The Fancy Read Free Page B

months ago. It must be all right now.”
    “D’you want to make me ill again?”
    “Why don’t you go to the doctor again and find out if it’s all right?”
    “I’ve been,” she said after a pause, turning away. He knew she was lying but he didn’t challenge her. No use laying yourself open to any more humiliation. Just as well Connie had had that illness really. She had felt like this about him before that, but now they could keep the pretence of the doctor between them, for decency’s sake.
    Connie patted her hair. “I’m going to put the kettle on. We’re going to have one more game before the News. You going to play?”
    “Might as well,” said Edward. “I’ll go and change.”
    The living-room looked pleasant with the curtains drawn and the centre light on. It was three lamps hanging from a circular wooden bracket, which in the days when lorries had gone down Church Avenue, used sometimes to revolve slowly, making the shadows travel. Pretty the way it shone on Dorothy’s fair hair. She did it drawn up at the sides into curls on top, and low at the back definitely blyh in a silky fold. Connie’s hair had only just been permed and was set in tight little curls under an invisible hairnet. Smart, but it made her face look too big, because she had had it cut, to give the perm longer to grow out. Edward preferred it when it was growing out and she could brush it at night without fear of losing the set.
    Mrs. Munroe’s hair under the light reminded Edward of the blue-black oil that covered the engines at Kyle’s before they were cleaned. It was drawn down from the middle into two immense coils over each ear, studded insecurely with hairpins, with a few wisps escaping horizontally from the centre.
    Mr. Munroe hadn’t got any hair ; his head was like a billiard ball in the light—Spot, because there was a mole on it. No, he had got one hair ; it grew out of the mole. Len’s hair was dark red and followed backward the sloping line of his forehead.
    Edward passed a hand over his own head. Funny soft stuff. It wasn’t really thinning; it was just very fine hair. Connie had once said in a moment of vision that it was like the pile on her camel hair coat.
    “Your turn to play, Ted,” she said, spreading her cards into a fan and shutting them up secretively. “For Heaven’s sake, I never knew anybody take so long to decide, did you, Pop?”
    “When I used to play at the Conservative Club,” began her father laying down his cards and preparing to tell a story, “there was a chap by the name of Bayliss, who——”
    “He’s a dark horse is our Ted,” said Don, through a waggling cigarette, “these slow starters always get your money in the end.”
    “This chap Bayliss, I remember, always used to count twenty-five before he played a card. I wasn’t a bad player in those days ; used to go up there nearly every night, as your mother will tell you. Whist mostly—that was my game. I remember I asked this chap——”
    “Oh shut
up
, Pop,” said Dorothy, “I can’t hear myself think.” She played a card, took it back again, fidgeted and played another. Her father leaned across the table to Edward. “So I asked him : ‘Are you aware,’ I said, ‘that out of every game, you waste, on an average, four minutes and ten seconds?’—I’d done a quick calculation in my head. ‘Multiply that by—’ ”
    “It’s your turn to play, Pop,” screamed Connie and Dorothy, “do attend to the game!”
    At ten to nine, Mrs. Munroe began to say : “Mustn’t miss the News.” At five to, she said it again, and : “Nearly News time, hadn’t we better turn it on in case your clock’s slow? She suspected all clocks, even Big Ben.
    Connie looked sharply at the green glass clock whose works were reflected in the oval mirror that hung forward over the mantelpiece. “That clock never loses.”
    “What about the News?” said her father looking up from his cards, with the air of one making an original