The Beautiful Visit by Elizabeth Jane Howard Read Free Book Online Page B

with a kind of brilliant modesty, infecting us with her success and happiness, and enriching all their tales with her attention and concern so that one watched
her, wholly enchanted. She was quite beautiful; triangular eyes with flecks of green, shining dark hair, a thin pointed mouth, pointed eyebrows to match, and a skin so milky pale that if you were
to touch it it would hardly be there. I could not take my eyes off her. I sat and watched her neck twisting (she wore a tight gold chain round the hight collar of her blouse), and neat head above
it. I sat and watched until my fingers were cramped in the handle of my tea-cup and Lucy leaned forward and said ‘ Isn’t she lovely!’ in a warm rush. Everyone laughed. Her
mother said ‘Nonsense.’ I flushed. Deb sat quite still, half smiling and not at all shy.
    After tea, we all went to the morning-room which everyone left in a joyful state of confusion. The jigsaw was still on the floor, half completed; it was very big, and Toby, the fat little boy,
would allow no one to touch it but himself. He was very slow and immersed in fitting pink roses all over a thatched cottage. When Lucy found the door, he growled and crossed the room with his hands
in his pockets in a solemn rage, and one tuft of hair sticking straight up from the crown of his head.
    Lucy’s mother said, ‘Don’t dear,’ calmly. She was embroidering a hideous peacock with exquisite deliberation; admiring Elspeth’s butterfly transfers, crooked and
smeared in a large scrap book; reminding Gerald and Lucy about the names of ponies (they were absorbed with an old collection of plaited horses’ hair kept, with labels attached, in a weak
cardboard box); advising Deb over colours for her cross stitch, who, I noticed, listened charmingly and never took the advice; hearing Elinor’s poem that she was learning, and being quite
unruffled when the recital always stuck in the same place; then talking to me, asking me about my mother and my sister and brothers, what I did, and which I liked best, town or country; making
everything I’d done seem important and interesting, so that I could not imagine why it had all seemed empty before.
    ‘I think it is very brave of you to come,’ she said. ‘Come along, darling, finish the roses.’ Toby came and smiled a beautiful slow smile, shook himself like a puppy, and
fell on the floor beside his great work. ‘He does it over and over again. No, darling, a host of golden daffodils. Start again to yourself. And are your brothers all at the same
school? That must be nice. Punch he was called, Lucy dear. The funny pink pony with a brindled tail who used to flybuck.’
    ‘Strawberry roan,’ they chanted, and Gerald wrote another little ticket.
    ‘All right, Toby, I won’t do it but you should try and finish the edges first. And do you play the piano? You must play to us some time. Not today; wait until there are a lot of us
and then we can dance. We all want to hear you. Well, darling, call it a Tortoiseshell, and do another with more water for a Painted Lady. Will you ring the bell, dear? I want to speak about Aunt
Edith’s sarsaparilla. No, Toby, that bit is lost. Blue, Deb, like the other side; or red like the border; you’ll find them both in my Indian Bag.’ Deb abstracted a thread of green
with a charming smile.
    Feeling completely part of the great warm untidy room I asked if after all I might play the piano. Of course I might. I played a rather scratchy piece of Scarlatti, and remember feeling faintly
shocked when no one paid the slightest attention. Elspeth had just upset her transfer water and was mopping it up with a skein of pale blue wool, and Elinor was half-way through the daffodils,
still holding her breath for the last verse. However, I found it much nicer from the playing point of view; it was much more enjoyable to approve and criticize oneself, to play back, as it were,
only to one’s own ears. I stopped after a bit. There was a