Read The Lily Hand and Other Stories for Free Online

rubbing his hands, because everything was going according to plan, and, knowing what he knew, he must have been willing to bet I was as good as hooked. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better – I might have been very happy, and I should almost certainly have been comfortably off, because he was the sort to do the right thing by his son-in-law.
    But of course, after that night everything was different. I don’t know that I had any choice, after that night.
    We were a whole week in Frankfurt, where Franz Eisner, the firm’s chief agent in Germany, had his office. Then we went on to Stuttgart and Munich, and back by way of Nuremberg. And it was in Nuremberg, when we had just two days to get back to Cologne and pick up Lilian, that Mr Fordyce got a telegram, and announced that a big deal with Canada was coming up unexpectedly, and it was by way of being an emergency, and he’d have to fly back to England immediately. Leaving me to drive the car back across Germany, pick up the girl, and escort her safely home. Which he had no doubt I could do admirably. Stephen Dalloway was the white-headed boy all right, while it lasted.
    I had no doubts, either. I felt a few inches taller, and quite complacent at the idea of two days or more tête-à-tête with Lilian, but probably not as complacent as he felt at the way the bait had gone down. It was only after I’d seen him off that I had time to remember little things like my complete lack of German, and the fact that I should have to drive and navigate at the same time on roads I didn’t know and through cities where the traffic had put the fear of God into me even on the way out when I’d had the boss and all his experience right at my elbow.
    Still, I wasn’t the sort to have qualms about my own capabilities. To my way of thinking, there wasn’t much I couldn’t do, given the opportunity. And of course, it was flattering to have it taken for granted that I could be relied on to manage the journey across Europe like an old hand. I had visions of a distinguished future, Stephen Dalloway, Continental representative of Fordyce’s, comfortably installed in Franz Eisner’s office in Frankfurt.
    It was afternoon when I started, owing to my having to see the boss off at the airport, but it was only two hundred and twenty kilometres to Frankfurt, and from there to Cologne by the autobahn is a morning stroll. I’d memorized the map beforehand, and in any case you’d have hard work to lose yourself between Nuremberg and Würzburg, because once you light out westward across the face of Germany there’s virtually nowhere else to go. I’d decided not to stay overnight in Frankfurt itself, but to stop short of it by the odd few kilometres, and sleep in Hanau, so as to face the city in the morning, when I was fresh and at my best.
    I had a bit of a cold, just come out that morning, but it was nothing much to bother about, and the sun was shining, and altogether I felt pretty good.
    By five o’clock that afternoon things didn’t look quite so cheerful. The sky clouded over early, and turned the colour of lead, and there was thunder rolling round on my left flank. Then I picked up a five-inch nail which was just one of the things I’d forgotten to allow for, and it fetched me up on the grass verge of the road, shaken and irritated. And while I was changing the wheel the rain began – not thunder rain yet, just a nasty, wetting drizzle that gradually grew heavier, and had me feeling cold and clammy before I had the sense to grope in the back of my car for my raincoat.
    I didn’t know the car well enough to have the drill to numbers, and the job took me longer than it should have done. And before I’d gone ten miles farther, my other back tyre ripped open on a piece of glass.
    I had to walk two miles into Neustadt to find a garage, and it rained hard all the way, and when I got there it took me