Free Feelings of Fear by Graham Masterton Page B

to be okay, down there looking after those old folks.”
    â€œWell, of course. I just wondered, that’s all.” But still she didn’t take her hand away.
    Cliff waited for a moment, and then he said, “Listen – I’m
always
afraid of dying, if you must know. I can never sleep, the night before we fly, and I spend the whole time saying my prayers. When you’re up there, you don’t have too much time to worry about it. You’re too busy getting yourself there and getting yourself back again, and trying not to bump into the other airplanes all around you. But there was one time when we were hit by flak over Emden, and we lost the whole of our nose section. How we managed to fly that baby back to Bassingbourn I shall never know. See this gray hair, right on the side here? I looked in the mirror after that mission and there it was.”
    Anne crushed out her cigarette in the big Guinness ashtray. “If I ask you something,” she said, “will you answer yes or no, nothing else; and if the answer’s no, will you say no more about it, and pretend that I didn’t say a word?”
    Cliff started to smile, but then he realized that whatever she was going to say, she was utterly serious about it. “All right,” he agreed. “I think I can manage that.”
    â€œTonight, will you sleep with me?”
    He opened his mouth and then he closed it again. He looked around to see if anybody else had heard her, but they obviously hadn’t. They were singing “Run, Rabbit, Run” and stamping their feet. He looked back at Anne and she still had the same intense expression on her face, and she was grasping his hand so tightly that her nails were digging into his skin.
    â€œAre you sure that’s what you want to do?” he asked her.
    She nodded.
    â€œDon’t you have a boyfriend or anything? What’s he going to say?”
    â€œNothing. We’re only chums.”
    â€œWell, I don’t know, Anne, you’re a beautiful girl, but—”
    â€œYou’re too religious, is that it? You’re a Southern Baptist or something?”
    â€œAnne, I don’t know what to say.”
    â€œAll you have to say is yes or no. Is that too difficult?”
    Cliff took a deep breath. Then he said, “OK, then. Yes. I may be stupid but I’m not that stupid.”
    Tom had three rooms upstairs at the Dog & Duck. Two of them were occupied: one by a man who was traveling in laxatives and the other by a wiry, elderly couple on a hiking holiday. Cliff had seen them in the saloon bar, poring over pre-war Ordnance Survey maps and arguing with each other in tense, sibilant hisses. “No, we
can’t
go through Little Eversden, it’ll take us
miles
out of our way.”
    The third room was the smallest, overlooking the pub’s back yard, where all the barrels were stacked, and the dog was kenneled. It was wallpapered with faded brown flowers, and furnished with a cheap varnished chest-of-drawers and a single bed that was covered with a pink, exhausted quilt, with a tea-stain on it in the shape of Ireland. On the wall above the bed hung a print of a First World War soldier saying goodbye to his wounded horse – “Goodbye, Old Pal.”
    â€œCheerful,” said Cliff, nodding toward the picture.
    Anne gave a nervous little laugh. She sat on the edge of the bed with her hands folded and looked up at him with an expression that he couldn’t read at all. It wasn’t demure, but on the other hand it wasn’tthe expression he would have expected to see on the face of a girl who had just invited a total stranger to bed.
    â€œI hope you don’t think that I’ve ever done this before,” she said. Her hair shone in the light from the bedside lamp. It had a pretense parchment shade, scorched on one side, with a picture of a galleon on it.
    â€œI don’t know what I think,” said Cliff. “All I know is