An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge

guidance.’
    ‘There’s no call to go looking in that direction,’ Vernon said.
    ‘Go along with it,’ urged Harcourt. ‘Put yourself in her place.’
    Vernon couldn’t. There was nothing in the girl’s present that remotely matched up to his past. He ordered some carbolic soap and abruptly hung up.
    Lily asked him what was wrong; he had a face on him.
    ‘I’ve just got off on the wrong foot with Harcourt. I meant to be open with him but when it came to it I beat about the bush. It had something to do with his tone. I often think he regards me as a fool.
    ‘I thought he was the cat’s whiskers in your books,’ Lily said. She was secretly pleased at this sudden spark of criticism leaping towards the almighty Harcourt.
    ‘I’m worried,’ fretted Vernon. ‘I can’t get over how different things are to the way it was when we were young. I can’t keep pace. Can you imagine what it must feel like to our Stella?’
    Lily remembered being cold, being hungry; how before she went to bed her mother had scorched the skirting board with the flame of a kerosene lamp to make the bugs jump out of the walls.
    ‘No,’ she said, ‘I can’t. I’d never even been on a train until I was past thirty and if you recall that was no joyride, simply a mercy dash to get Renée out of one of her scrapes.’
    ‘Does it count for nothing?’ Vernon said. ‘Was it in vain? All that misery!’
    Lily felt uncomfortable. If she hadn’t known better she’d have thought he’d been drinking. ‘I’m thinking of giving them rabbit tomorrow,’ she said.
    ‘It’s a different world, isn’t it,’ he pondered. ‘She takes pocket money for granted. Likewise baths.’
    ‘Not to mention telephones,’ Lily said.
    ‘If only we knew the sort of people she was mixing with. They may be educated but that doesn’t mean they have standards. I don’t want her made unhappy. I don’t want her to get out of her depth. I know she’ll learn in time but I want her to avoid the pitfalls.’
    ‘I’ll need carrots,’ said Lily.
    ‘I’d just like to bump into that Potter fellow she’s always on about.’
    ‘Some hopes,’ Lily said. ‘She’d die first.’
    Vernon went upstairs with the intention of ringing Harcourt again, but the lounge door was ajar and he was seen by the soap salesman who was playing gin rummy with the traveller in miscellaneous stationery. They asked him if they were making too much noise and he said no, not at all, he was just checking that everything was in order.
    He opened the front door and stood for a moment on the step looking at the glimmer of light touching the pale dome of the church and the glow of the city thrown up against the sky. In the opposite direction the street sloped downhill in darkness. Someone had chucked a brick through the gas-mantle on the corner by the Cathedral railings and it hadn’t been replaced. There was fog rolling in across the river. Out in the bay sounded the distant boom of a buoy warning of danger.

7
    The read-through of Peter Pan took place in the foyer beneath the back stalls. Decorated in lime-green and pink, its columns twined with formal festoons and palm trees of plaster in low relief, it smelt of coffee and cigars. Once, in the days when the building was known as Kelly’s Star Music Hall, the space had served as a beer cellar.
    ‘There are numerous books on the meaning behind this particular play,’ Meredith said. ‘I’ve read most of them and am of the opinion they do the author a disservice. I’m not qualified to judge whether the grief his mother felt on the death of his elder brother had an adverse effect on Mr Barrie’s emotional development, nor do I care one way or the other. We all have our crosses to bear. Sufficient to say that I regard the play as pure make-believe. I don’t want any truck with symbolic interpretations.’
    Bunny was frowning; the woman, who the night before had worn a bow in her hair, stared obliquely at Meredith. Her eyes were nearer