Friends and Lovers (12 page)

David noticed her sudden shyness.

“Are you sure you don’t mind this place?” Good Lord, he thought, I am becoming more Edinburgh than Edinburgh, worrying about what is done or not done. Or perhaps he was being unfair to Edinburgh judging it by Mrs. Lorrimer.

“Do you like Edinburgh?” he asked suddenly.

“Yes,” Penny said, in surprise, ‘don’t you?” And then she smiled.

“I like its Princes Street,” he said, ‘but I don’t know anything about its people. Except you and your mother, and you seem direct opposites.”

“Mother was born and brought up in England. She only came to Edinburgh when she married Father.” “Oh,” he said. He looked at Penny, and they both laughed, and then she became absorbed in studying the menu.

“If you really don’t care for this place,” he began hesitatingly, and then stopped. Mrs. Lorrimer’s influence was long-lasting, it seemed.

He was noticing, for instance, that the tablecloth, although white, was not well laundered, and that the menu was thumb-marked. Penny must have noticed these things at once. Damn, he thought; I’ve bungled things badly: I must look damned inadequate. He scowled savagely in the direction of an interested table.

“And who are these young men, anyway?” he asked suddenly. He was delighted when he saw his return stare had routed successfully the watching eyes. He began to feel more efficient again. Well, they asked for it, he thought: bloody rude of them to stare at Penny like that.

“Medical students,” Penny said.

David glanced at her sharply.

“Do you know them?”

Penny shook her head. She had liked the quickness in his voice somehow.

“You can always tell them. It’s their clinical interest.”

David relaxed, and a smile spread over his face as he ordered lunch.

By a skilful process of suggestion and elimination he managed to make her decide in half the usual time she needed to cope with a menu.

Well, she thought, as the full-bosomed, thick-wasted waitress in drab black retired with the completed order, well, it is rather nice to have some one to make up your mind for you— especially if he decides on the things you really wanted to have, anyway. She wondered if he always knew what he wanted so very quickly; and thank goodness the dye in her new suede gloves was fast and her hands were not streaked with blue as she had feared. And did that medical student with the red hair know her, for he looked as if he did recognize her—students had a way of knowing you without your ever having met them—and was he perhaps a friend of any of Moira’s friends? And then she suddenly thought, I don’t care even if all the family find out; I don’t care if I get into the most awful row. This, she decided, as she listened to David’s voice and watched the smile in his eyes, this is fun. She laughed suddenly.

“A good joke?” he said.

“I’m feeling rather good,” she said. She told herself she shouldn’t have admitted that, but her tongue had outwitted her.

“Are you?” He looked pleased. He said quietly, “So am I. Nice feeling, isn’t it?” Their eyes met and held in the same way they had met and held in Mrs. McDonald’s cottage. And the effect was still the same. Penny took fright, retreating into words: David was silent, watching her as she talked. She felt suddenly that he knew why she was talking like this, and she fell silent too.

“And what happened then?” he asked. He must have been listening after all.

“Nothing very much. I’m afraid I’m boring you.”

He shook his head slowly.

The waitress brought the food, and the intrusion brought them back to earth.

Besides, the roast beef was tender and properly underdone, the roasted potatoes were crisp and hot, the vegetables were an appetizing green and did not taste of baking-soda, and they were both hungry.

David congratulated himself on his choice of restaurant. It could cook. As he drank the excellent ale which he had ordered—Penny would have nothing to drink—he said, “Thank heavens you are a girl who can eat.”

She looked up quickly, horrified.

“No, please don’t,” he said.

“That was a compliment I was trying to pay you. There is nothing sillier than the girl who picks daintily and leaves most of the food on her plate.

She probably thinks she is being aesthetic or something, although how anyone can be ssthetic when they don’t appreciate an art like good cooking I can’t imagine.

Actually she always reminds me strongly of the princess in The Thousand and One Nights. The one who ate rice with a bodkin. Only rice, grain by grain; everything else refused. Remember her?”

