Mary Olivier: a Life Part 45

"It's your belief that makes you unhappy, not me."

"That's the cruellest thing you've said yet."

"You know I'd rather die than hurt you."

"Die, indeed! When you hurt me every minute of the day. If it had been anything but unbelief. If I even saw you humble and sorry about it. But you seem to be positively enjoying yourself."

"I can't help it if the things I think of make me happy. And you don't know how nice it feels to be free."

"Precious freedom!--to do what you like and think what you like, without caring."

"There's a part of me that doesn't care and there's a part that cares frightfully."

The part that cared was not free. Not free. Prisoned in her mother's bedroom with the yellow furniture that remembered. Her mother's face that remembered. Always the same vexed, disapproving, remembering face. And her own heart, sinking at each beat, dragging remembrance. A dead child, remembering and returning.

"I can't think where you got it from," her mother was saying. "Unless it's those books you're always reading. Or was it that man?"

"What man?"

"Maurice Jourdain."

"No. It wasn't. What made you think of him?"

"Never you mind."

Actually her mother was smiling and trying not to smile, as if she were thinking of something funny and improper.

"There's one thing I must beg of you," she said, "that whatever you choose to think, you'll hold your tongue about it."

"All my life? Like Aunt Lavvy?"

"There was a reason why then; and there's a reason why now. Your father has been very unfortunate. We're here in a new place, and the less we make ourselves conspicuous the better."

"I see."

She thought: "Because Papa drinks Mamma and Roddy go proud and angry; but I must stoop and hide. It isn't fair."

"You surely don't want," her mother said, "to make it harder for me than it is."

Tears. She was beaten.

"I don't want to make it hard for you at all."

"Then promise me you won't talk about religion."

"I won't talk about it to Mrs. Waugh."

"Not to anybody."

"Not to anybody who wouldn't like it. Unless they make me. Will that do?"

"I suppose it'll have to."

Mamma held her face up, like a child, to be kissed.

VIII.

The Sutcliffes' house hid in the thick trees at the foot of Greffington Edge. You couldn't see it. You could pretend it wasn't there. You could pretend that Mr. Sutcliffe and Mrs. Sutcliffe were not there. You could pretend that nothing had happened.

There were other houses.

IX.

The long house at the top of the Green was gay with rows of pink and white sun-blinds stuck out like attic roofs. The poplars in the garden played their play of falling rain.

You waited in the porch, impatient for the opening of the door.

"Mamma--what _will_ it be like?"

Mamma smiled a naughty, pretty smile. She knew what it would be like.

There was a stuffed salmon in a long gla.s.s case in the hall. He swam, over a brown plaster river bed, glued to a milk-blue plaster stream.

You waited in the drawing-room. Drab and dying amber and the dapple of walnut wood. Chairs dressed in pallid chintz, holding out their skirts with an air of anxiety. Stuffed love-birds on a branch under a tall gla.s.s shade. On the chimney-piece sand-white pampas gra.s.s in clear blood-red vases, and a white marble clock supporting a gilt Cupid astride over a gilt ball.

Above the Cupid, in an oval frame, the tinted crayon portrait of a young girl. A pink and blond young girl with a soft nuzzling mouth and nose.

She was dressed in a spencer and a wide straw hat, and carried a basket of flowers on her arm. She looked happy, smiling up at the ceiling.

Across the pa.s.sage a door opening. Voices in the pa.s.sage, a smell like rotten apples, a tray that clattered.

Miss Kendal rustled in; tall elegant stiffness girded in black silk.

"How good of you to come, Mrs. Olivier. And to bring Miss Mary."

Her sharp-jointed body was like the high-backed chair it sat on. Yet you saw that she had once been the young girl in the spencer; head carried high with the remembered tilt of the girl's head; jaw pushed out at the chin as if it hung lightly from the edge of the upper lip; the nuzzling mouth composed to prudence and propriety. A lace cap with pink ribbons perched on her smooth, ashy blond hair.

Miss Kendal talked to Mamma about weather and gardens; she asked after the kitchen chimney as if she really cared for it. Every now and then she looked at you and gave you a nod and a smile to show that she remembered you were there.

When she smiled her eyes were happy like the eyes of the young girl.

The garden-gate clicked and fell to with a clang. A bell clamoured suddenly through the quiet house.

Miss Kendal nodded. "The Doctor has come to tea. To see Miss Mary."

She put her arm in yours and led you into the dining-room, gaily, gaily, as if she had known you for a long time, as if she were taking you with her to some brilliant, happy feast.