Complete Short Stories (VMC) (58 page)

Lillah leant close to the looking-glass, fixing on some ear-rings.

‘Yes, of course, darling,’ her niece murmured, face hidden now under a tent of hair, rubbing her scalp. Before Lillah had put on the second ear-ring, she saw Arabella stretch out a hand and take up one of her hair-brushes.

‘You don’t mind, do you?’ she asked, and began to brush with great energy.

‘Well, as a matter of fact, I do rather,’ Lillah replied.

Back under her hair and brushing until it crackled, the girl seemed not to hear.

‘Haven’t you one of your own?’ Lillah asked, making an impatient movement to gain the girl’s attention. ‘I thought that models carried the lot wherever they went.’

She felt giddy again – rage hitting her, as the sun had.

Arabella swept the hair back from her face and smiled at her aunt. ‘I left the lot downstairs with Uncle Richard,’ she replied.

‘But you should have put us off,’ Helen Forester protested.

‘Of course you should,’ her husband added.

‘For goodness’ sake, we’re old enough friends by now …’ his wife went on.

‘Lillah wouldn’t hear of it. She says she feels so much better now and I shall be in trouble for ever having mentioned it. She’ll be down in a moment. This is Arabella’s, her niece’s,’ he explained, as he moved the wicker basket from a chair so that Helen Forester could sit down. ‘She’s a model in London and just looked in on her way home from some job.’

He thought that John Forester seemed to brace himself, and that well he might.

‘Forgive me, please,’ Lillah said, coming across the hall to the open door of the drawing-room. She stretched out her arms to them and put her cheek first to Helen’s then John’s, a heavy ear-ring swung against each face in turn. ‘I’ve felt so stupid all day long. I couldn’t lift my silly head.’

‘You should have put us off,’ said Helen. ‘I was telling Richard …’

‘But I had looked forward to seeing you so much, and now I have seen you I’m myself again. Mrs Hatton’ – she lowered her voice – ‘insisted on my going to bed. She’s a very strict disciplinarian.’

She saw John looking towards the door and turned round.

‘This is my niece, Arabella, who’s just dropped in,’ she said, staring down at the girl’s bare feet.

Arabella’s hair was now looped smoothly against her cheeks, like the youthful Queen Victoria’s. She had also, her aunt noticed, helped herself very liberally to Lillah’s scent.

‘We met when I was a little girl,’ Arabella said demurely. ‘I know you can’t remember me, because I was fat and had pigtails and a great brace on my teeth. I must look different now.’

‘You must indeed,’ John Forester said.

She smiled and came farther into the room. ‘You’re the Labrador breeders, aren’t you?’ she asked.

‘Where are your shoes, dear girl?’ asked Lillah, trying to get a tone of asperity across to Arabella, but so that the Foresters would not detect it.

‘It’s hardly worth putting them on now when I’m just going. I don’t care to drive with shoes on.’

‘You left your drink,’ said Richard, handing it to her.

‘Thank you, darling, I’ll thrust it down and be off. I promised to be out of the back door before you arrived,’ she told John Forester.

‘You silly girl,’ said Lillah lightly. She took the drink that Richard had poured out quickly, before, he hoped, she could put them all in the wrong, as she often did, by asking for something without gin. She laid her hand on his shoulder for a moment, where it looked very pale against the dark cloth, and Richard covered it quickly with his own. He smiled questioningly and she nodded.

‘Isn’t that a beautiful dress of Lillah’s?’ Helen asked, slightly embarrassed to find herself caught staring at them.

‘It’s my beautiful wife in it,’ Richard said.

‘But I meant that, too,’ Helen said, too willing for words to agree, not to seem restrained by hearing another woman praised.

Arabella was telling John Forester about the chinchilla coat and the game of darts, and he seemed entranced. ‘And guess what I had for lunch,’ she asked.

‘Isn’t it a heavenly frock Lillah’s wearing?’ Helen asked him. ‘Doesn’t it suit her wonderfully?’ To bring Lillah’s beauty to the notice of her husband was even greater generosity, she thought, and she looked almost transfigured with the pleasure of finding her friend so lovely.

