The Eye of Love Read Free Page A

apologised Dolores. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m upset.”
    Mr Gibson pressed her closer still. How wonderfully she understood! Just as wonderfully as she’d understood ten years earlier, when he brought her the lease of the little house. “I don’t like to think of you in the shop,” Mr Gibson explained, “at any chappie’s beck and call. I want you all to myself …” Dolores hadn’t even hinted that there was another way of having her all to himself; she understood at once that important fur-merchants didn’t marry girls from behind the counter. But though glad to get out of the shop on any terms (already troubled by fallen arches), basically she accepted the situation because she loved Mr Gibson. Romantically. Unlike her King Hal, who had lived unawakened to romance until he was forty, Miss Diver had been in search of it all her life. Why else had she rejected the pensionable post as telephonist, engineered for her by her brother, to become an assistant in a West End haberdasher’s? Why else (her heart and virtue, even in Piccadilly, so disappointingly unattacked) had she gone year after year to the Chelsea Arts Ball, until she was known as Old Madrid? She sought romance; and that she was thirty before she found it made it all the more wonderful when it came. To bloom in secret, the Spanish rose in King Hal’s secret garden (actually number 5, Alcock Road, Paddington), had for ten years completely satisfied her.
    Now all was over. She could exercise only one last right.
    â€œYou’ve told me so little, Harry, only about the business. Amalgamation—”
    â€œIt happens to be necessary,” said Mr Gibson heavily. “I’ve never wanted to bother my little woman, but the fact is we’re in a poor way. Amalgamating with Joyces’ gets us out of the consommé.”
    â€œCouldn’t you amalgamate without marrying Miss Joyce?”
    â€œIt seems not,” said Mr Gibson—heavily.
    There was a long pause. The declining sun, between the pink curtains, cast a sudden beam of brilliant light, making the stained-glass galleon sail in splendour. It was a moment the child Martha knew well.
    â€œWhat’s she like, Harry?”
    â€œCultured,” said Mr Gibson.
    â€œHow old?”
    Mr Gibson hesitated. Miss Joyce’s exact age was in fact unknown to him, and to say “ripe” would have given a wrong impression. He answered obliquely.
    â€œI’m not exactly a boy myself.”
    â€œYou are to me,” said Dolores. “Will she make you happy?”
    Again Mr Gibson hesitated.
    â€œMy mother says she will. Actually the mater is a cousin by marriage of her aunt.”
    â€œSo she must know all about her,” agreed Dolores, in a shaking voice. “Or at least that she’s cultured … Oh, Harry!”
    It was no use, it was too soon to talk rationally, they had to break off and comfort each other.
    â€œDolores!” cried Mr Gibson—his voice shaking too.
    â€œMy Big Harry! My King Hal!” cried Miss Diver.
    â€œMy Spanish rose!” cried Mr Gibson.
    They clung in genuine and ridiculous grief, collapsed together on the Rexine settee.
    2
    Martha was meanwhile out enjoying life.
    She had been accorded periods of liberty before, but never so absolutely. She was used to getting her own supper, but always before seven. Now she simply made a mental note of cold sausages in the larder. (Martha never neglected her stomach. Though no longer fat, she was no more, at nine, the conventional skinny orphan. She was consolidating fat into muscle.) The cold sausages as it were an iron ration at base, Martha gently closed first the front door, then the front gate, on all adult embarrassingness.
    She was wearing a navy-blue serge kilt, a navy-blue jersey, a brown straw hat and napper gloves. These last two items, picked up en passant in the hall, made her look very respectable. The time