Night Over Water by Ken Follett Page B

sunshine into the room. He was a small, neat man with a boyish smile and an American accent. His remark seemed spontaneous, and he had a charming manner, so she smiled radiantly at him, but she did not speak. She bought cigarettes and drank a glass of iced water, then returned to the dance.
    He must have asked the barman who she was, and found her address somehow, for the next day she got a note from him, on Midland Hotel writing paper.
    Actually, it was a poem.
    It began:
    Fixed in my heart, the picture of your smile
Engraven, ever present to mind’s eye
Not pain, nor years, nor sorrow can defile
    It made her cry.
    She cried because of everything she had hoped for and never achieved. She cried because she lived in a grimy industrial city with a husband who hated to take holidays. She cried because the poem was the only gracious, romantic thing that had happened to her for five years. And she cried because she was no longer in love with Mervyn.
    After that it happened very quickly.
    The next day was Sunday. She went into town on the Monday. Normally she would have gone first to Boots to change her book at the circulating library, then bought a combined lunch-and-matinee ticket for two shillings and sixpence at the Paramount Cinema in Oxford Street. After the film she would have walked around Lewis’s department store and Finnigan’s, and bought ribbons, or napkins, or gifts for her sister’s children. She might have gone to one of the little shops in The Shambles to buy some exotic cheese or special ham for Mervyn. Then she would have taken the train back to Altrincham, the suburb where she lived, in time to get the supper.
    This time, she had coffee in the bar of the Midland Hotel, lunch in the German restaurant in the basement of the Midland Hotel, and afternoon tea in the lounge of the Midland Hotel. But she did not see the charming man with the American accent.
    She went home feeling heartsick. That was ridiculous, she told herself. She had met him for less than a minute and had never said a word to him! He had seemed to symbolize everything she felt was missing from her life. But if she saw him again she would surely discover that he was boorish, insane, diseased, smelly, or all of those things.
    She got off the train and walked along the street of large suburban villas where she lived. As she approached her own home, she was shocked and flustered to see him walking toward her, looking at her house with a pretense of idle curiosity.
    She flushed scarlet and her heart raced. He too was startled. He stopped, but she carried on walking; then, as she passed him, she said: “Meet me in the Central Library tomorrow morning!”
    She did not expect him to reply, but—she would learn later—he had a quick, humorous mind, and he immediately said: “What section?”
    It was a big library, but not so big that two people could lose one another for long; but she said the first thing that came into her mind: “Biology.” And he laughed.
    She entered her house with that laugh in her ears: a warm, relaxed, delighted laugh, the laugh of a man who loved life and felt good about himself.
    The house was empty. Mrs. Rollins, who did the housework, had already left; and Mervyn was not home yet. Diana sat in the modem hygienic kitchen and thought old-fashioned unhygienic thoughts about her humorous American poet.
    The next morning she found him sitting at a table under a notice that read SILENCE. When she said: “Hello,” he put a finger to his lips, pointed to a chair and wrote her a note.
    It said I love your hat.
    She had on a little hat like an upturned flowerpot with a brim, and she wore it tilted all the way over to one side so that it almost covered her left eye: it was the current fashion, although few women in Manchester had the nerve for it.
    She took a little pen from her bag and wrote underneath, It wouldn’t suit you.
    But my geraniums would look perfect in it, he wrote.
    She giggled, and he said: “Shhh!”
    Diana