Read Online The Long Shadow by Celia Fremlin - Free Book Online Page B

shaking out the glittering folds and holding it up for inspection. “Look, Dot! Look, all of you! Isn’t it gorgeous?”
    “Beautiful,” said Dot, disapproving. It wasn’t that she was shocked, exactly, or disliked the garment in itself: it was just that she could see at a glance that no good would come of it. Some women have this gift.
    Herbert’s eyes were almost popping out of his head.
    “It’s the tops!” he cried. “You’ll be quite the cat’s whiskers!”—two expressions which—as he must surely have known—his wife couldn’t endure. To have a husband who is impossible, that’s one thing, and you can complain about it to your friends without loss of status: but to have a husband who is vulgar …
    “ Herbert! ”was all she said, and he subsided at once, while Imogen, still murmuring her embarrassed gratitude, re-folded the glittering thing and laid it back in its tissue-paper under Cynthia’s self-satisfied scrutiny. You could see that Cynthia had won: but without, as yet, having any idea what the battle was about.
    It was about Ivor, of course—what else? Even dead, she couldn’t leave him alone.
    During the five days since Cynthia’s arrival at Heathrow, nearly four hours late and having mislaid her vaccination certificate, Imogen had almost forgotten about her visitor having once been Ivor’s wife. She seemed more like an Act of God, scattering scarves, luggage, presents, hairspray all over the house and wanting to sleep with her head to the north, and with three hot- water-bottles . She couldn’t eat parsnips, or anything fried, and every mealtime started with her crying out “Where are my pills?” Three lots of them there were—white ones for her nerves, yellow ones for her blood-pressure, and pink ones for—what was it?—migraine,or something. They’d been prescribed by her doctor in Bermuda, a dear, lovely man. Promise me, he’d said to Cynthia, promise me you’ll take them regularly while you’re in England; and she’d promised. If only—Imogen mused darkly—if only the dear, lovely doctor could have made her promise also to put them back in the same place at the end of each meal. But alas, he hadn’t. Handbags, pockets, drawers had to be ransacked day after day, while the food cooled on the table, and everyone felt they must stop eating so as to look as if they were helping, and Cynthia clambered back and forth past their chairs, joggling the table, and saying she didn’t want to be a nuisance.
    *
    And now here she was waiting for Imogen to say something. Stick her neck out—put her foot in it—something. That gleaming, over-generous present had been a lead-in.
    Imogen waited.
    Forgiveness. That’s what it was. Cynthia forgave her; wanted bygones to be bygones. Christmas, surely, was the time for burying the hatchet?
    Indeed yes. But what hatchet? Which bygones? Imogen didn’t want to be behindhand in Christmas charity, but she couldn’t make out what it was all about. It wasn’t as if Ivor had left Cynthia for Imogen; he’d left her for peace and quiet, and freedom, and punctual well-cooked meals. Imogen couldn’t see how forgiveness came into it, in either direction, especially after all this time.
    But this, for some reason, simply made Cynthia burst into tears, and declare that Imogen didn’t understand, had never understood: which of course was true. But where do you go from there?
    “I know you despise me,” Cynthia sobbed, “you always have! You think I’m just stupid and impractical and silly … maybe I am, but all the same, Ivor loved me, he’d have wanted me to have my rights … he loved me just the way I am! He’d had enough of clever women, his first wife was a right blue-stocking, and years and years older than him … if you’d ever met her,you wouldn’t wonder that he ended up falling for a silly, feather-brained , harum-scarum little thing like me….”
    No? Imogen reflected on this whole harum-scarum little trip all the way from