Free An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge

said. ‘I couldn’t. It was thoughtful of you, but it would choke me.’
    He switched off the gas with a bad-tempered flourish, though his heart wasn’t in it. If his own life had been as full he too could have dispensed with food.
    ‘It was wonderful,’ she said. ‘I wish I could explain. You’ve no idea . . .’
    He had, but he stayed silent. She looked different since Lily had stopped curling her hair. It hung straight down, neglected, lank from the rain. It wasn’t altogether unbecoming.
    ‘When I came back across the square,’ she said, ‘and saw the trees swaying, I felt like Moley following Ratty through the Wild Wood, scenting his own little house on the wind.’
    ‘What trees?’ he asked. ‘What wood?’
    He’d seen her like this before, when she had her nose in those poetry books, and once when he’d sneaked up the stairs and caught her using the telephone. It had been one of those mornings when the early sun striking the coloured glass of the landing window had tinted the dark hall with amber light. The girl’s red hair burned against the mildewed wallpaper. She’d replaced the receiver instantly and refused to tell him who she’d been speaking to, but then, as now, there was something challenging in her expression.
    For a moment he saw her as someone outside of himself, another person, a stranger passing in the street with a face blazing with secrets. He felt uncomfortable; her eyes shone so.
    The following day the dress rehearsal went so smoothly that after giving out his notes – the pause at the end of the third act, before Olwyn opened the cigarette box for the second time, was a whisker too long, and her response to Robert’s line to the effect that she’d fabricated the person she loved a touch too quick – Meredith declared enough was enough. He didn’t want them to become stale.
    Privately he took St Ives aside and suggested he kept a friendly watch on Dawn Allenby. ‘Take her out for an hour or so,’ he urged. ‘On her own.’
    ‘Surely Dotty can accompany us,’ said St Ives.
    ‘Better not,’ advised Meredith. ‘You know what women are like.’ He found himself nudging St Ives in the ribs, man to man.
    Prue told Stella to collect Dotty’s black frock from the dressing-room; she felt the hem on the right-hand side wasn’t hanging as it should.
    ‘She’s a perfectionist,’ cried Dotty. ‘What a treasure,’ and asked Stella to afternoon tea at George Henry Lee’s across the road.
    ‘Like this,’ Stella said, looking down at her overall, and Dotty said clothes didn’t matter, it was the inner person that counted. In spite of this, it was half an hour before she came downstairs dressed up to the nines in a pin-striped trouser-suit, her hair caught up in a turban of white silk.
    Babs Osborne, huddled on the telephone in the doorkeeper’s cubicle, was attempting, yet again, to get through to Stanislaus. ‘Mr Winek has to be there,’ she cried, thumping the wall with her fist and dislodging a drawing-pin, sending a call sheet and a sheaf of addresses spiralling about the corridor. ‘He specifically told me to call.’
    ‘Go on ahead, dear,’ said Dotty. ‘Madame is having one of her turns. I shall have to see to her.’
    Stella crossed the street and loitered outside the store window displaying haughty mannequins flaunting swagger coats.
    In George Henry Lee’s restaurant a middle-aged lady wearing purple and accompanied by a string quartet sang ‘Tea for Two’, circling her hands in the air as though pushing away cobwebs. When it came to the line ‘. . . we won’t have it known that we own a telephone’, tears coursed down Babs Osborne’s cheeks.
    ‘Obsession is a terrible thing,’ said Dotty. ‘It devours one’s life. I still haven’t forgotten the misery I went through with O’Hara. I was a fool to myself; everyone warned me he was a philanderer.’
    ‘Stanislaus isn’t like that,’ Babs protested.
    ‘Of course he isn’t,’ soothed Dotty.