The Sleeping Beauty by Elizabeth Taylor Read Free Book Online Page A

jealously fostered and guarded by husbands.
    ‘If it is raining,’ Rose said, ‘you could go up this staircase and across the landing – the bathroom is there – and then down the main stairs to the dining-room; but if it is fine, it is quicker to go round the garden way.’
    Seeing Vinny touching the catches of his suitcase shehurried out, through the shrubbery to the lawn, where Isabella was walking up and down in front of the house.
    Vinny spread about a few of his possessions, then opened the door leading to the stairs. He found himself in a sealed-off part of the house beyond the kitchen. A tap dripped and a cistern hissed. There was a depressing smell of scrubbed deal, still wet. At the top of the stairs, which were covered with old linoleum, was a baize-padded door. He imagined his room having once been a housekeeper’s sitting-room.
    To get to the front of the house, without climbing the stairs, he could see that he would have to go through other rooms and that Rose had shown she was unwilling for him to do so. Even using the staircase made him feel guilty and he hoped that he met no one.
    It was the dead time of the day, just before four o’clock, and the landing was full of shadows and deserted, with all its doors closed. A draught lifted a mat outside one bedroom. It looked like a poor spent animal lying at a door and panting its last. Even the door itself shook frantically, tugged by the wind, and he visualised the bleak room beyond it, with curtains flying out like flags from the opened, seaward windows.
    It was the dreariest house, he thought; an inherited, unaltered house. The only touch upon it for years had been the shabby touch of time. Nothing lively was added: no one had put up a new picture or tried a different colour anywhere. ‘I am too much for them,’ the house cried, and the exquisite Sheraton chest-of-drawers on the landing had a bloom upon it, and its oval handles were tarnished. This Vinny did not like to see. He loved furniture; and the love, cancelling out his recent caution, took him across the landing so that he might run his hand over the bow-front and lift the brass handles. He forgot Isabella on the lawn and simply desired to spend half an hour polishing the mahogany. He knelt down to examine the boxwood inlay andwas still on his knees when one of the landing doors suddenly opened. It was the one behind the fretted mat.
    Was he always, he wondered, to be in the wrong with this woman – running into her in the dark; wrong in his dreams; and seeming now, at best, a ridiculous, an insufferably prying interloper? She gave no sign of recognition or surprise, and when he stood up and began to explain and apologise, glanced at him with indifference and then bent to straighten the mat. He thought: ‘I have never heard her voice, except in my dreams’; and when she spoke he was amazed because it was unexpectedly light and faltering.
    ‘Rose has other pieces you should see – a William-and-Mary tallboy with beautiful marquetry in the drawing-room.’
    He especially disliked the period; for it seemed to him un-English – an adjective he often fastidiously applied to anything too decorated.
    He remembered Isabella on the lawn. ‘I should like to see it, another time.’
    She rested her hands on the banisters and leaned over, looking down into the hall. Her hair, like her sister’s, was knotted back; but with what a difference, he thought: since it seemed arranged not merely for neatness but from a habit of beauty.
    He wondered why the phrase ‘habit of beauty’ had occurred to him. Her beauty had not gone: it was, in fact, the staggering perfection he had first thought it. Her dark dress dramatised the whiteness of her skin and her flawlessness. Yet the feeling that her beauty was over persisted in him, however much the beauty itself remained before him as contradiction.
    ‘I am here,’ she called, and she drew back from the banister-rail and went to the head of the stairs. Seeing