Pied Piper (34 page)
Authors: Nevil Shute
He laughed. ‘Well, I don’t know. I sent a cable asking if she’d have them, and she said she would. She’ll be all right with them. Costello seems to be reorganising the whole place for them. He’s building a swimming-pool and a new boat-house for their boats. I think that they’ll be very happy there.’
We went downstairs in the grey dawn and parted in the hall. He went out a few steps ahead of me; I paused to ask the night porter about damage to the club. He said that they had had a fire-bomb on the roof, but that young Ernest had kicked it about till it went out. He said there was no gas or water coming to the building, but that the electricity had survived the blitz.
I yawned. ‘I spent the night up in the smoking-room talking to Mr. Howard,’ I said.
The man nodded. ‘I looked in once or twice and saw you sitting with him,’ he said. ‘I said to the steward, I said—quite a good thing you was with him. He’s got to look a great deal older recently.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid he has.’
‘He went away for a long holiday a month or two ago,’ the porter said. ‘But I don’t know as it did him a great deal of good.’
I went out, and the glass crunched tinkling beneath my feet.
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, AUGUST 2010
Copyright © 1942 by William Morrow & Co. Inc.
Copyright renewed 1970 by Frances Norway
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. First published serially in
Collier’s
magazine, New York (Nov. 1, 1941–Jan. 3. 1942). Originally published in book form in Great Britain by William Heinemann Ltd., London, and in the United States by William Morrow & Co. Inc., New York, in 1942. This edition first published in Great Britain by Vintage Books, an imprint of the Random House Group Limited, London, in 2009.
Copyright © The Trustees of the Estate of Nevil Shute Norway.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data for
Pied Piper
is on file at the Library of Congress.
eISBN: 978-0-307-47699-9
v3.0