Read Online A World of Love by Elizabeth Bowen - Free Book Online Page B

who was to know? She did not pity herself, for there is an austere point at which even self-pity halts, forbidden. Loss had been utter: not till today had she wholly taken account. Guy was dead, and only today at dinner had she sorrowed for him.
    What had now happened must either kill her or, still worse, force her to live: automatically she pressed her hand under her breast on the heart side, testing her lungs at the same time with an uncertain breath. ‘Who here,’ she went on to ask, ‘ever thinks of others? I daresay I myself could have been a more loving mother to you and Jane, but as things are, neither of you require me. I should hardly call us a family. I admit your father works hard to keep us, but sometimes I imagine he wonders why.’
    Maud said: ‘I suppose, because we were born.’
    ‘You know, Maud, I had little to say to that. You never would have been here had things turned out differently; and as it is your father had small reward.’
    ‘Halving everything up with Cousin Antonia?’ Maud said,  taking a spoon to the melting butter.
    ‘I don’t consider Jane even halved. Seldom does she permit him to speak to Jane; that is, when the girl is allowed home. Now we see what comes of it—making a game of everything!’
    ‘Cousin Antonia loses her temper at games.’
    ‘You’re too old for your age, Maud.’
    ‘Well, look at today.’
    ‘Leave today alone.’
    ‘Banging off down the avenue in our motor—’
    ‘I said, that’s enough!’
    The child, turning to stare, said: ‘Are you missing Cousin Antonia?’
    That was it: Maud had hit the nail on the head. Who, today, but Antonia was the fellow-being? Everything had the two women gone through together; not least, the being against each other. At dinner that outrage had struck at them both, and, while they tried to turn it against each other, had made them one—thirty years, yes, and more, had led up to this. Animosity itself had become a bond, whose deep-down tightening suddenly made itself felt today. Antonia’s half of the past fitted in to Lilia’s: looking back, one saw through both lives the progress of the unfinished story. Thrown together, they had adhered: virtually, nothing more than this had happened to them since their two girlhoods. Thanklessly, intimacy had insisted on being theirs: how, indeed, could either have lived without it? Through bickerings, jibings, needlings, recriminations, sulks, traps set, points scored, ignominies inflicted, they had remained in communication; their warfare met their unwilling need for contact with, awareness of one another. Almost no experience, other than Guy and their own dissonance, could they be said to have had in common; and yet it was what they had had in common which riveted them. For worse or better, they were in each other’s hands. Such a relationship is lifelong.
    Today, at this very table, had they not both trembled, both feeling the same hand once more upon the door?
    Conquering, violating Jane—born of Lilia cold, by Antonia rendered colder—what had she done or been caused to do? Ready, empty, apt—the inheritor; foreign in her beauty with the foreignness of this supplanting new time. Jane, so removed by school education, taking out her trial lesson in love! Not so much the unlikeness of Jane to herself now, but the non-correspondence between Jane’s youth and her own had drained any hope of kinship from Lilia’s motherhood. This idol of Fred’s, this golden changeling was, in so far as she belonged to anybody, Antonia’s—but see, today, how even Antonia had been out-monstered.
    ‘Wherever is Jane? Whatever is she up to?’ Lilia restlessly asked Maud.
    The child returned: ‘How old would be Cousin Guy?’
    ‘When?’
    ‘Now. Getting on, like you all?’
    ‘I never speak of him as you know, Maud.’
    The child sat rather queerly biting her thumb, till Lilia uneasily said: ‘Well, what?’
    ‘I wonder how long anyone lasts.’
    At the instant, almost without a sound,