The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton

Author:Patrick Hamilton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781472103581
Publisher: Constable & Robinson
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

3

The Lieutenant! A problem she had almost forgotten!

‘And where is the nice big American?’ Vicki had asked her, only a few days ago, and she had answered, quite truthfully, that she did not know, she hadn’t seen or heard of him for nearly a fortnight.

She had found a curious pleasure in telling Vicki this – she did not exactly know why, any more than she had exactly known why she had refused to take Vicki out to meet the Lieutenant again that night.

She had, actually, seen the Lieutenant only once since that occasion – and that had been on a Saturday morning when she had run into him quite by accident in Church Street. Believing then, because he had not rung up for a week, that she had offended him by her obduracy over the telephone, and that he had no intention of meeting her, let alone taking her out and kissing her in the dark any more, ever, she had been surprised by the profuseness of his cheerfulness and cordiality.

They had only spoken to each other for half a minute, for each was hurrying elsewhere, but in that short space of time he had made it clear that she was now forgiven – if, indeed, she had ever been out of favour. He had said that he had been ‘up to his eyes’, that he had been having ‘the goddarnest awful time’, and that he had been meaning to phone her, and that he would now do so ‘just as soon as ever he got a moment to get round to it’.

That was a fortnight ago. He had not phoned until just now, and in the intervening period she had had time to wonder to what he alluded when he had said that he was ‘up to his eyes’. As she had gathered from other sources that nothing unusual had taken place or was taking place in his unit, as she knew, in fact, almost for certain, that he was entirely free every evening of the week, the problem grew more and more perplexing. But she was by now resigned to being perplexed by the Lieutenant – whose appearances and disappearances, whose enthusiasms and fluctuations, whose bland mental reconciliation of almost explicit offers of marriage with almost complete withdrawal of his person from the recipient, whose burning faith in the Laundry business, and whose habit of drinking much too much, could be withstood and surmounted by resignation alone.

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