Colour Scheme Read Free

vaguely uncomfortable. The front wall of the dining-room was built up of glass panels designed to slide in grooves, but devilishly inclined to jam. These looked across the verandah to the hot springs themselves.
    Barbara stood for a moment at one of the open windows and stared absently at a freakish landscape. Hills smudged with scrub were ranked against a heavy sky. Beyond them, across the hidden inlet, but tall enough to dominate the scene, rose the truncated cone of Rangi’s Peak, an extinct volcano so characteristically shaped that it might have been placed in the landscape by a modern artist with a passion for simplified form. Though some eight miles away, it was actually clearer than the near-by hills, for their margins, dark and firm, were broken at intervals by plumes of steam that rose perpendicularly from the eight thermal pools. These lay close at hand, just beyond the earth-and-pumice sweep in front of the house. Five of them were hot springs hidden from the windows by fences of manuka scrub. The sixth was enclosed by a rough bath shed. The seventh was almost a lake over whose dark waters wraiths of steam vaguely drifted. The eighth was a mud pool, not hot enough to give off steam, and dark in colour with a kind of iridescence across its surface. This pool was only half-screened and from its open end protruded a naked pink head on top of a long neck. Barbara went out to the verandah, seized a brass schoolroom bell, and rang it vigorously. The pink head travelled slowly through the mud like some fantastic periscope until it disappeared behind the screen.
    “Lunch, Father,” screamed Barbara unnecessarily. She walked across the sweep and entered the enclosure. On a brush fence that screened the first path hung a weather-worn placard: “The Elfin Pool. Engaged.” The Claires had given each of the pools some amazingly insipid title, and Barbara had neatly executed the placards in poker-work.
    “Are you there, Mummy?” asked Barbara.
    “Come in, my dear.”
    She walked round the screen and found her mother at her feet, submerged up to the shoulders in bright blue steaming water that quite hid her plump body. Over her fuzz of hair Mrs. Claire wore a rubber bag with a frilled edge and she had spectacles on her nose. With her right hand she held above the water a shilling edition of
Cranford
.
    “So
charming
,” she said. “They are all such dears. I never tire of them.”
    “Lunch is nearly in.”
    “I must pop out. The Elf is really wonderful, Ba. My tiresome arm is quite cleared up.”
    “I’m so glad, Mummy,” said Barbara in a loud voice. “I want to ask you something.”
    “What is it?” said Mrs. Claire, turning a page with her thumb.
    “Do you like Mr. Questing?”
    Mrs. Claire looked up over the top of her book. Barbara was standing at a curious angle, balanced on her right leg. Her left foot was hooked round her right ankle.
    “Dear,” said Mrs. Claire, “
don’t
stand like that. It pushes all the wrong things out and tucks the right ones in.”
    “But do you?” Barbara persisted, changing her posture with a jerk.
    “Well, he’s not out of the top drawer of course, poor thing.”
    “I don’t mind about that. And anyway what
is
the top drawer? It’s a maddening sort of way to classify people. Such cheek! I’m sorry, Mummy, I didn’t mean to be rude. But honestly, for
us
to talk about class!” Barbara gave a loud hoot of laughter. “Look at us!” she said.
    Mrs. Claire edged modestly towards the side of the pool and thrust her book at her daughter. Stronger waves of sulphurous smells rose from the disturbed waters. A cascade of drops fell from the elderly rounded arm.
    “Take
Cranford
,” she said. Barbara took it. Mrs. Claire pulled her rubber bag a little closer about her ears. “My dear,” she said, pitching her voice on a note that she usually reserved for death, “aren’t you mixing up money and breeding? It doesn’t matter what one
does
surely…” She paused.