Read Online The Wedding Party by H. E. Bates - Free Book Online Page B

Brighton?’
    â€˜No, miss. Never worked there.’
    â€˜Funny. I seem to have seen you somewhere before.’
    â€˜Don’t think so, miss.’
    â€˜Ah! well, we shall be seeing you again I expect.’
    â€˜Expect so, miss.’
    He was about to move away when Lubbock growled ‘What’s your name, anyway? What do they call you?’
    â€˜Squiff.’
    â€˜By God, you look it.’ Lubbock gave a short crackling laugh that was more like an amused snarl. ‘Hear that, Stella? Squiff. How’s that for a name?’
    Lubbock laughed a second time but by the time the sound had echoed round the high-pitched dining-room Squiff had gone.
    He had hardly left the table before Lubbock drained his glass and then, sloshing more wine into it, gave another insolent boar-like growl from the lips that were so like lumps of crêpe rubber, telling the entire dining-room:
    â€˜This place gets worse and worse. It’s going down the bloody drain. You can tell that. It’d better pick up or I’ll be hanged if we come here.’
    â€˜I like it here.’
    â€˜All right, if you like it that’s all right then. If it’s good enough for you—’
    She accepted this rough compliment as if it were a gem. An extraordinary look of entrancement, almost adoration, came over her face, precisely as if she could see behind the brutish crêpe-like lips some engaging quality in Lubbock that was lost on the rest of the world.
    â€˜Just like you to say that,’ she said. ‘Having a nice time?’
    â€˜All right. You?’
    â€˜Lovely. The wine’s just right on an evening like this. Somehow it never tastes the same anywhere else as it does here.’
    What exactly prompted Squiff to begin to send her flowers every week was something he could probably have never been able to explain. It might have been the only way he knew of saying thank you for the help she had given him; it was something he couldn’t possibly have expressed in words. It might equally have been that he was trying to express, in silence and from far off, an otherwise inexpressible adoration.
    It might also have been something of both these things but it wasn’t long before he heard that she was living with Lubbock in a farmhouse seven or eight miles away and there, every Saturday morning, bunches of red roses arrived, always without a card.
    Lubbock had called her Miss Howard, but in reality shewas still married to a man of Quaker sympathies named Bailey who kept a small stationery and fancy goods shop of an old fashioned sort in the nearest market town. Bailey was the sort of man who, rather than draw ten cheques to pay ten bills, would draw one cheque and walk round the town paying each bill by cash, thus saving nine cheque stamps. When he bought her a new coat or dress – and it hadn’t been very often – he gave her cash too and then insisted on having the few shillings, or even few pennies, change. It didn’t need much coaxing on Lubbock’s part to make her see that life could offer more than this kind of parsimony. She stepped in a few months from ready made coats and chain store dresses to mink wraps, hats from Mayfair, a car of her own and frequent trips across to the French coast to gamble and drink champagne on Sundays.
    â€˜A girl like you’s got to see the sights,’ Lubbock said.
    There are certain women who, though having refinements of their own, appear to relish a quality of brashness in a man. Lubbock loved her harshly, rudely and even brutally and in a strange way it excited her. The greatest of her qualities was not that she was very good looking but that she was gifted with curious powers of penetration. She saw behind all the barking insolence of Lubbock’s exterior a man desperately aware of his own deficiencies; the outer animal concealed a baby groping.
    In the same way she had been able to detect, or at least guess at, the deficiencies