The Pyramid Read Free Page A

and savagely.
    My mother expostulated fondly at breakfast.
    “Oliver dear, I know you’ve passed all your examinations and you’re going to Oxford, and heaven knows I’m glad for you to be happy—but you were making a dreadful noise in the bathroom! Whatever will the neighbours think?”
    I answered her indistinctly.
    “Young Ewan. Laughing at him.”
    “ Not with your mouth full, dear!”
    “Sorry.”
    “Bobby Ewan. It’s such a pity that you—Still he’s been away at school most of the time.” This telegraphic style was entirely comprehensible to me. It meant that my mother was regretting the social difference between the Ewans and ourselves . She was thinking too of the incompatibility that had magnified the difference and exacerbated it. As small children, socially innocent, so to speak, we had played together; and I knew things about that play which had reached neither Mrs. Ewan nor my mother. We had hardly been out of our respective prams.
    “You’re my slave.”
    “No I’m not.”
    “Yes you are. My father’s a doctor and yours is only his dispenser.”
    That was why I pushed him off the wall into the Ewans’s cucumber frame, where he made a very satisfactory crash. Not surprisingly we drifted apart after that, and what with school and motor bikes and careful parents, the most we ever did was to snipe at each other with our air guns, aiming always to miss. Now I had kissed Evie Babbacombe—well, more or less—and had seen Robert make a fool of himself.
    “Oliver, dear—I do wish you wouldn’t whistle with your mouth full!”
    After breakfast I went as casually as I could to the dispensary , where my father was making pills, in the old-fashioned way. I stood in the doorway that led from our cottage into the dispensary thinking consciously for the first time how much more like a doctor he looked than staid Dr. Ewan, or the junior partner, reedy Dr. Jones. Such a visit was not usual, and my father looked round ponderously under his heavy brows but said nothing. I leaned against the wall by the door and wondered what excuse I could find for going through into the reception room where Evie would be working. Perhaps, I thought, my father would agree that I needed a thorough overhaul; and indeed, my heart seemed to be acting up in an unusual manner. But before I had got round to saying anything, Evie—who must have been equipped with antennae like my mother—appeared at the end of the passage. She was wearing her blue and white cotton dress, and respectable stockings under her white socks; for of course she could not sit at the desk in the reception room with bare legs. She had one finger on her lips and was shaking her head severely. Her face was different. The orbital area of her left eye was swollen so that on the left side her paint brushes were motionless, their tips projecting in a rigid line. The right side made up for this inactivity; but I had little time to inspect her in detail since she so clearly had a message for me. The finger on the lips, the shaken head—that, I could understand. Don’t say anything to anybody about anything! Sensible enough and not really necessary; but those weaving motions with both hands at her throat as if she were trying to avoid strangulation, that hand then so fiercely stabbing with the fore-finger in the general direction of the Square—and now the head, nodding this time, the bob flying—.
    Evie stopped moving. Listened. Disappeared into the reception room, the door closing without a sound. My father was still making pills. Casually, I lounged back into the cottage and sat myself at the piano. I played, thinking. It was always a useful cover. What did she want with the Square? And who was going to strangle her? Sergeant Babbacombe was the obvious candidate but was hardly likely to do it in the doctor’s reception room. Perhaps she wanted me to go out into the Square so that she could pass me a message—say, in the High Street? It would be hours before