A Petrol Scented Spring

A Petrol Scented Spring Read Free

Book: A Petrol Scented Spring Read Free
Author: Ajay Close
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I’m the perfect damsel.’
    Hilda is listening very carefully.
    â€˜Look at that!’ I say.
    We’ve reached Throckmorton’s Fine Art, which today is displaying a canvas by Samuel Peploe. A still life of a restaurant table late at night.
    Bill’s eyes are hooded. Her fingers stray towards mine, then, remembering, twitch away again. I know what she’s thinking. I’m thinking it myself. The silver coffee pot beside the empty glass, the discarded napkin, that blown rose: it’s a painting of us. What use have we for Nature? We’re a new species, releasing our strongest scent in artificial light.
    Her thumb strokes the pearl button at her throat. ‘Half stupefied by meat and drink, the bitter aftertaste of coffee in my mouth—’
    She’s putting herself inside the canvas. It’s a game we play when we’re alone. I cough to remind her of our chaperone, but she takes no notice.
    â€˜â€”the throb of my pulse so alive to you, I can’t bring myself to meet your look.’
    Dinner at Mama’s table is a cheerfully temperate affair, precursor to eight hours of soundly dreamless sleep, and yet my little sister says, ‘I’ve felt like that’.
    â€˜I should hope you have not,’ I say, sounding like Aunt Nellie.
    â€˜And why shouldn’t she? She’s old enough to provoke a glance. Or do you think they only have eyes for you?’
    This is my cue to laugh, and reply of course: one glimpse of me and they’re smitten for all time . Instead I say, ‘She’s too young for all that rot.’
    Bill slides me a sidelong look, ‘You weren’t at seventeen.’
    â€˜Cheese it, Bill.’ But it’s too late, I can see Hilda wondering how, or rather with whom, I disgraced myself. The weedy aesthetes at Miss Burt-Cowper’s dance classes? One of Gordon’s friends? The gardener’s boy in Devon, with his strong brown hands?
    It’s almost eleven by the clock on the wall of Barkers department store when we get to Kensington High Street. I’m about to suggest we telephone Brewer with our apologies and have an early lunch in that place with the potted palms that does such delicious squab pie, when Bill catches my eye and directs a quizzing glance across the street. It’s a perfectly ordinary Monday morning. A good throng on each pavement. Errand boys in their white aprons, ladies’ maids in search of ribbons and stockings, chaps like Pa in bowler hats, a couple of fashionable gentlewomen rustling along in their whipped-cream skirts.
    But now I do spot something. That tall girl. Dressed with a simplicity that graces her slender figure like a boast, her hair much the same colour as Hilda’s and mine. She stands apart from the human tide, right against a shop window. All at once, as if she can feel my scrutiny, she turns and looks straight at me. A pretty face, though my first thought is not her prettiness. She seems terribly familiar.
    And there is something in her hand.
    Barkers’ clock strikes the first of its eleven chimes and, with a tremendous cacophony of smashing glass, the perfectly ordinary Monday morning turns to madness. It happened on Saturday on Regent Street, I read about it in the paper, which makes the fact of it happening now even more dumbfounding. The cheek of them! To do it twice! All along both sides of the High Street women I had not noticed until this moment – women wearing mannishly-tailored jackets over shapeless skirts – are pulling hammers out of their sleeves and striking at shop windows. Other women, shrieking, cower from the splintering glass. Policemen blow whistles. The chaps in bowler hats wrestle hammers out of hands. Not five feet away from me, a chit of a girl in a green, white and purple sash has her arms pinned behind her and is frogmarched towards a policeman. I feel so strangely filled and empty all at once, outraged and excited and even . . .

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