The Watch Tower by Elizabeth Harrower

wavering as he lifted it from his knees, drew on his shaggy cigarette and replaced it.
    ‘Look, boy, I can give you ten more seconds. I’m late as it is. What’s in it for you? Stuck at home. The thing runs itself.’ He jerked his head at the closed kitchen door behind which the wireless was playing and the iron thumping. ‘ She could run it. I’ve got the shops, the personnel, the clientele. If I can’t get your place, I’ll get a better one. So it’s the end of the line.’
    Felix laughed heartily, his short square brown face, on which the skin drooped in loose folds wrinkling all over. ‘You’ve got it worked out, all right! Well, I don’t know, young fella—I wasn’t thinking of getting rid of it just yet, but—’ he caught Peter’s eye ‘if that’s how you feel, it’s a deal.’
    He stubbed out his mangled cigarette, dashing at flying sparks and shreds of tobacco with his left hand. Peter Trotter almost smiled. He pulled from his pocket a contract which would be, he said, ‘legal enough’ till they saw their solicitors.
    ‘What was the joke?’ Laura asked, looking up from the ironing-board, smiling tentatively, when they appeared. She had been so glad to hear them laughing together; Felix needed men’s company andlight-heartedness.
    ‘Were we telling jokes?’ Felix drawled. ‘I thought we were talking business.’
    Trotter met Felix’s eyes, looked at his watch.
    ‘In good time you’ll be told all you need to know,’ Felix said to Laura, and in his expression there was an element at once sexual and sadistic. Clapping her on the back with a firm hand, he chuckled dryly, secretly, across the room, into his friend’s flickering, evasive eyes. ‘How about a cup of something, eh?’
    ‘Not for me, boy. I’m off. See you. Ring me.’ With a brief salute, he was across the hall and gone.
    Laura woke to a cheerful bull-frog version of Happy Birthday .It was only Felix, up and dressed, come to serenade her, holding parcels wrapped in pink paper: a silver tray, teapot, coffee pot, sugar basin and milk jug, pewter mugs and theatre tickets.
    He had roused the unconscious Clare at six and now she stood singing a duet with him and breaking into giggles as he strained after subterranean notes and jumped about the room with bearish playfulness. Laura uttered little squeals of delight.
    Clare now handed over her packages: a pair of pretty red sandals, a cotton skirt, a leather handbag.
    ‘Oh, it’s too much. Both of you. Everything so smart and well chosen! You both always give me beautiful presents.’
    Considering her income, Clare certainly gave lavishly, saving for months. But nothing was too much for Laura, nothing could be enough. You had to make it up to her, somehow. Had to try to. She said, ‘I’m going to make breakfast. I’ll call you.’
    Sitting in bed with the morning sun shining over her shoulder, Laura was visualising herself in this situation in order to feel a proper reaction to it. Shortly, it became evident that she was in a luxurious setting, surrounded by a small but loving family, and enviable. If she had known years ago that all this was before her, how gladly (she thought) she would have waited!
    Rather more girlishly than she had acted and spoken when she was younger, certainly in more youthful a manner than Clare’s, she kissed Felix and thanked him and drew the very last dregs of gratitude from herself to please him. After all, she owed him something ,and at times it pleased him to have her childish and excessive. When you thought of it, he was a stranger, under no obligation to provide for or feel anything towards her! Of his free will he had chosen her. The fact held her. Her mind’s core stood in meek and helpless subjection before the idea of herself as someone singled out. This was a safe and inviolable fact, not to be bent or broken by any amount of thought. Therefore no return that was in her power to give could be too great. It stood to reason. Alas, though!