As soon as Robert had gone off in the morning Tory came hastening round. ‘Well . . .’ she began, throwing open the door, her face bright with laughter. Then she saw Prudence clearing the table and she put an end to her laughter, which had not been real. ‘Was it a nice tea-party?’
Prudence gave her a brief look and went out with the tray.
‘Well, what is Rosamund’s little boy like?’ Tory asked Beth.
‘He is rather big. An ordinary sort of boy, shy and fashionable.’
‘Fashionable?’
‘I mean his literary tastes are all so up-to-date, loving the right ones – Donne and Turgenev and Sterne – and loathing Tolstoi and Dickens. At any moment he will find himself saying a good word for Kipling. He has already said one for Tennyson.’
‘So that is what you mean by being fashionable? Is he coming again? Has it led anywhere?’
‘Yes. He asked if he might bring some of his own poems and read them to me.’
‘What about Prudence?’
‘Prudence?’
‘I thought it was Prudence who was so lonely.’
‘Prudence seems to have no interest in literature.’
‘Perhaps she takes an interest in young men. For that matter I don’t take any interest in literature.’
‘Oh, nonsense, Tory. You have been educated. Girls of Prudence’s age seem not to be educated at all. When they leave school they know one play of Shakespeare’s inside-out and nothing else.’
‘All the same, he might have taken Prudence to the cinema.’
‘Perhaps he will.’
‘It doesn’t sound hopeful. He sounds like the sort of son Rosamund would have.’
‘What on earth can Robert want?’ Beth asked, at the window.
‘Robert?’ Tory seemed to flatten herself against the sideboard.
‘Yes, he’s come back.’
Forcing her eyes away from the mirror, Tory stood quite still, as if roots had run down from the soles of her feet. They heard Robert going along the passage and into the surgery.
‘He has forgotten something,’ Beth said.
‘I had a letter from Edward—’ Tory was beginning when Robert opened the door.
‘It is odd,’ she thought, ‘for life to fall into such a symbolic pattern at half-past nine in the morning.’ There was Beth at the window, dense and dreamy; she herself facing the mirror; over the room a little silence not longer than a second or two; and Robert . . . Robert said: ‘Good morning, Tory.’
‘Good morning, Robert,’ she replied, and gave a little stiff, sideways bow, as if she were Royalty.
‘I forgot this,’ he was saying to Beth, holding up a case. He gave Tory a look, but she did not know what it meant.
‘Well!’ Beth laughed when he had gone. ‘You and Robert are so very formal with one another, it is quite amusing.’
Tory sat down at the table, which was still covered with a crumb-scattered cloth, ringed with cocoa-stains in Stevie’s place and littered with torn-open envelopes. Staring at all this, Tory almost said: ‘We love one another.’ Her fingers gathered up the crumbs on the table, pleated an envelope. She could not speak. ‘I love your husband,’ she thought she would say. ‘So please help me now, as you have always helped me before.’
‘Oh, Edward’s letter,’ she said instead, and took it from her pocket and gave it to Beth. Seeing Tory’s face, Beth was prepared for something disquieting. ‘She is as nervous as a cat about the boy,’ she thought. ‘She will make herself quite ill.’
‘Teddy is rather naughty,’ said Tory disdainfully. She lolled back in her chair flicking crumbs across the tablecloth. ‘Rather naughty and deceitful. He promised he would go only once a term to see Edward.’
‘But he’s his father,’ Beth objected.
‘He has other things. I have only Edward.’
Beth stood up and handed back the letter. She looked shocked for once.
‘Tory, you mustn’t make a battlefield of the child. You and Teddy tugging him in different directions.’
‘Teddy is not to tug at all.’
‘He can’t help it. He can’t suddenly give up being a father.’
‘That’s what it amounts to,’ Tory said distinctly. ‘I didn’t ask him to leave us. He chose to. If that frumpish young woman means more to him than I do’ – she glanced again in the mirror – ‘or his home here, and his son . . .’ She shrugged. ‘He wants to eat his cake and still have it put out for tea every day. I shall refuse to allow him to see the child ever.’
