For Love or Money Read Free Page B

in the back and legs at Alamein. The rest of the war was passed peacefully enough in a Yorkshire hospital and it was there that he met Ruth.
    As the lady of the nearest sizeable house, she emerged once a week from an old shooting-brake to enter George’s world of white corridors and sterilised floors, bringing fruit and homely small talk to the wounded.
    George, who had few doubts about the war lasting much longer, had a great many more about what would happen to him when it was over. Four years ago his father had put what remained of his meagre capital into a publishing company, which he had barely lived long enough to see bankrupt. The old man had been buried in Brompton Cemetery, leaving his widow a pension and a suburban house, and his only son £ 2,000: a sum which, George thought lugubriously, would last him little more than a year of unemployment. And as he looked over his raised feet at the rose garden outside the ward he thought about suitable employment. Unfortunately the only jobs suitable for an officer and a gentleman demanded influence, money, or, failing that, an exemplary academic record, none of which he possessed.
    The triviality of Lady Lifton’s conversation and the sight of her sensible economy war-time clothes did little to alleviate his depression. She would walk from bed to bed talking to the soldiers and soon even George realised that her time spent by his bedside was as long as that paid to four others put together. Her air of complacent security and well-being irritated him, as his inattentiveness well demonstrated. She pleaded with him to take more interest in the things around him. He could hardly have pointed out that, never having enjoyed circuses, the things around him were the least likely to entertain. The man in the bed to his right was paralysed from the waist down and had lost a large part of one of his cheeks, while the only mobile member of the ward clicked past mechanically on a metal leg at half-hour intervals to the lavatory. Ruth was amazed at his rejection of the oldclichés: ‘fighting to recover, learning to live again’. She talked to the Sister, who assured her that his pain was no longer great. George had already been out in a wheel-chair and had twice been taken to the bathroom: on the back of the door was a Union Jack and underneath the words ‘Keep Smiling’.
    But as the long days passed and the sun slowly inched across the wall from the opposite beds to the end of his own counterpane, he couldn’t help thinking about Ruth’s home life. What was the woman doing now? Was she in the bath? On a horse? In the kitchen? Did she have dogs? What did Lord Lifton look like? How old was he? George began to look forward to those visits, visits of a person who came into his world from the security of a happier and affluent place. The kind of woman to whom he might soon be delivering groceries. What would she be like then? She probably wouldn’t answer the door but would lean out from a high turret window, ‘Leave them there. Cook will collect them.’ And yet now she talked to him with more than compassion, even with interest. They were together as equals.
    George smiled at her for the first time on her next visit and noticed too, the shape of her face, the angle of her cheek-bone , her auburn hair and dark-brown eyes. He wondered, too, what lay beneath that loose-cut coat and skirt.
    Yes, he had read the book and eaten the grapes, even the bad ones. His legs were definitely better.
    Perhaps when he had recovered he might come and stay with Lord Lifton and her for several weeks?
    The visit never took place; before that there had been the returned pressure hand in hand, the faster breath and the half-fearful stare into each other’s eyes, which said many things but one above all.
    Ruth’s infidelity took place a week after George’s release from the nursing-home and two months before the end of the war.
    The ‘Lamb and Flag’ was a small pub outside Ely in the flat