Cushing's Crusade Read Free Page B

with its ornate wooden scrolls on the arms. Diana particularly liked ferns, palms and other rubbery dark-leaved plants, which, Derek thought, gave the room an unnatural underwater look. Diana tossed him his parcel of clothes.
    ‘Don’t just stand there. Take off your trousers.’
    Derek did as he was asked and then slipped on his new garments . Diana watched him critically. She had often told him that his legs were short and stubby, quite wrong for his long torso, and that his head was too large for the width of his shoulders. Derek had always admitted she was right. She looked him up and down for a few moments and smiled.
    ‘You’ll do,’ she said generously.
    Derek stood awkwardly in the middle of the room.
    ‘All dressed up and nowhere to go,’ he said.
    ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ she replied after a pause. ‘The jacket looks just right for the sea.’
    Since they rarely went to the sea, Derek decided she was being sarcastic. He was mistaken.
    ‘Charles rang up this afternoon,’ she went on. ‘He’s bought ahouse on a Cornish estuary; wants us to stay there for a couple of weeks.’
    Diana’s evident excitement made Derek cautious. He hated sitting on beaches and swimming.
    ‘That’s jolly good of him,’ he said. ‘Of course there shouldn’t be any problem about getting time off. When does he want us to go?’
    ‘Last week in July and the first in August.’
    Derek sank down on to the Victorian sofa.
    ‘I see,’ he replied quietly. How could she possibly have forgotten that he had arranged to spend those very weeks in Edinburgh at the National Library of Scotland going through the Macnair papers: documents vital to his East African research. So that was her game. She’d clean up the house and stop messing him around if he gave up his crucial research trip. Diana was going on about how much Giles would enjoy himself. He could even learn to sail, and the opportunity for looking for his precious rocks along the sea shore could scarcely be bettered. Derek had a very fair idea of how Diana would respond if he said he intended going on with his research. What sort of a man could put a load of yellowing papers before a child’s enjoyment? If his research actually had any importance she might feel differently, but what was it except a dead-end subject about dead people? A convenient escape from the real world and real people.
    ‘Those were the only dates?’ he asked helplessly.
    Diana nodded. ‘So I can let him know it’s all right?’
    He took a deep breath and prepared himself for the worst. ‘I’m going to Scotland then.’
    ‘Doing what?’ said Diana, as though he had just made a uniquely disgusting proposition. ‘You can’t intend to prevent us going.’
    Derek put his head in his hands. Dear God, to think that he’d thought he had won a victory over the flat and her lethargy; if he had, she was going to make him pay for it all right. She wasn’t even remotely aware of the ludicrous irony that all her efforts of the last six weeks had been designed to make him assert himself, and now, when he did so, she wanted him to revert to his oldobsequiousness. Suddenly the solution came to him.
    ‘You go,’ he exclaimed triumphantly, as though announcing an idea of amazing brilliance. ‘You and Giles go to Cornwall and I’ll go to Scotland.’ He smiled at her and started laughing. ‘That’s the answer.’
    To his surprise Diana did not argue with him. He had been sure he would have to deliver a lengthy monologue on his personal feelings in order to convince her that he would ruin the holiday rather than contribute to it, but now, mercifully, there was no need.
    A few moments later Diana said, ‘Apart from my wanting you to come, don’t you think Charles is going to find your refusal rather peculiar?’
    Derek laughed. ‘He only likes me because he thinks I’m peculiar.’
    Diana laughed too and asked no further questions. Derek had known Charles Lamont for almost twenty years, but did not