‘You can’t do that. It would be cruel to Edward.’
‘Don’t you think I know what is best for Edward?’
‘No,’ Beth said. ‘No, I don’t.’
They looked at one another with the frightened and astonished expression of people who have never quarrelled before. Then Tory glanced quickly away. She got up and went to the door.
‘Tory, what are you worried about? You are always Edward’s mother. Who can alter that?’
‘You talk as if you were Auntie Beth in one of the women’s papers,’ said Tory, scornfully. ‘You’ve no idea of what is real, and how real people think.’ She put her hand to her breast, as if she were saying: ‘I am real.’ She was suddenly swept away on a tide of words such as came from Beth only through her pen. ‘Writers are ruined people. As a person, you’re done for. Everywhere you go, all you see and do, you are working up into something unreal, something to go on to paper . . . you’ve done it since you were a little girl . . . I’ve watched you for years and I’ve seen you gradually becoming inhuman, outside life, a machine. When anything important happens you’re stunned and thrown out for a while, and then you recover . . . God, how novelists recover! . . . and you begin to wonder how you can make use of it, with a little shifting here, and a little adding there, something can be made of it, surely? Everything comes in handy. At school you fell in love with the English mistress . . . it was the sort of thing . . . so sloppy . . . one writhes about it when one’s grown up . . . laying bunches of roses on her desk, writing poetry, drawing her name in golden syrup across your porridge. But it was real then. I could respect that. For years you tried to forget, and God knows I wouldn’t remind you, although I was as likely to fall in love with the gardener’s boy as that creature; and then suddenly you start churning it round again, brisk and business-like . . . “What can we make of this at three guineas a thousand?” ’ Beth looked up, as if she were watching a sleep-walker, but Tory swept on: ‘Oh, I know! There you flicker into life. “Oh, but it is four guineas,” you want to say, or five or ten. Your writing pride is hurt. The only pride you have. Damn the English mistress, whatever her name was – Eirene Crichton, that was it. She spelt it in the Greek way so that there was no mistaking she was different from everybody else – oh, and damn me, and your children and that boy you loved before Robert, who turned up in the last novel but one. I know you so well. I know you too well. Geoffrey Lloyd. I expect he’ll come in handy, too. Damn Prudence and her loneliness. You are so used to twisting things that you can see nothing straight. One day something will happen to you, as it has to me, that you can’t twist into anything at all, it will go on staying straight, and being itself, and you will have to be yourself and put up with it, and I promise you you’ll be a bloody old woman before you can make a novel out of that.’
She put her arm up across her face and turned away.
Beth led her to a chair and stood close to her, timidly, her hand on Tory’s shoulder, although she disliked touching people.
‘Tory, you seem all of a sudden to hate me,’ she said in a gentle but perturbed voice. ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘I don’t. I don’t,’ Tory sobbed, her tears hot through her sleeve. Beth had never seen her cry before. ‘I really think I love you more than anyone else, except Edward.’
She lifted her face, and it was still pink and smooth, Beth was surprised to find, rather like a wet rose, certainly not -without charm, and not in the least swollen or disintegrated.
She blew her nose loudly. ‘I think it is the change of life,’ she said, looking haughty.
‘My dear Tory!’
‘Have you a cigarette?’
‘Of course.’
Beth got up and began to search, looking in all sorts of unlikely places.
‘We must have a nice talk about our wombs some time,’ Tory laughed, dabbing her eyes.
‘Yes, that would be fun. Here is a rather bent Turkish one. Cigarette, I mean, not womb. Do you really think all this about me?’ Beth asked shyly, holding out the lighted match, her hand shaking.
‘Yes, I do,’ Tory said. ‘But I think it in a quiet way, not crossly like that. I feel you don’t live in this world any longer. But your husband and children do. I do, too. You will balls everything up with your indifference one of these days. I sometimes wonder if you love them.’ She stared in front of her.
