Lonely Road by Nevil Shute Page A

across the moors, skirting Manchester, to Buxton; then down to Newcastle-under-Lyme. It was there that Sixpence asked in all innocence if my car was a fast one and we got her up to eighty-six before I had to shut down for a corner, but mostly we were running at about fifty. We turned away from Staffordshire and cut down through Market Drayton to Shrewsbury, and when we had passed through that we began to think about our lunch.
    I chose the Chequers at Church Stretton, a place that I had had meals at before. The house dates back to the sixteenth century; a grey stone building, rather rambling, and full of open fireplaces burning wood. They have restored it and built on a dining-room within the last few years, and spoilt it altogether. They run it as a show place now, with prices commensurate, and no good American goes home without having spent a night in the room where Charles II slept and knighted Perrhyn.
    We left the car by the grass plot in front and went into the hall, ushered by a porter in brown livery. I knew that I had made a mistake as soon as I got inside; we should have lunched at some little pub by the roadside. The place was all white paint and glass panels inside, like a hospital; the mere travesty of an English country house. The new dining-room was verywhite and spacious, with tables round the edge of a bleak dancing-floor.
    I was occupied with Sixpence at the beginning of our meal, and we had finished the fish before I was free to look about the room. Over in an alcove by the window there was a lady lunching with a couple of children, very neat and clean, in charge of a neat, clean nurse in the uniform of some institute or other. Something about the lady seemed familiar to me and drew my attention; I stared at her a little harder, and it was Marion.
    Marion, whom I hadn’t seen or heard of for the last nine years since we parted in the stables down at Courton, crying her eyes out because she didn’t want to marry me. Why she should have cried like that I never understood; if anyone had a right to cry it should have been me, but I can only remember feeling a bit uncomfortable about it all. Nine years is a long time; she had filled out and collected a couple of children, but it was Marion all right. I seemed to remember having heard that she was married; I wondered what her name was now.
    Towards the end of lunch the nurse marshalled the children and went out with them, and she was left alone for coffee. I bent across the table to Sixpence.
    “I’ve just seen an old friend of mine at that table over there—the lady. Do you mind if I go over and speak to her for a minute or two?” And so I crossed the room to her table.
    “Good morning, Marion,” I said quietly. She looked up in surprise; then she recognised me. “Malcolm!” she said. “After all these years. My dear!”
    I sat down beside her table and talked with her for a few minutes of the old days and friends that we had known. She had a neat and orderly mind even in the old days; with the years this had grown on her and now she was very social, very rigid in her class. She told me that she was living in the hotel with her two children for the summer “because the air was so good for them;” I heard no mention of her husband, nor of any home that they had made. I sat there listening, thinking that I could have done better for her than that.
    In turn she wanted to know my news. “There’s nothing much to tell,” I said. “I still live down in Dartmouth, just the same. I have my work down there, you see, and that’s all one really wants.” I smiled. “That,” I said, “and a certain amount to drink.”
    She said: “Oh, my dear. Do you mean you’ve never married, all these years?”
    I laughed. “Lord, no,” I said; “nor likely to. You should know that.”
    She said: “Oh, Malcolm!”
    She leaned across and put her hand on mine. “Malcolm,” she said, “we were good friends once, and I’ve sometimes thought I didn’t treat you