286
PAUL SMITH
stayed, as if she wanted to communicate to her alone, something
other than the story she was telling. I watched her dark face struggle
to open, and then saw
it
close again as she withdrew whatever it
was she had been about to offer. "Anyway," she said, breaking the
silence while I continued to stare at the dark square of face before
us, "when I saw the fair looks of the fella asking I knew things
must always be easy for him. And I thought, why should they be.
Sometimes, I thought to myself, they should be different, even
for him.
"So, composing myself to resist, I heard him asking again, and
let ,him ask till the horse he was on gave up fighting the reins–
quivered like St. Vitus and came close, drenching me and all about
me in a stream of sweat. 'I'll not stir till you tell me,' the fella on
it said, and bent down toward me over the pommel. So I told him,
blazing my own impudence up at the blue eyes, just as the horse
under him began to prance.
" 'I'll see you so,' he said then; and he said when, and he said
where, and cantered off. I watched him, and now he'd gone I could
with calm eyes. Because for a minute, and while he was beside me,
I'd been put off course. And ..." Annie's prompt broke into the pause
that ticked with the alarm clock between the china twin dogs on
the mantelpiece.
"Did you?" Annie asked, and added, "tum up, I mean."
Ellen Simms nodded. "I did. But awkwardly, and needing
help," she said. "In the main door of the General Post Office the
following night. He was the first person I'd ever known who couldn't
look at me enough. I could feel the blast of that fella's eyes on me
the whole night.
It
was strange, because my father's eyes used to
stream off into long and lonely distances at the sight of me. But Andy
Prince's eyes stayed.
"We were married before Christmas. The week before. That
crib was the first thing he ever gave me. Bought it off a dealer's
stall in Moore Street."
"I never knew you'd been married," Annie said when Ellen
Simms stopped speaking, and it seemed as if she had forgotten us
or was not going to tell us more.
"For five years. For five years," EBen Simms said with unshak–
able certainty. And then began the story of those years. Of her and
Andy Prince. And the story went from that first meeting in the
