A World of Love (20 page)

‘Miss Maud put a curse on the house.’ Having chucked the letters on to the table, Antonia used both hands to stuff her shirt in, as, turning away, she made for the door. ‘The long and the short of it is, they’re out.’

‘Wait,’ cried the girl, ‘you forgot the writing!’

‘No, I did not,’ contradicted the other, from the echoing passage.

‘What’s it here for, then?’

‘Whoever’s next, I suppose.’

‘Miss … ?’

‘What?’ chafed Antonia.

‘Is it wicked writing?’

‘Look, if you like!’

‘Ah, I’d never dare!’

But the protest was almost mocking. Kathie had followed Antonia out: she stood, arms tight-folded, staring. A conflict of expressions was on her face—resentment and excitement at being tempted, guile, just not childish, and calculation. Like a grandmother she sucked in her mouth—while joy, pure joy at the notion of such temerity, startled her eyes open to their widest. She let her breath right out, got none back. Flattered, she nonetheless felt misprised, invited as being of no account: of account
was
her virtue, and she knew it—warily she stood and measured the lady who’d challenged her to engage it, perhaps lose it. ‘I wouldn’t care to mix myself up in that,’ she declared, though still with her head on one side. Antonia turned away, saying: ‘Don’t then,’ by which Kathie was left forlorn— ‘I’d hardly know,’ she said sadly, ‘whether I should.’

‘They’ve run their course,’ said Antonia, over her shoulder, starting away down the passage, ‘this last day or two.’

‘This last day or two,’ argued the girl, ‘there wasn’t a thing wrong with us but the weather. Heat, you can’t overlook: they say it was never like this till now—though I was never in any other house. Anything’s natural-enough, I dare say, here.—Or should be,’ she added with some misgiving, a fidget from one to the other foot. ‘Only, for goodness sake what’s come up? I’m sure I’d never care to stay where there’d been a curse.’

‘That was Miss Maud’s fun.’

‘She’s a tormentor,’ agreed Kathie.

Stupendously, all at once, she began to giggle. She saw daylight, and it was too much for her, it convulsed her—so much so that, ripping her arms apart, she had to beat them upon the air. Bent in two, she vomited laughter; though also, mortified by the exhibition, she let out penitent sobs and moans. This brought Antonia back on her tracks, to ask: ‘What on earth’s as funny as all that?’

‘N-nothing, miss,’ admitted Kathie. She hiccupped.

‘Then don’t hiccup.’

‘Only, tormenting and teasing is half the fun—’

Antonia shifted her black spectacles. Her saying nothing emboldened Kathie to finish: ‘—when it’s a lovely man.’

‘That’s a wicked thought.’

Kathie nursed it, liking it all the better. ‘There could still,’ she said, ‘be some terrible joke on us.’

Nothing in this house passes without comment, reflected Lilia, far from unhappily, seated on the edge of her bed cutting her toenails. Coming indoors just now, through the hall, she’d been swept on upstairs by the conviction that the hum to be heard in the stone passage only could have arisen because of her.—’Oh, Antonia?’ she called demandingly, upon a footstep’s threatening to pass her door, which she’d left ajar.

‘Then so there you are,’ conceded the other, coming no further in than she must.

‘And why not?’ asked Lilia, contemplating her right foot in balance upon her left knee.

‘No idea why not,’ confessed Antonia, noticing that the bedroom since Fred’s absence had gone on to spawn every kind of knick-knack. ‘Merely that Maud went without her tea.’

‘Oh, she did? Then why ever couldn’t Kathie?’

‘Filling the water-cart.’

‘Far too much,’ pronounced Lilia, though now remotely, ‘goes on down at that river, and always has.’ She went to work again with the fragile scissors—snipping, shaping, testing for smoothness with the pad of her thumb.

‘One good cut,’ quoth Antonia, ‘deserves another—your hair this morning.’ She appeared to feel she could now go. ‘Or did you,’ she asked reluctantly, ‘want to speak to me?’

‘Yes. I thought I
might
go to London.’

‘Whatever for?’

Lilia lifted her eyelids. ‘You told me I should. You said that I ought to.’ ‘Well, it’s exceedingly good for you, but
I’m
going, now.’

