‘Did they

‘Did they?’
Judging from the number of cars, he thought, there were not many people at the club yet. He switched off his lights, and waited for Louise to move, but she just sat there with a clen-ched fist showing in the switchboard light ‘Well, dear, here we are,’ he said in the hearty voice that strangers took as a mark of stupidity. Louise said, ‘Do you think they all know by this time?’
‘Know what?’
‘That you’ve been passed over.’
‘My dear, I thought we’d finished with all that. Look at all the generals who’ve been passed over since 1940. They won’t bother about a deputy-commissioner.’
She said, ‘But they don’t like me.’
Poor Louise, he thought, it is terrible not to be liked, and his mind went back to his own experience in that early tour when the blacks had slashed his tyres and written insults on his car. ‘Dear, how absurd you are. I’ve never known anyone with so many friends.’ He ran unconvincingly on. ‘Mrs Halifax, Mrs Castle ,fake uggs...’ and then decided it was better after all not to list them.
‘They’ll all be waiting there,’ she said, ‘ just waiting for me to walk in ... I never wanted to come to the club tonight. Let’s go home.’
‘We can’t. Here’s Mrs Castle’s car arriving.’ He tried to laugh. ‘We’re trapped, Louise.’ He saw the fist open and close, the damp inefficient powder lying like snow in the ridges of the knuckles. ‘Oh, Ticki, Ticki,’ she said, ‘you won’t leave me ever, will you? I haven’t got any friends - not since the Tom Barlows went away.’ He lifted the moist hand and kissed the palm: he was bound by the pathos of her unattractiveness.
They walked side by side like a couple of policemen on duty into the lounge where Mrs Halifax was dealing out the library books. It is seldom that anything is quite so bad as one fears: there was no reason to believe that they had been the subject of conversation. ‘Goody, goody,’ Mrs Halifax called to them, ‘the new Clemence Dane’s arrived,Moncler Outlet.’ She was the most inoffensive woman in the station; she had long untidy hair, and one found hairpins inside the library books where she had marked her place. Scobie felt it quite safe to leave his wife in her company, for Mrs Halifax had no malice and no capacity for gossip; her memory was too bad for anything to lodge there for long: she read the same novels over and over again without knowing it.
Scobie joined a group on the verandah. Fellowes, the sani-tary inspector, was talking fiercely to Reith, the Chief Assistant Colonial Secretary, and a naval officer called Brigstock. ‘After all this is a club,’ he was saying, ‘not a railway refreshment-room.’ Ever since Fellowes had snatched his house, Scobie had done his best to like the man - it was one of the rules by which he set his life, to be a good loser. But sometimes he found it very hard to like Fellowes. The hot evening had not been good to him: the thin damp ginger hair, the small prickly moustache,replica louis vuitton handbags, the goosegog eyes, the scarlet cheeks,LINK, and the old Lancing tie. ‘Quite,’ said Brigstock, swaying slightly.
‘What’s the trouble?’ Scobie asked.