R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield by To Serve Them All My Days Page A

friend they had unexpectedly re-encountered.
    But even that was not the end of it. In the evening he took Elizabeth to a variety concert in the pier pavilion and afterwards, when he saw her home, he kissed her at the gate. A very shy, restrained kiss it was, his first since party days in the Valley, a thousand years ago. Yet it did something to him, reviving, deep within him, a sense of being and existing, that snapped the final cord attaching him to the dried-out husk of a man he had been in the rejuvenating months at Osborne, a restoration of youth that he had come to accept as dead and buried, along with his generation, a quickening of ambition passing into his bloodstream like a powerful stimulant. It was too vitalising a mood to waste in sleep, so, instead of returning to the Y.M.C.A. where he was staying, he went back to the pierhead and leaned on the rail, looking out across the whispering bay and watching a sliver of moon ride the piled-up masses of blue-black clouds. He caught himself murmuring her name, catching and savouring its six syllables, and on its utterance the memory of her soft, eager lips returned to him, the final bonus of what he saw as the most exhilarating day of his life. He remained there a long time until he recalled he had no key and there was no night porter at the hotel. Then he moved on, smiling at the prospect of rousing the hotel at one in the morning but not caring a damn, for he saw himself then as a wandering drunk who, against all probability, had found his way home.
    In the morning, the moment the shops were open, he went out to buy her a birthday gift and ended by buying three, an early nineteenth-century print of Conway Castle, a small bottle of perfume and a great bunch of narcissi, daffodils and tulips, taking them down to the pierhead where they met by appointment, not caring whether she thought him naïve. She was overwhelmed, and when his parcels had been opened, and the bouquet laid aside, she threw her arms round his neck and kissed him, exclaiming, 'You know just how to impress, don't you, David? I believe you've had hundreds of girls and years of experience,' but he said, shaking his head, 'I've had far less experience than you – or rather, you couldn't have had less. I wanted to pay you back for that wonderful day we had yesterday. Where would you like to go today?'
    'Somewhere less expensive,' she said, laughing. 'A walk up to Blackberry mountain, where you can't spend any more money.'
    'Oh, to blazes with that. I haven't touched my gratuity yet, and there's absolutely no way of spending money at school. The nearest real shop is at Challacombe, miles away. Why don't we book a round trip and explore allthe castles? Unless you're fed up with conducted tours, that is. I've never seen Harlech and Beaumaris, although I've been to Caernarvon, and along the Straits as far as Telford's bridge.'
    'I'll go if you let me pay my share. That all-day tour is ten-and-six.'
    'I don't care if it's ten guineas. I came up here to enjoy myself and I don't fancy doing it alone any more. When are you due back at the hospital?'
    'Sunday,' she said. 'What an awful thought. You've got a month, haven't you?'
    'Not really,' he said. 'I've got to put in the last fortnight swotting for a degree. I should have done it last year but there was so much to learn about the job and, anyway, I wasn't really fit then.'
    'You are now, though?'
    'Never felt better in my life. Partly Exmoor air but mostly you.'
    It surprised him that he could talk to a girl this way, easily and naturally, as he was learning to communicate with the Sixth, and some of his favourites, like Boyer and Briarley. But then, he supposed, she was easy to get to know, having none of the artfulness his memory associated with girls that the newspapers were beginning to call 'Flappers' for some curious reason. She laughed easily, said the first thing that came into her head, and flattered him a little by listening very carefully to everything