Colour Scheme Read Free Page A

“There is an innate something…” she began. “One can always tell,” she added.
    “Can one? Look at Simon.”
    “Dear old Simon,” said her mother reproachfully.
    “Yes, I know. I’m very fond of him. I couldn’t have a kinder brother, but there isn’t much innate something about Simon, is there?”
    “It’s only that awful accent. If we could have afforded…”
    “There you are, you see,” cried Barbara, and she went on in a great hurry, shooting out her words as if she fired them from a gun that was too big for her. “Class consciousness is all my eye. Fundamentally it’s based on money.”
    On the verandah the bell was rung again with some abandon.
    “I must pop out,” said Mrs. Claire. “That’s Huia ringing.”
    “It’s not because he talks a different language or any of those things,” said Barbara hurriedly, “that I don’t like Mr. Questing. I don’t like
him
. And I don’t like the way he behaves with Huia. Or,” she added under her breath, “with me.”
    “I expect,” said Mrs. Claire, “that’s only because he used to be a commercial traveller. It’s just his way.”
    “Mummy,
why
do you find excuses for him? Why does Daddy, who would ordinarily loathe Mr. Questing, put up with him? He even laughs at his awful jokes. It isn’t because we want his board money. Look how Daddy and Uncle James practically froze out those rich Americans who were very nice, I thought.” Barbara drove her long fingers through her mouse-coloured hair, and avoiding her mother’s gaze stared at the top of Rangi’s Peak. “You’d think Mr. Questing had a sort of
hold
on us,” she said, and then burst into one of her fits of nervous laughter.
    “Barbie darling,” said her mother, on a note that contrived to suggest the menace of some frightful indelicacy, “I think we won’t talk about it any more.”
    “Uncle James hates him, anyway.”
    “Barbara!”
    “Lunch, Agnes,” said a quiet voice on the other side of the fence. “You’re late again.”
    “Coming, dear. Please go on ahead with Daddy, Barbara,” said Mrs. Claire.
    Dr. Ackrington bucketed his car down the drive and pulled up at the verandah with a savage jolt just as Barbara reached it. She waited for him and took his arm.
    “Stop it,” he said. “You’ll give me hell if you hurry me.” But when she made to draw away he held her arm in a wiry grasp.
    “Is the leg bad, Uncle James?”
    “It’s always bad. Steady now.”
    “Did you have your morning soak in the Porridge Pot?”
    “I did not. And do you know why? That damned poisonous little bounder was wallowing in it.”
    “Mr. Questing?”
    “He never washes,” Dr. Ackrington shouted. “I’ll swear he never washes. Why the devil you can’t insist on people taking the shower before they use the pools is a mystery. He soaks his sweat off in my mud.”
    “Are you sure…?”
    “Certain. Certain. Certain. I’ve watched him. He never goes near the shower. How in the name of common decency your parents can stomach him…”
    “That’s just what I’ve been asking Mummy.”
    Dr. Ackrington halted and stared at his niece. An observer might have been struck by their resemblance to each other. Barbara was much more like her uncle than her mother, yet while he, in a red-headed edgy sort of way, was remarkably handsome, she contrived to present as good a profile without its accompaniment of distinction. Nobody noticed Barbara’s physical assets; her defects were inescapable. Her hair, her clothes, her incoherent gestures, her strangely untutored mannerisms, all combined against her looks and discounted them. She and her uncle stared at each other in silence for some seconds.
    “Oh,” said Dr. Ackrington at last. “And what did your mother say?”
    Barbara pulled a clown’s grimace. “She
reproved
me,” she said in a sepulchral serio-comedy voice.
    “Well, don’t make faces at me,” snapped her uncle.
    A window in the Claires’ wing was thrown open, and between