King of the Sea

Chapter 19

Chapter 19

He realized he had been waiting for some such change in her. In the same moment it also struck him he could not simply give her the fiver and have done with it - which had been his first, rather thoughtless impulse. If she took it, her very acceptance would create "a situation" of some kind between them. That was why he had been waiting for her to claim it; he wanted her to have the initiative. His heart was calm again now but its earlier riot still worried him; it showed him how raw and untutored his emotions were. And some instinct told him that, for all her outward girlishness, she had a maturity in these affairs that he still lacked. He trusted her to get it right not absolutely, but far more than he trusted himself at that moment.

She leaned back in her chair and, smiling lazily, added, "Or have you forgotten it? Two quid for a kiss and a bit beyond!"

"Don't!" He shook his head vehemently. "It's one of those ghastly, ghastly moments I wish I could take back. It makes me cringe with shame."

His reply astonished her out of her playful mood. "But why?" she asked, slightly petulant. "I was flattered. It buttered me up all week."

"Well, you shouldn't have been."

"Ere! Was that winnings on a horse, too?" thought appeared to intrigue her.

He nodded glumly. "D'you bet often?"

"Every day."

"Blimey! And d'you win much?"

"Mostly." He dipped his head toward the fiver. "Not as much as that, mind. That was a lucky treble that came up."

"T'll say! You should come and talk my dad. He can lose a tanner a day. It's a mug's game, he says, but he still goes on punting."

"It's a mug's game if you don't follow form. Takes me an hour every day." He patted The Pink 'Un, which was folded in his pocket.

The barmaid, who had found half a dozen good reasons for flitting through the private bar since her colleague had drawn her attention to the young couple, reported back, "She's copped it with her glass but she ain't pocketed it yet. Sly little bugger, he must be!"

"Jealous?" He reached down and gave her garter a surreptitious twang.

"It'd take more'n a fiver to get me," she assured him acidly, pinching the back of his hand smartly.

Emma whistled silently. "Still - a fiver for an hour's work each day!" With enormous reluctance she picked it up, folded it twice, and passed it back to him. "I could never pay you back," she said. "Take me half a year to earn that much. Lend us five bob instead. I mean, I stand a chance there." "What can you do with five bob?" he asked glumly,

refusing the note for the moment. "Get a week's board and lodging."

And then? She shrugged.

"I know a man in the City who can give fake characters for servants," he told her. He didn't, actually, but he was sure Albert Crane, the bookie's runner, would.

"How much?" she asked at once.

"Not much. What have you got saved?"

"Nothing," she admitted ruefully. "I just blew it out on this dress. D'you like it?" She straightened herself up and breathed in, giving him plenty to see and like.

"She's going for more, sensible gel," the barmaid reported.

A rush of thoughts and sensations went to Lawrence's head. Why not! he exhorted himself angrily. D'you think such chances are going to come your way every day of the week? "Listen!" He swallowed hard and spoke out before the leaping of his heart could paralyze him again. "I don't want you to go back into service. I don't want you to get a fake character."

She stared deep into his eyes and saw she had won. She had formed no strategy and there had been moments when she believed she had thrown the whole game away, but now she saw she had been right simply to follow her instinct. Even so, the strength of the young man's passion awed her more than somewhat, and little alarms began to sound, telling her she was beginning something whose end she could not even glimpse. She knew its purpose, well enough - to revenge herself on that hateful mistress; but purpose and end might be poles apart. She drew another deep breath and cast the die. "What do you want, then?"

"I don't know. Does it matter yet? Let's think about it. I just want to... be able to go on seeing you. To talk to you. I've never known a girl I can talk with so easily as you."

"You mean about... your sister and such like?" "Everything. I think you and me could just be... tremendous friends."

"Well, I'm a good girl," she told him solemnly. "There won't be any of that. You know what I mean." He inhaled deeply and said, "Not for money, anyway." Delicately he tweaked the note out of her

grasp. Her freckles turned bright scarlet. "Oh, Master Lawrence! I never meant ..." she stammered into silence.

Meanwhile he pulled out all the change he had and, without counting it though it was certainly more than five shillings took her hand in his and pressed the coins into her palm. "We'll work something out later. One thing at a time, eh? Let's go and find you some digs. At least you'll be spared the park bench tonight."

"Well?" the barman asked when his colleague returned, looking puzzled.

"She's playing a very deep game, that one," she replied, unable to hide her disappointment. "That's all I can say."

K ATHLEEN CHOSE HER MOMENT carefully. Her mother was writing a letter to her father, a sacred and almost daily ritual that consumed at least an hour. She always wrote in her bedroom, lying half up on the counterpane with a rug over her limbs and using the breakfast table for support. Anyway, it meant that the front of the house was not guarded.

She rescued a pair of old envelopes out of the waste paper basket and told Mrs Johnson she was just popping down to catch the fourth collection oh, and she'd give George a little extra walk, too. If she took George, the family's sort-of golden retriever, she could go into the village without a chaperone - even though he'd do nothing more threatening than lick a stranger to death.

She put on her warmest gloves and her new fur hat and let herself quietly out. She knew what an appalling risk she was taking but she didn't care. Not that she had any very clear idea what she was going to do once she got down to Highbury Corner, beyond asking policemen and tram conductors and the ticket clerk at the station if they'd seen Emma Harding. At least she wasn't difficult to describe.

And if they had seen her, what then? She shrugged the thought away angrily. At least it was better than sitting at home like a jellyfish, kicking herself for lacking the courage to speak out when it mattered. If her mother made a fuss about this unauthorized expedition, she decided, she'd just run away from home. She'd cut off her hair, put on a breeches, and run away to sea as a cabin boy, like and Harriet the Hoyden in Girl Before the Mast, which Miss Kernow confiscated from Deirdre Vine. As long as she could remember, Catherine had always wanted to run away to sea. But now, walking down Highbury New Park, she

had to tear herself away from this, the happiest of all her daydreams, in order to rekindle her anger at what had happened today - though "what had happened today" was still rather bewildering to her. Until now she'd only become aware of herself at moments of petty crisis, like falling and cutting her knee or being put on bread and water and getting terribly hungry. In between such moments her selfhood had more or less vanished into the background.

She tried to explain it to Miss Kernow this morning how when she fell and cut her knee she hadn't gone crying indoors but had just run the garden tap over her leg until the bleeding stopped; that's all she was trying to do this morning. Miss Kernow seemed to have it all confused with vague talk of "psychic guilt" or some such nonsense. Catherine had no patience with schoolfriends who whimpered at every little hurt, whether of "psychic guilt" or actual physical pain. Her father always said the only thing to do with pain was to ignore it, and she agreed.

Except that now there were pains of a different kind, pains you couldn't just ignore because you needed someone else's permission to send them away like the pain of letting poor Emma down so badly today. If only she'd had the courage to tell her mother what had crossed her mind at the time, how different it would be now!