She raised her eyes. ‘It’s not that!’ she said violently. ‘You can tell him any lie you like and it won’t make no difference to me. What I can’t stand is that you should think it of me . . . that you should think I’d go with a common chap like that. It’s cruel, Mr Badger . . . cruel! After the friends we’ve been. . .’
She put her hands on his shoulders and looked at him, pleading. His lust got the better of him and he took her violently in his arms. She submitted, and he began to forget his suspicions. She clung to him so that he could think of nothing but that she was desirable. Then, cunningly, gradually she became playful and childish, teasing him, indignant that he should have thought so ill of her. By the time that he left her she had convinced him that nothing could spoil their intimacy; but whatever she pretended she could not shake herself free from the fright he had given her. She felt that the time would never pass till she could see Abner and warn him.
It was no easy matter, for when the evening came and she began her work in the bar, moving among the drinkers with her usual smiling freedom, Badger was also there following her with hungry eyes as she went about her work. He sat in a corner, isolated, for none of the strangers would have anything to do with him. While serving a tot of gin to Gunner Eve she contrived to whisper to Abner, begging him to keep away from the house that night.
‘Why? What’s up?’ he said.
‘I can’t tell you,’ she whispered. ‘Come to-morrow early, before it’s light on your way to work. Just to please me!’
She spoke so urgently and with such evident distress that he obeyed her, and Badger, who had seen her bending over to speak to Abner, spent a cold night watching the back of the Pound House in vain. He might well have been better employed, for while he stood there shivering Mick Connor made free with half a dozen of his pheasants.
Next morning, in the half light of dawn, which made the cold kitchen look unspeakably sordid, she received Abner. The meeting had none of the warm glamour of their nightly love-making, and her anxiety made him impatient.
‘What the hell do I care for Badger?’ he said.
‘Oh, quiet . . . quiet! Don’t speak so loud!’ she implored him. She submitted to his embraces, but her mind was not with him.
‘I can’t think what’s up with you,’ he said.