Ice in the Bedroom Read Free Page B

which had arisen, running, it would not be too much to say, the gamut of his emotions.
    At the outset he had been all joy and effervescence, feeling that out of a blue sky Fate had handed him the most stupendous bit of goose and that all was for the best in this best of all possible worlds, but as the time went by doubts began to creep in. Was this, he found himself asking himself, a good show or a bad show? Would seeing Sally alleviate that yearning feeling which so often darkened his days, or - let's face it - would he merely be twisting the knife in the wound, as the expression was? The question was a very moot one, and it is not surprising that those of his clubmates who threw lumps of sugar at him during the meal commented on his lack of sparkle and responsiveness.
    On the whole, though it was a close thing, he was inclined to think that the show's goodness outweighed its badness. Agony, of course, to see her face to face and think of what might have been, but on the other hand there was always the chance that Time the great healer might have been doing its stuff, softening her heart and causing better counsels to prevail.
    His mood, in consequence, as he made his way to Victoria and bought his ticket, was on the whole optimistic. Many a girl, he told himself, who in the heat of the moment had handed her loved one the pink slip, finds after thinking it over in the privacy of her chamber in the course of sleepless nights that what she had supposed to be a sound, rational move was in reality the floater of a life-time. Remorse, in short, supervenes, and when the rejected one suddenly pops up out of a trap before her, her eyes widen, her nose twitches, her lips part, she cries, 'Oh, Freddie darling!' and flings herself into his arms, and all is gas and gaiters again.
    The day was Friday, never a good day for travelling, and the congestion in all parts of the station had extended itself to the train for Loose Chippings. It bulged at every seam with human sardines. Faced with a choice between compartments filled with outsize adults and those where the adults were more streamlined but were accompanied by children, he chose one of the former. Only standing-room remained in the little Black Hole of Calcutta which he had selected, so he stood, and from this elevation was able to see his fellow-travellers steadily and see them whole.
    There were eight of them, three men who looked like farmers, three women who looked like farmers' wives, a man in black who might have been an undertaker in a modest line of business, and over in the far corner a small, trim girl who was reading a magazine. She immediately arrested Freddie's attention. There was something about her that reminded him of Sally. Extraordinarily like Sally she was, from what he could see of her, and the next moment he was able to understand why there was such a resemblance.
    It was Sally. She looked up from her magazine as the train started, and her eyes met his.
    They were, he noted, as blue as ever, and the nose, the one that twitched like a rabbit's, still tilted slightly at the tip. The mouth was as of yore a little wide. Of the teeth he could not judge, for she was not smiling, but what of her hair he could see remained that attractive copper colour he had always admired so much. Her face, in short, taking it by and large, was exactly as he remembered it from, it sometimes seemed to him, a previous existence, and at the sight of it he was conscious of an elation so pronounced that if the three farmers, the three farmers' wives and the undertaker had not been present, he would have snorted like the warhorse which, we are told, though it seems odd, used to say 'Ha, ha!' among the trumpets.
     

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    ’LOOSE CHIPPING’ chanted the porter as the train sauntered into the little country station, and Sally pushed her way through the sea of legs between her and the door and stepped down on to the platform.
    She was furious, and, she considered, justly. At the cost of