Читать книгу Unconditional Surrender онлайн

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"You must have some other things left."

"All I possess in the world is downstairs in your hall."

"Let's go through it, Virginia. You always had so many things. I'm sure we can find something. There's that cigarette case you're using now."

"It's badly knocked about."

"But it was good once."

"Mr. Troy, Cannes, 1936."

"I'm sure we can find enough to make up £250."

"Oh Kerstie, you are a comfort to a girl."

So the two of them, who had "come out" the same year and led such different lives, the one so prodigal, the other so circumspect and sparing, spread out Virginia's possessions over the grubby sofa and spent all that evening like Gypsy hucksters examining and pricing those few surviving trophies of a decade of desirable womanhood, and in the end went off to bed comforted, each in her way, and contented with their traffic.

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Guy felt that he had been given a birthday present; the first for how many years? The card that had come popping out of the Electronic Personnel Selector bearing his name, like a "fortune" from a seaside slot-machine, like a fortune indeed in a more real sense--the luck of the draw in a lottery or sweepstake--brought an unfamiliar stir of exhilaration, such as he had felt in his first days in the Halberdiers, in his first minutes on enemy soil at Dakar; a sense of liberation such as he had felt when he had handed over Apthorpe's legacy to Chatty Corner and when he broke his long silence in the hospital in Alexandria. These had been the memorable occasions of his army life; all had been during the first two years of war; of late he had ceased to look for a renewal. Now there was hope. There was still a place for him somewhere outside the futile routine of H.O.O. HQ.