Memoirs of a Dance Hall Romeo (18 page)

I pushed the letter into her hand. ‘Go on, read that. Guaranteed to bring you wide awake.’

And it did. She moved to the lamp beside the bed, her limbs showing through the silk nightgown enticingly, and was back in a moment.

‘Oh, Oliver, how wonderful. I’m so happy for you.’

She gave me the letter, leaned out of the window and kissed me. I stood there in the rain holding her lightly, inhaling the fragrance of her hair, and suddenly knew what I wanted to do—what was the right thing to do.

‘Marry me, Harriet,’ I said. ‘I can afford a wife now.’

She drew back. ‘Marry you?’

I was piqued at the tone of her voice and showed it, and she smiled gently with genuine concern. ‘Look, Oliver, you’re lovely, you really are and you’ve certainly been very good for me in the more basic areas of life, but there’s got to be more than that, hasn’t there?’ She shrugged. ‘Anyway, I’m going to Canada at the end of the term. My father’s taking over as Managing Director of a new subsidiary in Toronto and I’ve promised to go with them.’

I said lamely, ‘Well, that’s that.’

She said, ‘You can come in. A farewell party if you like.’

But that was no good. No good at all. ‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’d better be getting back before I start the dogs howling.’

She sighed. ‘Dear Oliver, I owe you such a lot. I really do.’ She kissed me gently, leaning out over the sill, then closed the window and I was alone.

Jake and I, walking through the city centre after midnight from some dance or other, had been in the habit of calling in at the central railway station, because there was an all-night café where you could get tea or coffee and sandwiches. It was a great Victorian barn of a place, cold, and with the taste of steam on the air, always deserted at that time of night, platforms disappearing into the shadows. It always filled me with a desperate unease.

I wrote a poem about it, which I found in an old notebook years afterwards and gave to a character in one of my later novels. It had to do with life sometimes being like getting on the wrong train and not being able to get off.
No way of getting back to where you started
, that was the line.

That night, standing there in the rain, I should have been happy, yet was filled with that same irrational sense of unease, the railway feeling all over again. Rather like setting off on the wrong journey. It was as if, on one of those long walks home in the rain on a Saturday night after the dance, I’d taken the first on the right when I should have taken the second on the left. It was a feeling that haunted me for years and still does.

But not then, standing there outside Harriet’s window. It was nonsense—had to be. I pushed the thought firmly away, walked down the path and turned along the road. The rain rushed through the trees and I paused under a lamp and realized I was still clutching the letter from my agent.

They never did film that book and all I ever received was the option money. But there were others over the years that followed, many of them, and there I still stand, caught in that timeless moment in the lamplight, the ink on the envelope beginning to run in the rain. No matter. Nothing could take the actuality of that letter away, then or now.

There had to be something more, Harriet had said that and she was right. I think it happened then, as Jake had said it might from the beginning, with a sudden rush, a kind of release, as if a tremendous energy locked up inside me had now broken free.

There
was
something more, waiting for me at the end of the street, around the corner, and I was free to find it. Really free. A hell of a year in more ways than one, but it had been worth it.

I put the letter in my pocket and walked home through the rain, content.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1989 by Jack Higgins

Cover design by Morgan Alan

978-1-4804-3258-1

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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