‘Are you? How fast you make up your mind.’

‘Nothing to how fast you change yours. You screamed the place down this morning, at the very idea.’

Lilia said: ‘Ah, but that was this morning.’

‘What induced you to make such an awful scene?’

‘I don’t recall,’ said the other calmly.

‘Well, I do. It was nice for Jane.’

‘Jane’s not by now so particular,’ observed Lilia, stooping, supporting her bust with one arm, to gather up slivers of toe-nail from the carpet. ‘Taking her with you, shall you be?’

‘Certainly. It’s high time she went to work.’

‘Otherwise, only be getting into mischief,’ assented Lilia, ‘or don’t you think so?’ A pause ensued, while she raised herself up—she then deliberately turned her head in Antonia’s direction: the women’s eyes met. Unflinchingly Lilia said: ‘What did it matter? You knew Guy was untrue to me.’

Antonia gave a rub at her lower lip, glanced at the blood-guilty lipstick on the finger. ‘Then you knew too, then.’

‘Yes; at the last,’ Lilia said in a lightened, relieved tone, putting on the same shoe Fred had put on for her.

‘How—I’d like to know?’

‘I could hear you both, at that station.’

‘Oh, you mean only
that,’

‘What more could I wish?’

‘You carried it off well, then, Lilia, I must say!’

‘It still meant something to me to be true to him.’

‘I suppose it did: what a bore you were.’

‘It was all I had.’

‘Still, you went too far—letting him waste your life.’

‘He
did not,’ replied Lilia, finding the other shoe. She put it on, rose, stood and balanced in both as though on skates, then went across, cast the slivers into the grate and drew a chiffon scarf out of a drawer. Sailing past Antonia, she left the bedroom. She trod down the stairs, seeming oblivious of the other hard at her heels—Antonia, at last coming abreast, begged to know: ‘What are you doing now?’

‘We thought of going for a spin.’

‘You and who?’

‘I and Fred—for a blow of air,’ amplified Lilia, fanning her brow to show the need. She opened the fence gate into the elsewhere of the evening: up stood the obelisk over floating light; sunset kindling the belt of trees dissolved into others the faint elder—from which like a cry came the sadness of something gone. ‘Like we sometimes used to,’ Lilia continued.

‘Fred needs a blow of air?’

‘It was his idea.’

The two stood waiting, backs to the fence. ‘Fred bringing the car round?’ Antonia asked.

‘I expect so. I like to start at the front.’

Antonia suggested: ‘Almost a pity to go to London?’

Lilia smiled: ‘Oh no, I should like to—now.’

‘Now’s the time, you feel?’

‘For about a week.’

‘The week will seem long,’ said Antonia thoughfully.

‘To me?’ asked Lilia, surprised.

‘Oh no, no. No, to those left behind.’

Lilia said: ‘Yes. That was what I thought.’

Antonia and Maud, at supper in silence, were waited upon by Kathie, also either subdued or preoccupied—that was to say, the servant came in from time to time with after-thoughts, sliced beetroot, seed cake, an unset junket and so on, which she recommended to notice without a word. Once Maud, as an experiment, rang the hand-bell, after which no more happened, but that the red-walled dining-room, blinds lowered as though at midday, went on filling with premature dusk.

Jane, when she did so, entered without warning and with bravado—’Whoo!’ vaunted the girl, seizing a jug and pouring out milk for herself with a big splash, ‘I thought I was late!’ She referred in no other way to the empty head and foot of the table.

Maud got up, sped to the wireless in the corner and turned the knob—out came blood-up laughter, which, thanks to the force of the new battery, blasted its way round and round the room, bringing the instant look of a quarry, terror, mortification, to Jane’s face. Maud, mind set at rest, switched off— ‘It’s not,’ she explained to them, ‘nine o’clock yet.’

‘I could have told you that,’ expostulated her sister.

‘Well, I know now.’

‘It was five to eight,’ went on Jane in a firm, tense voice, ‘when 
I left the castle.’ Antonia, already so sunk in thought as to have reacted in no way to the wireless, merely went on sipping whisky-and-water. ‘The drive,’ the girl added, ‘takes twenty minutes.’

