Читать книгу East Is Always East - Pamela Wynne - Страница 3
ОглавлениеCHAPTER I
Mrs. Metcalfe was tired. She was tired because she had been listening to her sister-in-law for more than half an hour. Over and over again she had repeated herself, saying in a hard metallic voice, “Yes, but think what a magnificent thing it would be for the girls. You can’t afford, at a time like this, to think only of yourself, Madeline. Pull yourself together!”
“Pull yourself together.” The drastic words waked Mrs. Metcalfe up. She had never cared for her sister-in-law and now she felt that she almost detested her. Paul, her late husband, had never cared for his sister either, and one of the last things he had said before he died was that she was not to let old Louisa try to run her. And now here she was running her and her affairs as hard as ever she could. She opened her round blue eyes and stared at her sister-in-law.
“Can’t you see what a magnificent thing it would be for the girls? India and cold weather in a military station. Both of them would marry at once. It’s a most generous offer. Your brother in such a good position, too!” Miss Metcalfe was angular and weather-beaten and had a face like a horse. She had never cared for her dead brother’s wife. The Metcalfes were County, and kept hosts of dogs, and always had all the windows open and hardly any fires, and even if there was a fire you couldn’t feel it because of the draught. Paul, Louisa’s brother, had been a dreamer and queer, and with his small income of eight hundred a year had pottered about the garden and done a little rough shooting and no work. And then on one disastrous day he had gone to a garden party and fallen in love with the daughter of a neighbouring vicar. For fifteen years this foolish couple had lived a limited but very peaceful life, buried in the country, as far away from the other Metcalfes as they could get, and then Paul had died from a severe attack of influenza, leaving his wife with twin daughters aged sixteen. That was two years ago.
“Yes, but I don’t know that I want to go out to India.” Mrs. Metcalfe, with her eyes now very wide open indeed, began to talk rather fast. Secretly she was afraid of Louisa. She was afraid of her calm assumption of always being in the right. Mrs. Metcalfe had the sense to know that she herself was very often in the wrong. Paul also had made her feel that sometimes, although he had tried not to. There was so much that she had not known: things like the date when pheasant shooting began and partridge shooting, and she had always thought that it was horribly cruel to hunt a fox to its death, although perhaps it was more cruel to allow it to live and be caught in a trap. But no one would ever think of catching a stag in a trap, and yet people, and well-bred people too, hunted a stag to its death, and what was the excuse for that? she had once asked her husband with blazing eyes.
But on the whole Paul had been kind and Mrs. Metcalfe had been very happy in the little cottage tucked away in a quiet Devonshire valley. And she would have been peacefully there now if it hadn’t been for Flavia, the elder of the twins and dazzlingly pretty. Both of them were dazzlingly pretty, although Mrs. Metcalfe, who secretly liked the younger one, April, much the best, thought she was the prettier. But other people said that the girls could not be distinguished apart. So Mrs. Metcalfe thought that it was perhaps only her great love for April that made her think her prettier, but she never confided to anyone that she did.
“Yes, but what should we do in India?” Mrs. Metcalfe fixed her eyes on the rather dingy wallpaper and prayed that she would be firm. If only her daughters had not gone out to a cinema. Louisa had arrived without giving any notice. She generally did that.
“What can you possibly do in a horrible boarding-house like this?” said Miss Metcalfe, staring round her and not caring a bit that the kindly careworn old waiter was clearing away the coffee-cups from the glass-topped tables in the lounge and must have heard.
“I don’t think it is horrible,” said Mrs. Metcalfe thinking of the excellent lunch that her sister-in-law had just eaten at her expense. Why, oh why had she ever told her about her brother’s invitation to India? It had only been from a low motive too. Arthur was in the I.C.S. and all the Metcalfes’ relations were in the Army, and Louisa always spoke as if anyone who wasn’t in the Army was hardly alive at all. Paul had been too delicate to go into the Army, and having an income of his own, he hardly had to do anything. But it was grander to be in the I.C.S., thought Mrs. Metcalfe childishly, setting her teeth and thinking that she would say so and not care what Louisa said or did, if the opportunity arose.
