Endless Night / Бесконечная ночь. Книга для чтения на английском языке

It puts me in a rather bad light, don’t you think?’

�I’m old enough to have my own friends,’ said Ellie. �I’m nearly twenty-one. When I am twenty-one I can have my own friends and nobody can stop me. But now you see – well, as I say there’d be a terrible fuss and they’d cart me off somewhere so that I couldn’t meet you. There’d be – oh do, do let’s go on as we are now.’

�Suits me if it suits you,’ I said. �I just didn’t want to be, well, too underhand about everything.

�It’s not being underhand. It’s just having a friend one can talk to and say things to. It’s someone one can —’ she smiled suddenly, �one can make-believe with. You don’t know how wonderful that is.’

Yes, there was a lot of that – make-believe! More and more our times together were to turn out that way. Sometimes it was me. More often it was Ellie who’d say, �Let’s suppose that we’ve bought Gipsy’s Acre and that we’re building a house there.

I had told her a lot about Santonix and about the houses he’d built. I tried to describe to her the kind of houses they were and the way he thought about things. I don’t think I described it very well because I’m not good at describing things. Ellie no doubt had her own picture of the house – our house. We didn’t say �our house’ but we knew that’s what we meant…

So for over a week I wasn’t to see Ellie. I had taken out what savings I had (there weren’t many), and I’d bought her a little green shamrock ring made of some Irish bog stone.

�It’s beautiful,’ she said.

She didn’t wear much jewellery and when she did I had no doubt it was real diamonds and emeralds and things like that but she liked my Irish ring.

�It will be the birthday present I like best,’ she said.

Then I got a hurried note from her. She was going abroad with her family to the South of France immediately after her birthday.

�But don’t worry,’ she wrote, �we shall be back again in two or three weeks’ time, on our way to America this time. But anyway we’ll meet again then. I’ve got something special I want to talk to you about.’

I felt restless and ill at ease not seeing Ellie and knowing she’d gone abroad to France. I had a bit of news about the Gipsy’s Acre property too.