Penny, whose knowledge of The Thousand and One Nights had been limited to one volume of carefully selected passages, to Rimsky-Korsakov’s music, and to the bowdlerized version of the Christmas pantomime, wrinkled her brow thoughtfully.

“I don’t know it,” she admitted.

“I

thought I knew The Arabian Nights pretty well, but I don’t know that story.

How did it end?”

“Well, roughly—without Scheherazade’s interruptions—she ate the grains of rice by day, drugged her husband’s coffee in the evening, and went out by night with her friend, the ghoul, totear a few graves apart. Nice clean fun, don’t you think?”

Penny thought over that, and then the full implication dawned on her.

She laughed and pushed back her empty plate.

“I was only trying to show you that I was paying you a compliment when I said I was glad you liked good food. But I suppose I haven’t Scheherazade’s charm as a teller of tales.” “Actually,” Penny said, with mock seriousness, ‘you should not mention ghouls or graves in Edinburgh. Burke and | Hare …

Remember them?”

“Why, of course, they worked here … Good old subconscious: it keeps on going all the time, doesn’t it?” He glanced over at the party of medical students, and caught the red-haired man watching Penny again.

“Now I know what to say to your medical friend if he doesn’t stop looking over in this direction.”

“What?” she asked, with dawning horror. But she did not need an answer.

David’s sudden outburst of laughter was enough. It made every one in the room turn their heads sharply to look at them for a moment; and strangers’ faces, as they picked up their own conversations again, still held something of the smile which had been brought to their lips quite involuntarily.

“I believe you would!” Penny said. She imitated his voice: “Doing much body-snatching these days, Dr. Redhead?”

After a while, when she could talk without starting to laugh all over again, she said,

“Actually we are being rather cruel. He is probably a most worthy young man.”

With a body-snatching eye, David thought.

“I’m sorry,” he said, but he did not look in the least. repentant.

“What other stories did Scheherazade tell?”

“One thousand and one nights of them.” He smiled, thinking of their variety.

“And the king who listened never got bored? She must have been very beautiful as well as having a lovely voice. But I suppose that after a thousand and one nights she had become a habit.”

“Probably,” David agreed. And a very pleasant one. The three sons which she produced meanwhile must have been a help too.

“She certainly kept her head, which was more than the King’s previous wives had been able to do.”

“I don’t believe she was afraid of death. She told the stories well because she wanted totell them. Perhaps she loved the king, and wanted to make him happy.”

“Perhaps.”

“You think I am being rather silly, don’t you?”

David’s smile disappeared.

“Good Lord, no! I’m interested. Do you really believe she was in love?”

“Why else would she bother? If you had totell a different story every night for almost three years to some one you did not love, you would probably give up after three months and petition to be beheaded. Wouldn’t you?”

David was smiling again.

“Probably.”

“You are as cautious as a Scotsman. I never heard such a collection of ” probablies” and ” perhapses.”

“All right, I’ll abandon caution. When can I see you again? Do you ever visit London?”

She pretended to be very busy pouring a second cup of coffee for him, no cream, three lumps of sugar.

David pressed his question. No chance of arranging a holiday there?”

If not, then I’ll just have to think up some old excuse to get to Edinburgh for Christmas. A complicated business. Still, he would arrange it somehow.

If he won that essay prize on the failure of democracy in Greece there would be enough money to cover expenses.

She shook her head, and then she relented: he was looking quite disappointed enough.

“I am coming to live in London.” she said very quietly.

What?”

“I’m going to the Slade School of Art. At the end of September.”

He pushed himself back from the table, wrinkling the tablecloth, spilling the coffee.

“Well,” he said, and then lowered his voice to a more normal tone; ‘well, that’s grand.” He studied her face for a few moments.

“You know, you can be a devil, too. Why didn’t you tell me?” “You might not have wanted to see me again,” she said gently.

Before he had recovered his breath to say anything to that, the waitress, with one eye on the clock and the other on an emptying room, came over and frowned at the tablecloth. Some people didn’t know when to stop talking or drinking cold coffee.

