To Love and Be Wise Read Free Page B

up since then. I mean, since he was fifteen, or so.'
    He was silent for a little, evidently disentangling this in his mind.
    Why had she told him that, she wondered? Why had she told him that her mother was possessive; even if she had made it clear that she was possessive in the very nicest way? Was it possible that she was nervous? She, who was never nervous and never chattered. What was there to be nervous about? There was surely nothing disconcerting in the presence of a good-looking young man. Both as Liz Garrowby and as Miss Lavinia Fitch's secretary she had entertained a great many good-looking young men in her time, and had not been (as far as she could remember) greatly impressed.
    She turned from the black polished surface of the arterial road into a side one. The last raw scar of new development had faded behind them, and they were now in an altogether country world. The little lanes ran in and out of each other, anonymous and irrelevant, and Liz picked the ones she wanted without hesitation.
    'How do you choose?' Searle asked. 'All these little dirt roads look alike to me.'
    'They look alike to me too. But I have done this trip so often that my hands do it for me, the way my fingers know the keys of a typewriter. I couldn't repeat the keys of a typewriter by trying to visualise them, but my fingers know where each key is. Do you know this part of the world?'
    'No, this is new to me.'
    'It's a dull county, I think. Quite featureless. Walter says that it is a constant permutation of the same seven "props": six trees and a haystack. Indeed he says that there is a phrase in the county regiment's official march that says quite plainly: Six trees and a hay -stack!' She sang the phrase for him. 'But where you see the bump in the road is the beginning of Orfordshire, and that is much more satisfying.'
    Orfordshire was in truth a satisfactory stretch of territory. In the growing dusk its lines flowed together in ever-changing combinations that were dream-like in their perfection. Presently they paused on the lip of a shallow valley and looked down on the dark smudge of roofs and the scattered lights of a village.
    'Salcott St Mary,' Liz said, introducing it. 'A once beautiful English village that is now occupied territory.'
    'Occupied by whom?'
    'By what the remaining natives call "they artist folk". It is very sad for them, poor things. They took Aunt Lavinia in their stride, because she was the owner of the "big house" and not part of their actual lives at all. And she has been here so long that she is almost beginning to belong. The big house has never been part of the village in the last hundred years, anyhow, so it didn't matter much who lived in it. The rot started when the mill house fell vacant, and some firm was going to buy it for a factory. I mean: to turn it into a factory. Then Marta Hallard heard about it and bought it to live in, right under the various lawyers' noses, and everyone was delighted and thought they were saved. They didn't much want an actress creature living in the mill house, but at least they weren't after all to have a factory in their nice village. Poor darlings, if they could only have foreseen.'
    She set the car in motion, and drove slowly along the slope, parallel with the village.
    'I take it there was a sheep-track from London to here in about six months,' Searle said.
    'How did you know?'
    'I see it all the time on the Coast. Someone finds a good quiet spot, and before they've got the plumbing fixed they're being asked to vote for mayor.'
    'Yes. Every third cottage in the place has an alien in it. All degrees of wealth, from Toby Tullis—the play-wright, you know—who has a lovely Jacobean house in the middle of the village street, to Serge Ratoff the dancer who lives in a converted stable. All degrees of living in sin, from Deenie Paddington who never has the same weekend guest twice, to poor old Atlanta Hope and Bart Hobart who have been living in sin, bless them, for the best part