Unexploded Read Online Free PDF Page B

The girl, a redhead in pale green silk, waited on a galleried balcony.
    ‘I take it the question is hers, not yours?’
    ‘I only need a line, Evvie …’
    ‘You have too many already, James!’
    ‘She’s clever. She’s clever like you.’
    ‘You see!’
    ‘You once told me that finishing school would have finished you off were it not for the art classes.’
    ‘History of Art classes. If she knows her art, she’ll finish you off.’
    ‘It is my sincere hope.’
    ‘James!’
    ‘Evvie, dear heart, listen. If I fail in my cause, I’ll have no choice but to confess to your parents that you are so winsome, I’ll need to marry you myself, and to hell with even-featured, physically impressive children who don’t drool. I think they’ll come round to the idea once they realize your dowry won’t even have to leave the family.’
    She shook her head, smiling. ‘My first proposal … Somehow, I’d imagined it all so differently.’
    ‘I’ll tell your mother it all began with that sudden shower as we stepped from the cab, when, yes, Aunt Maude, it was as you’d feared: Evvie’s flimsy gown clung to her, and I couldn’t help but observe –’
    ‘With your anatomical eye …’
    ‘With my anatomical eye – of course – that her breasts are of a size and shape otherwise seen only in the delicacy of champagne glasses’ – he glanced for corroboration at the empty coupé in his hand – ‘and that’s when I knew, dear Aunt, that’s when I knew I had to have her.’
    ‘One line …’
    ‘You are the bestest.’
    ‘You are unstoppable. Ask her if she regards Max Beckmann as an idle expressionist.’
    ‘Beckmann?’
    Her smile was sly. ‘See you shortly.’
    The Pavilion’s oriental domes and minarets were floodlit and golden, as beautiful and unlikely as ever. High overhead, gulls floated spectral against the inky sky, while partygoers strolled across the lawns,their laughter rippling strangely. From the ballroom, the slow-slow-quick-quick tempo of a foxtrot spilled into the night, and, somewhere, a woman declared drunkenly that she’d lost a shoe.
    As the lawns emptied, Evelyn began to wonder just how late it was … Had James forgotten her? Ahead, in the dim light of a red paper Chinese lantern, she could see loops of smoke rising from a cigarette, although she had to edge closer before she could make out its owner. ‘Sorry to trouble you.’ She tried to sound breezy. ‘Would you have the time?’
    As he stepped into the light, smoke escaped his nostrils. ‘Certainly.’ He pushed back a starched shirt cuff. ‘It’s twenty minutes past ten.’ He was tall, long-limbed. She couldn’t help but observe that the sleeves of his tailcoat were actually too short. ‘The only thing worse than borrowing one’s tailcoat,’ she heard her mother declare, ‘is buying one’s furniture.’ For her mother, it went without saying that one inherited one’s worldly goods – and that one owned a good tailcoat.
    On his breath she could smell whisky, no doubt from a flask hidden in the pocket on the underside of his tails. He reached into his jacket and offered her a cigarette from a case but she shook her head. She never managed not to cough, she explained, privately regretting that she sounded like a child. She met his eye, and looked away again, as if to examine the paper bloom of the lantern. He invited her to join him on a nearby bench but she declined, unable to say that a damp bench would mark her gown. Across the lawn, the lanterns were dissolving into the mist that had crept up from the front. ‘You can smell the sea,’ he said.
    In the narrow pool of light, his eyes were a rich brown, warm as autumn chestnuts, but was there also, she wondered, somethingguarded about them? Did he labour under a certain reserve? And now, was he simply too polite to walk away and rejoin his party?
    ‘Yes,’ she said abruptly, remembering the sea. ‘There’s a definite tang in the air.’
    He pointed to the