‘Love whom?’
‘The children. And Robert.’
‘But, Tory!’
‘You do, then?’
‘I should have to be a monster not to love my own children. And Robert? Why, I love him so well I don’t even think about it any longer.’ She had never been so embarrassed in her life.
‘This cigarette is years old,’ Tory grumbled. ‘It smells of sealing wax and face-powder.’
‘Oh, I beg pardon,’ said Mrs Flitcroft, halting at the door and then, with a glance at the clock, coming into the room. Gathering up the tablecloth, she shook it over the carpet. ‘The sweeper’ll take that lot up,’ she exclaimed, and began to fold the cloth with one edge tucked under her chin. Tory winked at Beth as she threw the cigarette away, her lashes flicking down, still wet. Beth smiled back, and her hands fell apart in a bewildered little gesture.
Mr Lidiard, the curate, was due at three, and Mrs Bracey leant back with her face turned to the clock, but her eyes shut, for a watched clock never moves, she had long ago decided. She imagined the afternoon outside, the bitter, washed-out sky, the sea slapping down one wave after another on the shore, the grit swirling along the streets. And Mr Lidiard she saw, too, stepping out from the ugly brick vicarage where he lodged and slamming the nail-studded door, under his arm three or four books. She took him through the churchyard for a short cut. Here the old gravestones lay this way and that, dark slabs sunk into the rank grass, but farther away from the church the new granite block with the fancy lettering – ‘Alfred Bracey, aged 49’ – and a space underneath . . . her heart turned over at the thought. ‘I shan’t go out of here again, save when they carry me feet first,’ she often said to people. Now it occurred to her that it was true. ‘Oh, my God, let it not be true!’ she prayed. She opened her eyes. Five minutes more at least.
Maisie was in the shop with Mrs Flitcroft. Presently they came into the back room to try on a corset. Mrs Bracey watched with interest while Mrs Flitcroft took off her skirt and an old cardigan Beth had given her for polishing rags, next a petticoat and lastly what could only be called drawers. Mrs Bracey lay back smiling, hoping for Mr Lidiard to walk into the middle of this scene, longing to see Mrs Flitcroft making for the scullery in her combinations. Maisie was lacing her up.
‘Tighter, dear. I like to feel something in the small of the back.’
‘How’s the doctor’s wife?’ Mrs Bracey asked her.
‘They’re a funny lot. Her and Mrs Foyle had a proper set-to this morning. I come into the middle of it to do the dining-room. Mrs Foyle crying.’
‘Not she!’ Mrs Bracey said, full of scorn.
‘That’s right. She was standing up by the door crying. Temper. I never heard the like. Of course I had to creep away and come back later. They never saw me. That’s right, Maisie. That seems all right.’
‘What was it all about?’
‘Don’t ask me. “You’ll be a b. old woman before you can do something or other,” I heard her say. The language was something terrible. I always say it takes some beating when a couple of ladies let fly.’
‘Ladies!’ said Mrs Bracey. ‘I like that.’
‘I got nothing against Mrs Cazabon. Nothing at all. You have to speak how you find. Well, I think that’s the ticket, Maisie.’
‘Suspenders a bit on the long side,’ Maisie said.
‘When I goes out later in the morning to do the steps,’ Mrs Flitcroft continued, stepping into her drawers, covering her colourless, veined thighs, ‘there’s Mrs F. as merry as a lark with the old boy from the Anchor, and he’s cleaning her front-door brass for her. And laugh! You’d never think that an hour earlier she was crying her eyes out.’
‘What, old Pallister?’
‘No. The old boy staying there. Proper old sailor. Hemingway, that’s the name. A beard,’ said Mrs Flitcroft, drawing her fingers out from her chin.
‘What was he doing that for?’
‘Ask me another.’
‘There’s the shop bell!’ Maisie said. ‘Oh, it’s Mr Lidiard. Into the scullery, dear.’ She addressed all her customers as ‘dear’. Mrs Flitcroft gathered up her clothes and was bundled away, so that Mr Lidiard could be called in. One way and another it was being a delightful afternoon to Mrs Bracey.
