Free Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories by H.E. Bates

brassy voice, a long yellow cigarette holder, and a low neckline from which melon-like breasts protruded white and hard, and took a drink from a tray, swallowing it quickly before taking the entire tray back with her.
    â€˜Just float in, dear. It’s like a mill-race in there. You just go with the damn stream.’
    Cautiously Mrs Corbett stood by the door of the drawing-room, holding the rose in its paper bag and staring at the gibbering, munching, sipping faces swimming before her in smoky air.
    It was twenty minutes before Lafarge, returning to the kitchen for plates of food, accidentally found her standing there, transfixed with deep immobile eyes.
    â€˜But darling Mrs Corbett! Where have you been? I’ve been telling everyone about you and you were not here. I want you to meet everyone. They’ve all heard about you. Everyone!’
    She found herself borne away among strange faces, mute and groping.
    â€˜Angela darling, I want you to meet Mrs Corbett. The most wonderful person. The dearest sweetie. I call her my heart specialist.’
    A chestless girl with tow-coloured hair, cut low over her forehead to a fringe, as with a basin, stared at her with large, hollow, unhealthy eyes. ‘Is it true you’re a heart specialist? Where do you practise?’
    Before Clara could answer a man with an orange tie, a black shirt and a stiff carrot beard came over and said, ‘Good lord, what a mob. Where does Henry get them from? Let’s whip off to the local. That woman Forbes is drooling as usual into every ear.’
    Excuseless, the girl with hollow eyes followed him away. Lafarge too had disappeared.
    â€˜Haven’t I seen you somewhere before? Haven’t we met? I rather fancied we had.’ A young man with prematurely receding, downy yellow hair and uncertain reddish eyes, looking like a stoat, sucked at a glass, smoked a cigarette, and held her in a quivering, fragile stare.
    â€˜Known Henry long? Doesn’t change much, does he? How’s the thing getting on? The opus, I mean. The great work. He’ll never finish it, of course. Henry’s sort never do.’
    It was some time before she realised what was wrong with the fragile uncertain eyes. The young man spilt the contents of his glass over his hands, his coat, and his thin, yellow snake of a tie. He moved away with abrupt unsteadiness and sheheard a crash of glass against a chair. It passed unnoticed, as if a pin had dropped.
    Presently she was overwhelmed by hoglike snorts of laughter, followed by giggling, and someone said, ‘What’s all this about a rose?’
    â€˜God knows.’
    â€˜Some gag of Henry’s.’
    A large man in tweeds of rope-like thickness stood with feet apart, laughing his hoglike laugh. Occasionally he steadied himself as he drank and now and then thrust his free hand under a heavy shirt of black-and-yellow check, scratching the hairs on his chest.
    Drinking swiftly, he started to whisper, ‘What’s all this about Henry and the grocer’s wife? They say she’s up here every hour of the day.’
    â€˜Good lord, Henry and what wife?’
    â€˜Grocer’s, I thought—I don’t know. You mean you haven’t heard?’
    â€˜Good lord, no. Can’t be. Henry and girls?’
    â€˜No? You don’t think so?’
    â€˜Can’t believe it. Not Henry. He’d run from a female fly.’
    â€˜All females are fly.’
    Again, at this remark, there were heavy, engulfing guffaws of laughter.
    â€˜Possible, I suppose, possible. One way of getting the custom.’
    She stood in a maze, only half hearing, only half awake. Splinters of conversation went crackling past her bewildered face like scraps of flying glass.
    â€˜Anybody know where the polly is? Get me a drink while I’m gone, dear. Gin. Not sherry. The sherry’s filthy.’
    â€˜Probably bought from the grocer.’
    Leaning against the mantelpiece, a long arm