I said yes, as happily as I could, and wished he would stay in the room with me. But I hadn’t the guts to ask him, and anyway he seemed to have his own plans.
He came up to me and kissed me gently on the lips. I was so surprised I just stood there. He said lightly, “I’m sorry, Viv, but you’re a beautiful girl. In those overalls you’re the prettiest garage-hand I’ve ever seen. Now don’t you worry. Get some sleep. I’ll keep an eye on you.”
I threw my arms round his neck and kissed him back—hard, on the lips. I said, “You’re the most wonderful man I’ve ever met in my life. Thank you for being here. And please, James. Be careful! You haven’t seen them like I have. They’re really tough. Please don’t get hurt.”
He kissed me back, but only lightly, and I let go of him. He said, “Don’t worry. I’ve seen this sort before. Now you do all I told you and get off to sleep. Night, Viv.”
And then he had gone.
I stood for a moment looking at the closed door, and then I went and brushed my teeth and got ready for bed. I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked like hell— washed out, no make-up, and deep circles under my eyes. What a day! And now this! I mustn’t lose him! I mustn’t let him go! But I knew in my heart that I had to. He would go on alone, and I would have to, too. No woman had ever held this man. None ever would. He was a solitary, a man who walked alone and kept his heart to himself. He would hate involvement. I sighed. All right. I would play it that way. I would let him go. I wouldn’t cry when he did. Not even afterward. Wasn’t I the girl who had decided to operate without a heart?
Silly idiot! Silly, infatuated goose! This was a fine time to maunder like a girl in a women’s magazine! I shook my head angrily and went into the bedroom and got on with what I had to do.
It was still blowing hard, and the pine trees clashed fiercely outside my back window. The moon, filtering through high scudding clouds, lit up the two high squares of glass at each end of the room and shone eerily through the thin, red-patterned curtains. When the moon went behind the clouds, the blocks of blood-red photographer’s light went dark and there was only the meager pool of yellow from the oil-lamp. Without the brightness of electricity, there was a nasty little movie-set feeling about the oblong room. The corners were dark, and the room seemed to be waiting for a director to call people out of the shadows and tell them what to do.
I tried not to be nervous. I put my ears to the connecting walls to right and left, but across the space of the carports I could hear nothing. Before I had set up my barricade I had softly opened the door and gone out and looked round. There had been a glimmer of light from Numbers 8 and 10 and from James Bond’s Number 40 away down to the left. Everything had been peaceful, everything quiet. Now I stood in the middle of the room and had a last look round. I had done everything he had told me to do. I remembered the prayers I was going to say and I knelt down there and then on the carpet and said them. I thanked, but I also asked. Then I took two aspirin, turned down the light and blew across the glass chimney to put it out, and went over to my floor bed in the corner. After unzipping the front of my overalls and unlacing but not removing my shoes, I curled myself up in the blankets.
I never take aspirins or any other pills. These, after carefully reading the instructions, I had taken from the little first-aid kit my practical mind had told me to include in my scrap of luggage. I was anyway exhausted, beat to the wide, and the pills, to me as strong as morphia, soon sent me off into a delicious half-sleep in which there was no danger but only the dark, exciting face and the new-found knowledge that there really did exist such men. Soppier even than that, I remembered the first touch of his hand holding the lighter and thought carefully about each kiss separately, and then, but only after vaguely remembering the gun and slipping my hand under the pillow to make sure it was there, I went happily to sleep.