Free Hotel de Dream by Emma Tennant Page B

Miss Briggs.” Johnny gave a dry laugh. “I only know one thing. I’m not being sent down to Dorset while you’re in this mood. Or ever for that matter. It’s time we put an end to the Houghton woman—do you realise how long this has been going on?”
    â€œSo you don’t love me any more?” Tears sprang into Melinda’s eyes and she wiped them away angrily with a corner of her soiled dress. “How can you go on like that, Johnny?”
    â€œFor Christ’s sake don’t let her see you like that or we’ll have a whole emotional scene to put up with!” Johnny sounded truly exasperated. “You know we don’t love each other, Melinda, we never have, it was all just an invention. Why can’t you be realistic for once?”
    â€œYes, and you know I want to be free …” Melinda stopped suddenly, recognising with an awful sinking of the heart thewords Mrs Houghton had so often put into her mouth:
    She wanted to be free, but she needed him, and if she saw the influence of her father in all this, the happy “normal” years when she had looked to a home for support supplanted by the growing doubts of an era in upheaval, she saw also an inability to live without him, to provide for herself in such a world.
    â€œWhat is love anyway?” Johnny demanded, but also with the angry expression of one who recognises a lack of originality in his words. “I don’t even want to …” He fell silent, Mrs Houghton having shown modernity in her approach to Anglo-Saxon usage and no word remaining to him with which to describe the act.
    â€œTo embrace me?” Melinda suggested.
    â€œYes, Cecilia certainly wouldn’t put it like that!” For a moment Johnny looked quite cheerful and the two characters exchanged glances of complicity. The only times they had succeeded in getting on together were when they outwitted Mrs Houghton and slipped unacceptable expressions into the fabric of her style.
    â€œBut why should it be of interest that it’s you who don’t want to embrace me?” Melinda cried. “I might not like the idea myself. Has that occurred to you?”
    Johnny groaned and flung himself down on the narrow divan beside her.
    â€œNot again, Melinda! Not that feminist stuff! You know you don’t care who embraces you as long as you get it. You’d probably go happily to Dorset if you thought there was going to be nothing but embracing down there!”
    â€œYou arrogant fool!”
    A silence ensued, while the woman and the man waited tensely for the usual small manifestations of a painful silence: Melinda undergoing a stream of consciousness which could only be broken by some move on his part;Johnny picking at his lower lip and playing with the straggled ends of his long hair. In their effort to prevent this, nothing at all happened; and after a minute or two both had relaxed and were examining the situation coolly.
    â€œWe’ll have to murder her,” Johnny said at last. “We can’t go on being like this. It’s all her fault after all. And who knows, we might actually like each other if we weren’t bound together like this. I’ll do it, don’t worry, leave it to me.”
    â€œWe might like each other?” Again, tears came to Melinda’s eyes, but this time they were tears of happiness. Mrs Houghton had fashioned her a romantic, vulnerable being and it would take an age before she could make some change in her personality.
    â€œSure we might.” Johnny was excited: Americanisms were the clearest sign of emancipation from Mrs Houghton. “Like we could have a break and see what comes along—take a raincheck, you know?”
    â€œAnd maybe be together again some day?” said Melinda dreamily.
    â€œSure, sure. Why not? Question is, how do I do it? Gun … pills … how?”
    â€œPeople do change and develop,” Melinda recited, then pulled