Читать книгу East Is Always East - Pamela Wynne - Страница 4

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The Metcalfe girls certainly were astonishingly good-looking. The few callow youths in the hotel could not keep their eyes off them. Flavia was delighted. She held herself rather more erect and made little jerky movements of her pencilled eyebrows. April felt uncomfortable when she did it and hated it. She was afraid of Flavia or she would have refused to go out with her. People stared in buses and Tubes. April felt responsible, especially as they were dressed alike. In the Church and Commercial Stores, for instance, Flavia almost flirted with the assistants. And then went away to pay the bill at the desk, and the young man left behind the counter, too flustered to remember which sister was which, began feverishly to carry on the interrupted conversation with April. It was all degrading, thought April, miserable and shy, and returning bold glances with a fugitive fluttering of her eyelids that made the person who had levelled them feel dreadfully ashamed and instantly cease to do so. One tall elderly man at the hotel was soon able to distinguish the sisters apart. He watched them as they came into the lounge in the evening for their coffee. He watched their mother and thought that when she was a girl she must have been almost as good-looking. But he did not speak to them because he knew from long experience that as a rule it was a mistake to get to know people in London hotels. He only stayed in this quiet, shabby one himself because it was quiet, and very near the Natural History Museum, where he was engaged on important research work.

But the open admiration that Flavia received went to her head like a cocktail. It was too marvellous after existence in Devonshire. “Thank Heaven I made Mother give up that beastly cottage,” she said excitedly that night, as the girls undressed in their large comfortable bedroom on the second floor.

“How can you call it beastly?” April, in her silk princess petticoat, was sitting on the bed unfastening her suspenders. Her knees were young and round. She slipped her silk stockings down over her ankles and feet and then shuffled them over her feet and let them fall on the floor. Her down-bent face was melancholy as she solemnly squeezed her toes and then abruptly laughed. “Can you move your little toe away from the one next to it, Flavia?” she asked.

“No, and I’m not going to try,” said Flavia. She had her round chin very close to the mirror. “Look,” she said suddenly.

“What?” April turned round.

“Come closer; you can’t see from there.” Flavia spoke excitedly. Her face was triumphant. Yes, she was really most frightfully pretty, there was no doubt about it. And they might still have been stuck away in Devonshire if it hadn’t been for her. “See?” She swung round to face her sister.

“Oh, that horrible stuff on your lips! Don’t! Flavia, it’s hideous. Don’t. Your lips are so nice and pink anyhow.” April’s voice was eager. How could she explain to Flavia that it didn’t improve her at all?

“Everyone puts it on,” said Flavia calmly. “I’m not at all sure that I shan’t have my eyebrows plucked too,” she continued.

“If you do, you’ll get old much quicker than I shall,” said April excitedly. Terror filled her soul. She would have to go out with this dreadfully got-up sister of hers and people would stare more than ever. The staring was beginning to get on April’s nerves. Why had they ever come to London? It made their mother ill, too; she had gone to bed when they came back from the cinema because she was so tired after Aunt Louisa’s visit. Too tired even to talk, thought April, remembering with a clutch at her heart the lovely calm evenings by the fire in Pear Tree Cottage.

“Do you really think I don’t look nice with lipstick on?” Flavia was now not so cock-a-hoop as she had been. Inwardly she thought a good deal of what April said, although she would have died rather than confess it.

“I think you look ghastly; common,” said April decidedly. She watched her sister crumpling up her lips and sucking them. The soft delicate pink of them emerged again.

“There you are. Can’t you see that you look much nicer without it?” April, small and slender in her pale pink petticoat, was smiling. “It doesn’t go with your hair—the red,” she explained. “You don’t need those things—yet.”

“No, perhaps I don’t.” Flavia was complacent. “You get into bed: don’t wait for me,” she said after a pause. “I’m going to try on all my hats, and perhaps alter the felt one back to front.”

“All right.” April returned to her end of the room. That would mean that the light would be on for ages longer, she thought, but it wasn’t any good minding. But as she lay with her face turned to the high white ceiling she wondered why Flavia thought such a terrific amount about what she looked like. Who cared what you looked like if you were nice? pondered April, twisting herself so that her face was turned away from the bright electric light. For instance, that nice man in the lounge who never spoke to anyone, but who sat drinking his coffee as if he knew exactly what everyone else was doing although he never even looked up. He was old, thought April briefly, quite forty-five and not a bit good-looking. And yet there was something about his clean-shaven mouth that was frightfully attractive. Only kind words could come out of it, thought April, beginning to feel sleepy although Flavia’s shadow still danced aggravatingly over the ceiling. But perhaps she would soon be done. Although, no—April raised herself jerkily and rather uncertainly from her pillow.

“Would you have the paste thing where I’ve put it or rather further back?” Flavia’s voice was clear. “Good heavens, you don’t mean to say that you’ve gone to sleep already?”

“Oh no!” April’s voice was stammering and apologetic. She tried to see and could not. “I’ll get out of bed and come round to the glass,” she said anxiously. “I don’t know—I think it’s glary or something and that’s why I can’t see.”

“You can’t see because you’re half asleep,” said Flavia impatiently. “Come on; I want to sew it in before I get into bed.”

And as April stood yawning and shivering a little under the bright light Flavia still spoke impatiently. “I can’t think how we come to be twins at all,” she said, “we’re so frightfully different. Now is that right?”

“Perfectly,” said April, trying to be really interested and only able to think of the rapture it would be to be cosily back in bed again.