A World of Love by Elizabeth Bowen Read Free Book Online Page B

you.’
    ‘“Upset”?’ he cried, knocking the word away. ‘But if you’d like to know why I’ve had enough, it’s this everlasting maunder about those attics.—You, Antonia, it must be twenty times I’ve asked you to get that stuff at the top cleared out—burned, junked, sold, shifted: I don’t care what. I’ve offered you the pack of men for the job. I need that space, I tell you! I’m short of storage.’
    ‘What would you like to put up there—oats?’
    ‘I won’t have those dragged upstairs,’ put in Lilia firmly, ‘bringing in rats.’
    Fred rolled his eyes, ‘Whoever said I said oats?’
    ‘Antonia did.’
    ‘Well, listen to what I’m saying!’
    ‘Why should I, when you’re seldom addressing me?’ Lilia paused, told Maud she might now be excused from the table (the child, however, chose to stay where she was) then added: ‘Although I must say, Fred, your objection to those attics is very sudden: it’s been my nerves they’ve been always upon—everything not only dirty but so inflammable day and night up there over our heads, with Kathie and who knows who going through with candles.’
    Maude stated: ‘Kathie is too scared.’
    ‘It’s not especially Kathie I’m referring to—though I’ve heard you prancing up there, from time to time, Maud, with your hobgoblin.’
    ‘No, I am the one,’ Jane easily said. ‘But if I’d started a fire, you’d know by now.’
    ‘We think we do,’ said Antonia. ‘That’s what’s the matter. We think we can smell burning; or at any rate the beginning of burning, smouldering. What have you done? You have an igniting touch—wouldn’t you, now, say so?’ she threw at Fred. Not yet gone, unable to go, he stood leaning heavily on his hands which gripped and shifted along the chair-back, tilting the chair up. Jane, at the instant, turned to her father also, with an air of waiting upon his verdict. He frowned; his eyes were not to be met; he told her: ‘Tell ‘em to go to blazes,’ which sounded  less like advice than a sort of plea.
    Antonia smiled: ‘Oh, Jane would never do that.’
    ‘Yes, I would. Do go to blazes, Antonia.’
    ‘But tell us—who are the letters from?’
    ‘“From”?’ echoed Lilia, then had to think again: this was hard to formulate. ‘How can they be “from” when they’re not to her?’
    ‘Still, come on, Jane. Otherwise one might guess.’
    Jane, by one of her miracles, had recovered nerve, effrontery or whatever the moment took. She first put down her spoonful of gooseberries, as a sort of concession to their anxiety, then drew her fingers slowly across her forehead, as it were as a dragnet for her thoughts. That having failed, she regretfully shook her head, till all at once she grew bright with the perfect answer. ‘They are simply signed with a squirl.’
    Antonia, stone-still while Jane deliberated, jumped as though something had struck the table: ostentatiously, however, she still said nothing, merely nodding across at Jane once or twice. In what had become an all-round hush Maud said grace loudly, then left the dining-room—in the stone passage outside she was to be heard scuffling and sparring with her familiar, Gay David, wrongly referred to by Lilia as a hobgoblin, who was not admitted by her to family meals. Smells of old oil from the incubator outside the kitchen for the first time travelled in through the open door: all the senses were sharpened. Fred raised his eyebrows, whistled a silent bar, let go the chair-back and followed Maud out. He was to be felt gone. Lilia it was who now, in a stony voice declared: ‘In that case, those letters are mine.’
    ‘Whatever makes you think that?’
    ‘The way you go on Antonia. And what Jane said.’
    ‘Poor Jane’s said practically nothing.’
    Lilia said: ‘It’s been more than enough.’
    ‘I only do wish,’ said the girl, ‘that I had said absolutely nothing. Then there need never have been this. From now on I shall; I mean I shall not.