Free Friendly Young Ladies by Mary Renault Page B

porter’s ragged moustache. She felt the trembling incredulity of the desert wanderer who sees at last, on the skyline, a fringe of palms. “You’ll need to take the ferry over to that. Straight down to the water, and then it’s twenty yards or so to your left. If you see the boat and no one there, you try the Green Lion, a little way along, and ask for Mr. Hicks.”
    “Thank you,” said Elsie, in a tone which she hoped would not reveal too obviously that she had never entered a public-house in her life. Gripping her little night-case and her handbag, she went out into the street, shivering a little in the cool air, and tasting its unfamiliar tang; smells of weed, water, live mud and rotting wood, with a whiff now and again of fresh paint, shavings, and varnish, for a little boat-building yard ended the street at the water’s edge.
    The evening sky was luminous and unclouded, and the ruffled Thames reflected it; broad shivering gleams came and went over the water, as if a huge invisible wing had swooped and passed. A straight row of poplars grew on the further shore. Before she had noticed the houseboats below them, her eye was caught by the reflected lights lying along the water, and wriggling like little snakes as the gusts went by.
    There were several of them strung out at irregular intervals, but it was growing too dark to see detail so far away. Some of them had no lights at all. Her heart sank as a conviction grew in her that it was to one of these that she would be ferried in vain. What would the boatman think? There was his boat, deserted too. A family of swans glided past it, father and mother with all sail set magnificently to the breeze, their grey woolly cygnets like bumboats round a couple of crack clippers.
    Elsie looked unhappily to right and left. Her eye was caught almost at once by the frosted windows, lavishly lit, of the Green Lion. She approached them with dragging steps. Pubs are few in North Cornwall, and local residents of any social standing, if they drink at all, do so in hotels. Drawing upon literature, Elsie envisaged beer-soaked sawdust, on which she would stand, the butt of tipsy revellers, like the Quaker lady in The Everlasting Mercy. She stood still for a moment, thought about Peter, and pushed open the swing door.
    Thick waves of tobacco-smoke met her, and a loud, deep burr of conversation. The place, as she had feared, was full of men: middle-aged men leaning against the bar, in earnest confabulation; old men sitting in a row against the wall, looking solemnly at the mugs in front of them; younger men round a dart-board, encouraging one another in mysterious terms. The noise continued, indifferently, around her. She had half-expected it to break off, while everyone turned to stare at her in insolent curiosity; but this was nearly as bad. She would have to go up to the bar, and the barman would think she had come to ask for beer. Practically anyone in the room might, as far as appearances went, have been Mr. Hicks.
    The group round the dart-board was re-shaping. She noticed with surprise, but little reassurance, a pretty fair-haired girl in the middle of it. She was trimly dressed and looked respectable; but in a place like this, with five men, Elsie knew better than that.
    Gripping her case like a defensive weapon, she went up to the bar. The barman, listening sympathetically to a little man who was saying, “You wouldn’t never know you was a ’uman being, according to them,” took no notice of her at all.
    The fair girl took a dart, poised it easily, and threw. There were noises of approbation; exaggerated, Elsie thought, seeing she had only hit the very outside ring of the target; but she was popular, no doubt. A slim, dark-haired youth in a fisherman’s jersey came up and thumped her on the back, before going over to the bar to order drinks. The barman attended to him at once. Elsie waited, resentfully, while six half-pints were drawn, and the players, whose game was