‘Then where’s the Daimler?’ asked Maud accusingly.

‘It? Oh, I was dropped at the gate.’ ‘Oh.’

‘You’ve been drinking again,’ said Antonia, obliged to arouse herself, sending a look, crooked, across the table.

‘And I was seduced, this time,’ said Jane, defiantly helping herself to beetroot, which no one had so far touched.

‘Well, that doesn’t matter: we’re going away tomorrow.’

‘No—how can we be?’

‘Because I say so.’

‘But how can you possibly say we are?’ The girl turned white and put down her fork.

‘Time we did.’

‘Is this on my account?’

Antonia shrugged her shoulders.

‘But Antonia—everything’s over!’ The entrenched presence of Maud could not but put a constriction on Jane’s lips; and as things were perhaps it was better so. Yet a hampered anger, anger at being hampered, rose in her breast. What she’d done—and what
had
she done?—was being made unspeakable by not being spoken. Women had framed her up—and that went for Maud, too. ‘You needn’t worry, you know, Antonia,’ she aloofly said—aloofly, yet with an infinity of scorn, though for whom or what, or why, it could not be known. ‘Everything’s over.’

‘What, thanks to Maud?’

Maud looked down her nose. Jane, turning to her—to her more than upon her, for this was largeness rather than anger—said: ‘Oh, then it
was
you? It was only you.’

‘Maud’s‘ said Antonia, ‘been through deep waters.’

‘I’m afraid,’ said Jane, ‘I don’t know what deep waters are.—You can’t possibly mean to go back to London?’

‘Many of us may be going—your mother, too.’

‘She’d rather die, she said,’ said the girl at once.

‘But that,’ pointed out Antonia, ‘was this morning.’

‘Now
why is she going?’ Maud asked with justified coldness, for this was the first she’d heard of it. ‘Leaving father?’ ‘Yes. For a week.’

The child, though not with surprise, said: ‘Oh.’ She added: ‘And, I suppose, me.’

‘Antonia, what a day you seem to have had!’ cried the girl, bravely mocking on. Though, turning her face from the two others, she was forced to behold the plate, knife-and-fork, cup-and-saucer at the head of the table vainly awaiting Fred. She declared, in a tone which defied the world to detect in it any loss of her golden confidence: ‘Then I ought to stay and look after him!’

‘Just when had you thought of beginning to earn your living?’

‘Not, I do hope, while it’s so hot.’ But Jane suddenly ate some beetroot, as though an end to sustenance loomed in sight. ‘Though in a way I’d have thought I already did.—Does this mean we’re stony again, Antonia? In that case, who’s going to pay for mother?’

‘What d’you mean, “you thought you already did”?’

Rising, Jane walked round the table and to a window: she gave a twitch to the yellow blind, considered whether to raise it but did not. Passing behind Antonia’s chair, she repeated the performance with the two others, each time with more indecision. Distantly staying where this had left her, somewhere in the embrasure of the third, she at last replied to Antonia: ‘I’ve been a pleasure.’

Antonia took time to lean back—she recrossed her knees, then asked: ‘What makes you think that?’

‘I don’t
think
it,’ steadily said the girl.

‘Anything,’ said the other, holding up a cigarette as an instance, ‘can be a pleasure. Taking pleasure, that’s what needs genius—idiot! Come and sit down.’

‘Antonia, why are you so hard on me?’

Antonia repeated: ‘Come and sit
down!’

‘Why?’ deliberated the girl, with that new air of making her own terms.

‘Can’t stand anybody behind my back.’

‘Except Guy?’

The other, ignoring that, said: ‘As you ought to know, by now.’

Jane, reflectively twiddling the blind-cord, said: ‘I was looking for a hat—I thought. Two nights ago, when I went into that attic.’

‘You blunderer! There was due to be a crisis,’ said Antonia, ‘for us all.’

‘I never
have
been so happy!’ confessed the girl, with a rush letting the blind up. Ruefully and ecstatically, as though, almost, for the last time before a death, she breathed in the stocks and roses in the garden: the window was open. ‘Fool as I’ve looked, fooled as I’ve been!—Antonia, when shall I
be
so happy?’