“Imagine them coming to a howf like this, anyway! With clothes and a figure like that I’d let myself be seen, she thought. The man was looking annoyed—did he just want to sit there talking all afternoon, and me with my feet fit to burst? But he tipped well, and that was something unexpected.

Usually the students—and he looked like one left threepence under the plate.

Hard-up they were, although they did have an extra glass of beer often enough. Funny kind of hard-up ness that.

That was men for you: suit themselves, me first, me me all the time.

“Thank you, sir.” She slipped the tip into the pocket under her apron, and stood there for a minute to watch them leave. Still talking their heads off.

And now he had his hand under her arm and was guiding her carefully between the empty tables. Well, she thought grudgingly, as she fingered the tip in her pocket, you’re only young once. And she wished them luck in her bitter, tired way, as she pulled off the stained tablecloth and mopped up the pool of coffee.

Edinburgh Castle looked coldly down on the last visitors still disturbing its peace. A poor lot, who paid money and stared. Once upon a time the price of admission had been a good sword arm, a hot-blooded battle-cry.

The group of international students was exhausted in everything, even in its good will. Tea had been suggested by Moira Lorrimer, and she was now shepherding her straggling guests towards the Castle gates.

Some of the thirstier ones had already started down the twisting cobbled paths, no doubt hoping to find a place where something more to their taste than tea might be found. Well, she had done her best: she had shown them practically everything they should see, and that wasn’t a bad day’s work.

Especially when Joan Taylor, who was supposed to be helping to guide the party around Edinburgh, had done nothing but enjoy herself with the Americans.

“We shall be late,” Moira said to the last small group of lingerers and hoped they would take the hint.

“Superb!” a French student cried, and swept out her arm to the gardens which lay down in the valley between the Castle’s precipice and Princes Street.

Her sense of drama did not seem to irritate the American who was beside her—as he had been for most of the day.

“On the Rhine we have many old and beautiful castles. Also beautiful rivers.” The German was still informative.

“Have you?” Moira answered coldly, for the twentieth time. She was becoming tired of hidden comparisons. What was more, after six hours of listening to foreigners she found that she herself had started to speak with their intonations. She had caught herself only ten minutes ago, shrugging her shoulders and saying, “But yes!” to a Frenchman.

And after two hours of the Germans, who seemed to have adopted her, for they kept coming over to ask questions or make statements, she was saying

“So!” as if it were “Zo!” and, alarmingly, “Please?” With the Italian she had found her eyes opening very wide, and her hands fluttering vaguely in the air. Joan Taylor meanwhile had been having no difficulties at all.

Now the very handsome Italian, who had more often than was truly necessary brushed against her arm—and twice, it had to be admitted, against her hips—was beside her once more. She flinched instinctively, and held her elbows out stiffly, as he walked much too near her, so that she found herself moving forward at a tangent until she was practically against the wall.

“I am sorry,” he said, with his deep, rich smile, as if he had just noticed that she was practically off the path again. “So very sorry.”

“Yes, yes,” she answered, but still kept her elbows in a defensive position.

He had magnificent eyes, and he used them well, almost as well as his hands.

“I have a riddle,” he was saying, dropping his voice to a friendly murmur.

“But what?” Stop talking that way, she told herself angrily. “What is it?” she asked quickly.

“Are the hearts of Scottish girls as hard as the rock on which they placed their castle?”

Moira looked wildly around for help. But, for once, the German had left her, the Americans had walked on with Joan Taylor and the French girl, and the Chinese scholar had retired into contemplation of the colour qualities of the smoke which hung over the distant rooftops.

She said weakly, “Perhaps they are.”

“No, no, no. Impossible!” He halted suddenly and grasped her arm.

“Look, see! There are sensible people here. There is a girl with a heart that sings, and a young man who is allowed to listen.”

Moira looked, in spite of herself, towards the couple he had pointed out.

They were standing at the rampart, leaning forward and resting their elbows on it. They were standing very near each other, for one thing. For another, the man was not even pretending to look at the city stretching out below them. He was watching the girl’s face.