‘Good afternoon,’ said Mr Lidiard, his face looking bitten by the cold.
‘Won’t you sit down?’ Maisie asked, fussing.
‘There’s Mrs Flitcroft’s cardigan. Take it out to her,’ said her mother. ‘She’s putting on her drawers in the washhouse,’ she explained to Mr Lidiard.
‘Oh, yes.’ He seemed to take it for granted that this should be, refusing to let her ruffle him or surprise him. ‘Where’s Iris to-day?’
‘She’s laying down on the bed. Just finished her dinner. Her feet ached.’ (‘If that silly fool’s coming, I’ll take my book upstairs,’ was what she had really said, going off in her stockinged feet, and taking a handful of toffees and Woman and Beauty.)
Mr Lidiard put two books on the bed and edged back again on to his seat.
‘What’s this? Little Dorrit? I don’t get on with Dickens, he’s too vulgar. Hakluyt’s Voyages. That looks better.’
‘It belongs to the Vicar, so don’t spill your dinner on it.’
‘You can take back the other,’ she said ungraciously. ‘I like a nice true book, something you can get your teeth into. If there’s any make-believe to be done, I can do it myself, out of my own head. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. I enjoyed that. And Seven Pillars of Wisdom. But that was a bit tiring, to hold up I mean. The Newgate Calendar. Did you ever read that? And what was the other book I liked? Maisie!’
‘Yes, Mother?’ She came out of the scullery, followed by Mrs Flitcroft, fully dressed.
‘What was the book I liked so much?’
‘How do I know?’
‘Well, I said at the time. “A pity they don’t write a few more of the same kind,” I said. About one of the Gaiety Girls married an old titled gentleman. Her life story.’
‘I couldn’t say, I’m sure,’ said Maisie.
‘I’ve got no patience with all these novels Iris sticks her head into. Everyday life. That’s good enough for me. Are you comfortable, Mrs Flitcroft?’
Mrs Flitcroft nodded hurriedly.
‘I hear Mrs Foyle’s getting herself talked about again,’ Mrs Bracey went on, turning to the curate.
‘Mother, don’t gossip.’
‘Let him see her in her true colours.’
Mr Lidiard stiffened. He would have spoken up for Tory, but he realised it was useless. With Mrs Bracey there was nothing to do but wait for her to die, which she would probably do long after her time.
‘Did he go inside with her afterwards?’ she asked Mrs Flitcroft.
‘After what?’
‘Cleaning the brass.’
‘I couldn’t say, I’m sure,’ Mrs Flitcroft said, very off-hand, for the curate’s benefit, but nodding behind his back.
‘There’s the shop again, Maisie. When you’ve finished serving we’ll have a cup of tea.’
But it was not a customer. It was Bertram, carrying a bundle of shirts under his arm.
‘Good God!’ he thought, checked and confounded. ‘The things I let myself in for.’ His eyes went at once to Mrs Bracey and hers to him, as if each recognised in the other something above the stature of curates, charladies and young women. ‘Beauty in vile ugliness,’ he told himself, imagining he looked at her with the eyes of Rembrandt.
‘Oh,’ said Iris, coming into the room in her stockinged feet. She didn’t like Bertram catching her off her guard, with holes in her heels, her skirt crumpled. She looked reproachfully at her sister, who should have warned her.
‘I am getting to know everyone,’ Bertram was saying, and began to count them by name on his fingers: when he mentioned Mrs Wilson, Iris and Maisie exchanged glances; when he said ‘Mrs Foyle’ (and he said her name last) they all looked down. ‘And the place that’s shut up? Who lives there?’ he asked.
‘No one,’ Mrs Bracey said. ‘Not local people at all. Bloody interlollopers from London. They been coming down every summer for years and taking the fat of the land and soon as the weather gets bad they hop it.’
