Читать книгу Clayhanger - Arnold Bennett - Страница 32

Edwin wondered mildly, as he often wondered, at the extremely bitter tone in which Clara always referred to their Aunt Clara Hamps—when Mrs. Hamps was not there. Even Maggie’s private attitude to Auntie Clara was scarcely more Christian. Mrs. Hamps was the widowed younger sister of their mother, and she had taken a certain share in the supervision of Darius Clayhanger’s domestic affairs after the death of Mrs. Clayhanger. This latter fact might account, partially but not wholly, for the intense and steady dislike in which she was held by Maggie, Clara, and Mrs. Nixon. Clara hated her own name because she had been ‘called after’ her auntie. Mr. Clayhanger ‘got on’ excellently with his sister-in-law. He ‘thought highly’ of her, and was indeed proud to have her for a relative. In their father’s presence the girls never showed their dislike of Mrs. Hamps; it was a secret pleasure shared between them and Mrs. Nixon, and only disclosed to Edwin because the girls were indifferent to what Edwin might think. They casually despised him for somehow liking his auntie, for not seeing through her wiles; but they could count on his loyalty to themselves.

“Are you ready for tea, or aren’t you?” Clara asked him. She frequently spoke to him as if she was the elder instead of the younger.

“Yes,” he said. “But I must find father.”

He went off, but he did not find his father in the shop, and after a few futile minutes he returned upstairs. Mrs. Nixon preceded him, carrying the tea-urn, and she told him that his father had sent word into the kitchen that they were not to ‘wait tea’ for him.