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She left the bus, and walked on air. She was going to see Henry, and only half an hour ago she had never expected to see him again. She looked at her watch and found it was half past twelve. Suppose Henry had gone out to lunch. Well, suppose he had – ‘I can see him some other time, can’t I?’ Something that felt as heavy as a lorryload of bricks crashed down on Hilary’s spirits. Easier to bear the thought of never seeing Henry again than to feel that he might be out now, at this very minute, when she had counted on seeing him. ‘Please, please, please don’t let him be out!’
She turned the corner, and there across the roaring flood of the Fulham Road was Henry’s shop, or rather the shop which Henry’s godfather had bequeathed to him, and which Henry was in two minds whether to accept or not. Hilary’s heart gave a foolish jump when she saw it, because she and Henry had been going to live in the flat over the shop when they got married. The Fulham Road may not be everyone’s idea of the Garden of Eden, but so inveterately romantic is the human heart that when Henry kissed Hilary and asked her if she could be happy in a flat over a shop, and Hilary kissed Henry and said she could, it is a fact that to them the noisy crowded thoroughfare became a mere boundary of their own particular paradise.
Hilary reminded herself that she was now perfectly calm, perfectly detached. She crossed the road, read the legend, “Henry Eustatius, Antiques,‘ and stood looking in at the window. She did this because something odd seemed to have happened to her knees. They didn’t seem to be aware that she was being calm. They wobbled. Impossible to confront Henry with any poise while your knees were wobbling. She gazed earnestly in at the window and noticed that the Feraghan rug which they had been going to have in their dining-room was no longer to be seen. It used to hang on the left-hand wall, and they had had a joke about it, because Henry said that if anyone came in and asked the price, he would say a thousand pounds, and she had said he wouldn’t have the nerve. Something tugged at her heart. It was gone. It was their very own dining-room carpet, and it was gone. Henry had sold it away into slavery to be someone else’s carpet, and she felt most desolate, robbed, and homeless. It was her own dining-room carpet, and Henry had stolen it.
For the first time she really believed that everything was over between them. It seemed quite impossible to walk into the shop and see Henry, and be cool and dignified. It seemed equally impossible to cross the Fulham Road again. And then as she stood looking in through the window past the inlaid table with the red and white chessmen, and the Queen A
Hilary wanted to run away, but her feet wouldn’t move. She didn’t dare look at Henry, so she looked at the other man. He seemed short beside Henry, but he wasn’t really short. He was just a very ordinary height, slim, pale, irregular-featured, with greenish hazel eyes, and red hair worn negligently long. He had on a soft collar and a tie not quite like other people’s ties, a sort of floppy bow. There seemed to be something rather odd about the cut of his suit too. It reminded Hilary of a Cruikshank caricature. It was of a slaty blue colour, and the tie was mauve. Hilary didn’t think she had ever seen a man wearing a mauve tie before. Frightful with that red hair – and he had matched his handkerchief to the tie, and his socks to the handkerchief. She had begun by looking at him because she didn’t want to look at Henry, but after the first glance her interest was riveted, because this was Bertie Everton. She had only seen him once before, at Geoff’s trial, but he was the once-seen-never-forgotten sort. No one else in the world had hair like that.
Henry was talking as they came into the shop. He pointed at a tall blue-and-white jar, and both men turned to look at it. Hilary let her eye slide rapidly over them. It slipped off Bertie Everton and rested upon Henry. He was talking in quite an animated ma
Henry had his back to her. He did not turn round. He was saying a beautiful piece which he had memorized with great care from one of his godfather’s books on ceramics. It was calculated to impress anyone except a real collector, who would probably recognise the passage and suspect that it had been learnt by heart.
When he had finished the paragraph, Bertie Everton said, ‘Oh, quite,’ and took a step towards the door, whereupon Henry turned round and saw Hilary. After which he sped the departing Bertie with an almost indecent haste. The door closed. The red-haired young man covered his red hair with a soft black hat, looked over his shoulder once at the girl who appeared to be admiring that remarkably fine set of ivory chessmen, and passed out of sight.
With a long striding step Henry arrived at the other side of the inlaid table which supported the chessmen. He said ‘Hilary!’ in a loud shaken voice, and Hilary dropped the white queen and backed into a grandfather clock, which rocked dangerously. There was a pause.
Emotion affects people in different ways. It induced in Henry a stare of frowning intensity, and in Hilary an inability to meet that stare. If she did she would either laugh or cry, and she didn’t want to do either. She wanted to be cool, calm, detached, and coldly polite. She wanted to display tact, poise, and savoir faire. And here she was, dropping chessmen and backing into grandfather clocks. And both she and Henry were in full view of everyone who happened to be walking down that part of the Fulham Road. Her cheeks were burning like fire, and if Henry was going to go on standing there and saying nothing for another five seconds, she would simply have to do something, she wasn’t sure what.
Henry broke the silence by saying in a tone of gloomy politeness,
‘Is there anything I can do for you?’
Rubbish for Henry to talk like that. She looked up with a bright sparkle in her eyes and said,
‘Don’t be silly, Henry – of course there is!’
Henry’s eyebrows rose. A most a
‘Well?’
‘I want to talk to you. We can’t talk here. Let’s go through to the Den.’
Hilary was feeling better. Her knees were still wobbling, and she wasn’t being properly aloof and cold, but she had at least got herself and Henry away from the window, where they must have been presenting a convincing tableau of The Shoplifter Detected.
Without further speech they passed round the screen and along a bit of dark passage to the Den, which had been the office of old Mr. Henry Eustatius. It was of course Captain Henry Cu