Balefanio - tmp0

"Here you are," she smiled.

Edward tried to raise himself on one elbow. Sank back with a groan.

"I'm all done in."

"Let me," said Margaret.

Smiling, she slipped an arm under his shoulder, raised him gently with a strong movement, brought the cup to his lips. Edward drank greedily. Then he lay back. She sat down on the edge of the couch and smiled at him. Edward's gaze cleared.

"Margaret."

"Yes, Edward."

"I want to ask you a question."

"Ask away."

"Why"—Edward brought out the words with his peculiar deliberation—"are you so damned good to me?"

"Am I?"

"You are. Christ alone knows why. Well, I want to know too."

Margaret turned away her eyes.

"Does it matter particularly?"

But she spoke very low, hardly above a whisper. And Edward had made a sudden violent move­ment, as though he were trying to break a mesh of ropes. He raised himself on his elbow. Almost shouted:

"Margaret!"

"Yes, what is it?"

"Take me away from here."

She smiled.

"Where?"

"Anywhere. Out of this damned town. Out of this cursed country."

"All right."

"You will? You promise?"

"Yes," she soothed him. "Of course."

"How soon?"

"As soon as possible."

"Tomorrow?"

"We couldn't start tomorrow."

"But soon?"

"Yes."

"Thank God!"

He raised himself, half turned, let his head sink back into her lap. Looked up at her with a strange, unhappy, boyish smile.

"You really mean it?"

"Of course, my dear. If you really want it."

Edward lay still for a second. Then he said quite distinctly, but half to himself, as though he were perfectly sober:

"I wonder if you can bring it off."

"I'm going to try," said Margaret, and her fingers moved softly through his hair. She couldn't look down at him. Her lips were trembling. The tears smarting in her eyes. So he had said it. At last.

Like a prisoner strapped ready for torture, Eric lay rigid, his fists clenched, in his narrow bed. Liar! he thought. Hypocrite! Liar! Cheat! He stared furiously at the dark ceiling. I was jealous. The whole thing was nothing but jealousy.

I'm ten thousand times worse than Edward, Eric thought. Ten million times worse.

Jealous; jealous; jealous!

I'm not fit to live.

It was more than three weeks later that Eric received a card postmarked from the South of France. A staring blue bay backed by a sky the colour of strawberry ice-cream. The tinting of sea and sky overlapped a little at the edge, staining the horizon puce.

All it said was:

"Please accept this as an alibi.

Edward"

Maurice also had received a card. The message was one word shorter:

"This is where I am."

Maurice stuck the card on his mantelpiece after a single glance. He was sorry, but not particularly surprised, to hear that Edward was out of reach.

Edward had promised to take him to Paris next Vac. Very likely he'd forgotten. There was no expecting anything from Edward, and Maurice was much too worried to waste any time thinking about him just now.

A very awkward thing had happened.

Currie had said, once or twice, that Maurice might borrow his Sunbeam when he wasn't there. And so, naturally, Maurice had taken to using it regularly. And, of course, it had had one or two little knocks which the garage people had grinned over and charged to Mr. Currie's account. Ap­parently he never made a fuss.

And so things had gone on in a very nice friendly way until last week, when Maurice had had the bad luck to run straight through a brick wall when swerving and skidding to avoid some fool on a push-bike. And Farncombe, who'd been with him, had broken his arm and his collar-bone. And Currie had suddenly become quite beastly, which Maurice couldn't understand. He was sorry he'd ever made friends with the man. Worst of all, Jimmy was making a thorough enquiry into the whole affair.

So Maurice had almost forgotten Edward's existence.

Eric's brain, whenever he was not actually working, struggled with the composition of a

letter to Edward. He made drafts of it and tore them up immediately. Sometimes it was to be very long. Sometimes very short. What exactly did he want to say? He didn't know. That letter was never written.

BOOK FOUR 1929

I

The headlights of the car illuminated a notice on a tree. "Trespassers will be prosecuted." Somebody had cut this with a penknife and scribbled it over with chalk.

Maurice drew on the brake and turning yelled out:

"Wake up, we're here."

Mary stirred comfortably on the back seat and came out of her doze far enough to say:

"Be quiet. We aren't."

"Does one open the gates," asked Edward, "or do we wait for the lodge-keeper?"

"You're the lodge-keeper," said Maurice.

"Why all this excitement?" came Margaret's voice languidly, from the back seat. "Has there been an accident?"

"No," said Edward, "we've reached John o' Groats and Mary's forgotten to bring the bathing-suits."

He opened the door of the car and got out stiffly.

"My God, it's cold!"

"Well, keep it to yourself, my lad," said Mary. "We'll believe you."

Edward shivered. The morning was horribly damp and raw. The gates were clammy and wet. The trees along the side of the road were dripping from every twig. Dawn showed cold and sickly over the Derbyshire hills, dimming the rays from the headlamps.

Just behind, Tommy Ramsbotham's two-seater was panting. Edward walked up to it, put his head inside and said:

"Hullo! Good morning."

"Good morning," said Tommy; and Anne, sitting beside him, asked:

"Did you sleep well?"

"Incredibly."

Edward felt himself suddenly in high spirits. Abruptly, he uttered a short strong laugh, slapped his sides and cut a caper on the wet road.

"Your rear passengers are dead," he added.

There they sat, in the dickey, two shapes stuffed into greatcoats, pullovers, fur helmets, swathed with woollen scarves, resembling very fat owls. Georges had completely sunk into himself, so that you could just see a vast ovoid mass, but poor Earle Gardiner was upright, in a position sug­gesting how terribly he'd been bumped during the journey.

"Are you all right?" Edward asked.

"Sure, I'm fine," Earle smiled heroically.

Edward put his mouth to Georges' ear and suddenly bellowed:

"Sept heures moins un quart!"

Georges woke up without a start and gave him a dazzling smile. Maurice began sounding long blasts on his horn.

"Gates!" he yelled: "Gates!"

Edward pushed them open and Maurice drove through into the park, Tommy following. As they moved off down the drive, Pamela woke up and turned round. The sight of Mary seemed to sur­prise her. She sat up sharply, in a way which instantly conveyed that not more than a year ago she'd been a schoolgirl, with her innocent head full of abductions and the White Slave Traffic. Then she was properly awake and recognised them all with a grin of relief.

"I must have been asleep," she confessed, with surprise.

Mary was thinking how narrow the drive was and how much smaller the whole park seemed. In less than a minute they were running downhill to the house. Anne, beside Tommy, fixed her eyes on the red spark of Maurice's tail-light. The hood of the two-seater was draughty. She had got a stiff neck. Tommy's profile, as he leant forward to the gear-lever, showed sharp against the pale stretch of land. It was getting lighter every minute. She rested her cheek for a moment against his shoulder.

"What is it?" asked Tommy, his eyes fixed ahead.

Then he realised and slipped one arm round her shoulder as he drove. He would, perhaps, always be a little slow, a few seconds late. My darling. My precious treasure. Feeling the rough tweed against her cheek, Anne spoke in a small dreamy voice: