A Winter's Child Read Free Page B

must know what I mean.’
    He gave a brief smile, understanding her, she thought, perhaps all too well. Not that she minded that. Dear Aaron, who had loved her, had been so terribly easy to deceive. Whereas Benedict, who probably did not like her much at all, was far less inclined to be impressed by the mountains she so loved to construct from any little molehill which came her way. Such a provoking man, always so aloof and sometimes quite disdainful yet so much more of a challenge. She smiled at him, her eyelids gently fluttering.
    â€˜Dear boy – such a dilemma. I shall have to explain it so carefully to the others. At teatime perhaps?’
    â€˜An excellent idea.’ And noting the sarcasm in his voice, these teatime discussions being her favourite solution to every crisis, she smiled at him again. Dear Benedict. She was such a trouble to him. He bore it so very impatiently. She rather prided herself on that. Yet, nevertheless, being still in the mood to make a little mischief, she found occasion that afternoon at teatime, sitting with her married daughter Eunice among the comfortable paraphernalia of silver tea kettle and flowered china, to complain of Benedict to his wife.
    â€˜Nola, my dear, I don’t wish to raise a storm in a teacup …’
    â€˜Of course not Miriam.’
    And looking at the blank, bored face of her daughter-in-law, Miriam knew that Mrs Benedict Swanfield was barely listening and did not care.
    That Benedict had married for money Miriam had never doubted and, indeed, could think of no other reason for choosing, some fifteen years ago, this particular bride, Miss Nola Crozier, a wool merchant’s daughter from Bradford, whose family in addition to money had a great many foreign and vaguely artistic connections, cousins who played Beethoven sonatas or attended universities in such remote places as Leipzig and Budapest; possessing a general disposition to speak foreign languages and indulge in foreign travel which had somehow made Nola herself seem alien and therefore suspicious to Miriam, not quite to be trusted.
    There had been no courtship. Nor had Miss Crozier of Manningham Lane in the wool metropolis of Bradford been brought up to expect it. Like Benedict Swanfield himself, the affair had been cool, dispassionate, successfully concluded. In the manner of industrial royalty – in exactly the way her father had married her mother – a wedding had been arranged, a diamond solitaire of appropriate value had been purchased, the size and terms of the settlement had been agreed, and Nola Crozier, educated at home by her mother to play the piano, to speak French and German and do very little else, had become Nola Swanfield, moving with her monogrammed luggage, her expensive trousseau, and – from the very first – her faintly scornful manner into High Meadows where she had lived ever since like an untidy, unpunctual, vaguely unco-operative guest.
    She was not in any conventional sense a pretty woman, certainly not by Miriam’s standards who, seeing beauty exclusively in tints of peaches and cream, ample curves, wide-set, startled blue eyes like her own and her daughters’, had from the start, been dismayed by the lamentable flatness of Nola’s bosom, the unfortunate hint of red in her hair, the sallowness – what kinder word could one find for it? – of her skin; and, perhaps most of all, by her odd partiality for plain, straight-skirted dresses in dull shades of mud and mustard and sage green. A strange girl who had become, at the age of thirty-five, whether Miriam cared to admit it or not, the exact type of woman referred to by every fashion magazine – now that the war had swept away the trailing draperies and tight corseting essential to the padded Edwardian silhouette – as ‘the very latest thing’.
    She was thin and brittle in her movements, her pale, pointed face and the auburn hair she wore low on her forehead giving