A Word Child Read Free

socks but for the telephone episode.
    â€˜I’ve been admiring your luscious stockings, I can’t take my eyes off your ankles.’ I talked this sort of vulgar nonsense to Laura. I always acted the goat with the Impiatts, they seemed to expect it. Sometimes there was not a pin to choose between me and Reggie Farbottom, the office comic.
    Laura, no longer either young or slim, was a good-looking woman. She came of a Quaker family and had given up her education to marry Freddie, a fact to which she often alluded. She was, like her husband, extremely energetic. There was something of the games-mistress. Will and energy poured from her, often in the form of a sort of anxiety, possibly an anxiety always to be doing something worth-while. She had a sweet radiant intense face and those very wide-apart eyes which give a slightly dazed and dazing mesmeric effect to the glance. She grinned rather than smiled and had a deep resonant emphatic incisive cultured voice which could be tiring to listen to. Some word in each sentence had to be rather comically emphasized: a sign more of shyness than of the bossiness which it often seemed to express. She was always quipping. Her eyes were a fine chestnut brown and her hair, once a dark brown and now rather grey, had until lately been bound about her head in two severe plaits. Now however she had taken to wearing it loose, streaming down her back nearly to her waist. This was disconcerting: a woman with long streaming grey hair cannot but look a little strange, especially if her eyes glitter with some exalted yearning. Now that her hair was down Laura’s energy, quite undiminished, seemed to have become more diffused, less directed and prosaic, as if she were recovering some of the misty electrical indeterminateness of youth. She had also lately developed a taste for flowing robes. Tonight she was wearing an ankle-length tent of green shot silk, split up the side to reveal blue stockings. She always dressed up for our Thursdays, even if it was only me. I did not fail to note this, and she knew I noted it. No wonder I shaved.
    â€˜How is Christopher?’ said Laura. She took a maternal interest in my young people.
    â€˜Much the same. Harmless. Picturesque. Useless.’
    â€˜Have you given Christopher a day?’ The reference was to my having regular days of the week for seeing my friends.
    â€˜No one under thirty is allowed to have a day.’
    â€˜Is that a rule? I think you’ve just invented it!’
    â€˜Hilary lives by rules,’ said Freddie. ‘He separates everything from everything.’
    â€˜And everyone from everyone!’ said Laura.
    â€˜Separation is the essence of a bachelor’s existence,’ I said.
    â€˜He likes to live in other people’s worlds and have none of his own.’
    â€˜Hilary is all things to all men.’
    â€˜Who do you think will succeed Templar-Spence?’ said Clifford Larr.
    They went off into office gossip. Laura disappeared to the kitchen. She was a good cook if you liked that sort of cooking. I contemplated the drawing-room and marvelled at the expensive knick-knacks and the absence of dust. Freddie and my fellow guest had got on to the economy. ‘The Sibyl’s leaves, what an image of inflation!’ said Clifford Larr.
    I never minded being left out of serious conversations. Ignorance should prompt modesty. And it suited me to be the one left to amuse the girls. Women are rarely pompous. I had no instinct to play the man as layer down of law. Freddie Impiatt did so with a touching unawareness. Freddie was stout, a waistcoat wearer, not tall, a little bald, monumental and greying, a kind conceited man with a big honest head and a pleasant horsy smile. He could not pronounce his r’s. Clifford Larr was thin and tall, a bit dandified, not an easy man, nervous, sarcastic, armed with conscious superiority, no sufferer of fools, one of those prickly unwelcoming reserved eccentrics in