Dead Water Read Online Free Page B

situation, anyway, but here, at least, she’s – ‘ He stood up. ‘Well, Jenny,’ he said. ‘There’s a sample of the English reticence that strikes you as being so comical.’ He walked down to the boat and hauled it an unnecessary inch or two up the beach.
    Jenny felt helpless. She watched him and thought that he made a pleasing figure against the sea as he tugged back in the classic posture of controlled energy.
    ‘What am I to say to him?’ she wondered. ‘And does it matter what I say?’
    He took their luncheon basket out of the boat and returned to her.
    ‘Sorry about all that,’ he said. ‘Shall we bathe before the tide changes and then eat? Come on.’
    She followed him down to the sea and lost her sensation of inadequacy as she battled against the incoming tide. They swam, togetherand apart, until they were tired and then returned to the beach and had their luncheon. Patrick was well-mannered and attentive and asked her a great many questions about New Zealand and the job she hoped to get, teaching English in Paris. It was not until they had decided to row back to their own side of the Island and he had shipped his oars, that he returned to the subject that waited, Jenny felt sure, at the back of both their minds.
    ‘There’s the brow of the hill,’ he said. ‘Just above our beach. And below it on the far side, is the spring. Did you notice that Miss Cost, in her interview, talked about the Pixie Falls?’
    ‘I did. With nausea.’
    He rowed round the point into Fisherman’s Bay.
    ‘Sentiment and expediency,’ he said, ‘are uneasy bedfellows. But, of course, it doesn’t arise. It’s quite safe to strike an attitude and say you’d rather sell plastic combs than see the prostitution of the place you love. There won’t be any upsurge of an affluent society on Portcarrow Island. It will stay like this – as we both admire it, Jenny. Only we shan’t be here to see. Two years from now and everybody will have forgotten about Wally Trehern’s warts.’
    He could scarcely have been more at fault. Before two years had passed everybody in Great Britain who could read a newspaper knew all about Wally Trehern’s warts and because of them the Island had been transformed.

CHAPTER 2
Miss Emily
    ‘The trouble with my family,’ said Miss Emily Pride, speaking in exquisite French and transferring her gaze from Alleyn to some distant object, ‘is that they go too far.’
    Her voice was pitched on the high didactic note she liked to employ for sustained narrative. The sound of it carried Alleyn back through time on a wave of nostalgia. Here he had sat, in this very room that was so much less changed than he or Miss Emily. Here, a candidate for the Diplomatic Service, he had pounded away at French irregular verbs and listened to entrancing scandals of the days when Miss Emily’s papa had been chaplain at our embassy in Paris. How old could she be now? Eighty? He pulled himself together and gave her his full attention.
    ‘My sister, Fanny Winterbottom,’ Miss Emily announced, ‘was not free from this fault. I recall an informal entertainment at our embassy in which she was invited to take part. It was a burlesque. Fanny was grotesquely attired and carried a vegetable bouquet. She was not without talent of a farouche sort and made something of a hit. Verb. sap.: as you shall hear. Inflamed by success she improvised a short equivocal speech at the end of which she flung her bouquet at H.E. It struck him in the diaphragm and might well have led to an incident.’
    Miss Emily recalled her distant gaze and focused it upon Alleyn. ‘We are none of us free from this wild strain,’ she said, ‘but in my sister Fanny its manifestations were extreme. I cannot help but think there is a connection.’
    ‘Miss Emily, I don’t quite see what you mean.’
    ‘Then you are duller than your early promise led me to expect. Let me elaborate.’ This had always been an ominous threat with Miss Emily. She resumed her