On the top of an oily quarter-pound of butter there’s a very dirty note.
“Dear Miss I am unable to come to-day has my little girl is queer hoping no inconvenence yrs truely mrs skinner.”
All right. I’ll wash up ... loathsome job! That kettle always took so long to boil—we ought to have a flat-bottomed one like the one they use for picnics at the Waters’. It’s a good thing I’m able to think so composedly of them. Doesn’t it show, after all, that—what I told his mother, what I thought I should have to hold away from myself so determinedly, may not really be true ... may not, anyhow, be the deep and lasting sort of “true” that I imagined? Just a fancy, a passing, summer-holiday attraction for someone who’ll never guess. It must—it shall be that. No harm in remembering him—all of them. Let’s see. To-day was to be their excursion to Red Wharf Bay. I can see the whole party—and their jolly, sun-browned faces against the throbbing blue of sea and sky. Odette Charrier will be like some bright foreign bird just alighted amid the homely gold of the Welsh gorse ... prattling away in her pretty broken English that I believe she sometimes breaks on purpose to hear Billy Waters’ amused, boyish laugh.
They’ll be together all the time to-day—no official fiancée to intervene with even the shadow of a claim....
Together they’ll be unpacking the picnic basket, hunting for the corkscrew, picking up big, sun-warmed pebbles from the beach to lay at the corners of the white picnic cloth to keep it from flying into the sea.
The others will be—oh, somewhere about....
Those two will stroll off after lunch, I suppose. I wonder if they’ll bathe? He wouldn’t have lost his nerve even after that afternoon swim.... Only yesterday? They’ll bathe from the rocks, I expect. And I might still have been there....
A ring at the door of the flat. Milk, Mrs. Skinner, or—what?
I’d better go and see....
They call us the unexpected sex, of whom no man can ever say what we shall be at next.