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

her more clearly in the light which flowed up from the hall, he thought that her face contrasted strangely with her hurried way of speaking andher graceful nervous movements, and as she ran downstairs it looked expressionless, with a slack grace, like the portrait of a great beauty by a not very great painter who had caught all the listed features, but not the living stir of loveliness – the ripple, and quickening, without which beauty is … is terrifying, he decided.
    He followed her slowly down the stairs and saw her disappearing through a door with her arm round a girl’s waist. Rose’s daughter, he thought, who, Laurence had said, was ‘not all there’.
    A grandfather clock in a corner whirred asthmatically ready to strike and he started at the sound. He cast a quick glance round at the red-papered walls burgeoning with antlers and masks, barometers, warming-pans, and stepped out on to the lawn.
    Rose and Isabella were going down the border examining the plants and Isabella was pointing at them with her umbrella. She looked up at Vinny with the relief of a woman who has been left too long with someone she dislikes.
    ‘But won’t you have tea?’ Rose asked.
    ‘Mrs D. will have it ready for us at home. I mustn’t annoy her,’ Isabella said hastily. ‘And I made a special cake. We just thought it better to bring Vinny’s things before it grew dark.’
    Round the macrocarpa trees came the Tillotson children, straggling and calling, and as Vinny and Isabella walked out of the gate on to the cliff-road the Tillotson baby (too young for the sands) was coming along in his pram. They could see his mittened hands waving on either side of the hood. The young nursemaid, buttoned up in her reefer coat, stared at them boldly as they passed.
    Harry’s name was in the nine o’clock news, and Isabella insisted on listening to it and insisted on crying a little in a fussy waywhen she did: and all her bracelets jingled as she dabbed her eyes.
    Polling had not been heavy. ‘There, you see,’ she said accusingly to Vinny. ‘I am sure they will have lost to Labour. I am glad that Harry never lived to see this day.’
    Vinny was oddly unable to attend to her. For the first time in his life tears were distasteful to him and he was struggling against impatience and fatigue. The arrangement and planning, enabling him to get away on a Thursday, had tired him, he reasoned with himself. He would not entertain the idea of being bored with Isabella’s grief. He drove the notion away before it could cross the threshold.
    ‘What are you thinking?’ Isabella asked.
    ‘Of you.’
    ‘Then why frown and shake your head?’
    ‘Worry for you.’
    ‘How wonderful! If you are to worry for me, I need not. It will be a great relief. Harry always did the worrying, like carving the joint and seeing to the drinks.’
    ‘Such a silly woman when one gets to know her well,’ he decided.
    ‘Do you hate me to speak of him?’ she asked.
    ‘Hate?’
    ‘I notice that people do hate it. They take a step back, away from me, and half-close their eyes, waiting for me to stop. Evalie always does. Yet how else can I keep him going?’
    ‘You shall talk of him all the time, if you want to. And I will often do the same. I should warn you, though, that talk alters people.’
    ‘How can it, if we only say the truth?’
    ‘You won’t. You’ll leave out, for instance, the days when you were not on speaking terms. I vividly remember one of them myself, when you spoke at one another through Laurence andme. It was painful and embarrassing for us all. And when you had an argument with him, he would suddenly lower his own voice and tell you not to shout. Very adroitly he did that – one of the tricks of his trade, I expect. “Of the dead only good” is what really finishes them off. Death from romanticism. It is always destructive.’
    ‘But I could not go about telling people how we quarrelled. And we seldom did.’
    ‘I meant that when you and I