[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.What he was already, a treasure held in cupped hands.Her challenge was not to hold too tight and not too loosely: neither to squeeze the life out of him, nor to let him slip away.Her torch made a path of light through the darkness, a circle before her feet.That was it, she had to watch her feet.It was like a bubble within the glass, a closer isolation.If she could only keep the two of them within that bubble and let nothing leak into the dark, then perhaps.Step by step, day by day.Night by night.She did worry that she was walking towards a precipice, but she didn’t seem able to stop walking, nor to turn aside.One step after another.Ruth watched her feet, didn’t lift her head.Didn’t try to peer forwards, into the dark.Felt a hand close suddenly over her mouth, heard a grunt of satisfaction by her ear.‘Here’s one for the knife.One slash, no more trouble.’She should perhaps have been more scared than she was.The surge in her blood was more despair than terror.She had dreaded discovery, and here it was.Her mind was bewildered by the man’s words.Even so, she knew a threat when she heard it.Her body was reacting already, before her brain could catch up.Every sense in her revolted at being handled so casually, so contemptuously, by a stranger.There were only two men she had ever licensed to come this close.One of them was somewhere ahead of her in the shadows, in the same danger – one for the knife – while the other.Well, Peter might be dead, but he hadn’t gone away.And not everything he’d left her with was sorrow, bruises on her soul.Peter had worried about her walking London streets after dark.Once the war started and the blackout came, he had worried enough to do something about it.Here, I picked this up in basic training, let me show you.Here’s how to break a man’s grip, if he grabs you from behind; here’s how, if he comes at you from the front.So Peter had basically trained her.And so, now, she turned not against that grip but unexpectedly into it, twisting around to face her assailant, almost nose to nose.Lifting her arm as she did so, that heavy torch suddenly a weapon, use anything you have to hand.With room and time to swing, she might have killed him.The torch was that solid, her impulse that ferocious.To save herself or to save Michael, she wasn’t entirely clear which.She was too close to do it handily, though, that long-armed sportsman’s swing; and too rushed to step away, once she’d broken free.Too surprised at herself, in honesty.She had taken Peter’s instructions to heart and practised assiduously, but for his sake more than hers, to ease his anxious mind.She’d never expected to need any of these moves, or, if she needed them, never expected to find that she could actually use them, or that they would actually work.This one seemed to have worked too easily, and so she was too slow.Too slow and too close, and still in a killing mood.She slammed the handle of that long torch upward, clean into her assailant’s face.She couldn’t see him clearly, could barely see him at all with the torch beam pointed the other way: just a pale round, moonlike, distorted.A moon that shrieked and fell away, clattering into piled furniture, all awkwardness and angles.Ruth’s breath came hard, with puzzlement riding the triumph.Who was this man, where in the world had he come from, what in the world did he mean.?She was turning the torch in her hands – blessing it twice over, for the weight of it and the robustness too, that the bulb was still alive and glowing – meaning to look for answers.But the straying beam found the doorway first, and there stood Michael, half naked and bewildered, coming to help in any way he could.Her torch was his betrayal, and he knew it.He stood exposed, framed in the doorway like a portrait of guilt, like a confession.She understood a moment too late, and snatched the beam away – too late, too late! – and felt hands close on her upper arms, hands from behind, because of course that first man hadn’t been talking to himself, of course he had a companion.One at least, and Ruth was seized again, and this time she had no easy escape.She did try, but he was wise to every move she could fling at him in a few brief seconds of struggle.Seconds were all that she had, and she didn’t know how to use them.If she called out, if she told Michael – not by name, don’t say his name! – but if she told him to clear out then that was her confession, crystal and inarguable.This was a tryst discovered, and whoever these men might be, whatever they were about, that was her career they held in their unkindly hands.Gone with a word, herself shamed and broken, Michael desolate and alone.She knew too well what he would do.Any moment now, he would come flying down the aisle.One-handed and unarmed, he would come anyway.And there was still a knife in the case somewhere, and she would take any last desperate chance to get them both out of this, whatever it cost.A lens focuses the light.people can get burned.There would be ways to use it as a weapon.She was betraying everyone tonight, it seemed; herself and Michael, now Cook too.Now Peter.It was easier here, perhaps, because he had already tripped her here [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]