Free The Green Gauntlet by R. F. Delderfield

afterwards when they roamed the dark streets in search of a taxi to take them to her flat on the second floor of a tall, Victorian building behind Smith Street. ‘It’s handy to the hospital,’ she explained, as she fumbled for the key, ‘I can pop back here whenever I get an odd spell off duty. There used to be three of us but Vera got a commission in the A.T.S. and now there’s only me and Henrietta. It costs us all getting on for a fiver a week. There’s silliness for you. I only earn about half that, for ten hours a day on my flat feet!’
    They groped their way up the broad staircase in the light of the bluish hall-bulb and she told him to wait on the landing while she fixed up the blackout. ‘We’ve got a Nazi air-raid warden round here,’ she said. ‘He calls up the riot squad every time he sees a sliver of light at a range of two feet! There, that’s done. What’ll you drink? I’ve got pretty well anything, Henrietta gets it from somewhere but I don’t ask whether it’s given, bought or earned!’
    She brought him a large brandy and another for herself. The flat was comfortably furnished with large, heavy pieces of the kind one might expect to find in a town house owned by one of the Forsytes. It was still spacious in spite of being divided in two by a new-looking partition. In addition to a large living-room and an untidy kitchen there was a twin-bedded room cluttered with feminine odds and ends. ‘We don’t do much housework as you can see,’ she told him. ‘We’ve got a Mrs Mop who comes in once a week but it’s a terrible slut she is and tiddly most of the time.’
    ‘Won’t Henrietta object to me parking myself in here?’ he asked, when she brought out sheets and blankets and laid them on the leather couch in the bay window.
    ‘Not her! She’s not the conventional type. One or other of her boyfriends is here every weekend but if she brings one back tonight he’ll have to curl up on the hearth rug.’ She slumped down in the deep armchair after turning on the gas-fire. ‘I feel all cosy inside,’ she proclaimed. ‘It’s the nicest evening I’ve had since Andy’s embarkation leave. I’m jolly glad Monica ran out on you!’
    She looked at him with speculative amusement, shooting her legs at the red glow of the gas-fire and cuddling her brandy glass as though it was a kitten. ‘Now tell me your troubles and see that you don’t leave anything out.’
    He told her the truth as he saw it, describing the scene in the hotel bedroom in detail and his overall relationship with Monica in the last few months.
    ‘It all sounds so casual,’ she said, frowning, ‘just a matter of using one another. It was never like that with Andy and me, not since the beginning,’ and before he could probe this unblushing announcement, she went on, ‘Do you think there’s somebody else after all?’
    He said, irritably, ‘Damn it, Margy, I told you over the blower …’ but she cut him short, saying, ‘I don’t mean another woman, idiot. I mean another man !’
    It was a possibility that had not even occurred to him and now that it did it seemed almost an affront to contemplate the fastidious Monica climbing into bed with a stranger.
    ‘No, that’s way off target!’ he said, ‘and if you think about her a minute you’ll know it is! I haven’t been one hundred per cent angelic but I’ll bet the Bank of England she has. Not out of regard for me but because she’s so damned hygienic’
    ‘That’s so,’ she admitted, with a kind of reluctance, ‘and for another thing she’d never have the nerve. She probably means exactly what she says about staying away until you change your mind. Will you? As time goes on and things get stickier?’
    ‘How the hell can I? How would it look to the Top Brass? Just one more L.M.F. using the back door!’
    ‘What’s an L.M.F.?’
    ‘“Lack of Moral Fibre”. A crack-up. It happens now and again, particularly in Bomber Command.’
    He got up and began