Free The Dreaming Suburb by R.F. Delderfield Page B

would end.
    This pleasant state of affairs might have continued indefinitely, had not Reggie Ramage died under his twelfth operation. He was buried in the North, and Rita was away making arrangements for more than a week.
    On her return she made a proposal that was to upset the rhythm of their lives. She suggested that, from now on, Archie might as well move in, and live with her openly. There would be no scandal with her neighbours. The house was her own, and in view of the acute housing shortage, the people in the upper half were very unlikely to object. Such an arrangement, she pointed out, would relieve Archie of the necessity of contributing fifteen shillings a week to Louise's house-keeping purse.
    Without being able fully to explain why, Archie felt violentlyopposed to the idea. Somehow it made him feel cornered. He was, he explained, very well satisfied with the present arrangement, and much preferred that it should continue.
    “We might as well be married,” he told her, “and that's never going to happen to me.”
    She said little at the time, but his rejection of the offer rankled, and a note of strain crept into their partnership. One night they had an argument over what Archie claimed to be a lack of variety in the supper fare.
    “Always fried, never nothing but fried,” he complained.
    She hit back at him with uncharacteristic harshness.
    “Never anything but fried!” she corrected. “When will you cease to talk like an errand boy?”
    He chose to interpret this as a piece of possessive nagging. Getting up, he walked out of the house, and stayed away three days in succession.
    He was surprised at the sense of freedom the break gave him, and the following week he stretched the interval to five days.
    On the fifth day she was frantic. She bought him a sports-coat, and took it along to the shop. She had never called on him at his work before, and her presence there embarrassed him, even though she was careful to give the impression that she was a relative who had called with a birthday present.
    That night he warned her:
    “Don't you ever come for me again. I don't like it! I don't like being chased!”
    Rita fought down her panic. Her pride, as far as he was concerned, had long since disappeared.
    “All right, Archie, let's not get edgy; let's go to bed.”
    But they did get edgy, in spite of going to bed, and soon their edginess began to display itself in the bedroom. He would remain for ten minutes, staring moodily out of the window after she had undressed, and what frightened her even more was that he began to show a disposition to go home earlier, sometimes as early as ten o'clock.
    One night, unable to stand the strain any longer, she challenged him:
    “You don't like coming here any more, do you?”
    Although she felt that she knew everything about him, she was shocked by the brutality of his reply.
    “No,” he said bluntly, “I haven't liked coming for months. It's not the same any more.”
    She felt sick with fear. With a great effort, she forced herself to sound reasonable.
    “Don't come for a month. Then maybe you'll want me again. I'll go away, I'll close up the house and go abroad for a month. When I come back it will be like it used to be.”
    “All right, Rita,” he said amiably, and it was agreed. She left that week-end, and at the end of a week he found that his powers of concentration were weakening. At the end of a fortnight he was in such a state of nervous depression that he lost his temper, and struck a counter-hand in the face for taking his raincoat from the cloakroom in error. Before the third week-end had arrived he had decided he could stand it no longer, and would have telegraphed her had he known where she was to be found. He did not, and so he consoled himself with the red-haired cashier, Lorna, who had tried, throughout several months, to attract his attention in and out of shop hours.
    Lorna was only nineteen, and grossly inexperienced, but she was an attractive,