The Lotus House by Katharine Moore Read Free Book Online Page B

it’ll simply be a nuisance having her around. I’ll fetch her in plenty of time for the new school term,” she had said.
    Margot herself considered Harriet her second big mistake, worse of course because the child was lacking in attraction, which she could not have foreseen. Still, it had been foolish to risk so much merely because she hoped that a baby would bring her the sort of fulfilment that it was said to supply to most women. The first mistake was, of course, her marriage, which she rushed into to escape from a home which was simply a wearisome battlefield.
    Her father came from humble origins but possessed a good business head and had raised himself to the position of land agent on a large estate in the West Country — “my father’s place in Dorset” as Margot was wont to refer casually to it. He had married a town-bred wife whom he had admired for her delicate prettiness, but this soon withered from boredom and indulgence, and she had developed a waspish neurotic temperament. They kept together, Margot supposed on looking back, partly because divorce then was both more difficult and more expensive — her father was always mean about money — and partly because mutual dislike seemed to have habituated them to a habit of scoring off each other, which brought a certain spice into their relationship. Their daughter became a pawn in these unpleasant games. Her looks and her intelligence made her a valuable asset as a possession. Incessant forays took place over her education, clothes, friends, almost every possibledebatable point. Her father, who held the purse strings, generally came off as the victor, but her mother scored points by running up large housekeeping and dress bills and by occasionally staging a bout of frightening hysteria. Margot learned from an early age to play off one parent against another and that, both from them and from most other people, she could get what she wanted by the exercise of her beguiling charm. But then, what did she want? Certainly not Dick Harper after the first year, nor motherhood apparently. Lovers? Too easy to subjugate and too tiresome when enslaved. Success in her business? Yes, because she despised failures, but somehow this wasn’t enough. Meanwhile there was Andrew whose demands were so simple, whose detachment intrigued her, and whose brains commanded her respect.
     
    Aubrey Stacey was busy hanging pictures. Over the fireplace in the room which had been the old night nursery, he hung a college group. He had gone up to Oxford because his twin brother had been a Trinity scholar at Cambridge, where he had taken a double first. Almost as soon as they outgrew their babyhood, Aubrey had realized that he was fated to play second fiddle to Michael — if indeed he counted at all in his mother’s eyes. “Is that you, darling?” he heard her cry sometimes when he had come home from school and he knew enough to answer: “No, it’s me, Mother.”
    His father, on the other hand, had always been painfully determined to play fair. “It’s rough luck on the boy,” he would say to his friends, “that Michael happens to be rather a brilliant fellow all-round, though I say it myself. Aubrey should have been a girl, he’d have made a good one — he’d not have felt the competition then and it would have been natural the way his mother feels — mothers and sons, you know, and I would have liked a daughter myself too, but we’ve got to take what comeshaven’t we, till the scientist chaps have changed all that for us. Anyway, Aubrey will make it, I always say.”
    What “making it” meant exactly had never been quite clear. A minor exhibition in English to one of the less distinguished colleges at Oxford, a respectable second-class degree, one need not be ashamed of these, but they were perhaps not exactly “making it”. Nonetheless, he had been happier at Oxford than at any other period of his life. He had been adopted by a set aspiring to the creative arts, had