Complete Short Stories (VMC) Read Free Page A

mammas looking at their sons with awe and anxiety and fanning themselves with their handkerchiefs, wondering if their darlings would not pick up some plague. We must not have that this year, Mr Baseden. You must promise me not. A thundery day … oh, by four o’clock! Could we have things in jars instead, sealed up? Or skeletons? I like it best when the little ones just collect fossils or flint arrow-heads.’
    ‘Flint arrow-heads are not in Hugh’s department,’ Robert said, although Muriel knew that as well as he, was merely going through her scatter-brain performance – the all-feminine, inaccurate, negligent act by which she dissociated herself from the school.
    ‘They are out of chapel,’ Hugh said. The noise outside was his signal to go. ‘No rabbits, then,’ he promised Muriel and turning to Hester, said: ‘Don’t be too bewildered. I haven’t had much start on you, but I begin to feel at home.’ Then, sensing some rudeness to Muriel in what he had said, he added: ‘So many boys must be a great strain to you at first. You will get used to them in time.’
    ‘I never have,’ Muriel murmured, when he had gone. ‘Such dull young men we get here always. I am sorry, Hester, there is no brighter company for you. Of course, there is Rex Wigmore, ex-RAF, with moustache, slang, silk mufflers, undimmed gaiety; but I should be wary of him, if I were you. You think I am being indiscreet, Robert; but I am sure Hester will know without being told how important it is in a school for us to be able to speak frankly – even scandalously – when we are
en famille
. It would be impossible to laugh if, outside, our lips were not sealed tight …’
    ‘If everything is to be said for me,’ Hester thought, ‘and understood for me, how am I ever to take part in a conversation again?’
    From that time, Muriel spoke on her behalf, interpreted for her, as if she were a savage or a mute, until the moment not many days later, whenshe said in an amused, but matter-of-fact voice: ‘Of course, you are in love with Robert.’
    Muriel saved Hester the pains of groping towards this fact. She presented it promptly, fresh, illicit and out-of-the-question; faced and decided once for all. The girl’s heart swerved in horrified recognition. From her sensations of love for and dependence upon this older man, her cousin, she had separated the trembling ardour of her youth and unconsciously had directed it towards the less forbidden – the pianist in the café for instance. Now, she saw that her feelings about that young man were just the measure of her guilt about Robert.
    Muriel insinuated the idea into the girl’s head, thinking that such an idea would come sooner or later and came better from her, inseparable from the very beginning with shame and confusion. She struck, with that stunning remark, at the right time. For the first week or so Hester was tense with desire to please, anxiety that she might not earn her keep. Robert would often find her bowed in misery over indecipherable shorthand, or would hear her rip pages out of the typewriter and begin again. The waste-paper basket was usually crammed full of spoilt stationery. Once, he discovered her in tears and, half-way across the room to comfort her, wariness overtook him. He walked instead to the window and spoke with his back to her, which seemed to him the only alternative to embracing her.
    Twice before he had taken her in his arms, on two of the three times they had been together. He had met her when she came home from Singapore where her father had died, and she had begun to cry in the station refreshment-room while they were having a cup of tea. His earlier meeting was at her christening when he had dutifully, as godfather, nursed her for a moment. The third encounter she had inveigled him into. He had met her in London secretly to discuss an important matter. They had had luncheon at his Club and the important matter turned out to be the story of her misery at living