An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge

Author:Beryl Bainbridge
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Actresses, Teenage girls, Action & Adventure, Liverpool (England), Fiction, Psychological, Large type books, General
ISBN: 9781856952644
Publisher: ISIS Large Print Books
Published: 1997-12-14T10:00:00+00:00

8

Bunny escorted Dawn Allenby to the station. She was going to Birmingham to stay with her sister who had just had a baby girl. It would be a nice rest and such a joy to hold the child. Professional women, women of the theatre, missed out on that sort of thing, didn’t they? Still, sacrifices had to be made, though sometimes one couldn’t help wondering whether it was all worth while.

She looked rather well after her night in the hospital and spoke complacently of the bother she had caused. What confusion! She’d had one of her headaches, taken three aspirins and popped out to telephone her sister. She remembered nothing more until she woke up in the ambulance. Such an absurd misunderstanding.

Bunny didn’t feel it was either the time or the place to mention the half-dozen empty aspirin bottles strewn about the floor of the phone box – their contents were later found heaped like so many loose sweets in the bottom of her handbag – or that she had ‘popped out’ in the middle of the scene in Cleopatra’s boudoir. Nor did he think it would serve any purpose to refer to the lipstick-smeared card, originally written by Dotty and still wired to the stem of the mutilated plant, which, in the heat of the moment and the fitful light of the streetlamps was mistakenly thought to have been dipped in blood.

He bought Dawn a newspaper for the journey and carried her suitcase along the platform to the compartment. She ran in front of him, head high, as though someone important was waiting for her. When they reached the carriage he swung her luggage up onto the rack and said, ‘We had a little whip-round’, and thrust seven one-pound-notes into her hand. It was a lie; it was his own money.

She thanked him without warmth and stuffed the notes casually into her bag. Rose had already given her two weeks’ salary. ‘That girl,’ she said. ‘Her mother left her alone in an empty house. You want to keep an eye on her. She’s trouble.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I must be off.’ And he escaped onto the platform, praying for the whistle to blow. At the last moment, when the engine blew steam, she let down the window and handed him an envelope addressed to St Ives; she looked at him with the eyes of one waking from a dangerous dream. ‘God speed,’ he cried, and ran a few steps alongside the departing train to show it wasn’t just a question of out of sight out of mind. She stared straight ahead as she slid away.

He opened the envelope on his way back to the theatre. The scrap of paper it contained, torn from a telephone pad, was wrapped round the musical lighter.

He read the letter not out of curiosity but to spare St Ives further embarrassment – the last thing he needed in his present introspective state was a love letter from Dawn Allenby.

St Ives blamed himself for what had happened.

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