‘Well,’ said Mrs Flitcroft (and she got a look from Mrs Bracey for butting in), ‘you can’t blame them. No visitors, no money.’
‘Are there visitors, then?’ Bertram asked, but he did not know how deep this question went with them, nor how little they cared to give an answer.
‘There used to be,’ Mrs Bracey said, after allowing a little silence to rebuke him, ‘when I was a girl’ (she saw herself, black-stockinged, the white wings of her pinafore standing up on her shoulders, playing hopscotch, or patting a ball against a brick wall, or running out with a jug for a pint of vinegar), ‘when I was a girl this was shipbuilding country. And for years before that. Building yards where you’re sitting this minute. Out in the wash-house there’s an old mooring-post. Iris!’ she said suddenly, raising her voice, ‘take this gentleman to see the post.’
‘Oh! Mother, he doesn’t want to see that.’
‘Yes, he does. Don’t you? And leave off picking at your nails like that, Iris. If you must put that muck on them for God’s sake leave it be.’
Iris sighed theatrically and stood up. ‘You’d better come,’ she said to Bertram, ‘for peace and quiet.’
He stood up eagerly, for Mrs Bracey was right. He did want to see. Curiosity about what was out of sight had always dominated his life and led him into difficulties, disasters and much boredom. He wanted to see not so much the mooring-post but what was behind the door, and he went out into the dark scullery with Iris and looked round quickly. ‘Yes,’ he said to her, ‘that’s interesting.’ But what he found interesting was the cracked mirror above the sink, Iris’s dinner plate not washed up, Eddie’s shaving brush on the window-sill beside a flower-pot all overgrown with maiden-hair fern, and the tap dripping into a bowl of water. Iris stood by sulkily, dissociating herself from all her mother’s doings.
‘Yes, that’s interesting,’ he repeated for Mrs Bracey’s benefit, returning to the kitchen, his head bent as he came through the low doorway.
‘My mother remembered when they used to carve figureheads on the boats, great women with big busts and drapery and crowns on their heads. Painted.’
‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Flitcroft, nodding.
‘And then the industry died out or shifted?’ Bertram asked.
‘Went up north. Then they opened that hotel on the hill. “The Newby Bay.” Visitors started to come. We had a concert party every summer.’
‘Yes, I heard about the concert party,’ Bertram said.
‘Oh!’ Mrs Bracey glanced at her two girls.
‘Then the New Town began to grow round the Point?’ Mr Lidiard, a foreigner, suggested.
‘Yes. It’s milder there. More sheltered. They got a pier and Italian Gardens.’
‘Ice Cream Parlour,’ said Mrs Flitcroft.
‘Cinema,’ the girls added.
And then a little silence fell over them.
‘What happens at the Fun Fair?’ Bertram asked.
‘Slot-machines and pin-tables and those funny mirrors.’
‘I hate them,’ said Mrs Flitcroft.
‘Every summer I think they’ll make it their last, but they always turn up. One morning it’s peaceful, and the next they’re in and the shutters up and music coming from one of those penny-in-the-slot machines all day long.’
‘You hear it right out over the harbour, my man says,’ Mrs Flitcroft put in.
‘And he stands out the front with his arms folded and bawling his head off London ways. Fair people, I always say they are. And pigging it in those upstairs rooms.’
‘When do they come?’ Bertram asked.
‘You’ll see. They’ll come all right.’
Mrs Bracey thought how it would be: one morning she’d hear the braying, tinny music and would know the summer had come. And though she pretended she hated it, she would always call to Maisie to leave the shop door open, and her heart would quicken, feeling life stirring outside.
Bertram guessed that the opening of the Fun Fair had some especial meaning to them all, as if they could not face a time when the London interlopers did not come, when they would be abandoned. It was, perhaps, to them the measure of the outside world’s recognition.
