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family. I wondered sometimes if I ought to say something about it myself. I didn't know how she felt about the subject. I asked her straight out at last.
    “Look here, Ellie,” I said, “do you think I ought to - meet your family or would you rather I didn't?”
    “I don't want you to meet them,” she said at once.
    “I know I'm not much,” I said.
    “I don't mean it that way, not a bit! I mean they'd make a fuss. I can't stand a fuss.”
    “I sometimes feel,” I said, “that this is rather a hole and corner business. It puts me in a rather bad light, don't you think?”
    “I'm old enough to have my own friends,” said Ellie. “I'm nearly twenty-one. When I am twenty-one I can have my own friends and nobody can stop me. But now you see - well, as I say there'd be a terrible fuss and they'd cart me off somewhere so that I couldn't meet you. There'd be - oh do, do let's go on as we are now.” “Suits me if it suits you,” I said. “I just didn't want to be, well, too underhand about everything.”
    “It's not being underhand. It's just having a friend one can talk to and say things to. It's someone one can -” she smiled suddenly, “one can make-believe with. You don't know how wonderful that is.”
    Yes, there was a lot of that - make-believe! More and more our times together were to turn out that way. Sometimes it was me. More often it was Ellie who'd say, “Let's suppose that we've bought Gipsy's Acre and that we're building a house there.”
    I had told her a lot about Santonix and about the houses he'd built. I tried to describe to her the kind of houses they were and the way he thought about things. I don't think I described it very well because I'm not good at describing things. Ellie no doubt had her own picture of the house - our house. We didn't say “our house” but we knew that's what we meant...
    So for over a week I wasn't to see Ellie. I had taken out what savings I had (there weren't many), and I'd bought her a little green shamrock ring made of some Irish bog stone. I'd given it to her for a birthday present and she'd loved it and looked very happy.
    “It's beautiful,” she said.
    She didn't wear much jewellery and when she did I had no doubt it was real diamonds and emeralds and things like that but she liked my Irish green ring.
    “It will be the birthday present I like best,” she said.
    Then I got a hurried note from her. She was going abroad with her family to the South of France immediately after her birthday.
    “But don't worry,” she wrote, “we shall be back again in two or three weeks' time, on our way to America this time. But anyway we'll meet again then. I've got something special I want to talk to you about.”
    I felt restless and ill at ease not seeing Ellie and knowing she'd gone abroad to France. I had a bit of news about the Gipsy's Acre property too. Apparently it had been sold by private treaty but there wasn't much information about who'd bought it. Some firm of London solicitors apparently were named as the purchasers. I tried to get more information about it, but I couldn't. The firm in question were very cagey. Naturally I didn't approach the principals. I palled up to one of their clerks and so got a little vague information. It had been bought for a very rich client who was going to hold it as a good investment capable of appreciation when the land in that part of the country was becoming more developed.
    It's very hard to find out about things when you're dealing with really exclusive firms. Everything is as much of a deadly secret as though they were M.I.5 or something!
    Everyone is always acting on behalf of someone else who can't be named or spoken of! Take-over bids aren't in it! I got into a terrible state of restlessness. I stopped thinking about it all and I went and saw my mother.
    I hadn't been to see her for a good long time.

Endless Night

Chapter 6
    My mother lived in the same street she had lived in for the last twenty years, a street of