On Green Dolphin Street Read Free Page B

sat next to the fire with his teacup rattling in his lap; he was awkwardly polite toward Mrs. Kirwan, struggling to his feet each time she came back into the room, slopping tea into the saucer, and was deferential toward her husband, occasionally slipping in a vocative “sir.” He had round cheeks and wire-rimmed glasses; it was a face that seemed aching to be comic, and his manner suggested some hilarity suppressed, but he successfully maintained a solemn front, smiling only when he glanced across at Mary, who was sitting on the sofa, her stockinged feet beneath her, stroking the marmalade cat.
    Mary Kirwan, at the age of twenty-one, had something of the feline about herself. She was smaller than either of her parents, lacking her father’s solid build or her mother’s height; she was small-boned, with wavy hair of a color bordering on black, cut a little above the shoulder and held off her face with combs. Her movements were still quick and girlish, while her features were those of her mother at the same age: large, dark eyes, prone to fright, in pale, clear skin. “It’s like looking at a miniatureversion of myself,” Elizabeth said. “Like looking in a mirror that slightly reduces everything.” Her sense of her daughter as someone of not quite serious adult size was integral to the way she loved her.
    Mary’s father often brought home people from work; he liked to think his wife and daughter would enjoy their conversation and he wanted lonely colleagues to think they were free to share in his unexpected domestic happiness. A bachelor who lived in Southwark digs, where the landlady’s offering was some version of stew and semolina at six o’clock, David Oliver was easily persuaded to stay to dinner. He drank gin and orange and accepted two refills.
    “David’s a terrific brainbox,” said Mary’s father over dinner. “People are in awe of him at work.”
    “I had to make myself good at work because no one took me seriously.”
    “Why was that?” said Elizabeth.
    “It just happened. At school, at work, wherever I’ve been, it’s always the same. The others always seemed to think I was a figure of fun.”
    “But why?”
    “I don’t know.” David looked down into his wineglass; he seemed less nervous than before. “Maybe I’ve just got a ridiculous face.”
    A week later, Mary had a postcard from David asking if she would like to go to the pictures; there was a cinema in Bloomsbury still showing
Rebecca
, he said. Concealing the fact that she had already seen it, Mary took a bus to Russell Square and sat through the film a second time. Afterward, they went to an ABC café, where they had tea and dry buns; David told her about his work and how little he liked it. He was in a reserved occupation, required to lend the weight of his economic expertise to the war effort; he had failed an army medical on the grounds that he was still debilitated by childhood polio.
    “But it’s absurd,” he said, drawing a face with his finger on the steamed window of the café. “I’m as strong as an ox. I play squash twice a week. As soon as this job’s over, I’m going to reapply.”
    “I think you should,” said Mary. “That’s a good drawing, by the way.”
    “What?” David rubbed his hand quickly across the pane.
    “Do you do proper drawings? I mean on paper, not on glass?”
    “I do go to life classes, I admit. In an awful drafty place in Battersea. We draw a little man who used to be a prizefighter, or so he says. He’s very hairy.”
    Mary looked at David’s face closely: his blinking eyes and plump cheeks would hardly have enthralled a Rebecca, but she felt at ease with him, flattered by his attention.
    David continued to send her postcards; he seemed anxious that her parents should know that he communicated with her, that there should be nothing underhand in his approach. He invited her to watch him play squash, where he revealed an unexpectedly muscular and competitive side, whipping the small