Read Harriet for Free Online Page B

be. She felt her happiness melting round her like the snow.
        ‘Why can’t I see you any more?’
        ‘Darling, for everything there is a season. You’re a lovely warm crazy girl, and we’ve had a ball together. Now I’ve broken you in nicely, you’ll be a joy for the next guy, but it’s time for us both to move on.’
        ‘But I love you,’ she stammered.
        He sighed. ‘That’s your problem, sweetheart. I never said I loved you. I never pretended this was going to last.’
        Her face had a look of pathos and stricken dignity.
        ‘I don’t believe it,’ she whispered.
        Simon was not finding this as easy as he had expected, rather unpleasant in fact. Oh God, why did women get so keen on one? He was nibbling the skin round his thumb nail. He seemed to Harriet to have shrunk in size; there was something about his eyes like an animal at bay.
        She licked her dry lips. ‘Will you find someone else?’
        ‘Of course I’ll find someone else,’ he snapped, anger with himself making him crueller towards her. ‘Borzoi’s coming back. I got a letter from her this morning.’
        ‘And so I get d-dumped like an unwanted dog on the motorway.’
        Slowly it was dawning on her that his future didn’t contain her.
        He tried another tack. ‘You’re too good for me, Harriet.’
        ‘I’m not,’ she said helplessly.
        ‘Yes, you are. I need a tough cookie like Borzoi.’
        The sun, which hadn’t been seen for ages, suddenly appeared at the window, high-lighting the chaos of the room - the unmade bed, Harriet’s clothes strewn over every chair, the brimming ashtrays.
        ‘Cheer up,’ said Simon. ‘At least it’s a lovely day. Come on, lovie, get your things together; we haven’t got much time.’
        As he threw records, scarves, papers, make-up into her suitcase, she felt he was getting out an india rubber and carefully erasing every trace of her from his life. He was hard put to contain his elation. Even his goodbye was absent-minded. He patted her on the bottom and told her to behave herself. She could almost hear his sigh of relief as he shut the door and rushed back to tidy up for Borzoi.
        She went straight home and dumped her suitcase. For a minute she lay on her bed and listened to the clocks striking all over Oxford. Only eleven o’clock. A whole day to be got through, a whole lifetime without Simon stretching ahead. She got up, turned on the gas and knelt down beside it; after ten seconds the meter ran out.
        Mrs. Glass came in and started to shout at her for the rent, then she saw Harriet’s face and stopped. ‘White as a corpse, poor little thing,’ she told her husband afterwards. "Er sins must have catched up with ‘er.’
        Harriet got up and went out and walked round the town, the slush leaking into her boots. She didn’t notice the cold even in her thin coat. She had nothing of Simon’s. He had written her no letters, given her no presents. How crazy she had been, how presumptuous to think for a moment she could hold him. It was like trying to catch the sun with a fishing net. She walked three times round the same churchyard, then took a bus to Headington, looking at the trees, their branches shiny from the melting snow. She got off the bus and began to walk again, thinking over and over again of the times Simon and she had spent together, illuminated now in the light. Never again would she tremble at his touch, or talk to him or gaze at him. All she would hear was stupid people yapping about his latest exploits, that he’d landed a part in a play, that he was back with Borzoi.
        It couldn’t be true. Borzoi would come back, Simon would realize they couldn’t make a go of it, and send for Harriet again. Wading through the cold grey slush, she walked back to her digs and fell shuddering into bed.
        Everyone said, ‘I told you so.’ Geoffrey was magnanimous, then irritated that she wouldn’t snap