Complete Short Stories (VMC) Read Free Page B

with her mother – the moods, scenes, words, tears. He could see that she found telling him more difficult than she had planned, found it in fact almost impossible. Rehearsing her speeches alone, she had reckoned without his presence, his looks of embarrassment, the sound of her own voice complaining, her fear of his impatience. She had spoken in a high, affected, hurried voice, smiling too much and at the wrong moments, with a mixture of defiance and ingratiation he found irritating, but pathetic. He had had so little solace to offer, except that he was sure the trouble would pass, that perhaps her mother suffered, too, at the crisis of middle-age. At that, Hester had been overcome by a great, glowering blush, as if he had said something unforgivable. He did not know ifit were some adolescent prudery in her, or the outrage of having excuses made for her enemy-mother. (For whom excuses might have been made, for she died not long after, of cancer.)
    Now, as he stood at the window listening to her tears, he knew that she was collapsed, abandoned, in readiness for his embrace of consolation, and he would not turn round, although his instinct was to go to her.
    He said, absurdly: ‘I hope you are happy here,’ and received of course only tears in answer.
    Without physical contact he could not see how to bring the scene to an end. Bored, he surveyed the garden and thought that the box-hedge needed trimming. Beyond this hedge, hanging from the branches of fruit trees were old potatoes stuck with goose-feathers. He watched them twirling gaily above the currant bushes, not frightening the birds, but exciting or bemusing them.
    She realised that he would not come to her, and her weeping sank into muffled apologies, over which Robert could feel more authoritative, with something reassuring to say in return and something to do. (He fetched a decanter of sherry.) His reassurances were grave, not brusque. He put the reasons for her distress sensibly back upon legitimate causes, where perhaps they belonged – the death of her mother, shock, strain, fatigue.
    He sat by his desk and put on his half-moon reading-glasses, peered over them, swung about in his swivel-chair, protecting himself by his best old-fogey act.
    ‘Muriel and I only want to make you happy.’
    Hester flinched.
    ‘You must never let this work worry you, you know.’ He almost offered to get someone else to do it for her, his sense of pity was so great.
    His reading-glasses were wasted on her. She would not look at him with her swollen eyes, but pointed her hands together over her forehead, making an eave to hide her face.
    ‘But does Muriel
want
me here?’ she cried at last.
    ‘Could you be here, if she did not?’
    ‘But do you?’
    In her desperation, she felt that she could ask any questions. The only advice he ever wanted to give young people was not to press desperation too far, uncreative as it is;
not
to admit recklessness. Muriel had once made similar mistakes. It seemed to him a great fault in women.
    ‘I shall only mind having you here if you cry any more. Or grow any thinner.’
    He glanced down at his feet. She was not really any thinner, but Muriel had begun her work on her clothes, which now fitted her and showed her small waist and long narrow back.
    ‘You are bound to feel awkward at first with one another,’ Robert said. ‘It is a strange situation for you both, and Muriel is rather shy.’
    Hester thought that she was uncouth and sarcastic; but not shy, not for one moment shy.
    ‘I think she is trying so hard to be kind and sympathetic,’ he continued, ‘but she must make her own place in your life. She would not be so impertinent as to try to be a mother to you, as many less sensitive women might. There is no precedent to help her – having no children herself, being much older. She has her own friends, her own life, and she would like to make a place for you, too. I think she would have loved to have had a daughter … I can imagine