Palladian by Elizabeth Taylor Read Free Book Online

Latin on the timetable,’ he observed smoothly.
    ‘I thought … She knows scarcely any French yet.’
    ‘Latin is more important than French. Do you read Greek, Miss Dashwood?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘No, well, I shall take Sophy for Greek myself then. Perhaps in the afternoon … ’
    ‘She is a little young … surely?’
    ‘Her mother was reading Homer in the original at the age of eight.’ He drank some coffee, but he still watched her. Cassandra thought, to comfort herself, that it is always the wonderful dead who have done all the marvels.
    ‘Not that Sophy is much like her mother. In any way. Her looks even. Beauty like her mother’s rarely reproduces itself. No, Sophy is more like her cousin, Margaret.’
    His features she considered ill-matched – the two halves of his face belonging, it might have been, to different men, or as if seen through a flawed mirror, like the room itself, which was cracked by the long crooked shadows and the shifting slatted light.
    ‘When you are not looking after Sophy, what will you do?’
    He leaned forward and poured more coffee into her cup. Will you walk about in the garden with a book in your hand, which you will never read? That is all there is to do here. There is all day long and the night, too; and yet, there is only time to dip into books and turn over a few pages. You’ll find that. Whenthere is so
much
time, there is never enough. Those long summers in the Russian novels – the endless bewitched country summers and the idle men and women – making lace. Do you remember in
A Month in the Country
– that was how Natalia described their conversation – it was love conversation, too – that it was making lace … they never moved an inch to the left or right … only idle people are like that … they talk to pass the time for they know that time is only a landscape we travel across … They hope to make a busy journey of it …’ His fingers stroked between his eyes. ‘… I walk about my room – this room – and about the garden, with a book in my hand, with my finger marking the place, even, as if I were going to read at any moment. But I seldom do. Although I was not always idle.’
    ‘Why does Sophy tell untruths about her mother?’ Cassandra asked, with the sharp edge to her voice of sudden and undisciplined courage.
    ‘We all tell lies about her,’ he said calmly.
    ‘But Sophy could not remember her.’
    ‘You
can
remember what you have never had,’ he insisted.
    ‘When did her mother die?’ She said ‘her mother’, since she could not say ‘your wife’.
    ‘She died in childbirth. Sophy was the child.’ He watched her, then he went on: ‘You see, that does happen in real life as well as in the novels. Though not as commonly.’
    ‘Then she …’
    ‘Obviously Sophy can never have known her.
She
is making lace, too, perhaps.’
    She had come a long way from the life of yesterday, of the day before that – the shabby home, the traffic, the bush full of tram tickets, the crowds on the pavements, clotting, thinning out, pressing forward; travelling across time, Marion had called it, but they were really going to work, or going home from work, or shopping, or wooing one another. ‘Quite separate,’ shethought. ‘Each quite separate. That is the only safe way of looking at it. And we can never be safe unless we believe we are great and that human life is abiding and the sun constant and that we matter. Once broken, that fragile illusion would disclose the secret panic, the vacuity within us. Life then could not be tolerable.’ Marion, with his talk of lace-making, had threatened to reveal the panic and confusion and so create an intolerable world for her.
    ‘I should get back to Sophy, perhaps.’
    He stood up, but ignored her remark.
    ‘
Your
mother died too short a while ago for you to be telling lies about her either to others or yourself. It will be a strange time for you, the time between her death and the day when you begin falsifying