Lonely Road by Nevil Shute Page B

very well.” I said something or other—I don’t know what. “But you’re still a young man, and its not too late now for you to marry some nice girl and be happy with her, as you used to want to be. There’s ever so many nice girls about, Malcolm. You mustn’t go and hurt all your old friends by getting down too low. I know what men are, of course … but don’t go down too far, Malcolm.” And she glanced across the room at Sixpence, sitting all alone.
    I knew that Sixpence wasn’t happy there. It was not that she was unaccustomed to a good hotel, because she evidently was; she knew the ropes all right, but there was a bleak austerity about that place that might have daunted anyone. She was sitting rather stiffly on her chair, ill at ease and anxious in the menacing presence of the waiters. In the freezing cleanness of that room she looked a little shabby and a little overdressed; the paint upon her face showed up most cruelly.
    I smiled. “Looks a bit high and dry, doesn’t she?” I said cynically. I knew that I must get back to her; it was bad luck for her to be made to feel like that upon the first day of her holiday.
    “Who is she, Malcolm?”
    I glanced at Marion for a moment, thinking what a different life I should have had to lead if we had gone through with it. Some things cannot be explained; I knew that Marion would never understand me if I talked to her all night. Ishrugged my shoulders. “One of my little friends,” I said. “I picked her up in Leeds.”
    She withdrew her hand. “You’ve changed a lot, Malcolm,” she said quietly.
    I nodded. “I dare say. It’s probably as well we never married, Marion.”
    She had nothing to say to that.
    I ground the stub end of my cigarette down upon the tray. “Things change,” I said, “and people. And one gets to think about things differently. It’s been jolly seeing you again, Marion, but now I think I must get back to her.” I smiled. “I paid her ten pounds to come away with me, you see, and I must get my money’s worth.”
    She sighed a little, and I left her to her life of freezing clean hotels, her two hygienic children and their nurse, and all the Best People that she knew, and I went back to Sixpence. “This room simply shatters me,” I said, and glanced around me with distaste. “It’s like a ruddy ice-house.”
    She rippled softly into laughter. “Oh, you are funny!” she said. “I mean, I’ve been feeling like that, too. It’s terribly grand, isn’t it?”
    She had finished lunch while I had been talking to Marion. “Let’s get out of it,” I said.
    She stared at me. “Don’t you want any more to eat? You haven’t had half enough, driving all that way.”
    I smiled. “Don’t want any more,” I said. “The food would choke me. You want to trifle with lark’s tongues in aspic and talk about Marcel Proust when you lunch here.”
    She stared at me. “Who was she?”
    “I don’t know,” I replied. “That’s why we’re going.” And I sent the waiter for the bill.
    We settled down again into the Bentley and went wandering south between the hills to Ludlow, running at an easy speed. All afternoon we ran southwards by the border, through Ludlow to Hereford and down to Ross. Then we cut across to Gloucester and down beside the Cotswolds, till finally we ran into Bristol in good time for tea.
    I turned to Sixpence as we drove through the suburbs of the town. “I chose that place for lunch,” I said, “and it turned out to be a dud. You’d better have a shot this time, and choose where we have tea.”
    I thought for a moment. “We’ll have to have supper on the road, I think. We’ll be a bit late getting in, and I haven’t told them we should want a meal. Would you like a meat tea and a light supper somewhere?”
    She looked up at me doubtfully. “Would you like that? I mean, is that what you have?”
    I laughed. “I had my way about lunch. You’ve got to choose where we have tea.”
    She laughed with me.