Night Without Stars Read Free Page A

it.
    â€œThanks,” I said. “ I’ll keep you up to date.”
    He’d evidently expected the thing to be rapid because when I went again in six months he showed no surprise. In the meantime I got about as usual.
    I sold the family house in the end and found a smallish flat in Portland Place which suited a lot better. There were a few disadvantages, of course. I’d thought of pottering about with music again and it was a wrench to sell the piano, but I couldn’t imagine myself doing much with it in the flat. Anyway I was in the centre of things.
    Spare evenings now were mostly spent at the club, and I began to make money at poker. I gave up golf, said it was a strain, and nobody suspected the truth. This slow loss of sight was quite different from the first go; all sorts of things helped: hearing, smell, touch.
    I developed a low cunning too. It became a sort of game, a matter of pride not to get caught out. I knew where everything was in the office, had my own table at the club. When at last it got so that I couldn’t read small print I depended more than ever on Marigold, and kept other people out of my office while the first business of the day was gone through.
    Then after a time it wasn’t a game any more but deadly earnest. I thought I’d go on as long as I could. After that it was anybody’s guess. I hated the thought of becoming helpless, an object of Sympathy. And I’d had one taste of complete darkness. I couldn’t seem to see myself there again. But what was there to do about it?
    One day I saw old Hampden and Cousin Lewis, and told them I was giving up. I think by now they suspected a good bit because they didn’t jib much but only argued pacifically over the use of the leisure I was going to take and the amount of the allowance they were to make me. Cousin Lewis said he thought a sea-trip would put me right, and old Hampden advised salmon-fishing, but I left them saying I’d let them know later on where to send the money.
    I didn’t go to see Caroline and Hugh but dropped them a letter. It saved trouble. At that point it was hard to decide where to go, except that I’d a vague hankering to sit in the sun and let things slide. Then I thought of the Wintertons.
    The Wintertons had reached England with other refugees from the South of France in 1940. Because they knew my father they came in to our office and I had been able to help them with credits and recommendations, and also to get a passage to America in the following year. When the war was over they went back to their villa in Beaulieu near Monte Carlo, and since then had sent me three letters asking me out.
    It seemed worth trying. I had memories of hot sun and mountains and bathing in the Mediterranean when I was a kid. Too many of these precious months had drifted away in offices and the courts and among the fogs that had nothing to do with my eyesight. I wanted the sun.
    I wrote them and got a wire back: “ Delighted. Come and stay the winter.”
    Walter Winterton was a tall Europeanised American of about fifty. Claire was an indefinite forty-five, half French and half something else, I never knew what. She was small and rather plump, had a tired caressing voice and liked her hair in vivid colours.
    They met me at the station in an enormous car—I could just recognise their figures on the platform—drove me to their white Italian villa overlooking the beach, and entertained me like a king. I stayed two months, browning in the winter sunshine, driving with them into Monte Carlo or Nice, talking endlessly and pleasantly on the veranda, sipping champagne cocktails, or taking up a corner at one of their sherry parties. Claire’s hair changed with the seasons, from a luscious mahogany to a glamorous primrose yellow. Walter talked about cars and Wall Street and winter sports and radiograms and the international situation. Claire talked about the ballet, shopping, food, her