Free The Green Gauntlet by R. F. Delderfield Page B

flat-mate was and what conclusion she would be likely to draw from the pair of them huddling under a blanket at three o’clock on a winter’s morning.
    Presently the sniffs ceased but she did not move away. He could feel her hair against his face and the simple perfume she used reminded him, improbably, of summer in the Valley when he was a boy crossing Shallowford Woods on his cob. She was that kind of person he decided and had never been otherwise, despite their years of racketing about the fashionable resorts of the Continent and the cities of the North and Midlands. She didn’t belong in cities but somewhere like that place in Wales she had mentioned. She was more akin to his mother than to Monica, someone who needed open spaces, country scents, plenty of good food and a big, hearty husband who threw her about and shared her primitive instincts. In a way she had always been the odd one out of the quartette, stringing along for Andy’s sake and for his, sensing the strength of the link between two men emerging from the same womb within seconds of one another. She was worth, he thought, about ten Monicas, providing you had the sense to value her in real currency.
    ‘I’ll put the kettle on and brew some coffee,’ he said, but she reached out and held him, holding the blanket closely about them so that it would have needed a determined effort on his part to get up from the couch.
    ‘You told me about you and Monica,’ she said presently, ‘but you don’t know about me. I woke up and felt frightened, frightened about everything, Steve. You’ve got to help me! I can’t go on like this any longer and it’s better you than just anybody, you understand?’
    He didn’t, or if he did he did not bring himself to believe the implications of her appeal. ‘You can talk,’ he said, ‘you can tell me any damn thing you like if it helps.’
    ‘It does,’ she said, ‘it helps more than you know! I can’t face not having someone all that time. I knew I couldn’t a few days after Andy left but I stuck it out as long as I could, longer than I could, you understand now? Then I went on the bottle and that helped for a time but later on it only made things worse. Last Christmas there was a man—Johnny, a medical student—and after him another, a Yank from the Embassy, someone Henrietta brought home. I felt awful about it afterwards and wanted to do myself in. Can you believe that? I wanted to plug the windows and doors and turn on that gas-fire. I felt like doing it again the other night just before you rang. It was either that or go out and find a man. Any man! All these other wives, I don’t know how they cope! Maybe they aren’t made like me, or maybe they weren’t rolled once a night by someone as lusty as Andy. Anyway, that’s the way it is, and if you write me off as a nympho I wouldn’t blame you. That’s what I am I suppose, only, like I say, it wouldn’t have seemed so bad if there had been more to it than just using someone, the way I used Johnny and that Yank. What I mean is, if either of them had meant a damn thing apart from their sex.’ She was silent a moment. ‘Do you want to smash my face in, Stevie?’
    She asked him to judge her but he had no useful comment to make. She had made it all too clear that she had been fighting a losing battle with herself from the moment Andy’s troopship sailed into the blue. Men didn’t get leave from the Middle East. It might be years before she could lie in his arms again and it might be never. She just wasn’t the kind of person who could sit hoping and longing and remembering, or pouring her feelings on to sheets of paper. Then he had another thought and it disturbed him more deeply than her confession. Clearly something had been expected of him last night, and equally clearly the flat-mate, Henrietta, wasn’t likely to show up. He remembered the casual way she had invited him here and the way she had relaxed half on to his knee in the taxi. He remembered