Читать книгу Imagined Corners - Willa Muir - Страница 13

Mr and Mrs John Shand, as was fitting, gave a dinner in the evening to welcome the bride and bridegroom, a family function, the only other guest being Miss Janet Shand.

The dinner itself was a success. Mabel had studied even more intensively than usual her stock of ladies’ magazines, and the table decorations, the glass, the silver, the modish little mats recommended instead of an enveloping tablecloth by Lady Fanny of The Ladies’ Fashionmonger, had all attained the high standard set by that arbiter of refinement. And had knocked Elizabeth flat, decided Mabel.

Such a satisfactory conclusion ought to have made her happy. But a hostess, a figure who carries the main burden of civilization, whose difficult task it is to invent a progressive notation for mankind’s faith in the ability of the human spirit to surpass itself, cannot ignore the more rarefied ingredients of a dinner-party, the blending of temperaments, the flavour of conversation, the pleasant aroma of expanding minds. A dinner-party that provokes quarrels is like a bouquet containing nettles, and it was undeniable that all three of them now remaining by the fireside, Mabel, John and Aunt Janet, were nettled.

John was standing with his back to the fire. He was a tall, bulky man with reddish fair hair; his features were large but harmonious, and the beard he wore dignified his appearance. In spite of the beard, however, there was something simple and childlike in his face; perhaps it was the candid expression of his blue eyes which had no eyebrows to give them depth.

‘She’s much too good for him,’ he said.

Aunt Janet laid down her knitting again. It was a custom that she should spend the night with John and Mabel after dining there.

‘You have always misjudged Hector,’ she objected.

‘I think his wife has misjudged him. A quiet, sensible girl like that: what induced her to marry him I can’t think.’

Great lump that she is, said Mabel to herself, with irritation.

A hostess is only human, and Mabel had had a trying afternoon before her dinner-party began. Ned Murray had not proved amenable. She did not mind so much his absent answers to her questions – although it is annoying to have someone answer ‘Yes, yes,’ to everything one says – but she could not stand his behaviour to the other people on the links. She would never been seen in public with him again. A man who scowls at people and mutters and turns round to glare at them is a compromising partner. And on top of that Hector had been almost rude to her.

‘Hector has a most affectionate and loving nature, and nobody is more unhappy than he is when he does wrong, poor boy,’ said Aunt Janet.

John tut-tutted. ‘He has no moral sense. And his loving nature is too promiscuous for my taste.’

‘He’s too sensitive, John, that’s all. Girls simply throw themselves at his head. He can’t help being so attractive to women.’

‘Tut!’ said John again; ‘he uses women to feed his vanity. You’re not going to tell me that that poor girl he ruined – Duncan, wasn’t she called? – threw herself at his head whenever he bought a cigarette from her? Much he cared for her! His sensitive heart didn’t keep him from clearing out to Canada when he was given the chance.’

‘But he confessed the whole story to me, John, with tears in his eyes.’

‘That was just another way of getting rid of it. A few tears are an easy price to pay. You’re too soft with him.’

Janet Shand’s short-sighted eyes filled with tears.

‘I know him, John, as well as if I were his mother.’

‘Well, well.’ John stroked his beard. ‘Let us hope his wife will take a stronger line with him.’

Aunt Janet picked up her knitting with a sigh.

‘Elizabeth is very young, of course.’

Elizabeth, she felt, was not quite the right kind of wife. There was something about Elizabeth that made one uncertain….

‘Four years younger than Hector, isn’t she?’

‘Yes, John; only twenty-two.’

‘Well,’ said John, ‘Mabel’s only twenty-three, and she has sense enough.’

‘Too much sense to marry Hector,’ said Mabel, preparing to go upstairs.

‘I think Hector’s insufferable,’ she burst out as she was brushing her hair. ‘I wish he’d go and live somewhere else. Must you take him into the mill, John?’

‘I can’t very well keep him out. He’s a Shand, after all.’

‘He’s a bad Shand.’

‘I didn’t know you disliked him so much.’

‘I detest him,’ said Mabel, brushing her long hair furiously.

‘I haven’t much use for him myself…. But I passed my word that if he settled down I’d take him on…. You needn’t see much of him, you know; and Elizabeth’s a sensible girl, don’t you think?’

‘I think,’ said Mabel, and bit the words short.

