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worry. I've seen this sort before. Now you do all I told you and get off to
sleep. Night, Viv."
And then he had gone.
I stood for a moment looking at the closed door, and then I went and brushed
my teeth and got ready for bed. I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked
like hell washed out, no make-up, and deep circles under my eyes. What a day!
And now this! I mustn't lose him! I mustn't let him go! But I knew in my heart
that I had to. He would go on alone, and I would have to, too. No woman had
ever held this man. None ever would. He was a solitary, a man who walked alone
and kept his heart to himself. He would hate involvement. I sighed. All right.
I would play it that way. I would let him go. I wouldn't cry when he did. Not
even afterward. Wasn't
I the girl who had decided to operate without a heart?
Silly idiot! Silly, infatuated goose! This was a fine time to maunder like a
girl in a women's magazine! I shook my head angrily and went into the bedroom
and got on with what I had to do.
It was still blowing hard, and the pine trees clashed fiercely outside my back
window. The moon, filtering through high scudding clouds, lit up the two high
squares of glass at each end of the room and shone eerily through the thin,
red-patterned curtains. When the moon went behind the clouds, the blocks of
blood-red photographer's light went dark and there was only the meager pool of
yellow from the oil-lamp. Without the brightness of electricity, there was a
nasty little movie-set feeling about the oblong room. The corners were dark,
and the room seemed to be waiting for a director to call people out of the
shadows and tell them what to do.
I tried not to be nervous. I put my ears to the connecting walls to right and
left, but across the space of the carports I could hear nothing. Before I had
set up my barricade I had softly opened the door and gone out and looked
round. There had been a glimmer of light from Numbers 8 and 10 and from James
Bond's Number 40 away down to the left. Everything had been peaceful,
everything quiet. Now I stood in the middle of the room and had a last look
round. I had done everything he had told me to do. I remembered the prayers I
was going to say and I knelt down there and then on the carpet and said them.
I thanked, but I also asked. Then I took two aspirin, turned down the light
and blew across the glass chimney to put it out, and went over to my floor bed
in the corner. After unzipping the front of my overalls and unlacing but not
removing my shoes, I curled myself up in the blankets.
I never take aspirins or any other pills. These, after carefully reading the
instructions, I had taken from the little first-aid kit my practical mind had
told me to include in my scrap of luggage. I was anyway exhausted, beat to the
wide, and the pills, to me as strong as morphia, soon sent me off into a
delicious half-sleep in which there was no danger but only the dark, exciting
face and the new-found knowledge that there really did exist such men. Soppier
even than that, I remembered the first touch of his hand holding the lighter
and thought carefully about each kiss separately, and then, but only after
vaguely remembering the gun and slipping my hand under the pillow to make sure
it was there, I went happily to sleep.
The next thing I knew I was wide awake. I lay for a moment remembering where I
was. There was a lull in the wind, and it was very quiet. I found I was lying
on my back. That was what had awakened me! I lay for a moment looking across
the room at the square of red high up on the opposite wall. The moon was out
again. How deathly quiet it was! The silence was warm and embracing after the
hours of storm. I began to feel drowsy and I turned over on my side so that I
lay facing into the room. I closed my eyes. But, as sleep held out her hands
to me again, something nagged at my mind. My eyes, before I had closed them,
had noticed something unusual in the room. Unwillingly, I opened them again.
It took minutes to recognize again what I had seen. The faintest chinks of
light were shining from between the door frames of the clothes cupboard up
against the opposite wall.
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How stupid! I hadn't closed the doors properly, and the automatic "courtesy"
light inside hadn't switched itself off. Reluctantly I [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]