On Green Dolphin Street Read Free Page A

could fry up, too.”
    “I guess I should head back.”
    “Have a bloody omelette,” said Charlie genially. “Here, listen to this.” He took off Frank Sinatra and began riffling through a line of long-playing records held in a red wire rack.
    By four o’clock, they had sampled most of the collection and the bottle of Four Roses was empty. Mary showed Frank upstairs to the attic at the back of the house; he lost his footing for a moment on the uncarpeted stair. Charlie was already in bed by the time Mary got back to their room and started to undress.
    “Have we got to get up early?” he said.
    “Just the usual. School.”
    Mary slid in beside him.
    “What do you make of that chap?” said Charlie.
    “Who? Frank?”
    “Yes.”
    “Strange,” said Mary. “Your sort of man, though.”
    “Yup. Ghastly taste in music.”
    That night, for no reason she could see, Mary dreamed of David Oliver. His presence in her dreams was, naturally, unpredictable, though he always took center stage as though nothing had gone wrong.
    In the second summer of the war, having completed her studies, Mary was in London, living with her parents in their house in Regent’s Park. She helped them stick tape crosses on the windowpanes in the corridor that ran off the first-floor landing; though London was a dangerous place to be, beneath the German bombs, her parents felt better with their only child wrapped up safe inside their house. Mary, while she set about applying to join the WAAF, was glad to be home again, and to resume the familiar routine all three of them pretended they followed only to please the other two. Before dinner they gathered in the drawing room for drinks and did the crossword in
The Times
. Mary’s father, James Kirwan, read out the clues to give the women a chance to volunteer an answer; if none was forthcoming, he would fill it in himself with a propelling pencil. “Mary, here’s one for you: ‘One takes a hammering, sleeping rough without security.’ Twelve letters.
G
, two blanks
C
, ends
P
three blanks. If ‘Pietà’ is right, which I think it must be.”
    “Glockenspiel,” said Mary. “I don’t know why.”
    After dinner they would listen to the wireless, read or play cards. James often wore strangely unbecoming clothes, lumberjack shirts or tennis sweaters, after his day at the Treasury; Mary’s mother, Elizabeth, was usually in a suit she had worn to the surgery where she worked as a general practitioner. James was a solidly made man, patient and sardonic; Elizabeth suffered from weak eyesight, was sympathetic, untidy, with gray hair struggling to escape from a variety of restraints, and still had the clear skin and wide dark eyes that had made her beautiful. She also had a ferocious temper, which exploded without warning; although the subsequentpeacemaking could sometimes make the atmosphere more harmonious than before the outburst, it was a process the others both feared.
    Mary had thought all children were as richly enfolded in love as she was because the child assumes the extent to which it possesses any quality is the norm, until its experience of others’ lives gives it a median against which to judge. It was not until her twenties that she started to appreciate that, even among families generally termed happy, few children had enjoyed what she could now see that she had had: a triangle of affection, in which each person was fully contented only in the presence of the other two. Sometimes when it was growing dark she watched the railings at the foot of Primrose Hill from her bedroom window until she saw her father’s hat and turned-up raincoat progressing toward the gloomy street lamp; though he denied it when she taxed him with it later, it was clear to her that his step unconsciously quickened to something near a run as he approached his house.
    One day he brought back with him to tea a man called David Oliver, an economist who had been seconded to the Treasury from London University. He