Free This Merry Bond by Sara Seale

of soup from his mother.
    “No. We won’t be hunting till next month now, I suppose,” said Nicky, and someone asked what the date was.
    “The twenty-fifth of January,” Mary Shand replied, in her deep north-country voice.
    Something suddenly clicked into place in Nicky’s brain. January the thirty-first was the date on which Simon’s loan was to be repaid. Less than a week away and she had no idea what Charles had done about it. A loan, like so many other things in the Bredons’ casual philosophy, was a thing quickly pushed on one side and forgotten until it became pressing. After the first awkwardness, Nicky had never given it another thought.
    She looked up to find Simon’s eyes upon her and she wondered what he was thinking. He had never mentioned the matter from that day to this, just as he had never again kissed her. But there was something in his expression that made her feel distinctly uncomfortable before he looked away and spoke to someone else.
    She decided that she must tackle Charles that very evening.
    But Charles laughed it off and refused to take the matter seriously at all.
    “Don’t be so ridiculous, Nick,” he protested. “The fella’s a reasonable being even if he is a blooming tradesman. He’ll just have to wait like everyone else, that’s all. Just imagine putting a time limit on a friendly loan, anyhow! I never heard of such infernal cheek. In any case, I’ve definitely decided to clear off abroad till the spring, so the thing’ll have to wait till I come back.”
    For the first time in her life Nicky felt distaste for the easy shiftlessness in which she had been reared since childhood. Everything slid off Charles’s airy shoulders, and she had never before stopped to think that the responsibility must fall on somebody. It was useless to argue with him once his mind was made up, however, and Nicky went up to bed with vague forebodings.
    Oh, well, it couldn’t be helped. As Charles had said, Simon would have to wait for his money like everyone else, and as for that ridiculous bargain they had made, well, naturally he wouldn’t hold her to it for a single instant. The man wasn’t quite crazy, and he had been educated a' gentleman even if he hadn’t been born one.
    She asked Simon to dine at Nye on the thirty-first. Charles was in London, and she took Mouse into her confidence.
    “I want a very special sort of dinner,” she said. “Intimate—with good masculine food and just the right wine. Something that will make him mellow and receptive—you know.”
    “What are you trying to do to the poor gentleman?” asked Mouse with one of her disapproving looks. “He may be very nice-spoken, but he’s trade all the same, and you shouldn’t make eyes at him, Nicky.”
    Nicky burst out laughing.
    “Make eyes at him!” she exclaimed. “Why he doesn’t even like me very much—not as a person, I mean. You’ve got it all wrong, Mouse darling. He lent us money, and I’ve got to ask him to wait for repayment, that’s all.”
    “That’s all!” echoed Mouse but she said no more.
    Borrowing money, even when the gentry did it, still seemed to her one of the deadly sins. How did they keep their self-respect, wondered Mouse, when they were always up to their eyes in debt?
    When Simon arrived, he looked slightly surprised to find that Charles wasn’t there, but as Nicky proceeded to entertain him with a charm that he had seldom seen her use before, he suppressed a smile and listened gravely to her chatter.
    But when back in the library after dinner, the coffee and glasses had been taken away, a silence fell upon her. She lit one cigarette after another and threw them away half-smoked, and finally she rushed into speech.
    “Of course you guessed why I asked you here this evening,” she said.
    For answer he took a folded piece of foolscap from his breast-pocket, and held it out to her.
    “I’m ready to tear this up when you say the word,” he replied.
    She jumped up and stood facing