Sunflower Read Free Page B

press him to if he didn’t, she looked into the distance; and met the eyes of four people who were standing beside a small yellow car.
    Nice manners they had, staring at a person like that. They might think that though a person was on the stage that wasn’t to say that they liked being treated off the stage as if they were a waxwork. She was always slow of thought, and never slower than when she was forced to suspect that the world was not kind, but the look of them made her apprehensive, for though they were all smiling as they looked at her there was a kind of grease on the surface of their gaze, a kind of scum of squalid feeling …
    And at her elbow the mechanic said, ‘Beg pardon, Mr Pantridge, but that party with the yellow Morris-Cowley was asking if Lord Essington lived in the neighbourhood. I’ve never heard of him being round here, have you?’
    ‘No, not a bit of it,’ said the little man. ‘His place is down Cookham way. Some of us went over from Reading Hospital first time I was wounded. His wife gave us tea. A very nice lady she was. Tell ’em they’re dreaming. What do they want to know for? Got a cousin who does his lordship’s lamps?’ He was annoyed at being interrupted, and immediately went on telling her about his wife’s eldest brother, who had done so well in the war that he got a commission.
    Her jaw dropped. She stared at the four, wondering how they could do such a thing. When startling things happened to her she always became a child again at the impact and felt as if she had no previous experience of the sort. For a moment these people seemed to her as prodigious as gnomes and giants; and then noting the cheap, smart make of the women’s clothes, the excessive something about the men’s skirted overcoats, the common look they had of trying to look not better but worse than they really were, a kind of aspirant unpurity, she wearily placed them as members of a type she had encountered hundreds of times before. ‘What we want to know’ cads, they were. One saw them sometimes at the Embassy Club; they did not belong to it, but men who had to be nice to them because of business took them for a treat and they sat about staring at the people, bobbing forward suddenly to ask who they were, and getting pop-eyed if they had asked about anybody who was divorced or kept. A blush began to sweep over her face, her neck, her breasts, which had begun to smart since she realised that they were thinking of her as a sexual being. These men she thought would have liked to buy all the women in the world, but the money hadn’t run to it. These women would have liked to be bought by all the men in the world, but they hadn’t found their way in to the market. So they dreamed beastly dreams of the world as they would have liked it to be, men and women all sticking together like jujubes in a box, and to make them more solidly satisfying they pretended that they were real things that happened to real people. It was they who said that Connie Maddox had had a black baby; who said that Lettie Aylmer, who was straight, had had an affair with the Duke of Victoria, so that when she got engaged to young Lennie Isaacs his people, who minded, being Jews, were horrid to her for quite a long time. And God knew what they had said about her; what they were saying about her at this very minute. In pain, for she was silly and never got used to this sort of thing, she stared across at them to see what they were saying. It would be something new and lying, for the true thing, about Essington, was too old to amuse. They were sniggering together, with pleased moist smiles under noses wrinkled with disgust, like horrid children talking of a nasty secret. There wasn’t any knowing what they might be saying, she said to herself again and again, lest when she stopped she should maybe know what they were saying.
    When the little man had paused in his story of how well his wife’s eldest brother had done in the war, she put out her