So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish - Douglas Adams [30]
“I know,” she said. “I shall have to remember,” she added, “that you are the sort of person who cannot hold on to a simple piece of paper for two minutes without winning a raffle with it.”
She turned away.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she said quickly. “Hyde Park. I’ll change into something less suitable.”
She was dressed in a rather severe dark dress, not a particularly shapely one, and it didn’t really suit her.
“I wear it specially for my cello teacher,” she said. “He’s a nice old boy, but I sometimes think all that bowing gets him a bit excited. I’ll be down in a moment.”
She ran lightly up the steps to the gallery above, and called down, “Put the bottle in the fridge for later.”
He noticed as he slipped the champagne bottle into the door that it had an identical twin to sit next to.
He walked over to the window and looked out. He turned and started to look at her records. From above he heard the rustle of her dress fall to the ground. He talked to himself about the sort of person he was. He told himself very firmly that for this moment at least he would keep his eyes very firmly and steadfastly locked on to the spines of her records, read the titles, nod appreciatively, count the blasted things if he had to. He would keep his head down.
This he completely, utterly, and abjectly failed to do.
She was staring down at him with such intensity that she seemed hardly to notice that he was looking up at her. Then suddenly she shook her head, dropped the light sundress down over herself, and disappeared quickly into the bathroom.
She emerged a moment later, all smiles and with a sun hat, and came tripping down the steps with extraordinary lightness. It was a strange kind of dancing motion she had. She saw that he noticed it and put her head slightly on one side.
“Like it?” she said.
“You look gorgeous,” he said simply, because she did.
“Hmmm,” she said, as if he hadn’t really answered her question.
She closed the upstairs front door which had stood open all this time, and looked around the little room to see that it was all in a fit state to be left on its own for a while. Arthur’s eyes followed hers around, and while he was looking in the other direction she slipped something out of a drawer and into the canvas bag she was carrying.
Arthur looked back at her.
“Ready?”
“Did you know,” she said with a slightly puzzled smile, “that there’s something wrong with me?”
Her directness caught Arthur unprepared.
“Well,” he said, “I’d heard some vague sort of—”
“I wonder how much you do know about me,” she said. “If you heard from where I think you heard then that’s not it. Russell just sort of makes stuff up, because he can’t deal with what it really is.”
A pang of worry went through Arthur.
“Then what is it,” he said, “can you tell me?”
“Don’t worry,” she said, “it’s nothing bad at all. Just unusual. Very very unusual.”
She touched his hand, and then leaned forward and kissed him briefly.
“I shall be very interested to know,” she said, “if you manage to work out what it is this evening.”
Arthur felt that if someone tapped him at that point he would have chimed, like the deep sustained rolling chime his gray fishbowl made when he flicked it with his thumbnail.
Chapter 19
ord Prefect was irritated to be continually awakened by the sound of gunfire.
He slid himself out of the maintenance hatchway which he had fashioned into a bunk for himself by disabling some of the noisier machinery in its vicinity and padding it with towels. He slung himself down the access ladder and prowled the corridors moodily. They were claustrophobic and ill-lit, and what light there was continually flickering and dimming as power surged this way and that through the ship, causing heavy vibrations and rasping humming noises.
That wasn’t it, though.
He paused and leaned back against the wall as something that looked like a small silver power drill flew down the dim corridor past him, with a nasty searing screech.
That wasn’t it either.
He clambered listlessly through a bulkhead door and found himself in a