The Heat of the Day Read Free Page A

brought her there as a bride. She now, that is to say within these last years, never left London, having been left with no place to go to. She was lucky, she understood by reason, in being left with Chilcombe Street: few wives of men called up remained placed as they were before. But the idea of Chilcombe Street's being home, which at the best of times had resided in Tom only, had been taken away by him to India. For her part, as things were now, she was glad to get out of it every morning: she neglected the rooms--front and back, opening on one another through an arch across which Tom had fixed a curtain--the Turkey-patterned lino lost its gloss and she went out leaving the big bed slatternly; in revenge, perhaps, for its being so cold all night. Her returns from the factory every evening had in one or another manner to be survived--all the fine evenings of this summer there had been the solution of a walk in the park; when it rained, she either sat in a movie or else lay on her bed in a series of heavy dozes alongside the hollow left by Tom's body. In this state, drugged by the rainy dusk, she almost always returned with sensual closeness to seaside childhood; once more she felt her heels in the pudding-softness of the hot tarred esplanade or her bare arm up to the elbow in rain-wet tamarisk. She smelt the shingle and heard it being sucked by the sea. Louie had, with regard to time, an infant lack of stereoscopic vision; she saw then and now on the same plane; they were the same. To her everything seemed to be going on at once; so that she deferred, when she did, in a trouble of half-belief to either the calendar or the clock. At present, though bodily seated on a chair on a darkening slope listening to music, she was in effect again in the park rose garden, where she had been walking that afternoon. Great globular roses, today at the height of their second blooming, burned more as the sun descended, dazzling the lake. Lagging along the turf between the beds, Louie repeatedly stooped to touch petals, her raspy fingertips being every time entered by their smoothness. She above all desired to snap two or three of the roses from their stems--had she been alone she would have taken the risk, but she dared not because of her Air Force friend. She had found all men to be one way funny like Tom--no sooner were their lips unstuck from your own than they began again to utter morality. To divert his attention she had once, even, tried staring up alarmedly at the sky. "_Look__--that balloon there's come all untied!" But his glance had been too brief. "They don't," he said to her, tolerant. "Oh, they do!" He only resettled his guiding thumb more firmly inside her elbow. "My husband saw one do," she improvised. "He told me." "I shouldn't wonder he told you a lot of things." The sneer at Tom turned her scarlet--she veered away from roses, rebelliously stiffening her muscles inside the airman's hold. He and she returned to the slope of mound under the ilex where they had already been lying most of the afternoon: here once more she spread her coat out, and he, somewhat absently, set to tickling her behind the ear with a blade of grass. Round them the lawns were dotted with other couples imploring with their extended bodies the yellow last of the sun. To this spot, to which Tom had been so much attached, a sort of piety made her bring any other man: she had thus the sense of living their Sundays for him. She stared up into the tree. "Not ticklish?" said the airman, dissatisfied. "What, aren't I?" "You ought to know," he said, throwing the grass away. "Don't you know anything?" He heaved over on to his back, dropping one hand over his eyes; and she, having for the moment forgotten what he looked like, turned round to wonder what was under the hand. Something more began to invade his manner--he began: "Where was it you said you lived?" "Why, I never did say." "Still, you must live somewhere. You ought to have a nice place, a nice girl like