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

came back from the tool-shed. The piquancy of her own humour delighted her and she returned to the allusion again and again, puzzling Hester – who expected drunkenness to affect the limbs, but not the wits, and was exasperated as the young so often are at failing to read an extra meaning into the remarks of their elders.
    Through a kissing-gate they came into a wood of fir trees. Miss Despenser slid and scuffled down the sloping track which was slippery with pine-needles. Jagged white flints had surfaced the path like the fins of sharks, so that Miss Despenser tripped and stumbled until Hester took her arm. She thought that they must look a strange pair and – such was the creaking darkness and mysterious resinous smell of the wood – half-feared that as the path curved they might see themselves coming towards them through the trees, like a picture of Rossetti’s she remembered called
How They Met Themselves
. ‘I shouldn’t care to meet myself,’ she said aloud, ‘in this dark place.’
    ‘You wouldn’t recognise yourself. You are much too young. When at long last you really learn what to look for, you will be too old to be alarmed.’
    ‘I didn’t mean that I should, or could; just that I’d hate it.’
    ‘I meet myself every so often. “You hideous old baggage,” I say, and I nod. For years I thought it was someone else.’
    ‘This wood goes on and on,’ Hester said nervously.
    ‘Ah, you are frightened of adders.’ When she had finished laughing, Miss Despenser said: ‘When I go into the town to get the cat’s meat, the chancesare that as I go round by the boot shop I see myself walking towards me – in a long panel of mirror at the side of the shop. “Horrid old character,” I used to think. “I must change my shopping morning.” So I changed to Fridays, but there she was on Fridays just the same. “I can’t seem to avoid her,” I told myself. And no one can. Go on your holidays. You take yourself along too. Go to the ends of the earth. No escape. And one gets so bored, bored. I’ve had nearly seventy years of it now. And I wonder if I’d been beautiful or clever I might have been less irritated. Perhaps I am difficult to please. My mother didn’t care for
herself
, either. When she died, the Vicar said: “It is only another life she has gone to, an
everlasting
life.” An extraordinarily trite little man. He hadn’t got much up here.’ She tapped her forehead and stumbled badly. ‘I said to him: “Oh dear, oh dear, for pity’s sake, hasn’t she had enough of herself?” I asked. He couldn’t answer that one. He just stared at the glass of sherry I was drinking, as if he were taking comfort in the idea of my being drunk. “I believe in personality,” I said. “You believe in souls.” That’s the difference between us. Souls are flattened out and one might very well spend an eternity with one’s own – though goodness knows what it would be like – as interesting as a great bowl of nourishing soup. I always think of souls as saucers, full of some tepid, transparent liquid. Couldn’t haunt anyone. Personalities do the haunting – Papa’s for instance. Tiresome, dreadful things. Can’t shake them off. Unless under the influence, of course.’
    ‘Of drink, I suppose,’ Hester thought.
    ‘Of drink,’ the old lady added.
    ‘It
is
a gruesome place. I like trees which shed their leaves.’
    The bark of the trees was blood-red in the dying light and there were no sounds of birds or of anything but branches creaking and tapping together. Then the pink light thinned, the trees opened out and blueness broke through, and in this new light was a view of a tilted hillside with houses, and a train buffeting along between cornfields.
    ‘And there is my home,’ Miss Despenser said. She scrambled down the bank into a lane and, as she brushed dust and twigs from her skirt, she crossed the lane and opened a gate.
    Laurels almost barred the way to the little house, which was of such