‘I’m sorry for her,’ she added. But she deserves what she’ll get, her thoughts ran on, as she brushed and brushed the long strands of her bright brown hair.

After he turned out the lights and got into bed John made one more reference to Elizabeth:

‘It’s funny to think that there’s another Elizabeth Shand now, isn’t it?’

‘Why – of course,’ said Mabel. ‘They’re not like each other, are they?’

John chuckled.

‘About as like each other as fire and water. I’d give anything to see Lizzie dealing with Hector.’

‘What would she do?’

‘If she’s still what she used to be she’d have him deflated within ten minutes. There wouldn’t be much left of him.’

‘I wish she’d come and do it,’ murmured Mabel.

All through the evening the phantom of the other Elizabeth Shand, his sister, had haunted John, and now that he was safely under the bedclothes he allowed himself the indulgence of thinking about her. He had tried for so many years to forget her that even now, when anger had died away, he felt his persistent affection for her as a weakness to be indulged only when his head was under the blankets, when the respectable citizen of the daytime had merged into the boy of five-and-twenty years ago. He was startled by the painful leap his heart gave when Mabel murmured: ‘I wish she’d come and do it.’ He had not known how greatly he desired to see Lizzie again. Twenty years it was since he saw her last. She must be thirty-nine now, three years younger than himself. But that was absurd; he could not picture Lizzie as a mature woman. A wild thing she had been, always in hot water. What a day that was when their father had married again! She was three miles down the coast when he found her, hatless and coatless; she made him miss the wedding too, and she must have been at least twelve then; yes, Hector was born a year later, thirteen years’ difference between them…. What an extraordinary thing affection is, John reflected. Aunt Janet was always down on Lizzie; she couldn’t stand Lizzie; and yet, there she was, sticking up for Hector who wasn’t fit to black Lizzie’s boots. Lizzie was a wild creature, but not a selfish one. On the other hand, his own affection for Lizzie was just as unreasonable as Aunt Janet’s for Hector. Lizzie had behaved scandalously; she had outraged everything he stood for; he had been ill with rage when she ran off with that foreign fellow. Yet that was in keeping with Lizzie’s character; she was always dashing into adventures. It had been she who had discovered the disused pottery miles from home where they set up house for so many weeks one summer. He could remember the tumbledown shed, with a low bench covered with dust and fragments of baked clay, fluted moulds broken and crumbling, whorls and handles lying in careless heaps. With closed eyes John re-traversed the road that led there through a hot summer’s afternoon, with Lizzie, like an elf, darting from one hedgerow to the other, until she discovered the overgrown side-path, and set off down it at a run. She would never keep on the main road, not Lizzie. Nobody knew what it meant to him when she ran off with that German. He nearly threw up everything to go after her. But even if he had tracked her down, how could he have brought her back to be a perpetual reminder of disgrace? A drunken father was bad enough without a dishonoured sister; no family could have lived them both down. Yet though he could justify his anger and his estrangement from her the long companionship of their childhood was still alive and seeking fulfilment. Twenty years. She was nineteen then. But when he dreamed of her, as he did now and then, she was always a slip of girl…. He drifted into sleep with the vague idea that he was stumbling through a dark forest of lofty trees, pursuing a brilliant butterfly that would dart off at a tangent and would not keep to the path.

Mabel Shand had never seen her sister-in-law, and, like everybody else, was unaware of John’s passionate regret for her. Like everybody else, too, she knew the facts of the scandal; Elizabeth Shand had run away with a married man, a foreigner, the head of the modern languages department in the Calderwick Academy. Mabel also had the benefit of Aunt Janet’s comments, including the information that John could not bear to have his sister’s name mentioned; but she had been surprised shortly after their marriage to hear John say lightly: ‘You remind me of my sister Lizzie; she was a gay young thing something like you.’ He had added hastily, ‘But you have more sense,’ and Mabel realized that the comparison was intended as a compliment. Of course she had more sense; she knew too well the value of social prestige. Her position as John Shand’s wife was more worth while than any fly-by-night nonsense of true love. Mabel had no intention of falling in love. She preferred to see others in love with her. She had fancied Hector, but that was when she was a mere child, and now, lying in bed beside John, she was convinced that she hated Hector. The thought flashed through her mind with savage suddenness: ‘I wish I had him here; I’d smack him!’

Her body quivered with the intensity of her feeling. Smack him, good and hard, she would.