Free The Dividing Stream by Francis King Page B

grey-flannel cricket hat such as Karen could not remember having seen since the days at her mother’s school. His heavy jowl shone after its morning shave like a slab of purple meat and she noticed, glancing at his massive hands on the wheel, that he wore a broad gold wedding-ring on his fourth finger.
    ‘‘You must be excited about the children,’’ Mrs. Maskell said, and then, clutching at her hair, ‘‘Could you shut the sunshine roof a little, Tiny?’’
    ‘‘What’s the matter? Losing the old toupée?’’ His bell-like guffaw jangled back and forth, deadened only by the stifling upholstery. ‘‘Yes, you must be pleased about the brats,’’ he said.
    ‘‘Have you any children?’’ Karen asked.
    ‘‘No,’’ Mrs. Maskell answered in a small voice from the back of the car.
    Tiny sighed. ‘‘It’s not for want of trying,’’ he said. ‘‘There’s nothing we want more. Still, we have some nephews and nieces, we get a lot of fun out of them. And I always say a doctor has to be a father to his patients.’’
    ‘‘I love your dress,’’ Mrs. Maskell said. Unlike her husband she did not care to talk about their childlessness and believed him to be insensitive for doing so.
    ‘‘Do you? I’m so glad. I got it in Paris when we stopped there on our way through.’’
    ‘‘We hurried through Paris as quick as we could, to avoid the temptations.’’
    ‘‘What temptations?’’ Tiny asked jocularly, but Mrs. Maskell’s voice surmounted this obstacle, merely by rising a little, as the car was at that moment surmounting the bumps in the road:
    ‘‘Fifty pounds is so little,’’ she said. ‘‘One feels so ashamed, having to niggle and scrape all the time. It can’t be good for British prestige.’’ Plumply middle-aged, she had a fresh complexion, a round, indeterminate face and a tendency to wear the sort of clothes and hair-styles which she saw in fashion magazines on girls of half her age. At present, as she leant forward, the white flesh of her bare mid-riff was creased into three rolls. ‘‘Someone thumbing for a lift,’’ she said, as out of the dust before them a khaki-clad figure with a rucksack on his back could be seen with raised arm. ‘‘No, don’t stop,’’ she told Tiny who had begun to slow down. ‘‘ We’re cramped enough here already, what with the picnic basket and those two empty Chianti bottles I keep telling you to throw away.’’
    ‘‘Looked English,’’ Tiny said.
    ‘‘Probably one of those Scandinavian students who would sleep on the beach of our hotel at Nice. They do Europe on a shoe-string. I rather admire that, because I could never do it myself. They’ve got guts, those Nordic people. Don’t you think, Mrs. Westfield?’’ She fingered her hair which was brushed back in a straggling Dauphin bob. ‘‘Don’t you?’’
    ‘‘More than the Southerners, you mean?’’
    ‘‘Yes, more than the Southerners.’’
    ‘‘Chris always gets romantic about the North,’’ Tiny Maskell explained. ‘‘That’s why I’ve never dared to take her for a holiday up there. I think it began with a Swedish medical student she was walking out with before she met me.’’
    ‘‘Oh, don’t be silly, Tiny.’’
    ‘‘What was he called? Tore—Tore——’’
    ‘‘I can’t remember.’’
    ‘‘Of course you can,’’ he said jovially. ‘‘You’re only bluffing. I often wondered what happened to the chap? Nice-looking boy, he was.’’
    ‘‘I made a list of what we ought to see in Siena,’’ Chris Maskell interrupted. ‘‘At least, I made it with the help of an Italian friend of ours.’’ She added impressively: ‘‘The Marchesa di Canelelas.’’
    ‘‘Oh, yes,’’ Karen said.
    Mrs. Maskell felt that some amplification was necessary. ‘‘Last year she fell suddenly ill during the night in our hotel at Salzburg and Tiny had to go along to see her. It was sheer over-eating, he says. But she thought he’d done wonders