'The thing is,' she said, 'for you to take all your clothes off straight away and then come into bed. It's much easier like that.'
'Oh, couldn't we have a little chat first? After all, we've only just met. We don't know each other.'
'We soon will if you do as I say. And chatting afterwards is nicer.'
Paying no attention to this, he sat down on the far corner of the bed and began polishing his pince-nez on a blue silk handkerchief that, she noticed, exactly matched his jacket.
'It's a great relief,' he said, 'to be able to come here and relax after a day on the sort of job I'm doing now. You get all wound up when you're engaged on vitally important, really very very secret work.'
The degree of guttural emphasis he gave the last phrase, and the peering look at her that accompanied it, puzzled her faintly. But she said nothing.
'I can tell you,' he went on after a moment, 'that some of those gentlemen in the East and round the place generally would give their eye-teeth for just five minutes with some of the documents I was dealing with today.'
He gave her another look, this time through the pince-nez. She still said nothing, feeling a little unkind, but knowing that total silence on her part would either pull him the more quickly into bed or push him the more quickly out of the door.
'Some of these new weapons we have are really quite terrifying.'
Silence.
'They make the atomic bomb look like a firework.'
Silence.
'Absolutely revolutionary.'
Silence. After about forty seconds of it Leonard got to his feet and, with a faint but sharp sound, pulled the bow of his evening tie apart. Lucy relaxed. She knew where she was now. It was the ego build-up as preliminary. Even her dentist friend would still sometimes be telling her, at this stage, about his plans for the welfare of indigent ex- members of his profession, other people's plans for luring him back into teaching. It made no difference to what happened next.
When Leonard had nearly taken off his trousers a kind of metallic trickling noise began. Lucy could not make out where it came from and was startled. So was Leonard, clearly, but within a second he was pulling his trousers back up again.
'It's all right,' he said abstractedly. 'It's an emergency. But it may not be anything. Thing on my wrist tells me when they want to get through to me. Got to go and get through to them now. I hope I'll be able to come back, but if I can't I hope you'll understand. I did want to talk to you.'
He ran oat, his jacket over his arm. Lucy turned onto her side. When the trickling noise started she had been very interested in where it came from, but already the question seemed boring. Forgetting Dr. Best, she thought this was probably the end of the evening and might as well be. She fell asleep, but soon woke up again two or three minutes later when Leonard ran back into the room and set about undressing as quickly as anybody she had ever met in her life.
'What was that funny noise that made you rush out in such a hurry?'
With a kind of plunging dance-step he trod off one shoe after the other.
'Was it a telephone sort of thing or something?'
The zip of his trousers whined briefly.
'But it's all right now, is it?'
A sound like the plucking of a very slack guitar-string came from the elastic waistband of his underpants.
'Oh.'
Almost immediately after that Captain P. B. Leonard of the Sailors was demonstrating beyond possibility of error that as regards one side of life at any rate he was not just all right really, but all right. He went on with the demonstration rather longer than Ross-Donaldson's findings might have indicated as likely or average for the relevant age-group.
'Wow,' said Lucy eventually.
'Did I do it properly?'
'Yes, you did. Very properly indeed.'
'Honestly?'
'Yes, absolutely honestly.'
'Good. I particularly wanted to do it properly because I think you're marvelous. You're so pretty. When Alastair told me about the set-up here it somehow never entered my head that you'd be pretty. And I certainly never dreamt for a minute that you'd be sweet as well. But you are. You're very sweet.'
'So are you.'
'But what I can't understand is this. Why, being so pretty and sweet, you have to go to bed with all these men one after the other when you can't really know any of them, very well.'
Lucy broke her usual rule of not discussing this question, which everybody except Ross-Donaldson and one or two others got to sooner or later. 'I don't have to do it. I just like doing it. I don't say I like sex any more than the next person but this is the way I like it. I know it wouldn't do for everybody.'
'It certainly wouldn't for me-the corresponding business, I mean. But I don't want to sound as if… How did you get on to it, kind of thing?'
