Read Online The Man in the Wooden Hat by Jane Gardam - Free Book Online

empty seat the one beside you, and there’ll be Chinese standing thick down the middle of the bus all down the centre aisle, and there’ll never, ever, be one of them who will sit down beside you. We are invisible.”
    Elisabeth, standing in her green dress by the car, now felt invisible. She decided to turn back. After all, I’m not just anyone . She would go back to the bedroom and wait to be properly taken to Edward’s party. I am a grown woman.
    And yet, I’m still telling myself stories. I have not had the courage to throw away childish things. You’d never take me for a linguist and a sociologist and an expert in ciphers, and all of it after being in the Camps. There is something missing in me. I’m empty.
    Tears began to come. She knew that it was love that was missing. Edward was missing. She had forgotten all about him. Put him ruthlessly into memory.
    “Good afternoon,” said someone behind her and she looked down to see a very short, thickset troll of a man wearing a brown felt hat. He removed it.
    “I am Albert Loss. I cannot say my ‘ahs.’ I am the instructing solicitor and almost lifetime friend of Mr. Edward Feathers QC. I am instructed to drive you out to Repulse Bay to dine with him.”
    A white-uniformed driver now stood beside the car’s opened doors. She was put behind the driver and Ross next to her on a built-up seat that set them on a level. The air-conditioning after several minutes was cool and silent, and the car slid carefully through the crowds and away.
    “You said something—” she turned to Ross. “You said something like ‘QC.’ Edward is too young to be made a Queen’s Counsel.”
    “He has just been made one. I mentioned it in my telephone message.”
    “No! Has he? I never took it in. Oh, how wonderful! He never told me he’d applied. Oh, I see! Now I see. This is to be a celebration.”
    “Not altogether. He has other things to say. I shall leave the rest to him.”
    “Oh, and he so deserves it. Oh, I hope he’s letting himself be happy about it.”
    “He will never let on,” said Ross, “but he has been frequently smiling.” He removed his hat, turned it over, unzipped a small zip inside the crown and removed a pack of cards. He did up the zip again, dropped the hat to the floor and set up a little shelf. He began to deal himself a hand.
    “I like cards, too,” she said. “But will there be time? I thought we were almost there.”
    “There is always time for cards and reflection. They are an aide-memoire. I am a compulsive player and I have a magnificent grasp of fact. My memory has been honed into an unbreakable machine. There is half an hour more of this short journey. We have to make a diversion on the way.”
    “Won’t Edward wonder? Worry?”
    “He knows you are with me.”
    “But where are we now?” She looked through the one-way glass window. “You can’t be driving a car like this up here.”
    “It will take little harm. I agree that my London Royce would be more appropriate. And the card tray there is firmer.”
    “But this is an awful place. Wherever are we going?”
    Stretching away were building sites and ravaged landscapes. Squalor and ugliness.
    “It is your bread and butter—shall we say our bread and butter? And also our caviar. We are approaching the reservoirs, the sources of legal disputes that will support us all for years to come. Off and on.”
    “But it’s horrible! It’s a desecrated forest. It’s being chopped down. Miles and miles of it.”
    “There are miles more. Miles more scrub and trees. They will all, of course, have to go in time, which is sad since so much was brought here by the British. Like English roses in the Indian Raj the trees here grew like weeds. It was once a very good address to have, up here, you know. The dachas of the British. I still have a small one here myself, just to rent out—here we are in the trees again—which I intend to sell. The area is not safe now after dark. The reservoir