The Heat of the Day Read Free Page B

you." "Oh, I have," she said with enthusiasm. "You have?" He shifted his hand and rolled round his head in order to look at her with increasing interest. "Still, lonely, all on your own." With resentment she thought of the un-picked roses: _so__, why ever should he? "I'm not," she promptly said. "I live with my auntie. She lives with me." "Look," said the reddening airman, "what's this all of a sudden about you having an auntie?" "An invalid," threw in Louie even more rapidly. "Poor thing. Never goes out." The airman looked at her harder. "Come on," he said, "we'll drop in and meet the old cup o' tea.--Well?" Louie, sitting up, removed a twig from her hair. "You have no right to speak of my aunt like that," she said. (Nor of Tom, either, she added in her own mind.) "You've never got an aunt any more than I have," said the airman, stern with sexual anger. "How was I to know," she replied, "you had never got an aunt?" "You make me sick," he said, getting up. "Starting off by saying you were lonely. Wasting my afternoon." He stood up, pulled at his tunic, slapped at his pockets, finally stooped to brush shreds of moss from his trousers. "You ought to be ashamed, with your husband fighting." "Oh dear," said Louie, disheartened, "whatever is the matter?" "Time," he said aloofly, "I was getting along." "Still, it's been nice," she ventured, lying there sadly, receiving the last blast of disparagement from his back-view as he marched away. However, that was that, and she was now more than even with him about the roses and his mocking of Tom. When she was not disobliging, and she was not always, everything still somehow ended in her being told off--with a resignation no sigh could express she reached out for a new blade of grass and experimentally tickled her own ear, but was still not ticklish. Saddest of all, she found herself without any real desire to return to the roses; she stayed where she was, on the suddenly hard, chill and unloving breast of the lawn till she saw people moving towards the concert, whereupon she got up and moved after them. There is a freedom about an outdoor concert: you come or go at will--there is easy passage between the rows of chairs and your step muted by the grass disturbs no one. However, either the punctiliousness of a stranger or the superstition that rules any movement to do with love made the thinker wait where he was for the coming interval. Nothing more now than suffering the music, he sat on tensely, eye fixed on his watch. The music ceased: he shot up, stood, looked round at the thinned-out clapping, then, in the hurry of flight, made his way out past the Czech soldier, along the row of chairs, up the middle gangway. So far, so good. He paused for less than a second to get his bearings at the theatre gate--whereupon, up came Louie, breathless from her run. "I've had enough, too," she said. She swung into step with him like an old companion. "Looks quite ghosty," she said of the reach of lawns. "That must be mist off from the lake." "Goodnight, then," he said prematurely--for fifty yards more they had to share the path. "I'm going back home," she volunteered, "now, I think." "Much the best thing you can do." "You mean, the evenings are drawing in?" They were--the weeping trees, one by one, shivered slenderly in a tide of ground-mist; away on the mound each ilex stained with a little night of its own the after-death shining of the day. Ahead stood, still open, Queen Mary's gate, high gilded plaque and garlands having not yet forgotten their all-day glittering in the sun. "Are you?" said Louie suddenly. "What?" he said with a start. "Going home? No, I've got a date--thanks." She took this with unconcern; if anything, she sent him a puzzled look as though wondering how such a thing could be. He quickened his step, she hers. Paths parted, _they__ did not--she continued manfully at his side. Riled to a point, he turned on her, saying harshly: "What I meant was, I'd _go__ home, if I were you. You