The Heat of the Day Read Free

had asked him to go away and to stay away: that was the best he could do--she said, last time. What did she expect him to do? She expected him to do whatever he did do: she had no idea what he did, but surely he did do something?--why not get on with that? She had finished up with: "I'm sorry, but it just is that you don't attract me. Why should we go on wasting each other's time?... There's something about you, or isn't something about you. I don't know what." He was not, however, through. He was once again, this evening, on his way to her flat. He proposed, in fact, to be back with her as the clocks struck eight. Up his sleeve he had something--only, the question was in exactly what manner to bring it out? He had hoped, by sitting down at the concert, to have arrived at the answer before they met. It seemed to Louie that there was overmuch music at this concert. There was nothing for her but to drop back again into the stupor in which she had been sitting before her notice lit on the thinking man. The quality of the stupor was not much altered--content at having forced him to notice her, she did not look back over their conversation or ask herself what it had come to or where she stood. Unlike him, she did not look at things in the light of their getting or failing to get her somewhere; her object was to feel that she, Louie, _was__, and in the main she did not look back too willingly at what might have been said or done by her in pursuit of that. She had her misgivings; though always, she hoped, no cause for them. She had never had any censor inside herself, and now Tom her husband was gone--he was in the Army--she had no way of knowing if she were queer or not. Possibly she addressed herself to unknown people in the hope of perceiving what _they__ thought--she had perceived just enough queerness in this last man to make her fancy he might not be a good judge. She often was disconcerted, but never for long enough to have to ask herself why this happened. Left to herself, thrown back on herself in London, she looked about her in vain for someone to imitate; she was ready, nay, eager to attach herself to anyone who could seem to be following any one course with certainty. Tom, by this time, had been drafted abroad; more or less she understood him to be in India. In his letters home he expressed the hope that she was getting on well and being a good girl: to this she never had any notion how to reply, so did not. She maintained what had been their married home, a double first-floor room in one of those little houses in Chilcombe Street, and worked every day at the factory in another, not too far distant part of London. In order to continue to meet the rent at Chilcombe Street, she drew, with Tom's consent, on the sum of money which had come to her from her parents, both of whom had been killed by a bomb. She had been the only child of their late marriage; they had been people who, having done well with their little business, or shop, at Ashford, found themselves in a position to sell it and retire; accordingly, when Louie was ten years old, there had been a removal to Seale-on-Sea, where the family had already spent happy holidays. It was at Scale, in the little villa they had so much enjoyed, that the elderly couple had been wiped out during the Battle of Britain. Louie, having been married by Tom early in 1939, was then in London. The marriage had been a surprise to everyone, most of all herself--actually, the~goodness of her home and the solidity in every sense of her people had been reassuring: she had been a far from bad match--as for her as a wife, it only could be supposed that Tom, himself solid, a serious and progressing young electrician, had a soft spot for comics. They had happened to meet when he was at Scale on holiday--_how__ it should have arrived that she caught his fancy he had not explained to her, and she had never asked. Child of Kent, she had been to London only a few times on a day-ticket before Tom