“Where shall we go?” she asked, when they got outside.
“Wherever you like,” he offered.
“I don’t know this part,” she pointed out. “Lord, aren’t there any Lovers’ Lanes round here, or anything?”
He laughed. “I wouldn’t know,” he said.
“Oh yes you would, dear. Take me where you used to take her, then.”
He laughed again. “You’d have to dye your hair,” he said.
She wasn’t going to have that.
“Here, who d’you take me for?” she demanded. “It’s disgusting, that is.”
“I’m sure I didn’t.…”
“Oh yes you did, or you wouldn’t have said. Now where? Left or right?”
“This way,” he answered, and she put her arm through his as they set off.
“You aren’t leading me to one of those kid’s places, six trees and a bit of railing, where they lie up of an evening?”
He risked a lot. “Wait and see,” he told her. It was all right, because she laughed.
Rain had been pouring down all summer, with the result that this October was the hottest in years. It was a red sunset for them, but, even so, too cold to sit out. There was no wind, everything was quite still. They walked at a smart pace, in silence, and in five minutes were leaving the cheaper estate, on which Mr Grant had bought his own residence, for a road which ran through wide gardens with expensive houses, one or two of which were blitzed.
Autumn was the season, most roses were dead. Petals that had dropped some months back and rotted, traces of a summer now gone, were covered by the brown leaves which even in this still air rocked down to lie deep on the ground as they walked, so that their feet rustled. Where a flying bomb had dropped recently, the drift of leaves was still green underfoot, the trees bare as deep winter. Then, just as they were passing this spot, the syrens set up a broken wailing.
“Come on,” he said, turning off the road into the garden of a house in ruins.
“Why, surely you never took her here?” she asked, for the place could only have been blitzed a few days.
He laughed.
“Or are you nervous?” she wanted to know.
“Not of them,” he answered.
“Why not?” she demanded, as they skirted what was still standing, against the untouched chimney a lone staircase which descended from nothing to the leaf-covered drive, the steps blotched with a dust of plaster, and all of it turned a great red by the setting sun, her face as red as his own. “Why not?” she repeated.
“Don’t know,” he answered, hurrying her along.
“Where are we going?” she asked, and seemed content. He knew no more than she. But when they got round the red garage, which was intact, and a privet hedge, which, in this light, and because it was shaded, burned a dark glowing violet, they found what had been the rose garden, enclosed with a low brick wall, and then they had before them, the outlines edged in red, stunted, seemingly withered, rose trees which had survived the blast as though it had never happened, and, for a screen at the back, a single line of dwarf cypresses, five feet high with brown trailing leafless briars looped from one to the other, from one black green foliage to its twin as green and black, briars that had borne gay rose, after rose, after wild rose, to sway under summer rain, to spatter the held drops, to touch a forehead, perhaps to wet the brown eyes of someone idly searching these cypresses for an abandoned nest whence fledglings, for they go before the coming of a rose, had long been gone, long ago now had flown.
Both instinctively looked back to find whether they were being followed, but all they saw was the red mound of light rubble, with the staircase and chimney lit a rosier red, and, as they turned again to themselves in the garden, the briars wreathed from one black cypress to another were aflame, as alive as live filaments in an electric light bulb, against this night’s quick agony of the sun.
Then, before he knew what she was about, she had put her arms round his neck, and kissed him.
“There,” she said into an ear. “That’s for coming down.”
But he put his hands behind her head, pressed her kissing mouth harder on his own. The night, on its way fast, was chill, and now he had again that undreamed of sharp warmth moving and living on his own, her breath an attar of roses on his deep sun-red cheek, her hair an animal over his eyes and alive, for he could see each rose glowing separate strand, then her dark body thrusting heavy at him, and her blood dark eel fingers that fumbled at his neck.
She cruelly spoiled it. She took her sweet lips off his.
“Was it like that?” she asked, as though nothing had happened.
He made to grab her up to him once more. But she twisted away.
“Was it?” she repeated. He did not realize that she was aiming at Rose.
Then, in the position she held, half in, half out of his arms, and so close that the one eye in his line of vision was in the outer corner of its socket to watch him, he saw it catch the dying sunset light around, and glow, as if she had opened the eye hole to a furnace.
He made another clutch at her, but she broke away completely. He was left, so that his arms hung at his sides, and he could not speak, paralysed, for an instant, as Mr Grant.
“I’m sorry, dear,” she said, annoyed with herself. He did not move, or speak.
“It’s too cold to sit. We’d best go back,” she said.
So they walked home in silence. In the dark she took his arm once more, pressed close. But he said and did nothing at all. He couldn’t even feel.
When they got home in the dark, Nance found she had left her key behind. They were obliged to ring the bell. They heard pattering footsteps. Then Mrs Grant flung the door open.
“Oh so it’s you,” she said, in an accusing voice. A lock of grey hair lay unexpectedly over her forehead. “He’s had a bad turn,” she went on, almost wailing suddenly, “he’s ever so ill, my darling is, come quick,” this to Nancy, for she chose to ignore Charles. “Where could you have got to? I don’t know how you could.”
As the two women hurried upstairs, Miss Whitmore called out to Summers, “Wait there. Don’t go,” she said.
He was still absolutely dazed by the scene he had had with this girl, and it was not until Charley got into the living room, and was faced by a chair overturned, that he knew there was disaster in the wind, because the whole house had always been completely neat.
So that, on top of everything else, he began to dread what was due.
Then just as he was putting the chair to rights, a car drove up.
It was the doctor.
As Charley opened the door the doctor said, “What’s this?”
“Don’t know quite,” he replied, ashamed.
“How’s that?” the man asked, obviously despising him, as, in his turn, he hurriedly climbed out of sight into an upstairs deathly silence. Charley re-entered the living room, sat down, put his hands on his face.
The worst part was he could hear nothing, nothing at all. The eyelids burned over his eyes, and were as red as that sunset. Now that he could begin to think, he wondered if this whole affair wasn’t another Dot Pitter. Then he saw he was useless on account of his being so slow. That time, in the office, when he put his face against hers because she was crying, had led to his call on Nance, which had caused him to take Dot down to Jim Phillips, which, in its turn, had pushed him on here to Nance. “Oh Rose, Rose,” he cried out in himself, not noticing that he did this without having real regret, “Oh, why did you?” He began to cry, in his self pity seeing himself again with his hands, like a monkey’s, hung up on the barbed wire which had confined him within the camp.
He felt a touch on his shoulder. It was Nance. She’d come back so quietly he hadn’t heard. He sprang away, went to stand by the blackout.