John’s attention was turned from Arabella rather slowly, his eyes moved almost unseeingly to where they were directed. ‘Perfect,’ he said.

‘A cheese sandwich,’ said Arabella. ‘Just imagine.’

‘I suppose you live on air,’ he said, his glance, enlivened, returning quickly to her. He was much taken by the rounded thinness of her arms, slim even where they joined the shoulders. If they had been alone, he
would have made some excuse to touch them, perhaps patting her in a fatherly way as he begged her not to starve herself or, more youthfully, wondering if he could circle them between finger and thumb.

‘I eat like a horse,’ she said. ‘Worse – for I’m carnivorous. And the bloodier the better.’

‘What a gigantic cineraria,’ Helen said in an admiring voice.

‘It is rather ghastly, but dear Mrs Hatton gave it to me on my birthday and I have to have it about, not to hurt her feelings. It’s just the sort of thing she adores.’

Helen decided not to like cinerarias in future.

John was looking at Arabella’s diminishing drink with anguish. Evenings alone with Richard and Lillah were never so entrancing to him as they were to his wife. Admiration was such a large ingredient of Helen’s simple good-nature. She did not feel, as he did, that some attempt should be made on their own behalf. She basks in the shade, he thought. The tops of her arms, he suddenly noticed, were very freckled and their flabbiness flattened against her sides.

What would happen to them all if the girl didn’t soon go, Richard wondered. Especially, he wondered, what would happen to him.

Then Lillah – not to be put in the wrong by this ravenous girl, warmly said, ‘Arabella, may I ask Mrs Hatton to do a little concocting? You
will
stay?’

‘I simply
couldn’t
. I know only too well how it is in kitchens. Sometimes I take a man home to dinner without warning and there may be only two cutlets.’ John seemed to have drawn her eyes back to his, and to his devouring attention she addressed herself. ‘Mother and I hiss over them all the time they are cooking. “Let
me
be the vegetarian this time. You were yesterday.” But Mother’s so noble. She usually manages to get the poached egg for herself and makes long, long apologies for never eating meat. She goes into it rather too much. She went on and on to one man, and a lot later he came again and this time I had managed to get the egg, and Mother ate her cutlet with great enjoyment. “You’ve changed over, you two,” he said.’

For some reason, John burst into sycophantic laughter, then he tilted his glass and finished his gin.

‘You will think we live on cutlets,’ Arabella said a few seconds later, and after that there was silence.

‘Well, nothing is settled,’ Richard thought. ‘She hasn’t answered one way or another.’ He felt that their evening was nearly on the rocks. Adoration cleft the conversation in two – John’s of Arabella, Helen’s of Lillah – and he began to pour out more drinks, since the continuing silence and John’s empty glass made it impossible not to. Lillah, thinking of Mrs Hatton and even more, no doubt, of social patterns she despised, would be impatient. ‘Everyone drunk before dinner,’ she had said so often, driving
home from other people’s houses. ‘I have never known a claret so thrown away,’ or ‘That poor withered old soufflé.’

‘I’ll tell you what, Lillah,’ Arabella said in her most childish voice, ‘let me go and reconnoitre. I’ll see how things are with Mrs Hatton. It’s for me to bear the brunt.’

Lillah moved quickly to prevent her, tried to say something to detain her, but the girl had sped across the hall. John was touched to see that the soles of her feet were dirty.

‘Oh dear,’ Lillah said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Such a beautiful girl,’ said Helen.

‘That family has more than its fair share of looks, I always think,’ Richard said, smiling at his wife. John looked at her, too, almost for the first time that evening – and saw resemblances between the two faces – the niece’s, the aunt’s. He had not known Lillah in the early years of her marriage, and he wondered if Richard had had such luck long ago – an Arabella-like bride, whom time had changed and paled and quietened, but whose erstwhile beauty still quite clearly bewitched him.

‘Oh, dear,’ Lillah said again. ‘I hope she is not lifting the lids off the saucepans and asking questions.’

Richard, seeing Mrs Hatton crossing the hall with a grim stride, going to rearrange her table, closed the door.

‘How are the roses this year, John?’ he asked.

