Back by Henry Green Page A

see,” he said.
    “You don’t, from the looks of you,” she replied. “Oh all right, take your time. You’ll get used to it. Don’t mind me. Be easy now.”
    “Has Mr Grant sent many to you?”
    “Here,” she said harsh, “what are you insinuating? I told you before I won’t have his name mentioned, ever again.” He had no recollection of this. He assumed that he must have forgotten, as he had with Mr Grant’s request not to disclose how he got her address.
    “I rang him up,” she said. “I told him. ‘This is the first time you’ve done this,’ I said, ‘and let it be the last. Haven’t you been enough trouble all my life?’ I said. ‘And now if you’re to start sending people round, what will the others think? Why I’d be hounded out of these rooms.’”
    “What if Ridley came?” he suddenly asked, with the air of a man who has produced the unanswerable, who is bringing the whole house of cards down.
    “Her little boy?” she enquired, absolutely unmoved. “You know I’ve often and often wondered. Why, it would be cruel, wouldn’t it?”
    “You’ve said it.”
    “I’m not too sure I like your attitude,” she complained. “Ofcourse that would be cruel, but not my fault? I can’t help looking as I am, can I? Which is at my father’s door.”
    He did not wait to consider this. He must have thought he had her pinned.
    “But if Mr Grant sent him?” he asked. His face flushed, and it was plain that he was trying to hold her eyes with his own. She became agitated.
    “Why, he’d never,” she cried. “Why, it wouldn’t be right. He’d never dare.” She was truly indignant. “When the little chap thinks his mother’s away with the angels? I dream of it sometimes. Running across him in the street, I mean. Perhaps his grandma takes him up round the shops with her. I often wonder, wouldn’t that be awful if we met. But then it couldn’t be my fault, after all.”
    “Whose then?”
    “Why my dad’s of course.”
    He now realized that she must be out of her mind, which would account for the change in her voice, and manner. He became terribly sad. Oh, this was not the old Rose, at all.
    “That’s what makes me do it,” she explained.
    “Do what?” he murmured.
    “Aren’t some men dense?” she said. “You don’t suppose I’m talking to you, like I do, because I’ve nothing better, surely? I’m a working woman. I wouldn’t want to offend, of course. But as I told you before, I consider I have a duty by you and the others. Only when you said that my dad sent you, then I had to turn round at once. You see that surely?”
    He felt he had best humour her.
    “Yes,” he said.
    “And you seemed to take it so hard I was sorry for you, and here we are,” she said.
    He had a wave of self pity.
    “It’s affected my work,” he muttered.
    “You don’t want it to do that,” she said. “You see, I’ve thought more about this than you can ever. If you like to put it thatway, I’ve been brought up with the problem. It’s chance, that’s all, nothing more than bad luck. I’ve known since I was sixteen.”
    That she’d leave the husband she had not yet seen, the unborn child, he cried out in his mind. He was sickened by it.
    “What?” he said.
    “Are you going queer a second time,” she wanted to know. “I mean about my half sister, naturally. They all say we might have been twins. What d’you think?”
    “There’s no telling you apart,” he said, back to his idea of humouring her.
    “Yet it’s funny I never felt anything when she was ill, like twins are supposed to feel, you understand. Then of course we were never real ones. Still, it makes you wonder, when I tell you we came within three weeks of one another. The old devil,” she said, with a hint of admiration in her voice.
    “Did he send Middlewitch?” he asked, jealous again as soon as Mr Grant was mentioned.
    “Of course not. I said, didn’t I?”
    “How did you come across him, then?”
    “I’ll