Free The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen

might never see him again. "Came all the way across London, I shouldn't wonder?" pursued Roderick, recrossing his feet in the place where Stella had sat. "I should have said he'd have had a thirst." "Who, Harrison? No, he'd been listening to the band in the park." "Oh, is that what people here still do on Sunday evening?" asked Roderick, willing to document himself as to civilian life. "But I suppose there'll be a stop to that: winter'll be coming on." "Yes, winter will be," she said, vaguely thumbing the letter she ought to show him. "It will be coming on." "Those in fact must be nearly the last roses," he pointed out, looking, with the elegiac pleasure possible at twenty, at the desk. "Mother, I don't think you ought to knock them about like that." "It's nothing more than September," she sharply said.--"Here, do you want to read this?" He reached across for the lawyer's letter, but only went on to say: "Then he's musical?" "For heaven's _sake__, Roderick--on and on about Harrison? What's the matter with you? Can't you see how he bores me?" "Then why do you have him in the flat?" "You know how people come in." "I know they keep coming into houses; I didn't think they kept coming into flats. That was the point of a flat, you once said." She sat down again on the sofa, angrily took a cushion back and, unconsciously holding it against her like a shield, said: "You're not growing up to be a bully, are you?" He seldom was, and was not this time, put out. "But I always have taken an interest in you, Mother. Once I knew most of your friends, or at least about them. I sometimes wonder where some of them are." "Then you would put them all in the past tense?" "Oh no," said Roderick, once again surprised, "I daresay it's I who am in the past tense." Forthwith he began to arrange himself for sleep, lay flat, arms folded loosely across his chest; his mouth hung slightly open after a yawn as he dropped his head back to stare up into the ceiling's inverted depths. "Did you say there were blankets?..." She stared at him, repeating: "I am so sorry about tomorrow." "I shall sleep, you see," said he, with his air of total detachment. "But not all tomorrow--how can you?" "You've no idea how I can." "But it seems such waste." "Waste of what?" She did not seem sure. "Waste..." she said again, for an instant closing her eyes. She bestirred herself and said: "What about your friends? David, for instance, came running across the street the other day to ask where you were; and I saw Hattie on the top of a bus looking so nice." "I have nothing against either David or Hattie," said Roderick tranquilly, "except that I haven't a word to say to them." "They might not expect that." "Why shouldn't they? They ought to. Fred does." "Oh, very well," said his mother.--"In case you do wake up, have you got any money?" "Well, that is a point," he conceded, knitting his brows. "I mean, it could be a point in case of--that is, I mean to say, if possibly--" He showed, for the first time this evening, signs of some inhibition. "But no," he went on, "I don't imagine, on second thoughts, that you would ever _be__ free for dinner tomorrow evening?... If you had been, you and I might have gone off somewhere and had a slight blow-out." "Roderick, there's nothing I'd like more." The answer, at any time natural, was in this instance intimi-datingly true. It was dreamlike--how long would it last, in fact?--this throwing of desire into reverse. "I can count," she said, "on your being awake by then?" "Yes.--Well," he said, sighing, "that will be very nice. In that case, I _should__ be glad if we could arrange a loan." It had been clear, since Roderick was a child, that friendship with him would have to be one-sided. Not minding if he saw a person or not had been as far, apparently, as he would ever go; though he showed a well-mannered pleasure, wrongly read as response, in efforts to entertain or attach him. Stella had seen, if never taken to heart, the folly of hopeful comment