Having upset all but one of them under that roof, hindered dinner, made an awkward number at the table and talked too much, Arabella, towards the end of the meal, suddenly shivered. Leaning forward, chafing the tops of her arms, she studied the centrepiece of fruit and took out an apple from underneath, so that the pyramid collapsed, a peach rolled across the table and cherries were scattered.

‘It will be a chilly run back,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I should make a start.’ For at last the day was cool.

The others were still eating a kirsch-flavoured confection that Mrs Hatton had sampled in California. Much praised it had been by Helen, who spooned it up lovingly. She would describe it later to her humbler friends and would expect them to listen spellbound.

Arabella was up now and darted round the table with a kiss for each of them. Lillah, receiving hers last, kept her head bent, and John pushed back his chair, dropped his napkin, knocked a spoon and some cherries on the floor. Richard went to the door and opened it.

‘Don’t stir, anybody,’ Arabella said.

‘It’s true that we haven’t finished dinner,’ Lillah said. (‘And I consider she had every right to say it,’ Helen told John afterwards.)

‘Don’t come out, Richard. Please not to. Lillah, may I borrow a sweater? I’ll be frozen driving home.’

‘There’s a cardigan on the hall settle,’ her aunt said, and seemed with the most delicate gesture to draw Richard’s attention to his place at the table. He returned to it and passing Lillah’s chair, patted her shoulder – with such a touch of understanding, Helen thought.

‘There’s lipstick on your face,’ she told her husband.

‘On all your faces, if I may say so,’ Lillah said, having removed it from her own.

‘Such a lively girl,’ Helen said uncertainly. After all, it was Lillah’s own sister’s child and so had every claim to praise.

‘Delightful,’ John said in a more definite tone. ‘She reminds me how scatter-brained I was myself when I was young.’ He listened to the car being started, then throwing up gravel as it tore away.

‘We envy the young, that’s what it is,’ Richard thought sadly. ‘It is natural for us to harden against them.’

‘My poor sister was widowed at twenty-three,’ Lillah said; as if this could be the explanation of her niece’s behaviour. She gazed at the scattered cherries on the white cloth, then added: ‘Her life was haphazard, at the best of times.’

‘My aunt is a perfectionist,’ Arabella had said a little while ago. She had spoken to Helen, and as if Lillah herself were not present.

This had often been said of her before, but now she would have liked to disclaim the label, seeing herself, in Arabella’s eyes, too much absorbed by trifles, restricted and neurotic. ‘It must be Mrs Hatton who is the perfectionist,’ she had said. ‘It was all left to her.’ Helen had once more, boringly, been praising something.

Haphazard though her sister’s life was, she had this daughter in it, and close enough they seemed to Lillah whenever she saw them together. And the Foresters had children, too, though grown-up now and gone away.

‘Rather a disrupted evening,’ Lillah said apologetically as her guests were going, and had hardly the patience to listen to their protestations, their expressions of delight. She and Richard went down the steps with them on to the dark drive and stood together as the car drove away, each lifting a hand briefly in farewell, then turning back towards the house, which still threw out from its walls the stored warmth of the day. He took her arm as they went up the steps.

‘You were wonderful,’ he said.

‘Well, it is over.’

‘You must feel exhausted.’

‘That dreadful girl,’ she said.

Helen looked back as the car turned into the lane, and saw Richard and Lillah at the top of the steps, in the light from the hall. Until they were out of the drive, she had said nothing, and even now kept her voice low, as if the still air might waft it back towards the house.

‘How in love they are,’ she said. ‘Every time I see them they seem more so.’ Which touched her most she hardly knew – Richard’s gallantry, or Lillah, who inspired it. ‘I loved the stuffed vine-leaves. I’ve so often read about them in books. I suppose Mrs Hatton picked that up in the Middle East. What a pretty touch – those tiny flowers in the finger-bowls. What were they? I meant to ask. I don’t think the niece was welcome. I’m sure I shouldn’t have been so smooth about it as Lillah was. If Mrs Hatton complained, you couldn’t blame her. I must try that with the vine-leaves. See what I can do. I suppose you would need to blanch them first. I was longing to ask, but didn’t quite like to.’