|
Mrs Fortescue
495
good nature.
'Well all right, dear,' she went on, 'just a little one to keep you
company. You're like your Dad, you know that?'
'Is that so?' He came out of the shop with the bottle under his
arm, shutting the door behind him and locking it. The stairs glim-
mered dark. 'Many's the time he's offered me a nip on a cold night,
though not when your mother could see.' She added a short trium-
phant titter, resting her weight on the stair-rail as if testing it.
'Let's go up,' he said insinuatingly, knowing he would get his
way, because it had been so easy this far. He was shocked it was so
easy. She should have said: 'What are you doing out of bed at this
time?' Or: 'A boy of your age, drinking, what next!'
She obediently went up ahead of him, pulling herself up.
The small room she went into, vaguely smiling her invitation he
should follow, was crammed with furniture and objects, all of
which had the same soft glossiness of her clothes, which she now
went to the next room to remove. He sat on an oyster-coloured
satin sofa, looked at bluish brocade curtains, a cabinet full of china
figures, thick, creamy rugs, pink cushions, pink-tinted walls. A
table in a corner held photographs. Of her, so he understood, pro-
gressing logically back from those he could recognize to those that
were inconceivable. The earliest was of a girl with yellow collar-
bone-length curls, on which perched a top-hat. She wore a spangled
bodice, in pink; pink satin pants, long black lace stockings, white
gloves, and was roguishly pointing a walking-stick at the audience
— at him, Fred. 'Like a bloody gun,' he thought, feeling the shameful
derisive grin come on to his face. He heard the door shut behind
him, but did not turn, wondering what he would see: he never had
seen her, he realized, without hat, veil, furs. She said, pottering
about behind his shoulder: 'Yes, that's me when I was a Gaiety Girl,
a nice outfit, wasn't it?'
'Gaiety Girl?' he said, protesting, and she admitted: 'Well that
was before your time, wasn't it?'
The monstrousness of this second
wasn't it,
made it easy for him
to turn and look: she was bending over a cupboard, her back to
him. It was a back whose shape was concealed by thick, soft,
cherry-red, with a tufted pattern of whirls and waves. She stood up
and faced him, displaying, without a trace of consciousness at the
horror of the fact, his sister's dressing-gown. She carried glasses
and a jug of water to the central table that was planted in a deep
496
- Doris Lessing
pink rug, and said: i hope you don't mind my getting into some-
thing comfortable, but we aren't strangers.' She sat opposite, hav-
ing pushed the glasses towards him, as a reminder that the bottle
was still in his hand. He poured the yellow, smelling liquid, watch-
ing her face to see when he must stop. But her face showed nothing,
so he filled her tumbler half-full. 'Just a splash, dear . . . ' He
splashed, and she lifted the glass and held it, in the vague tired way
that went with her face, which, now that for the first time in his life
he could look at it, was an old, shrunken face, with small black
eyes deep in their sockets, and a small mouth pouting out of a tired
mesh of lines. This old, rather kind face, at which he tried not to
stare, was like a mask held between the cherry-red gown over a
body whose shape was slim and young; and the hair, beautifully
tinted a tactful silvery-blonde and waving softly into the hollows
of an ancient neck.
'My sister's got a dressing-gown like that.'
it's pretty isn't it? They've got them in at Richard's, down
the street, I expect she got hers there too, did she?'
'I don't know.'
'Well the proof of the pudding's in the eating, isn't it?'
At this remark, which reminded him of nothing so much as his
parents' idiotic pattering exchange at supper-time, when they were
torpid before sleep, he felt the ridiculous smile leave his face. He
was full of anger, but no longer of shame.
'Give me a cigarette, dear,' she went on, 'I'm too tired to get up.'
'I don't smoke.'
if you could reach me my handbag.'
He handed her a large crocodile bag, that she had left by the
photographs, i have nice things, don't I?' she agreed with his un-
spoken comment on it. 'Well, I always say, I always have nice
things, whatever else . . . I never have anything cheap or nasty, my
things are always nice. . . . Baby Batsby taught me that, never have
anything cheap or nasty, he used to say. He used to take me on his
yacht, you know, to Cannes and Nice. He was my friend for three
years, and he taught me about having beautiful things.'
'Baby Batsby?'
'That was before your time, I expect, but he was in all the papers
once, every week of the year. He was a great spender, you know,
generous.'
is that a fact?'
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
