Friends and Lovers by Helen MacInnes Read Free Book Online

felt had not been fel by this man, or men just did not think this way. She wondered still remembering the McDonald cottage, if he saic how d’you do like that to every girl. Surely he couldn’ simply couldn’t, go about staring at people when he first me them as if his whole life had stopped for a moment. An< first she had stared back at him, and then she had felt a; helpless as if she had been drowning, and then she ha panicked, and then she had rushed out of the cottage sayin; she would be late for something or other. Late, and an idiot imagining—when the first wild surge of feeling had subsidei —that he had known that strange emotion too. Surely any thing so strong as that must have been shared. But it hadn’ been. She felt a warm flush spread over her cheeks.
    Her colour deepened still more as she heard him laugh. He was saying that now they were even: she hadn’t been listening this time, and his question was left floating in the air.
    “It wasn’t worth answering, anyway,” he said.
    “Questions and answers are a dull way of learning about people.” Damn, he thought, I am always saying more than I should to her. That had been a particularly naive approach. He racked his brains for a quotation or two—this scenery called for some, and he had been quite free with them as he had walked over here by himself. Normally there was always some poetry lying about in his head to be picked up and presented. But to-day, or now at least, his memory was failing him. He searched for his pipe and tobacco.
    But that failed, too. The matches flickered and died in the strong southwest breeze. He paused, turned his back to the wind, and then, as the match was still blown out before the pipe was set going, she suddenly cupped her hands round the pipe to form a windbreak. He looked up from the flaring loose strands of tobacco in surprise. She had been completely natural in her action: she was watching the tobacco as critically as he himself might have done.
    “That’s it, I think,” she said.
    “My grandfather is always having the same kind of trouble with damp matches.” She looked up at him and smiled. She had dropped her hands as soon as the tobacco was lit, but her eyes were still held by his. It was the McDonald cottage all over again.
    She turned away hurriedly, and said quickly, “We really ought to hurry. We are frightfully late.” “Yes,” he said.
    They started walking towards the village, but their pace was just as slow as it had been before. He began to talk. Gradually she was made to talk too.
    A strange mixture of talk about people and food and pictures and plays and novels. Little things, trivial things perhaps, never definitely with an end or a beginning, always merging as their minds set out to entertain each other and were in themselves entertained. But they were all somehow vitally important to both of them, as they unconsciously strove to build up the shadowy outline of each other’s life. It would have been simpler if they could have said directly, “Who are you? What are you?”
    David, if he had found any time to rationalize—his favourite method of defence against women in these last months at Oxford—would have found himself in grave difficulties. He was talking, and listening in his turn, without any fashionable pretence or attitudes. His words came easily, as they did when he was alone. Now he could quote himself without fear of a misplaced interruption or of a dazed, tolerant smile, or—worse still—of the supercilious smirk which warned you that everything you said was being taken down and would be used against you. And if he talked well it was not for the old reason that he wanted to talk well, but also because he wanted to hear her replies.
    As for Penny, even her most critical mother—if she could have listened—would have had to admit, in spite of her alarm, that her daughter had never been more charming.
    They came at last to the path that led to the house on the hill. It was