The Pyramid Read Online Free PDF Page B

the door. Evie was sitting behind the desk and trying to inspect her left eye with her right one in a small round mirror. She saw me in it, instead.
    “Olly! You musn’t come—”
    “Here you are. Thought you’d like this.”
    With an attempt at Robert’s nonchalance I tossed the cross on the desk. Evie pounced on it with a delighted cry.
    “My cross!”
    She put down the mirror and busied herself, fixing the chain round her neck. Her face went solemn and she bent her head. She muttered, made some quick movements over her breasts with one hand. In our local complex of State Church, Nonconformity, and massive indifference, I had never seen anything like them. She looked up at me and smiled suddenly with open mouth, one eye blinking. She whispered with a kind of gleeful accusation.
    “Olly! You story!”
    “What d’you mean?”
    She pushed back her chair an inch or two, then sat, looking up, her hands grasping the edge of the desk. She examined me as if she had never seen me before.
    “Evie—when can we—”
    “That’d be telling, wouldn’t it?”
    There was no doubt at all. Evie Babbacombe, ripest apple on the tree, was regarding me with approval and positive admiration!
    There came a voice, resounding from the depths of the doctor’s house.
    “Miss Babbacombe!”
    She jumped up, patting back her bob, and went to the door into the surgery. She stopped by it and looked back. Giggled.
    “ You had it all the time! ”
    I took my outrage with me back into the dispensary. My father was still at the microscope, adjusting the slide with minute movements of his big fingers. I left well alone and went through into the cottage, wondering what to do. If Sergeant Babbacombe got her story out of her, by third degree or other means, he might not admire my imagined part in it as much as she did. This was an emergency. I had to see her before she went home; but I could think of no excuse for going back through the dispensary. On the other hand, if I stood sideways by my bedroom window I could see down into the Square and the steps of the Ewans’s house next door. As soon as she appeared, I could go down stairs again and through into our garden. If my mother was in the kitchen or scullery I could account for these movements easily enough. (“Just going to have a look at my bike.”) In the garden, I could accelerate, nip over the garden wall into Chandler’s Lane, pound along past the bottom of the Ewans’s garden, the vicarage garden and the three cottages where the lane turned down towards Chandler’s Close, then come back between the vicarage and the churchyard. By this means I should be entering the Square from the opposite direction and could meet her accidentally. I went to my station therefore, and stood close to the chintz curtains. It was long wait, but I could take no chances. Then, just when I was expecting her at any moment, I heard a heavy and martial tread approaching under my window from the other direction. Sergeant Babbacombe was coming from the Town Hall. He was not taking his usual route, past Wertwhistle Wertwhistle and Wertwhistle, Solicitors, Miss Dawlish’s bow window and the rest. He was coming along this side on a course which would lead him straight to our front gate. It was not my actions during the past twenty-four hours that put me in an instant panic. It was my intentions. For under the forward angle of his three-cornered hat, his face wore such a plethoric and parental animosity it took my breath away. His meaty fists swung low as he marched along, the metal studs of his shoes struck sparks from the cobbles. Then—as if she had been watching from a window too—Evie came tripping down the steps from the Ewans’s door. She was wearing a head square of white silk tied under her chin and the free corners flipped as she moved. She wore stockings of course. She was laughing and smiling, hands up by her shoulders, calves moving outward, bottom rotating a little. She tripped up to Sergeant