The Watch Tower by Elizabeth Harrower Read Free Book Online Page A

see?’
    But it was rough, when you came to think of it, not to have clapped eyes on Jack since they signed the bill of sale. And having reminded himself of the bill, a copy of which was always in his wallet, Mr Shaw looked up Jack’s address in the telephone book and detoured off up to the North Shore after unloading a few gross of peppermint creams in town. ‘Just passing, Jack!’
    Lo and behold! (which was rather how it struck him) Jack’s house was a two-storeyed mansion in a sortof Millionaires’ Row, with a huge garden and a glimpse through big double-barrelled gates of what looked extremely like a swimming pool out at the front. You would have needed high explosives to blast your way into the grounds.
    Felix Shaw drove away very fast, chewing it all over in his mind, and sweating with a curious relief that he had not been spotted. Jack was a married man: the place might belong to his wife. No explanation of this sort exactly fitted Jack’s description of his circumstances, but there was nothing wrong with Jack .Possibly if Felix had known the cove wasn’t really on his uppers, he might not—But a deal was a deal. It was a fair price he had received for the factory, even if it erred maybe one decimal point in Jack’s favour. Perhaps the house back there was misleading. A businessman had to put up a prosperous front. Also, old Jack definitely was not doing the business that all the activity at the factory might lead you to expect: his payments were falling further and further behind.
    ‘Come and have a look at this.’ Mr. Shaw and Laura were in the car together and it was Friday afternoon. Laura had dashed solemnly in and out of city shops delivering chocolates while he kept the engine running. Now on the way back to Manly, he pulled up unexpectedly in Neutral Bay in a street close to the harbour. ‘Bought myself a house yesterday.’
    It was a lovely single-storeyed colonial housepainted white, with a roof of grey slate and long shady verandahs decorated with old wrought iron. There were lawns. There were daphne and camellia and gardenia bushes with dark shiny leaves. In the garden behind the house there were fruit trees, two of which were hung with enormous lemons, sweetly scented.
    Inside, the rooms were large and cool, and stood awaiting furniture and embellishment at the hands of their new owner. A pattern of leaves, criss-crossed and winking light, blew and shivered on the empty white wall of the sitting-room as the poplars at the side of the house shook and sent shadows indoors.
    ‘Well, what do you think? And how about that view?’ Mr. Shaw was so strangely jocular that for an instant Laura wondered if the house really did belong to him, or whether he was trespassing as a kind of joke.
    ‘It’s beautiful. It’s the loveliest house I’ve ever been in.’
    She glanced through the bare french windows, over the greenness of grass and flowering hedges to the blue ship-laden harbour, and the city beyond it. She had no idea what she was thinking.
    An enterprising young chap (as Mr. Shaw described him) called Peter Trotter, opened a speciality shop in the city to sell Shaw’s factory-produced home-made chocolates exclusively.
    Peter Trotter said, ‘You can sell anything these days,but you can still sell a good sweet easier than a bad, and this line of yours is unique.’ He had three languid beauties, predictably blonde, brunette and redhead, attending to his uniformed clients. He himself, spruce and pallid, helped the ladies who drifted in, drenched with perfume, clanking charm bracelets, complaining glamorously to him about clothes coupons (which he had supplies of) and runs in the unobtainable nylon stockings so thoughtfully provided by American friends.
    The ladies’ hair was often dramatically tinted and lacquered into wicker baskets with a week’s life expectancy. Peter Trotter admired these artful arrangements and his scented callers’ prosperity generally. Everyone was playing a part that