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Authors: Rebecca West
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black coats and striped trousers, the women with their hats like trays of flowers and their bright fan-tailed dresses, each couple halting every now and then to greet another couple. The women did the talking, standing face to face, digging their frilly parasols into the turf a few inches in front of them and crossing their hands on the crooks of their parasols, which showed off their graceful wrists, and tilting back their heads to keep the hat-brims from nodding over their eyes, so that they all seemed to be taking a dashing, defiant conversational line. The men, standing soberly by, might have been members of another species who kept these lively multicoloured creatures as pets and were exercising them. In each male hand there might have been a leash, a collar round every female throat under the net and lace.
But if Tania had been a sheep-dog she would never have passed the obedience tests. Though her cousin’s fingers hovered near his hat-brim, in readiness for farewell, she kept on talking to the woman opposite her with such absorption that she let her parasol fall, and did not pretend to mind when the two men bent to pick it up, but turned and beckoned to Laura and Lionel as if to tell them to come quick before the rainbow faded.
That was not surprising. It would have been a pity to miss the really extraordinary hair which shone under the stranger’s black hat. It was golden, but not like Tania’s or her own, which was dark as the gold used by Egyptian and Roman jewellers; Susie’s was like the bloom on the petals of certain flowers, the celandine and the kingcup, yellow and yet white. Her lips too were extraordinary. It was as if an artist had painted a perfect mouth and smudged it, not from carelessness, but to get a certain effect. What effect? Just that effect, just what one saw. But what did one see? One had to look again, and never was sure. Everything about this woman was unexpected, like the flowers on the tulip tree, which were up instead of down.
Nobody had ever said that Susie Staunton had anything to do with the darkness that had fallen on Radnage Square. There was no real reason to suppose that she had. When they had got home in the hot late afternoon Papa had been drinking hock and seltzer in the curtained drawing-room, and Tania had poured out her ecstasy over this beauty she had discovered. It had turned out that Papa had met her, ten or twelve years before. She was the daughter of a North Country baronet, poor and unimportant, from whom he had once bought a horse, and had been married out of the schoolroom to the son of an equally poor and unimportant peer. Papa had been introduced to her by her father-in-law when he was giving the young couple tea on the terrace before they went off to some job in Canada. The husband, Tania supplied, was now in the Caribbean; she had had to come home because she could not stand the relaxing climate.
Tania added, “I think she’s poor. Her clothes look good, but what wouldn’t, on her.”
Papa shook his head and said he had thought nothing of the woman, wondered only why his single meeting should have stuck in his memory, and teased Tania about her enthusiasms. He had never said or done anything to suggest that he had changed his opinion of Susie: never, during all the time when she was in the house every day of the week from Monday to Friday, not just for parties, but like a relative, only more so, nor during the period which followed, when she did not come to see them any more. Odd as it was that Susie should have become a part of their lives though it was only two years since they had met, it was odder still that she still seemed so, when it must be a full year since her name had been spoken in the house.
But perhaps her mother was making a mistake about something quite innocent her father had done. Tania had changed lately. In the past, if she had had one quality more than all others, it was self-control. She never lost her temper, though sometimes she
But if Tania had been a sheep-dog she would never have passed the obedience tests. Though her cousin’s fingers hovered near his hat-brim, in readiness for farewell, she kept on talking to the woman opposite her with such absorption that she let her parasol fall, and did not pretend to mind when the two men bent to pick it up, but turned and beckoned to Laura and Lionel as if to tell them to come quick before the rainbow faded.
That was not surprising. It would have been a pity to miss the really extraordinary hair which shone under the stranger’s black hat. It was golden, but not like Tania’s or her own, which was dark as the gold used by Egyptian and Roman jewellers; Susie’s was like the bloom on the petals of certain flowers, the celandine and the kingcup, yellow and yet white. Her lips too were extraordinary. It was as if an artist had painted a perfect mouth and smudged it, not from carelessness, but to get a certain effect. What effect? Just that effect, just what one saw. But what did one see? One had to look again, and never was sure. Everything about this woman was unexpected, like the flowers on the tulip tree, which were up instead of down.
Nobody had ever said that Susie Staunton had anything to do with the darkness that had fallen on Radnage Square. There was no real reason to suppose that she had. When they had got home in the hot late afternoon Papa had been drinking hock and seltzer in the curtained drawing-room, and Tania had poured out her ecstasy over this beauty she had discovered. It had turned out that Papa had met her, ten or twelve years before. She was the daughter of a North Country baronet, poor and unimportant, from whom he had once bought a horse, and had been married out of the schoolroom to the son of an equally poor and unimportant peer. Papa had been introduced to her by her father-in-law when he was giving the young couple tea on the terrace before they went off to some job in Canada. The husband, Tania supplied, was now in the Caribbean; she had had to come home because she could not stand the relaxing climate.
Tania added, “I think she’s poor. Her clothes look good, but what wouldn’t, on her.”
Papa shook his head and said he had thought nothing of the woman, wondered only why his single meeting should have stuck in his memory, and teased Tania about her enthusiasms. He had never said or done anything to suggest that he had changed his opinion of Susie: never, during all the time when she was in the house every day of the week from Monday to Friday, not just for parties, but like a relative, only more so, nor during the period which followed, when she did not come to see them any more. Odd as it was that Susie should have become a part of their lives though it was only two years since they had met, it was odder still that she still seemed so, when it must be a full year since her name had been spoken in the house.
But perhaps her mother was making a mistake about something quite innocent her father had done. Tania had changed lately. In the past, if she had had one quality more than all others, it was self-control. She never lost her temper, though sometimes she
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