“That depends on what you are accustomed to,” said Miss Metcalfe crushingly, returning to her assault on the hotel. “Personally I can imagine no greater misfortune than to have to spend even a week in surroundings like these.”
“The girls love it. We have hardly ever moved from Pear Tree Cottage. This is their first real glimpse of London,” said Mrs. Metcalfe. “They love going to the cinema and looking in at shops. They think this boarding-house is nice. It is nice,” ended Mrs. Metcalfe fiercely. Her eyes filled with angry tears as she thought of the joyful excitement of the move from Devonshire to Ferndale Road. Pear Tree Cottage let for a year. The excited selection of a boarding-house from the tremulously flapping sheets of Bradshaw. An old Bradshaw certainly, but the prompt reply from the Private Hotel in Ferndale Road showed that the selected boarding-house still existed. It called itself a Private Hotel in Bradshaw. Mrs. Metcalfe suddenly remembered that and shot it out like a small bullet from an air pistol. “It isn’t a boarding-house at all; it’s a Private Hotel,” she said.
And somehow that last remark made Miss Metcalfe feel that this sister-in-law of hers was not worth bothering about at all. Anyone who could attempt to justify her present mode of living was surely beyond argument. She had come to look her up because she had heard that she was in town. And in course of conversation the news had leaked out that she had the chance of going to India for the cold weather and taking the two girls with her. Obviously the thing to do, because the girls, from photographs timidly shown, were apparently very good-looking. However, Madeline was not going to do this obvious thing; better to leave her alone to reap the results of her own stupidity. Miss Metcalfe got up to go, diving down the sides of the rather shabby easy chair to retrieve her workmanlike gloves.
“Oh, must you go?” Mrs. Metcalfe, showing herself to be still young and slim, also got up out of her chair. Was then this dread visit at an end? She could hardly believe it.
“Yes, I’ve got several things to fit in before dinner.” Miss Metcalfe was brief and businesslike. “I am sorry that I haven’t seen the girls. Give them my love, will you?”
“Yes, I will,” said Mrs. Metcalfe eagerly.
“What do they think about this visit to India?” enquired Miss Metcalfe, walking with long, leisurely strides to the tall, black painted door of the lounge.
“They don’t know anything about it,” replied Mrs. Metcalfe guiltily. “They went off very early, before the second post came.”
“They don’t know anything about it! But then of course they’ll insist on going,” exclaimed Miss Metcalfe, stopping dead in the middle of the floor.
“Yes, I know. I expect we’re sure to go,” said Mrs. Metcalfe placidly. For a moment or two she looked quite young. Louisa was a donkey, she thought complacently.
“But you gave me to understand——” Miss Metcalfe was really angry now. She stood still and glared at her sister-in-law and her weather-beaten face flushed.
“Yes, I know. But you always take it for granted that I’m such an idiot,” said Mrs. Metcalfe unexpectedly. “Just because I don’t understand things like hunting and dogs and wasn’t presented: all the things that you think matter, and I don’t think matter a bit. You think I’m hopeless. And now Paul is dead and I am left with the twins, and you immediately think that I’m not going to do the best I can for them. But I am. Perhaps you can’t imagine girls like mine that like just pottering about and being with their mother,” said Mrs. Metcalfe, thinking of April with a warm flame round her heart, and shivering a little because she knew that Flavia wasn’t in the least like that really.
“Well!” and then, as there was obviously nothing else to say, Miss Metcalfe shook hands with her sister-in-law and walked down the short flight of steps to the pavement. And the last sight of her that Madeline had was of Louisa signalling to a bus to stop, and the driver of it not taking the faintest notice and careering triumphantly to a stopping-place quite a hundred yards ahead.
