Mrs Graham said in an absent-minded voice,
‘Mr Martin… Oh, dear I don’t think that curler is right. You’ll have to take it out again.’
Althea undid the curler and repeated Mr Martin’s name.
‘He admired the begonias – over the hedge – and you seem to have given him the idea that we should be willing to sell.’
Mrs Graham picked up the hand-mirror and twisted round to see the curls at the back of her head.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’ve sometimes thought – houses have been fetching such very good prices…’
‘We should have to buy another, and that would fetch a good price too.’
‘Oh, there wouldn’t be any need to settle down again at once. I have wondered about a cruise. I believe one meets the most charming people. The Harrisons went last year, and they enjoyed it so much. They missed all the cold weather and came home again in the spring. It sounded delightful.’
‘The Harrisons could afford it. I don’t see how we could.’
‘Oh, it would have to come out of the money we got for the house.’
‘And what do we live on when we have spent our capital?’
‘But, darling, what else is there to live on? It’s the only possible way. The Harrisons have been doing it for years – she told me so herself. Suppose it costs us five hundred pounds. I don’t know that it would, but just for the sake of argument suppose it did. I don’t know how much interest we get on that for a year, but by the time the income tax has come off there is so little left that I can’t see that it really matters whether we get it or not – and we should have had our cruise. You know, darling, it is all very well for you – you get out a great deal more than I do – but there are times when I feel that I might have better health if I could get away from Grove Hill. I said so to Ella Harrison, and she said of course what I really needed was to meet fresh people and to have more interests in life. As she says, I am really quite a young woman still. I was only seventeen when you were born, and even so, she wouldn’t believe me when I told her you were twenty-seven.’
Althea gave a short laugh.
‘Was that intended as a compliment for me?’
Mrs Graham had a small satisfied smile as she said,
‘Well, darling, I am afraid not. She just couldn’t believe I had a daughter as old as that. She said she always thought your father must have been married before, and that you were a step-child. Very ridiculous of course, but I could see she meant it.’
Standing behind her mother and looking into the mirror on the rather elaborate dressing-table, Althea could see the two faces reflected there. Even with her hair full of setting-combs and curlers Mrs Graham was a pretty woman. The legend of her marriage at sixteen was of course apocryphal. She had been twenty-one, and Althea was born the following year. Mrs Graham was therefore forty-eight, and she knew perfectly well that Althea was aware of it, but she had been moving the date of her marriage back for years. Beyond sixteen she would, unfortunately, not be able to go, and the trouble was that Althea looked her age and more. She must be induced to take more interest in herself – to encourage the wave in her hair and use a little discreet make-up. She had been an attractive girl – some people had even called her beautiful. It wasn’t a style Mrs Graham admired. Men preferred blondes, and so did she. But Thea had quite good features, and if she were to give herself a little trouble she ought to be able to take five or six years off her age. Of course it wouldn’t go down at Grove Hill, which was full of girls who had been at school with her, but on a cruise among quite fresh people where she could allude to her as ‘my young daughter’ and throw in a smiling remark about girls always being too serious when they had just left school… She went on thinking along these lines, and presently came back to Mr Martin.
‘I think I might really ask him to come and see me. He will know that I cannot get down into the town.’
Althea had finished with the combs and the curlers. She was now putting things away in the washstand drawer. She said over her shoulder.
‘Why do you want to see him?’
‘Darling, to ask him about getting a good price for the house.’
A thought knocked insistently at Althea’s mind. She didn’t want to let it in, but it was difficult to keep it out. She couldn’t help wondering whether Mrs Harrison had told her mother that Nicholas Carey was back from wherever he had been for these five long years. It meant nothing, it couldn’t mean anything, but if Mrs Graham thought that it might, it could be a reason for her interest in a cruise. She said a little more sharply than she had meant to.
‘I saw him this morning, and I told him we didn’t want to sell.’
Mrs Graham turned round on the dressing-stool. She was flushed and shaking.
‘You never told me!’
‘I didn’t want to worry you.’
‘You didn’t want to tell me because you knew what I would say!’
‘Mother… please…’
‘You knew I would like to sell. You knew I wanted to get away from this place that was making me ill.’
‘Mother!’
‘You think of no one but yourself. Do you suppose I don’t know why you don’t want to go away? You’d have jumped at it any time during these five years, but now just because Nicholas Carey is home again you don’t want to go!’ She laughed on a high, angry note. ‘Do you know so little about men as to suppose that he ever gives you a thought? Darling, it’s really very stupid if you do. Five years!’ She laughed again. ‘There will have been dozens of girls since you. That’s what men are like. Have you looked in the glass lately? When Ella Harrison told me he was back I wondered if he would even recognize you.’
‘Mother, you’ll make yourself ill.’
It was her only defence, her only weapon. If she answered back, if she let the sick hurt in her turn to anger, the scene would end as other scenes had done – her mother suddenly frightened at the storm she had raised herself, gasping for breath, alternately clinging to her and pushing her away. There would be the dosing, the getting her to bed, the telephoning to Dr Barrington. It had happened so many times, and she knew her part in it, a part in a play which has been played so often that her response to the cues had become automatic. She must keep her voice low, she must avoid saying or doing anything that could offend, she must produce the sal volatile and the smelling-salts at exactly the right moment, and when the time came she must allow herself to be forgiven.
She went through with it now. It wasn’t, after all, to be one of the worst scenes, since Mrs Graham had fortunately remembered about Mr Snead and the Harrisons coming in to bridge. She had had her hair done on purpose, and she didn’t want to waste the Sungleam, so she checked herself, pressed her hand to her heart, sighed, closed her eyes, and said faintly,
‘I’m not really strong enough for this sort of thing, darling – you ought to know that. If you will just help me to the bed…’
There was a good deal more to it than that – the sal volatile of course, the careful arrangement of pillows, the bed-jacket – ‘no darling, I think I would rather the blue one’ – the fetching of a hot-water-bottle, the spreading of a coverlet, the drawing down of the blinds, the quotations from what Dr Barrington had said upon other occasions, to the final brave ‘I shall be all right if I can be perfectly quiet for a little’ before an erring daughter was dismissed to make the cakes for tea.
THREE
MRS GRAHAM WAS able to enjoy her tea-party and the bridge which followed it. The Sungleam had done all and more than she had hoped, and really she had to admit that Thea had a talent for doing hair. The soft gold waves in front and the curls at the back were quite delightful. Now if she were to take as much trouble over her own! It had been a very pretty golden brown when she first grew up, and a natural wave is such a useful thing to have. It was a pity that she had got into such a dull uninteresting way of dressing – quite ageing. She really must be roused into taking more interest. Looking as she did now, no one would take her for under thirty. Ridiculous to suppose that she could have a daughter over thirty!