A World of Love Read Free Page B

the matted black hair, here and there glistening with tea drops, on his barrel chest. He now was a thickset man, about fifty-three, with a touch of the Latin about his pigmentation and cast of features. His skull was broad, with forehead receding somewhat; his muscle-webbed neck was short. His far-apart, dark and prominent eyes were inhabited by a look of curious patience, as though he had at one time been struck across them and might be so again. Grey streaked his short, unevenly-clipped moustache, though not yet the hair plastered flat to his head.
    He bumped down the empty cup on the table and, the heat of the tea coming out in sweat, pulled a khaki handkerchief from his breeches pocket and mopped round his face and behind his ears. Kathie nipped to refill the cup, but he shook his head. Seeing Lilia come in, with, perhaps, news, he could not refrain from one glance of hope—she, however, only went straight to put down the glass, saucer and candlestick on the already cluttered board of the sink. After that, subsiding on to a chair, she went on taking pleasure in saying nothing, till he caught her eye by making as though to go. She then asked: ‘Know there’s a fly on your neck?’
    To oblige, he slapped at it, but in the wrong place.
    ‘Oh well,’ she yawned, ‘keep it, if you prefer it. I should break down if one walked on me. I too well remember where they have come from. Going out again now, are you?’
    ‘Mm-mm. Why?’
    ‘Then what were you waiting for?’
    ‘Swallow my tea,’ said Fred. He made for the door.
    ‘Oh, about Jane,’ said Lilia, slowly turning her head. Like a fool he stopped in his course, to hear. His wife went on: ‘Well, she was not up there.’
    ‘Up where?’ he asked apparently vaguely, plucking away at an old nail loose in the lintel of the door.
    ‘Not up there with Antonia, for a wonder.’
    No more was necessary: Fred was gone. ‘He’s scalded for time,’ remarked Kathie, through one then another window watching him cross the yard—she brought the candlestick to the middle table and began to jab at the wax in it with a broken knife. Lilia looked on at the process with a gahtering frown. ‘It’s extraordinary, Kathie,’ she said at last ‘how you always do what need not be done immediately. Look at those dishes over from last evening, only attracting flies into the sink; and where do I see Miss Antonia’s tea-tray, now she’s awake?’
    Kathie willingly scrubbed her hands on her apron and made a dart for the cupboard of better china. Searching about for unchipped pieces, she volunteered: ‘I’m half sure I saw Miss Jane this morning, away out over the country in a ball gown.’
    ‘Then why not say so?’
    ‘Away out over, and I’d the sun in my eyes.—Unless could it ever have been a Vision?’
    ‘Now don’t you start being peculiar, in this heat.—Ball gown? There’s no such thing in this house. Miss Jane leaves her fashionable clothes in London, and what should I do with a ball gown, I’d like to know?’
    ‘I’d like to know!’ echoed Kathie, nonplussed. She gave two bangs to a tray, to dislodge crumbs, took a cloth to a smear, then devoutly began to set out Antonia’s tea-things. Through the propped-open windows, the door ajar, came in the sound of the tractor three fields away—they were hay-cutting early, this dewless morning. The mechanical hum was louder because of the stillness around the house—not a rustle anywhere; the usual murmurs of summer were suspended. Not a breath travelled over these uplands under the mountains or fanned its way down the river gorge: the heat stood over the land like a white-hot sword, causing an apprehensive hush. Here in the kitchen the strips of flypaper hung from the ceiling without swaying. What was eerie was that a snowlike reflection came in from the sunstruck white buildings across the yard.
    The green of the ivy over the window -bars and the persisting humidity of the stone-flagged floors made the kitchen look