Читать книгу Old Wine and New - Warwick Deeping - Страница 14

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Mrs. Marwood removed her hat. She had her back to the room and was facing the mirror over the mantelpiece. Her daughter had remained in the doorway.

Mrs. Marwood placed her hat on the curved back of the very hard sofa, and jabbed the two long pins through it so that the hat was speared to the cushioned surface. She looked at herself in the mirror, and raising her hands, patted her hair, but she was observing the reflection of her daughter’s face as well as her own. The sleek gestures of her hands and arms both suppressed and flaunted her anger.

“Harry in bed?”

“Yes.”

“Bob in yet?”

“No.”

They exchanged blows in uttering those curt and purely perfunctory words. Mrs. Marwood continued to be busy with her hair. She had brought into that stuffy and over-furnished little room suggestions of perfume and heat and yellowness, and the large movements of a well-fleshed body. Her eyes were blue and slightly protuberant, and like the eyes of an impudent and greedy child. These eyes were watching the implacable pale face of her daughter. It enraged her. It looked so square and stern and resolute. Also it was the face of an enigma, of the watchful and baffling silence of youth. Also it was the face of the dead Marwood.

“Anybody been?”

“No.”

Mrs. Marwood, revolving suddenly like a figure turning on a pedestal, stared at her daughter, and then, with a flaunting aggressiveness, sat down on the sofa.

“You’d better go to bed.”

The stillness of Julia’s figure was exasperating. Consciously and wilfully it seemed to close the doorway, even as Marwood’s dull and undistinguished figure had blocked the free play of his wife’s exuberant adventurousness. Florence Marwood had been married at seventeen, and marriage had become for her a kind of cage in which her mature and intense vitality had raged rebelliously. She had been married too young; and then in the end the war had to come to tantalize her very discursive appetite for all things that could happen outside No. 53 Spellthorn Terrace.

Seeing that her daughter did not move, she gave a shrug of the shoulders. She wanted to say things to Julia; bold, bitter, hazardous things, but never yet had she said them. It is possible that she was a little afraid of Julia, for Julia had the strength of her silence. She looked and said little, and to a woman like Florence Marwood, who had no restraint, this obdurate young face was like a granite wall. Instinctively she knew that no satisfaction was to be obtained from flaring in the face of such reserve. Julia reduced her mother to a mute, exasperated restlessness.

“Well, it’s a cheerful house. Any supper left?”

She was aware of something in her daughter’s eyes, a secret, triumphant gleam.

“Yes. I thought you had had supper.”

“You would. Iron rations.”

Julia’s right hand moved. It slid forward and rested on her thigh and from its white fingers the end of a key protruded. Her mother’s blue eyes fastened upon that piece of metal. She understood that she was being shown it. Her large handsome face grew flaccid. Her mouth hung open.

“You—”

The girl appeared to nod her head.

“I’m turning in now. I’ve told Bob that if he comes home after ten he can stay outside.”

She stepped back into the passage, and quietly drew the door to after her. It closed with a soundless finality, and Mrs. Marwood sat staring at it. Her face had a suffused, red muteness. Almost she looked like a woman on the edge of a spasm of coughing, and about to extrude some irritant substance. But no sound came from her. She stood up, snatched at the pins that fastened her hat to the sofa, and putting the round black head of one of the pins into her mouth, sucked it. Her teeth bit on the steel shaft.

“The young—!”

But the explosion was noiseless. She sucked the head of the pin, and her eyes stared.