Complete Short Stories (VMC) by Elizabeth Taylor Read Free Book Online

were,’ he said.
    She was stunned. She slammed the drawer shut and stood up. She thought: ‘Those are the worst words he ever spoke to me.’
    ‘I shall have to go,’ he said. ‘I suppose I can leave this till this afternoon.’ He held up the letter in his hand. ‘I didn’t want to discuss it at lunch, that was all. The point is that Lady Bewick hoped we could take a partner for her niece who is staying there – she thought we could ask one of the staff. I wonder if Hugh …’
    ‘But he’s so boring.’
    ‘We need not stay together.’
    ‘Take Rex.’
    ‘Rex?’
    ‘Why not? He dances well.’
    ‘But he’s so impossible. You have never disguised your scorn for him.’
    ‘He would be better than Hugh – not so achingly tedious.’ Irritability, the wish to sting, underlined her words. ‘You are achingly tedious, too,’ she seemed to imply. Her voice was higher pitched than usual, her cheeks flushed. He looked at her in concern, then said: ‘All right. Three tickets, then.’ He put the letter in his pocket and turned away.
    As soon as he had gone, but too late, she broke into weeping.
    They dined at home before the dance. Muriel was intimidating, but uncertain, in too many diamonds. When she brought out her mother’s jewels, Robert always felt put in his place, though never before had they all come out at once. Her careless entrance into the drawing-room had astonished him. She was shrugged up in a pink woollen shawl, through which came a frosty glitter. Rex’s look of startled admiration confirmed her fear that shewas overdressed. ‘She has never erred in that way before,’ Robert thought: but she had shown several new faults of late; flaws had appeared which once he could not have suspected. There was, too, something slyly affected about the cosy shawl and the stir and flash of diamonds beneath it.
    ‘It is only a countrified sort of dance,’ Robert told Rex. His words were chiefly for Muriel, who should have known. ‘Nothing very exciting. Good of you to turn out.’
    He hoped that Hester would now feel that she would miss nothing by staying at home, that he could not have gone himself, except as a duty; or asked anyone else to go, except as a favour. His stone, which should have killed two birds, missed both.
    Hester, wearing a day-frock and trying to look unconcerned, managed only a stubborn sullenness – a Cinderella performance Muriel thought wrongly, underlined by Rex’s greeting to her – ‘But you are coming with us, surely?’ – when her clothes made it quite obvious that she was not.
    Robert’s shame, Muriel’s guilt, Hester’s embarrassment, seemed not to reach Rex, although for the other three the air shivered, the wine-glasses trembled, at his tactlessness.
    ‘Too bad,’ he said easily. ‘Well, there is no doubt that you are coming.’ He turned to Muriel, his eyes resting once more upon all her shimmering glitter. (‘Ice’, he called it, and – later, to Hugh Baseden – ‘rocks the size of conkers. Crown jewels. The family coffers scraped to the bottom.’)
    The glances, which he had meant to appear gallant and flattering, looked so predatory that Muriel put her hand to her necklace in a gesture of protection, and a bracelet fell into the soup. She laughed as Rex leant forward and fished it out with a spoon and fork and dropped it into the napkin she held out. Her laughter was that simulated kind which is difficult to end naturally and her eyes added to all the tremulous glint and shimmer of her. Hester, coldly regarding her, thought that she would cry. A Muriel in tears was a novel, horrifying idea.
    The bracelet lay on the stained napkin. ‘The catch must be loose. I shan’t wear it,’ Muriel said, and pushed it aside.
    ‘That will be one less,’ Robert thought.
    After dinner he had a moment alone with Hester.
    ‘All rather awkward about this dance. I hope you don’t mind, my dear. Don’t like leaving you – like Cinderella.’
    Hester could see Muriel,