Something Short and Sweet by H.E. Bates

Author:H.E. Bates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1974-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

The Case of Miss Lomas

I

In the dining-room of the Bellevue Boarding House Miss Lomas and Mr. Sanderson ate their fish in silence. They sat at separate tables. They were the only guests. Miss Lomas was somewhere between thirty-five and forty: a woman of medium height with pale brown hair and a reserved, almost apologetic manner, who looked as though keeping to the medium, even the unhappy medium, had been her life’s most constant ambition. She had a habit, never varied, of staring out to sea as she ate. To-day the rain was coming down in thin curtains between great islands of cloud shadow and vast blue storms lying over the coast of France. It was already late October, and it looked as if the weather were breaking up at last.

Mr. Sanderson felt that he might say so. He had been at the Bellevue, now, for three days, but Miss Lomas, except to say ‘Good morning’, or ‘Good afternoon’, had not spoken to him. She had not even got so far as saying ‘Good night’. She looked in some way preoccupied with melancholy, with herself, with some indefinable and perhaps even unmentionable grievance or difficulty. He himself was not feeling too cheerful either; he had lost his wife, he had not been over-grand all summer. He was rather an upright, handsome man of fifty-two, though he felt, if anything, a little older. Nor was the Bellevue too cheerful. The smell of stale food was so thick and almost sickening everywhere that it was like an anaesthetic. It was perhaps hardly the place, after all, to put him on his feet again.

At last he spoke. ‘Well,’ he said, in a deliberate voice, ‘I rather think …’

He got no further. The maid, at that moment, came in to clear the fish plates. He sat silent, playing with the salt. The girl took Miss Lomas’s plate. She came over to take his own. It was just then that he made up his mind to say to her what he had wanted to say to Miss Lomas.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I rather think it looks as if the weather has broken.’

‘Oh! you never know,’ the girl said. ‘The autumn goes on a long time here.’

She spoke in a friendly voice, and Mr. Sanderson felt cheered. She was not much more than a girl. He watched her go out of the dining-room, eyes fixed on her slim legs.

She came back with plates of boiled mutton, and then dishes of potatoes and cabbage. All the time Miss Lomas gazed out of the window. They both ate in silence. Miss Lomas’s mouth, while she ate, was a mouth with no expression of emotion on it at all – no hunger, no pleasure, no distaste, no annoyance, no weariness, nothing. It seemed to express a personality that was at once upright and negative. So that Mr. Sanderson could not help wondering about her. What was she, what was she doing, why was she so standoffish? She was negative almost to a point of mystery.

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