He stood up to go and, bending to take Mrs Bracey’s hand, he picked up the book from the bed. ‘Hakluyt’s Voyages,’ he said aloud, holding the book as if he were judging the weight of it, and looking at her with eyes which seemed to judge her, too. ‘I could do so much for you,’ he thought, and the old desire to make himself felt, to make himself indispensable, came over him. ‘Shall I come again?’ he asked her.
‘You can please yourself,’ she said.
‘Well, then, I will.’ He laid the book down on the bed again.
‘Good day to all of you,’ he said, grandly, to the other four. Maisie went after him to see him out. As he passed Iris he smacked her hands down, for she was picking her nails again, absorbed.
‘Wet Paint,’ he read aloud off the pavement and looked up at the half-finished shop-front; then he smiled at Maisie and walked away.
Mrs Flitcroft was favourably impressed. ‘Look at the quality of these shirts,’ she said, leaning over quickly to finger his bundle of washing. ‘I only hope Maisie does them justice.’
‘My Maisie knows how to wash and iron,’ Mrs Bracey said calmly.
‘So friendly,’ Mrs Flitcroft marvelled.
Mr Lidiard was called upon to agree.
Mrs Bracey withheld comment, but when Maisie brought in the tea she gave a smooth, pleased sigh. ‘It’s been a nice afternoon,’ she said, smiling round at them all, but she had to add, ‘for once.’
Lily Wilson sat behind the lace curtains with Lady Audley’s Secret on her lap, but it was too dark to read. Although awaited, the first flash of the lighthouse was always surprising and made of the moment something enchanting and miraculous, sweeping over the pigeon-coloured evening with condescension and negligence, half-returning, withdrawing, and then, almost forgotten, opening its fan again across the water, encircled, so Lily thought, all the summer through by mazed birds and moths, betrayed, as some creatures are preserved, by that caprice of nature which cherishes the ermine, the chameleon, the stick-insect, but lays sly traps for others, the moths and lemmings. ‘And women?’ Lily wondered, and she turned down a corner of Lady Audley’s Secret to mark the place, and stood up yawning.
She banked up the fire with small coal and put on her coat, for ‘Why sit alone when I might be in company?’ she asked herself uneasily. Downstairs the waxworks seemed to stand in a greenish, submarine light. She hurried between them and, opening the door, was struck by the buffeting wind, which she took into her lungs with relief.
‘Each evening I go a bit earlier,’ she thought, hurrying along to the pub. ‘Bob wouldn’t like it.’ (‘But he shouldn’t have left me,’ the little voice in her breast whispered, the little voice the bereaved try not to hear, for it is full of reproaches to the dead, who have forsaken them but are beyond blame.)
During the evening Prudence met Bertram on the quay and walked with him beside the rocking water, complaining of her life and how, as soon as she made plans, bronchitis overtook her – and it had been the same always as long as she could remember.
‘Oh, the young!’ he thought. ‘The egotism of the young.’
‘It is hateful,’ she said, meaning her youth, her life. ‘The old ones keep everything to themselves.’
‘Except the things they cannot keep,’ he said. ‘Beauty, the unwrinkled eyelid, the round cheek, the bright hair.’ He continued the catalogue to himself, looking at her in the lamplight.
Passing Tory’s house, she had the feeling of having touched something loathsome unexpectedly, the quick recoil and the will summoned to make an effort of forgetting, and she looked away from the lighted window as if some frightening image might be printed upon the thin curtains. She had such a feeling that her father was in Tory’s house, that when he drove up at his own front door she felt shocked.
Bertram said good night and strolled back towards the pub, and Prudence was forced to arrive at the doorstep at the same time as her father.
‘What are you up to?’ he asked, sorting out his bunch of keys.
‘I went for a breath of air.’
‘And did you get it? Who is that man?’
‘Mr Hemingway.’
‘For God’s sake, Prudence, don’t go wandering round the harbour in the dark. It’s the worst thing for you.’
‘Don’t fuss me.’
He opened the door and let her in. His first movement was always towards the telephone-pad, which he read with absorption and annoyance.
