Dolly Read Free Page A

was apparently restored to health. She had highly polished social manners which nevertheless released something of her original intentions, so that my mother felt it her duty to express gratitude that Dolly hadbothered to visit her at all. One felt dissatisfaction in the air, and also tiredness, frustration, all covered up by a tremendous show of goodwill, of resolute generosity.
    ‘Then we’d better have tea straight away,’ said my mother humbly. ‘It’s all ready. Jane will hand round.’
    When we returned from the kitchen, having removed the shrouds from the plates of cakes and sandwiches, Hugo was shaking his head ruefully over the disastrous bridge hands he had held on the previous evening.
    ‘Couldn’t do a thing with them,’ he went on, although my father, who did not play bridge, could not have been interested. That was their way, I was to learn, to trail one entertainment on to the next, so that one always heard a great deal about what had happened on the previous occasion.
    ‘No thank you, dear,’ said Dolly, as I relentlessly proffered plate after plate of food. ‘I never eat in the afternoon. And you shouldn’t either,’ she warned my uncle, as he took two sandwiches and laid them in his saucer, where they absorbed a little tea.
    ‘You see what a terror I married,’ he said to my father, who was not used to such playfulness from men. He leaned over perilously, dislodging a little more tea, and pinched Dolly’s cheek. She smiled a small taut smile.
    ‘At least you can make up for it this evening,’ she said. ‘We’ll be going on later for bridge,’ she explained, in the face of my mother’s constraint. My father turned away and busied himself with his cup. When he turned back towards us his face was entirely serious.
    I examined Dolly, leaning against her chair for a better view.
    ‘Don’t do that, dear,’ she said. I registered the fact that she did not like children.
    I could see that she was in the grip of some tremendous impatience, although the journey to Prince of Wales Drive, in a hired car, could not have been very arduous. With the percipience of childhood I sensed that she was struggling against increasing weight or some such bodily discomfort. Women were not yet quite as at ease with themselves as they are today. In 1969 or 1970, when this tea-party must have taken place, they had heard the calls of liberation but had not yet developed into those speedy slimmed-down versions of themselves that they were to become in the 1980s. And then I think that work had a great deal to do with this transformation. Women who did not work, like my mother, or, more conspicuously, Dolly, aged more quickly and along more traditional lines. Dolly must have been in her middle forties at this time and was aware that the age of fading attractions had arrived. More specifically, she was aware of such fading in her husband, who, after youthful good looks, had developed a complacent personality and a saurian aspect, the smile still on his face, his eyes frequently closing behind his glasses. His evident comfort in my father’s armchair, and his absent-minded but constant ingestion of my mother’s food, as if his restoration to the bosom of his family had temporarily effaced his social pretensions, had bred an indignation in Dolly, whether she was aware of it or not. Like an automaton he continued to deal out largely meaningless social noises, none of which was of relevance to my mother or my father, but a loosening of the usual performance had taken place, and he seemed both older and youngerbecause of it, younger because he looked to my mother with a sort of trust, which might have been quite foreign to him in his usual everyday incarnation, and older because he no longer had the means to charm and to please, as had formerly been his habit, and his right.
    Dolly, despite her constrictions, was still a handsome woman. I was aware of this, as I was simultaneously aware of a sense of strain and