Free Pray for a Brave Heart by Helen MacInnes

getting the feel of a place, that’s all.” Paula glanced at a table nearby, and then casually across the room at its curve of giant windows, at its sedate groups of families out together for an evening’s relaxation, at the clusters of couples who were engrossed in each other. “There’s a man over there,” she said with amusement, “who’s much too interested. He pretends he’s only studying this huge room, but you know how it is—the more he avoids being found watchingus, the more he actually gives himself away. Is he a friend of yours?”
    Francesca let her eyes wander slowly round the tables. “That creature in the silver-grey suit?” she asked.
    “No,” Paula said. “That’s only a landmark.”
    “He certainly is.”
    “Beyond him to the left. I mean to the right. Your right, his left. It’s always so mixing.”
    “I see,” Francesca said slowly, and looked at the man, and then quickly at another table where three girls expanded in pink blushes, pure Renoir colour, under the proud eyes of their parents. “No, he is no friend of mine.” She looked back at the man. He was hunched, now, as if he were trying to contract into nothingness. Thin face, weak chin, nondescript clothes. He wasn’t even the kind of man who would seem likely to be interested in anything except his own dull life. “You’re joking, Paula,” she said.
    “Oh, he’s just some little clerk putting in a lonely evening,” Paula said. “But why come here if he enjoys himself so little? Perhaps he’s going straight back to his attic room to start chapter three of his autobiographical novel —How I Suffer Among the Bourgeoisie. You’ll be the heroine with the sensitive face who is being led astray by Swiss comfort and American materialism. Now, wouldn’t he be delighted if that dark-haired gigolo in the fancy suit came over here to join us? It would fit all theories perfectly.”
    “I’m afraid the pearl-grey suit is too interested in his brandy and cigar,” Francesca said, “and thank heaven for that.”
    “He’s leaving, trailing clouds of richness,” Paula reported.
    “Some men would do better to stay poor,” Francesca said. “Money only exaggerates their vulgarities.”
    Paula laughed. But her eyes were thoughtful as she noticed that the thin-faced man paid no attention at all to the departure of the pearl-grey suit, so that when he had been looking in this direction he must indeed have been watching Francesca and herself. Paula didn’t need to glance over her shoulder to see what table lay behind theirs: there was none—Francesca and she had chosen a corner.
    Francesca said, “Shall we leave, too? Then let’s do it quickly.” Paula looked at her grave face and nodded. Within three minutes they were standing at street level far below the high terraces of the Kursaal, deposited there by an outsize elevator which had descended through the solid rock of the Schänzli. Their luck continued. Even as Paula looked with dismay through the drizzling darkness at the long, lonely expanse of bridge back into town, a solitary taxi passed them, hesitated, halted. “Quick, quick!” said Francesca, and ran for it. But once they were over the Kornhaus Bridge, it was Francesca who suggested they might drive slowly around the Lower Town following the loop of the River Aare which semi-circled this tongue of land with its eighteenth-century houses and twisting streets. “To let you see how it looks on a rainy night,” Francesca said. “Houses are like husbands: you should see them at their worst before you decide which to choose.”
    The rain was easing, but the weather had kept many people indoors. Most of the restaurants were closing, the streets were bleak, the fountains lonely, chattering shadows robbed of colour and design by the blackness around them. It might have been three o’clock in the morning instead of eleven at night. It could have been almost a medieval city, except that the guttersheld only rain, the