Free The Sleeping Partner by Winston Graham Page B

nails.’
    â€˜Perhaps his is the more sensible attitude.’
    â€˜Yes … but don’t you see, if it wasn’t for you it soon would be making only brass nails.’
    â€˜Maybe it will even yet,’ I said, thinking of the plane on its travels.
    She stooped to pick a yellow daisy of some sort flowering in a crack in the tarmac. ‘ It’s not like an ordinary factory at all. It’s built round one man. Without you the place would fall to bits in a week.’
    â€˜You’re being very long-sighted this morning.’
    â€˜No. But an onlooker sometimes—’
    â€˜You being the onlooker.’
    She smiled, all her face rounding with it. ‘Well, in this I am.’
    â€˜Have you come to any other interesting conclusions about me and the firm?’
    â€˜Not really …’
    â€˜Cough them up.’
    â€˜When I know you better.’
    â€˜Don’t you know me well yet?’
    â€˜Not very well.’
    â€˜You’ve seen a great deal more of me in the last two months than my own wife has.’
    Her eyes glimmered bluely as she looked beyond me. ‘D’you count knowing by the quantity of time spent …?’
    â€˜Not necessarily—’
    â€˜It’s the quality of the time, isn’t it? The—’
    â€˜And ours has been without quality. Yes, I see that.’
    She looked a bit startled, uncertain, like someone who hasn’t seen a move at chess. ‘Not altogether without quality perhaps but without …’
    â€˜Personality?’
    â€˜Well, only in a sense. You must know what I mean.’
    I suppose it was the way I’d phrased things that made the conversation important, that marked the change. Yet I couldn’t say there was anything deliberate about it. The words came that way and the change took place. No doubt it was all only reflecting what had been going on unknown to me for some time, and by chance I let her know it at the same time as I realised it myself.
    About twelve-thirty the fog came down again. You could feel the heat of the sun through it and occasionally see a blurred yellow disc staring. There was no radar on this disused strip, but presently we got in touch with Rhodes on the short-wave radio, and after a bit we could hear him circling around somewhere not far away. When he got down he came in swearing madly because he’d buckled one of his wheels, but Thurston was very pleased with the way the surveyor had behaved and we spent most of the afternoon checking the results.
    I thought I’d leave at five-thirty but Thurston said: ‘ I’m wondering if you could leave one of your people behind, in view of this new urgency and in case anything unexpected crops up. Mrs Curtis would be ideal, that’s if she’s able to stay.’
    â€˜I don’t think for family reasons that she’d want to stay.’
    He nodded. ‘Well, Dawson will do. It doesn’t matter about theory: we’ve plenty of theorists here.’
    So I left Frank behind.
    The fog had nearly cleared when we left about six-fifteen. I was suddenly lighter-hearted than I’d been for weeks. The fact of getting this job satisfactorily done even against the revised delivery date made me suddenly realise how much its failure would have meant to me. I knew very well the feeling of satisfaction couldn’t last against the loss of Lynn, but temporarily it was there. With an hour for a meal somewhere it seemed likely that we should be home before midnight, but after about thirty minutes’ driving I blamed myself for not ringing the AA to see how far the fog persisted. It kept coming in patches blotting everything out, and I’d have to slow to an absolute crawl. Driving through fog in the day is worse than at night because even your lights don’t help. The white line was a life saver, but after about an hour we ran on to a patch of newly tarred road and I had to stop to wipe all the windows