A Lovely Day to Die by Celia Fremlin Read Free Book Online Page B

they hadn’t even been born when he passed this way before! And yet they seemed so familiar, so unchanging a part of the scene, he could have sworn it was no more than a few days since, blind with love, he’d blundered through the thick of them, peering wildly past and beyond all those middle-aged bodies, for the one that was young and golden, with shining hair cut in a long bob, and of whom all he knew as yet was that she worked in one of the kiosks on the sea front, and that her name was Maisie.
    They were passing through the main street, lined, now, with supermarkets, concrete office blocks and parking-meters … and yet, somehow, it still seemed utterly familiar. Malcolm smiled tohimself, and shook his head in bewilderment. Everything has changed, he thought wonderingly, and yet nothing has! Nothing at all!
    It had, though. Within twenty-four hours of their arrival, this had become abundantly, devastatingly clear.
    *
    It was he who had changed, of course: he and Maisie. Well, naturally they had, he’d expected nothing else. It was while he was convalescing from last winter’s illness, fresh from his brush with Death and consumed with a sense of time running out, that he’d persuaded Maisie to agree to this trip back into the past, to this place where they’d spent what proved to have been the happiest summer of their lives: and naturally, in planning such a holiday he’d borne in mind, and (so he thought) had fully accepted, the fact that they who were once young had become old.
    But somehow, when it came to the point, the shock of it was appalling.
    It wasn’t just that they’d grown older—this one learns to adapt to because it is part of the pattern of life—it was that the balance of power between them was subtly and completely changed. The eleven years’ difference in their ages, which had once conferred upon him, in the prime of his young manhood, such effortless leadership, such easy, unquestioned dominance in his relationship with the shy little salesgirl just out of school—all this had now quietly gone into reverse. It was she, eleven years younger, who was the strong one now, the one with the right to patronise and protect. It was she, now, who helped him over the slippery, seaweed-covered rocks; she who waited, resignedly, halfway up gorse-strewn hillsides to allow him to catch up. She it was, now, who carried the heavier cases, who climbed on a chair to fix the wardrobe door, who called out “Are you sure you’re all right?” across the racing surf when they ventured into the sea.
    By the end of the first week, it was clear that even worse than these changes, was the sheer boredom. The racking of the brain under a broiling sun to think of something to say to one anotherthat hadn’t been said before: the scouring of the local amenities for something fresh to do.
    What had they talked about, all those years ago?
    What, when they weren’t making love, had they actually done ?
    It must have been these thoughts, or some very similar, which drove Maisie, after a very few days, to her knitting.
    “ Such a lucky thing I thought of bringing it,” she would say, each time she unrolled it from its plastic bag under the wide summer sky or at the margin of the blue, sparkling sea. “At least I’ll have something to show for it, when we get home.”
    In a way, the knitting made things easier for both of them, because from then on Maisie complained hardly at all about the day’s activities. She didn’t mind where they went, what they did, what sort of trips they opted for, so long as, when they reached their destination, there would be somewhere she could sit and get on with her knitting. Among harebells, among poppies, amid the ruins of mediæval abbeys, she would sit hunched contentedly over the monstrously growing garment, her fingers flying. “Did we?” she would say, when Malcolm reminded her of some long ago romantic interlude, or took her on expeditions to the very site of their first picnic,