The Tightrope Men / The Enemy Read Online Free Page B

when he heard her giving the order. He waited until the waitress left before putting away the handkerchief. The woman opposite him said, ‘Harry, that’s a really bad cough. I’m not surprised you’re thinking of giving up the cancer sticks. Are you feeling all right, darling? Maybe you’d be better off in bed, after all.’
    ‘I’m all right,’ he said.
    ‘Are you sure?’ she asked solicitously.
    ‘Perfectly sure.’
    ‘Spoken like the old Professor Meyrick,’ she said mockingly. ‘Always sure of everything.’
    ‘Don’t call me Professor,’ he said testily. It was a safe enough thing to say regardless of whether Meyrick was really a professor or whether she was pulling his leg in a heavy-handed manner. The British have never been keen on the over-use of professional titles. And it might provoke her into dropping useful information.
    All he got was a light and inconsequential, ‘When on the Continent do as the Continentals do.’
    He went on the attack. ‘I don’t like it.’
    ‘You’re so British, Harry.’ He thought he detected a cutting edge to her voice. ‘But then, of course, you would be.’
    ‘What do you mean by that?’
    ‘Oh, come off it. There’s nobody more British than an outsider who has bored his way in. Where were you born, Harry? Somewhere in Mittel Europa?’ She suddenly looked a little ashamed. ‘I’m sorry; I shouldn’t have said that. I’m being bitchy, but you’re behaving a bit oddly, too.’
    ‘The effect of the pills. Barbiturates have never agreed with me. I have a headache.’
    She opened her handbag. ‘I have aspirin.’
    The waitress, Valkyrie-like, bore down on them. Denison looked at the bottles on the tray, and said, ‘I doubt if aspirin goes with beer.’ That was the last thing he would have thought of as ‘the usual’; she did not look the beery type.
    She shrugged and closed the bag with a click. ‘Please yourself.’
    The waitress put down two glasses, two bottles of beer and a packet of cigarettes, said something rapid and incomprehensible, and waited expectantly. Denison took out hiswallet and selected a 100-kroner note. Surely two beers and a packet of cigarettes could not cost more than a hundred kroner. My God, he did not even know the value of the currency! This was like walking through a minefield blindfolded.
    He was relieved when the waitress made no comment but made change from a leather bag concealed under her apron. He laid the money on the table intending to check it surreptitiously. The redhead said, ‘You’ve no need to buy my cigarettes, Harry.’
    He smiled at her. ‘Be my guest,’ he said, and stretched out his hand to pour her beer.
    ‘You’ve given it up yourself but you’re quite prepared to pay for other people’s poison.’ She laughed. ‘Not a very moral attitude.’
    ‘I’m not a moral philosopher,’ he said, hoping it was true.
    ‘No, you’re not,’ she agreed. ‘I’ve always wondered where you stood in that general direction. What would you call yourself, Harry? Atheist? Agnostic? Humanist?’
    At last he was getting something of the quality of Meyrick. Those were questions but they were leading questions, and he was quite prepared to discuss philosophy with her - a nice safe subject. ‘Not an atheist,’ he said. ‘It’s always seemed to me that to believe in the non-existence of something is somewhat harder than to believe in its existence. I’d put myself down as an agnostic - one of the “don’t know” majority. And that doesn’t conflict with humanism.’
    He fingered the notes and coins on the table, counted them mentally, subtracted the price of two beers based on what he had paid for a beer in the hotel, and arrived at the price of a packet of cigarettes. Roughly, that is. He had an idea that the price of a beer in a luxury hotel would be far higher than in an open-air café.
    ‘I went to church last Sunday,’ she said pensively. ‘To the English church - you know - the one on