Undercurrent by Frances Fyfield Read Free Book Online Page B

same thing as liking. I think that LIKING is a cousin to respect, but respect is more important. Angela was often difficult to like, but she deserved enormous respect. I like Maggie she does not know how generous she is and I must not take advantage of her. I have a phonecard. I could speak to her but I don't, it isn't fair.
    I shall dribble on to paper instead, avoiding facts and dates.
    Father once took us to the house of a military friend of his, very old school. He had stuffed animal heads on the walls. Maggie and I must have been about two feet each, gazing at them in horror. It was Maggie who said that the rest of the tiger was behind the wall, ready to come crashing through as soon as we left.
    And I believed her.
    FMC

CHAPTER THREE

    HENRY walked down the length of the High Street, took the next left and made for the sea. A stiff breeze raised the hair on his head and made him vow to buy a new hat on the way back. He had noticed a shop that seemed to specialize in what other men seemed to wear, a strange species of cap which did not seem to protect the ears, but he also noticed that the men who wore hats seemed to spend most of their time bareheaded. Into a shop they would go, and off came the hat; if they met a woman, off came the hat, a constant doffing of the thing, as if it was an embarrassment.

    There was something else he noticed too, in the bustle of the narrow pavements, and that was the way that whenever they bumped into each other, both parties said 'sorry', regardless of fault. The word was a kind of password, a prefix to whatever came next, 'Sorry, could you hold the door for me . . . Sorry, I haven't got change today. . . Sorry you bumped into me.' It seemed mandatory to apologize for taking up space.

    All in all, his encounter with the lawyer was one Henry decided he had found oddly exhilarating, despite the accompanying humiliation, and he was trying to work out why as he walked up towards the sea through a series of narrow streets, remembering to say 'sorry' to whoever crossed his path.
    He felt he had got something off his chest by at least admitting to someone, even someone as alien as Edward Burns, that what he really wanted to do, above all else, was find Francesca Chisholm.

    And he had done it; he had actually made the admission to a complete stranger; he had taken a spontaneous risk and he had not felt quite such a fool as he'd thought he might feel. That was number one reflection. The next was a sense of release that the lawyer had not said Francesca who?
    Or murmured, my dear man, of course Francesca Chisholm is alive and well, but how on earth could you imagine she would want to renew an acquaintance with a lousy little bore like you? And thirdly, a sense of mild triumph which was the most difficult to explain.

    Francesca Chisholm was patently alive and not in the graveyard, as a few of his contemporaries already were as the result of rash experiments with drugs, ambition and fast cars. He could not see Francesca as self-destructive, but he could see her crashing a car with the greatest of ease. She would be impulsive with her enthusiasms; she would never be scientific enough to know how an engine worked. She would press the pedals and tell it to go.

    How do you know that? he asked himself. You don't know anything. You didn't really know her; it was she who seemed to know you. What pleased him most about the lawyer with the dead fish in his office was what he had revealed about Francesca, rather than what he had withheld. The woman was not only alive, but she had made the news, done something that made her attorney bridle so defensively. She might be a notoriety of some kind, raising Cain, running protest movements, leading a wild life, behaving scandalously, or at least oddly, shocking the natives one way or another, and he was distinctly proud of her for that.

    The sense of vicarious achievement grew with each step. You are known, Francesca; people know who you are; they talk about