didn’t like his smile in the dimly lit hallway. ‘Don’t try too hard, Julia,’ he told her. ‘Goodnight.’
He pushed her gently into the hall and closed the door soundlessly behind her.
‘I hate him,’ said Julia, and took off her shoes, flung the shawl onto the floor and crept upstairs to her bed. She had intended to lie awake and consider how much she disliked him, but she went to sleep at once.
The Professor took himself off home, to his elegant Chelsea house, locked the Rolls in the mews garage behind it, and let himself into his home. There was a wall-light casting a gentle light on the side table in the hall and he picked up the handful of letters on it as he went to his study.
This was a small, comfortably furnished room, with rows of bookshelves, a massive desk, a chair behind it and two smaller ones each side of the small fireplace. Under the window was a table with a computer and a pile of papers and books. He ignored it and put the letters on his desk before going out of the room again and along the hall, through the baize door at the end and down the steps to the kitchen, where he poured himself coffee from the pot on the Aga and acknowledged the sleepy greetings from two small dogs.
They got out of the basket they shared and sat beside him while he drank his coffee: two small creatures with heavily whiskered faces, short legs and long, thin rat-like tails. The professor had found them, abandoned, terrified and starving, some six months earlier. It was apparent that they weren’t going to grow any larger or handsomer, but they had become members of his household and his devoted companions. He saw them back into their basket, with the promise of a walk in the morning, and went back to his study. There were some notes he needed to write up before he went to bed.
He sat down and pulled the papers towards him and then sat back in his chair, thinking about the evening. What had possessed him to take Julia out to dinner? he wondered. A nice enough girl, no doubt, but with a sharp tongue and making no attempt to hide the fact that she didn’t like him. The unknown Oscar was possibly to be pitied. He smiled suddenly. She had enjoyed her dinner, and he doubted whether Oscar rose much above soup of the day and a baked potato. He acknowledged that this was an unfair thought; Oscar might even now be searching fruitlessly for Julia.
When Julia went down to breakfast in the morning, Ruth and Monica were already at the kitchen table, and without wasting time they began to fire questions at her.
‘Did you dance? Was it a splendid hotel? What did you eat? Did Oscar propose? Did he bring you home?’
Julia lifted the teapot. ‘I danced three and a half times, and the hotel was magnificent.’
She shook cornflakes into a bowl. She didn’t like them, but, according to the TV ad, the girl who ate them had a wand-like figure—a state to which she hoped in time to subdue her own generous curves. She said, ‘I didn’t eat at the hotel.’ She took a sip of tea. ‘Oscar didn’t propose. I don’t think he ever will now. And he didn’t bring me home.’
‘Julia, you didn’t come home alone?’
‘No, Professor van der Maes drove me back.’
She finished the cornflakes and put bread in the toaster.
‘Start at the beginning and don’t leave anything out,’ said Ruth. ‘What on earth was the Professor doing there? He doesn’t write verses, does he?’
‘No. Though I’m sure he is very handy with a needle.’
Her sisters exchanged glances. ‘Why did you dance half a dance?’ asked Ruth.
Julia said through a mouthful of toast, ‘Oscar was annoyed because I hadn’t stayed on my chair to wait for him, so I asked him if he wanted to marry me.’
‘Julia, how could you…?’
‘He told me to go to the ladies’ room and compose myself, so I found my shawl and left, and the Professor was at the entrance. He said he was hungry and asked me if I was, and when I said yes, he took me to Wilton’s.’
‘Wilton’s?’ chorused her sisters, and then added, ‘The dress…?’
‘It was all right. We sat in a booth. It was a nice dinner. And then, when I asked him to bring me home, he did.’
Two pairs of astonished blue eyes stared at her. ‘What about Oscar?’
‘He was shocked.’
‘And the Professor? Whatever did he say?’
‘He said he wasn’t surprised that Oscar wasn’t mine.
You will both be late for work…’
‘But why should the Professor take you out to dinner?’ asked Ruth.
‘He said he was hungry.’
‘You can be very tiresome sometimes, Julia,’ said Monica severely.
When they had gone Julia set about the household chores and then, those done, she made coffee and a cheese sandwich and sat down to write verses. Perhaps Oscar would be able to get her the sack, but on the other hand her verses sold well. The senior partners might not agree. For it wasn’t the kind of work many people would want to do and it was badly paid. She polished off a dozen verses, fed Muffin, the family cat, and peeled the potatoes for supper. Oscar, she reflected, wouldn’t bother her again.
CHAPTER TWO
OSCAR came four days later. Julia was making pastry for a steak pie and she went impatiently to the front door when its knocker was thumped. Oscar was on the doorstep. ‘I wish to talk to you, Julia.’
‘Come in, then,’ said Julia briskly. ‘I’m making pastry and don’t want it to spoil.’
She ushered him into the house, told him to leave his coat in the hall, and then went back into the kitchen and plunged her hands into the bowl.
‘Do sit down,’ she invited him, and, when he looked askance at Muffin the household cat, sitting in the old Windsor chair by the stove, added, ‘Take a chair at the table. It’s warm here. Anyway, I haven’t lighted the fire in the sitting room yet.’
She bent over her pastry, and presently he said stuffily, ‘You can at least leave that and listen to what I have to say, Julia.’
She put the dough on the floured board and held a rolling pin.
‘I’m so sorry, Oscar, but I really can’t leave it. I am listening, though.’
He settled himself into his chair. ‘I have given a good deal of thought to your regrettable behaviour at the dance, Julia. I can but suppose that the excitement of the occasion and the opulence of your surroundings had caused you to become so—so unlike yourself. After due consideration I have decided that I shall overlook that…’
Julia laid her pastry neatly over the meat and tidied the edges with a knife. ‘Don’t do that,’ she begged him. ‘I wasn’t in the least excited, only annoyed to be stuck on a chair in a corner—and left to find my own way in, too.’
‘I have a position to uphold in the firm,’said Oscar. And when she didn’t answer he asked, ‘Who was that man you were talking