Prudence felt that the shabby, badly-lit hall was unbearable in its changelessness. It was, perhaps, a desire to explode its calm dreariness, the feeling that all alteration must be for the better, that made her suddenly say: ‘Mother and Tory had a quarrel this morning. Would you believe it?’ she added, laughing in a frightened way.
He looked up from the pad in his hand and stared at her. She could not believe that she was looking at her own father; his expression was for a second incredulous, full of panic. ‘He is afraid to ask me about it,’ she thought.
He unhooked the old-fashioned telephone with a movement so agitated that he might have been trying to get the fire brigade. Running his tongue between his lips, he waited, and at last gave the number. Prudence walked past him and upstairs, and as she reached the half-landing she heard him saying: ‘This is Dr Cazabon and I want Matron, please.’
Now, later, she lay in bed, naked, as she liked to be, with a cat on either side; silken fur against her flesh; cold, padded feet upon her. She felt oppressed by the sudden view of her parents as human beings, a view she had not formerly imagined possible. To a girl who had taken for granted that her mother and father were sub-human creatures, from whom might be expected no emotions stronger than irritation or anxiety, or a calm sort of pleasure, this sudden view opening out was not easily to be borne. She felt shame and disgust and terror. She was not prepared to pity her mother, whom she had always rather despised, nor to despise her father, whom she had loved. That he deserved to be despised she did not for a moment doubt. At the first signs of her house cracking, she saw it lying in ruins, and that he was false to her mother and had lived with Tory (her mother’s best friend) in adultery (and by ‘live’ she meant ‘popping in and out of her house at odd times’) for years and years, she believed without hesitation. Her parents had encouraged the idea of themselves as stoics, they had never displayed affection for one another in front of the children and, although sometimes they bickered slightly, they had always stood together and hidden any deep displeasure. ‘We are the meal-providers, the rule-makers,’ they seemed to say. ‘Do not embarrass us by demanding more.’ Prudence could not imagine her mother crying or using harsh words. She had listened to Tory’s muffled sobbing and raised voice with incredulity that morning, standing by the kitchen dresser hanging up cups, and feeling her wrists weaken and terror strike at her. She lay in bed remembering all this. Then she saw another picture, of the day Stevie was born. She was fifteen. She came in from school, and her mother was telephoning in the hall, wearing her old dressing-gown. She heard her say, ‘Good-bye, Robert. Don’t hurry,’ and there was a ring of whiteness round her mouth, but she turned and smiled at Prudence and said: ‘Hullo, dear. Did you have a good day?’ as she always asked when she was not busy writing. She looked different, and yet her voice was carefully the same. ‘Do you want tea here or with Tory?’ she had asked. ‘I’ll go in with Tory,’ Prudence said, knowing the rules of this game. ‘She must have been in pain,’ she thought now. ‘And then, when her books come out, perhaps she is excited after all, perhaps she feels it is a special day, different from the others. And perhaps she is sometimes frightened or disappointed. And now may be grieved.’ But her new picture of her mother was no more like the real Beth than the old one.
She gently lifted the cats’ claws from her bare sides and they came burrowing through the bedclothes until their cold noses were thrust against her neck.
The real Beth was undressing. She put on a wide, old-fashioned nightgown, which Robert called Big Top, and began to brush her hair.
‘We forgot Prudence’s vapour-lamp,’ Robert began when he came in.
‘Oh, so we did. But she seems better.’
‘She was out this evening. It really is maddening.’
‘Stevie seems tougher than poor Prue.’
‘She’s not tougher in her mind.’
‘No. At tea-time we were just having a cosy time, and she suddenly said: “Which do you want to be when you’re dead? Burnt or buried?” I hope she is not going to be morbid.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Oh, I said it didn’t matter either way, because when you’re dead you’re not there.’
‘She wanted an answer.’
‘What would you have said?’
Beth looked so worried now, sitting there looking at him through the mirror, that he laughed.
‘I should have said that both were so delightful I wouldn’t know which to choose.’
And then she laughed, too, and began to brush her hair again.