The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen Read Free Book Online Page A

say I) are of the opinion we rightly ought to have popped him a good long time ago. Phut, you must surely see, would have gone the only possible argument for leaving him any longer on the loose. I go--he goes. However, of course that is up to you." "I should have done my duty." "Ah--to the country?" said he, jumping to the point with surprising ease. "Exactly--how right you are. And it seems," he added, "so right _for__ you to be right that I almost wonder we haven't got round to that before. Naturally, if you're thinking about the country we shall have to go back and run through this whole matter over again; I mean to say, it puts everything in a somewhat different light. So if that's what is on your mind--" "--Well, it's not. If it were," she said, "do you suppose I'd submit my conscience to you?" As to this, he seemed to have no opinion; or, at any rate, showed no great concern. Having looked suspiciously at her clock, he confirmed what it said by reference to his wrist watch. "I'd no idea, do you know, it was getting so late!" "Hadn't you?" It might have been midnight--might have even been the most extinct and hallucinatory of the small hours. She had by now passed through every zone of fatigue into its inner vacuum, and had forgotten hunger. She wanted nothing, nothing but that he should not be any longer there. Her fingers, having exhausted any capacity to tremble, any further to feel the touch of each other, lay in an inanimate tangle in her lap. Her spine by now ached from her having sat so long on the backless stool; her head was empty. "Anything else?" he said. "Because, if not--" "--How am I to know you are not bluffing?--In fact, I know you are." He stood, frowned, tatted at his moustache. "Yes, that's the devil, of course," he feelingly said. "I don't quite see how you _are__ to check up--on me, that is--without bringing down the roof. You can't be too careful." "Still, I still think there's someone who can confirm that you're a fake." "Trouble is, everyone's so damned cagey." "But I know a lot of people!" she said, with the first touch of hysteria. Harrison shrugged his shoulders. "That's, again, always up to you. Go ahead." To release any kind of feeling could be to release it all. Stella rose, went to the chimneypiece, and, impassively reaching across Harrison, turned round Robert's photograph once more to face the room. "And another time," she said, "leave my things alone!" She then turned full on him, from less than a yard away: they were eye to eye in the intimacy of her extreme anger. There is actually little difference as to colour in the moment before the blow and the moment before the kiss: the negligible space between her and him was now charged, full force, with the intensity of their two beings. Something speechless, tenacious, unlovable--himself--was during that instant-exposed in Harrison's eyes: it was a crisis--the first this evening, not the first she had known--of his emotional idiocy, and it was as unnerving as might be a brain-storm in someone without a brain. The moment broke: he did not attempt to touch her. Having shaken a loose sleeve back, she supported an elbow against the chimneypiece, a side of her face against the palm of a hand, and continued to study him, though vacantly. He, having come to one of those pauses in his fidgety smoking, slowly slid his hands down into his pockets. "And as far as we're concerned," he said, "think it over." "I'd never love you." "I never have been loved." "Do you wonder!" "The thing would be, we'd get to know each other." "You're not _still__ expecting me to do what you say?" He said softly: "That would be what I'd like." "Not again see Robert?" That took him aback. "Or--might not that seem a bit suspicious? I should have suggested, more, as things are, ease out." "Just like that. I see.--Do you know much about love?" "I've watched quite a lot of it." "How much time do you give me?" "Listen," he said, "I hate you to put it that way." "A month?" "Good