North Face Read Free Page A

her terseness entirely to force of circumstances.
    “Must be this side of sixty, anyway. Mrs K’s pretty straight, she wouldn’t have poked him up there without giving him some sort of hint what he was in for. Nice if he turned out to be a Raf type, demob, leave or something. But what a hope.”
    “I don’t suppose”—Miss Searle tucked back her handkerchief—“that we shall see a great deal of him, in any case.”
    “I follow you there all right.” Miss Fisher felt she was getting a response at last; she warmed. “Not if that Winter girl sees him coming. Talk about a fast little bit—” With some presence of mind, she clipped off two consonants just in time.
    “Oh? Miss Winter goes out so much; I’m afraid I’ve noticed her very little.”
    This time, Miss Searle had managed a clear articulation. Miss Fisher bent over her plate; the scone she was crumbling made a film of margarine on her fingers. Her sunburned brow stung like fire. Miss Searle must have caught the word after all.
    Rolling, obviously, a greasy crumb, Miss Fisher relived, as rapidly as the drowning, the bad moments of a lifetime: the Housman disaster; the time when she had called a bishop Mister; the cocktail party to which she had gone in a backless evening gown. With it all, she felt an inarticulate sense of wrong. The Miss Searles got the last word so easily, by freezing explanation. She would have liked somehow to make clear that she had let slip a bit of occupational slang, whose specialised place she really knew quite well; that she wasn’t interested in Raf types only because they made good escorts, but because some of them, when she looked in with a hot drink just before the night staff came on, had unburdened themselves of things not known to their mothers or their girls. All this struggled within her, hopelessly; she groped for her handkerchief and wiped her fingers clean.
    “I see in this morning’s paper,” said Miss Searle, relenting in victory, “that we can expect some settled weather for the next few days.”
    A couple of hundred yards up the road, Neil was folding away his map. The scale was irritatingly small; inch-to-the-mile editions showed no sign of reappearing, and his pre-war collection had not covered this unfamiliar ground. Well, he could make his own. Why not? He had nothing better to do, or, certainly, to think about.
    Two inch to the mile; it was unlikely he would get squared paper at the local stationer’s. The nearest place … Disturbed by a vague feeling that there was something he had better do first, he realised that he was hungry. The sensation had become, lately, so unusual that he was slow to recognise it.
    Anyway, he thought, the air’s good here.
    As he disinterred his rucksack from the bracken he remembered that, having travelled down from the north overnight without a sleeper, he would probably be improved by a clean shirt. He swung the rucksack indecisively; but, like everything else nowadays, it didn’t seem worth the trouble. Shrugging himself into the straps, he made for the landmark of the tower.
    Mrs Kearsey received him at the door with instant misgiving. She had hoped against hope that he would be young enough to find it amusing. Forty-five, she thought, if a day; then subtracted a few years, for he looked very run-down, she thought, and shockingly thin for a man of his length and shoulders. Her spirits, which had sunk at the sight of him, were not raised by a Standard English accent which disposed at a blow of heather and outside stairs. Chattering with nervous brightness while she sought for comfort, she found some reassurance in the shirt. He couldn’t be fussy; it was doubtful if he had even shaved today. (Neil owed the benefit of the question to the fact that his beard grew lighter than his hair.) He had forbiddingly little to say; he must have seen the tower as he came up the road. Unable to bear it longer, she committed her fears to words.
    “That’s all right. I saw it coming