A Closed Eye Read Online Free Page A

maintain this household all on her own, and then told herself that she not only could but must.
    Sometimes it was manageable. The little back room was warm in winter, when the rain lashed the windows. Merle, taking a break, would kick off her high-heeled shoes, and Hughie would massage her feet. Harriet would close her books and run next door for coconut macaroons. Tea would be brewed and cigarettes smoked. When she saw her mother relaxed Harriet would open her book again. They asked nothing of her, seemed glad of her presence, did not enquire into her thoughts. It was in many ways a sheltered upbringing, so much so that Harriet had no longing for the outside world. The shop and the back room, so warm, so peaceful, and her simple father and her brave mother were companyenough for her. And then there was school, which she also loved, and the public library. She was quite happy.
    She had a friend, whom she worshipped, Tessa Dodd, a cut above her, indeed a cut above the rest. The Dodds lived in Cadogan Square. Colonel Dodd, a solid invincible-looking man, went to Whitehall every day and did something patriotic. Mrs Dodd had her own dressmaker and did not patronize ‘Merle’. Tessa was tall and fair and commanding, a heroine to her contemporaries. Harriet would be invited for tea, along with Pamela Harkness and Mary Grant, whom she also thought of as her friends, although there was an indefinable difference. They were kind enough, though the three of them were occasionally distracted by laughter which left Harriet puzzled. Skirts would be tried on in Tessa’s bedroom after tea, blouses exchanged. The blouses were unbuttoned at the top, to judge the effect. ‘Tessa, you can’t!’ Mary would shriek, and they would collapse. After that, exhausted, and perhaps a little disgusted, they would kindly include Harriet in their conversation. ‘What are you doing tonight, Hattie?’ Mary or Pamela would ask. ‘Washing my hair’ or ‘Reading’, she would say, and be aware of a giggle suppressed. But they were kind, and she was always asked again.
    (Oh, my companions, thought Mrs Lytton, in her exile. My lost companions.)
    Yet of the four of them she was the one to marry first, although there was little sign of this. She went to a secretarial school in Oxford Street, where again she was perfectly happy, happy above all after her day’s typing, when she walked home in the darkening evening, at one with the home-going crowd. Even at the age of twenty she perceived the beauty of this, the virtue of doing a day’s work and receiving the reward, the legitimate reward, of the lighted streets and the buses, and the girls—like herself—in their smart cheap clothes. In the summer she walked through the park andthought that this was all she needed, or indeed knew, of wider spaces and of fresher air. Tessa she still saw occasionally, but Tessa was busy most evenings, and in the daytime attended a cookery course with Mary and Pamela. But though distracted and high-spirited Tessa was still kind. The others she did not see, nor did she particularly want to, since Pamela had advised her to cover her birthmark—now largely faded, but still visible—with heavy make-up. Harriet overlooked this, but could not quite forget it. ‘I must rise above it,’ she said to herself in her bedroom that night, after shedding a few tears. ‘I must simply live on a higher plane.’
    She got a job typing invoices in a bookshop, which she also loved. Again, she was perfectly happy. From the back of one shop to the back of another seemed to her a logical progression, and a satisfactory one. She had no ambition. She still walked home, from Cork Street now, and still perceived the beauty of the procedure. One evening there was a visitor sitting with her father, a man who had been in his squadron and who had thought to look him up. He stood up when Harriet entered, and was introduced as Freddie Lytton. Both Merle and Hugh seemed excited and gratified by his