A World of Love by Elizabeth Bowen Read Free Book Online

ways. Her attitude to what was set before her was therefore gentlemanly or rational—had one hoped to eat well, one should not have put Lilia here. She now, having drunk water, put down her glass and took up her fork. ‘And how are we all, after all that?’ she genially asked, looking round the table.— ‘You for instance,’ turning to him, ‘Fred?’
    He blinked at having been singled out, swallowed, and asked her: ‘After all what?’
    ‘Our gaiety.’
    ‘What, yesterday?’ He was forced to empty his mouth.
    ‘By the look of it, they should have taken in money—record, I should wonder.’
    ‘Any idea how much?’
    ‘Four hundred and ninety-eight pounds, sixteen and five-pence,’ Maud volunteered.
    ‘Who asked  you?’ asked her mother. ‘And gross or net?’
    ‘Time will show,’ said the child, looking down her nose.
    Antonia mused: ‘The country’s rotten with money, if one could touch it. Why not a Fête to promote us, here?’
    Lilia, in a discouraging tone, said: ‘And what would they do here?—all jump off the rock?’
    ‘So,’ Antonia went on, this time to Jane, ‘you ended by haymaking?’
    ‘Yes I did.—What about my pay?’ the girl demanded radiantly of her father, who replied: ‘Not for less than a day’s work.’
    ‘She works in her way,’ said Antonia. ‘She’s always company, Fred.—Naturally she’ll have told you about her letter?’ ‘Had you a letter?’ he asked Jane.
    ‘Dear Fred, it’s been the talk of this morning!’
    ‘Antonia, don’t be hateful,’ said Jane calmly.
    ‘There happened to be nothing for Jane this morning,’ Lilia still more crushingly interposed. ‘I know, as I took in the post myself—what was for you Antonia, I sent up.’
    ‘Yes, thank you: bills, as no doubt you saw.—No, Jane’s didn’t come by the postman; nothing so boring. She helped herself to it, out of a trunk—we are inclined to think it was not to her.’
    ‘Of course it was not: how could it be? I told you,’Jane said, beginning to colour up, ‘it, they, fell out when I took the dress.’
    ‘You’re far too quick to assume that people are dead.’
    ‘The trunk was up in the attics, ’Jane told her father, as though in justice to him if not to herself she ought to give the entire picture, in the as nearly as possible proper light. ‘And there’s a hat up there, rather like Lady Latterly’s. (I must go back for that; I forgot it!)’
    ‘Those musty attics,’ Lilia remarked. ‘Everything up there belongs to Antonia.’ She yawned and piercingly rang a hand-bell for Kathie to bring in pudding and change the plates. Jane sat like a statue till this was done, then said:
    ‘But so does everything is this house.’
    ‘Somehow, Jane,’ said Antonia, ‘that sounds unfriendly.’
    ‘I don’t see why.’
    ‘To start with, I’ve no idea what is in the house. Never have I known, and I never want to—by this time, who could know, and however should they? Not I, certainly: God forbid! Yet I can’t help wondering what you’ve unburied—there may be much (I  should think there probably is) that we should all do far better to leave alone.’
    Lilia, who seldom addressed her elder daughter, turned her head aside to avoid any air of doing so, while she nonetheless felt called upon to explain: ‘What Antonia means, and she has the right to do so, is, why were you interfering with her things?’
    ‘Almost that,’ half-agreed Antonia smoothly, ‘though not altogether, perhaps, quite.’ Her eyes and Jane’s met across the table. Up to now Jane’s acting of the chidden and disconcerted favourite had been no more than in the convention, but now there was a tremor—resistance, query, reproach, but above all a sort of disassociation showed in her unswerving long blue gaze. Not she but Antonia had gone too far this time. The moment declared itself, and sharply—Antonia brought out her cigarettes and with nervous egocentricity lit up. (She seldom, at Montefort, smoked