Free The Wedding Party by H. E. Bates

in Squiff. She was quick to sense something more than a nervous upheaval of incompetence behind the trembling hands.
    But when the roses began to arrive she failed to put the fact of them and Squiff together; it never once crossed her mind that the two might have a connection. At first she felt inclined to treat them as a joke but after two or three weeks they started to affect her in quite another way. She felt herself making something intensely secretive of them and when Lubbock teased her about them in his coarsest fashion she merely lied in rather a clumsy way.
    â€˜New boy friend turned up trumps again, I see. More roses, eh? Generous bastard – a whole bleeding dozen again. Have to watch himself or he’ll be broke soon.’
    â€˜I have them sent myself,’ she said. ‘They’re the new Baccarat roses. A special sort. I like them because they last so long.’
    All the time, still acting as wine-waiter up at the hotel, Squiff waited for one Saturday after another. He hoped always that she would wear one of the roses in her dress at dinner but she never did. This hope threw him into a tremendous battle to keep himself calm but he could never manage to control the shaking of his hands.
    One evening, as the weather turned sharply chilly in late September, Lubbock decided to drink red wine instead of white at dinner.
    â€˜We’ll have number 15,’ he said ‘the
Nuits St George
’ – he pronounced it
Newts Saint George
and in a strange way something inside Stella Howard wept for him – ‘and see it’s the right bloody temperature. Nice and warm. I don’t want my guts froze out tonight.’
    Squiff fetched up two bottles of wine from the cellar,found a convenient radiator, put the bottles on top and waited for them to warm up.
    Ten minutes later Stella Howard was doing her best not to pretend that she knew the wine was cooked. Squiff’s hands, as usual, were shaking violently and something about them and about the way she stared up at him as he started to pour a quivering trickle of wine aroused in Lubbock a violent rush of suspicions.
    â€˜Tip some in here!’ he ordered. ‘I’ll taste it.’
    He drank rapidly at the wine and immediately jumped as if scalded.
    â€˜You flaming wet! It’s like hot soup! Take the bloody stuff away.’
    Squiff stood helpless, without a word, his hands still violently shaking. Stella Howard stared up at him in uneasy pity, without a word either. The clatter of a spoon falling on the bare oak floor at the far end of the dining-room was like a sudden signal to Lubbock, who abruptly turned on her in a lash of rage, for once not loud, but curt and cold.
    â€˜And what are you grinning at? You harboured him in it, didn’t you? You knew it was cooked, didn’t you?’
    â€˜I am not grinning.’
    â€˜You were grinning like a bloody heifer.’
    She at once took the mink wrap from the back of her chair, slipped it over her shoulders and got up.
    â€˜And where d’ye think you’re going?’ he said.
    She merely stared coldly past him, closed the wrap firmly across the front of her dress and started to walk away. She had hardly moved from the table before Lubbock leapt up,took one long stride towards her and half-pushed, half-knocked her back in the chair.
    â€˜Don’t make a damn fool of yourself. Sit down.’
    She sat there without attempting to make another move. There were tears in her eyes. The wrap, falling slowly from her bare shoulders, slid to the floor.
    For a few miraculous moments Squiff’s hands had stopped trembling and he stooped down to pick up the wrap. He had hardly moved before Lubbock said:
    â€˜And what are you dancing about at? She doesn’t want any help from you. When she wants any help from you she’ll send you a wire.’
    Without answering or looking at either Lubbock or the girl Squiff walked away. He had seen the gleam of tears in