Read Online The Green Gauntlet by R. F. Delderfield - Free Book Online

Civvy Street or else, just like that!’
    He waited, giving her time as he thought to absorb the shock, but when she spoke she seemed no more than mildly surprised and even a little amused. She said, ‘Well now, where’s she gone? Home to mother?’
    ‘How the hell do I know where she’s gone? She took a taxi to York and that’s all I know. She surely wouldn’t be fool enough to go back to the Archdeacon. He’s church militant and would soon send her packing if she shot the line she shot to me! The point is, why! I mean, what have I done for Christ’s sake? No, there’s no other Judy, cross my heart. If there was I could make some kind of sense out of it. Well damn it, what a bloody silly question. Of course I want her back! It’s bad enough being stuck on an F.T.U. up this ruddy desert without having to sleep at the mess. Besides, she talked as if it was for good unless I agree to go back to Civvy Street!’
    ‘When are you due for leave, Stevie?’
    ‘Not until the course is finished but I could get a crafty forty-eight if I played my cards right.’
    Margaret laughed and the ripple that reached him brought some kind of sanity back into the evening. She said, reasonably, ‘Then you’d better play them, come to town and have a long talk with Auntie Margaret. You could take me out to a dinner and show. I’d love that, I’ve had no male company for months, except the odd Yank at the Embassy, and they’re so bad at it! Pawing, I mean, and working overtime at being masculine.’
    ‘I’ll put in for a forty-eight tomorrow. Right now I’m going to get plastered. Before I do tho’, did you ever have the idea she might fly off the handle like this?’
    ‘Yes,’ Margaret said, ‘I think I did, Stevie, but it isn’t the kind of thing I can discuss on the phone. Hold on—tomorrow’s Wednesday—ring this number lunch-time Friday and I’ll try and meet the train.’
    He scribbled the number on the back of his identity card and rang off, already feeling a great deal better. Quarrelling didn’t come easily to him. Such disputes as had cropped up in the past had been adequately handled by Andy, the more aggressive of the two. Now that he had told somebody he could begin to relax and make some kind of attempt to come to terms with Monica’s extraordinary conduct. Whistling tunelessly he dressed, went downstairs and across the blacked-out town to The Mitre. He forgot that he hadn’t eaten and when he was roused by George at seven the next morning he had no appetite for anything except a pick-me-up laced with Worcester sauce.
    III
    H e did not see her in the crush at the barrier and had resigned himself to waiting in a telephone kiosk queue to ring the hospital when a knot of sailors, toting enormous kit bags, moved aside to reveal her standing alone outside the buffet, legs planted astride, hands clasped behind her back, her smile asking him to join her in a parody of the military turmoil of the platform, with its aimless swirl of blue, navy-blue and khaki. To Stevie she looked like the last pre-war woman alive.
    She gave him a couple of sisterly kisses but her gesture in holding on to his hand, and pressing it hard against her breast, told him at once how much she was missing Andy, and how genuinely pleased she was to see him. Stevie was not an intuitive man but there wasn’t much you could teach him about affectionate women. He was flattered to note that she had gone to some pains to dress for him, for he had expected her to be wearing a coif and one of those dramatic cloaks nurses wear when they snatch an hour or two from the wards. She had never had Monica’s taste but today he was glad of it. She was her old self, half jazzy, half svelte, with a hairstyle that was manifestly a copy of Veronica Lake’s ‘peek-a-boo’, one hazel eye almost masked by a shining husk of hair that swept across her cheek and ended defiantly under a small, dimpled chin. He said, ‘By God, Margy, it’s a joy to look at you!