Read Online The Gazebo by Patricia Wentworth - Free Book Online

of it all he had come home to find that nothing had changed. The locked place was open and empty. Althea was just across the room from him, and he might never have been away. She turned her head and their eyes met.
    It was a most curious experience. It was like waking up and finding that something horrible had never happened. He saw a flush come to Althea’s face quick and bright, and he saw it fade and leave a patch of colour on either cheek. She had put it on so carefully that no one could have told it was not her natural bloom until everything in her failed and left it visible. She began to make her way towards the door.
    She had known all along that Nicholas might be there. And so would the Miss Pimms have known, and all the other people who knew about her and Nicholas, and who would all be deeply interested to see them meet again. It was going to be a really absorbing moment for Grove Hill, and there had been times when she felt as if she couldn’t face it, but they passed, because there was something that she could face even less. If it came to seeing him in a crowd or not seeing him at all, there wasn’t really any choice to be made. He wouldn’t come and see her – not after the way they had parted five years ago. Now he was back for an hour or two, a day or two. If she didn’t see him in this little space of time she would never see him again. She stopped reasoning about it. If you are very thirsty in a desert and there is water within your reach, you don’t reason about it and say, ‘It will be worse afterwards,’ you snatch and drink.
    But when she looked across the room and saw him and he looked at her, she couldn’t go through with it. She didn’t know what was happening, or what was going to happen. She only knew that it couldn’t happen here under all these curious eyes. The long unnatural control of years was cracking, she must get out of the room before it broke. She threaded her way between people all shouting at each other without very much chance of making themselves heard. She didn’t look at Nicholas again. She heard Ella Harrison’s metallic laugh, and quite suddenly in a momentary lull a girl’s voice said, ‘and his nose was as cold as ice!’ And then she was at the door. There was a fat man leaning against it. He seemed to have had a good many cocktails and to need support. She was wondering how she was going to get past him, when she heard Nicholas say, ‘Just a minute, old chap, we want to get out.’ A hand came over her shoulder. The fat man was eased along the wall, the door opened, and she found herself in the passage. Nicholas said, ‘Quick!’ and ran her along with an arm about her shoulders to the little room which used to be Sophy’s. With the door shut on them, he let go of her and stood back. They didn’t speak, they looked at each other. In the end he said, ‘Well?’ and she said, ‘Where have you been?’
    EIGHT
    NICHOLAS’S LAUGH WAS not quite steady.
    ‘Oh, just going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it, like my namesake in the book of Job.’
    She said with a kind of soft irrelevance,
    ‘Do you remember when you dressed up as the devil with horns and a tail and frightened Sophy’s birthday party into fits by turning out the lights at the main and coming in all daubed with phosphorescent paint?’
    He laughed again.
    ‘It went with a bang!’
    ‘Because you had a squib at the end of your tail and when you let it off everyone screamed.’
    ‘You didn’t.’
    ‘I can’t when things happen – I go stiff.’
    ‘The trouble with you, darling, is that you’re just a mass of inhibitions. You don’t scream, and you don’t cry, and you don’t climb on a chair when you see a mouse.’
    ‘I might if it was a spider.’
    ‘Spiders can run up chairs, but it’s only the little ones that have an urge that way. The large hairy ones are given over to sloth. They lurk and brood in baths and places where you want to wash. Let us return to your