He was early for his appointment and wandered the streets of the ugly, red-brick city looking into shops.
    As always, he was startled to find how used he had become to English ways and the English scene, the tall buses and the tiny cars, the long lines of tired-looking women queued up at butcher and fishmonger with their net or paper market-bags, the distinctive smell of coal smoke, the homely, friendly pubs placarding their particular brand of beer or ale, drably-clothed people endlessly riding past on bicycles, and the characteristic gaps where houses were missing in the heart of the shopping-district and where now stood the round, low water tanks as protection against any future fire blitz.
    He thought about his own village of Westbury—the broad shopping-street with the huge plate-glass windows, the big shiny cars lined up at the curb, the quiet tree-shaded side streets, the kids pouring out of the high school in the afternoon, the peaceful, lazy games of ball that would be going on on a summer’s day, like this one so far away in Kenwoulton, bright, warm, and shining. What a day to start this queer trip with an odd little girl he did not even know very well!
    How different everything was from home, almost as though he were playing a part in a dream, except that he was there standing at Hadsley Circle carrying his Valpack, his cap pushed to the back of his head, watching a white-cuffed bobby directing the stream of snorting double-decked red buses and military traffic. It might well be that home was the dream.
    He looked at his watch. It was time. He picked up his grip and walked the three streets to Bishop’s Lane, the narrow, grubby street consisting of low and lightless brick houses where Patches was quartered with her group of WAAFs.
    Jerry’s heart was beating hard with excitement. He pictured Patches’ small, shapeless figure, in her blue-grey uniform and jaunty cap, coming down the stairs, and wondered what he would say to her and how she would behave and whether she would detect how strange and awkward he felt.
    He pushed the button beneath her name—“Sgt P. Graeme, WAAF”—and went in. Immediately he heard her call from above: “Is that you, Jerry?” and when he answered, she said: “I’m ready,” and he heard a door close and her feet on the stairs.
    And then she came down the dark, grimy staircase carrying a small bag, and Jerry stared and had to look twice to recognize her. She was wearing a tweed skirt and a dark-blue silk blouse, high-heeled shoes, and silk stockings. She had her hair parted in the centre and coiled about her ears, and perched atop her head was a silly little hat made out of straw and artificial cornflowers.
    Jerry exclaimed: “Patches! You’re in civvies! You look wizard!”
    “Do you like me? I hoped you would. Oh, Jerry, it’s so wonderful to wear clothes again.”
    “Patches—I didn’t expect . . . I mean I’d forgotten you didn’t have to wear your uniform.”
    It wasn’t that it changed the contours of her queer little face or even made her pretty, but she had become a girl, something he had never been conscious of before. Robbed of the bulky stiffness of her uniform, her figure was young and slender; the gentle lift of her breasts showed beneath the silk of her blouse. Her legs moved with a new kind of freedom and rhythm; there was a pathetic slimness to her shoulders and a charm to the proportions of her head and the youth of the soft column of her neck.
    Jerry set down his bag and leaned over almost shyly and kissed her cheek. She lifted her hand to his face and held it there, and then they stood for a moment in the gloomy hall of the lodging-house looking at one another.
    In her mind Patches closed a door softly and paused with her hand upon the door of another. There was nothing left of sadness or hurt or struggle within her. All that had had to be faced she had fought with alone