A World of Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

arrived, stared, resignedly took Antonia by the elbow and got her through the crowd to the parked car. ‘Sick?’ was all he asked, on the drive home. ‘Only of everything,’ she replied coldly. Once at Montefort, she uncorked the whisky, he got back into working clothes and was seen no more.
    Left behind, Lilia resorted to spending money. The dishevelled stalls by now offered not much choice, but what did remain was being knocked down. She acquired a handpainted crock of bath salts, some particles of coconut fudge, a nosegay of woollen flowers to pin on and a Lalique-like amber glass salad bowl. Having given up hoping to know where Jane was, she then set off to track down Maud, to ask her how they ever were to get home. But the child, found at the clock golf, merely reiterated loudly: ‘Cousin Antonia owes me much more money!’
    ‘Or does your father intend us to stay all night?’
    ‘I don’t know.—What have you got in the bag?’
    ‘Nothing for you.’
    ‘Oh, sweets.’
    ‘Oh, don’t argue, Maud! And do come: it’s time we were going.’
    Maud, for some reason, respected this academic statement: she gave a finishing lick to her ice cream cone, stacked up her punnets of oozing strawberries and preceded her mother to the car park, where they stood about in the dust watching others go. ‘If you ever knew anyone,’ Maud remarked, ‘we’d have got offered a ride home.’ Lilia expected to faint, so it came at last to their placing themselves under compliment to a stranger, who detoured to drop them at the Montefort gates. ‘No idea there was anyone living here,’ he confessed, with a glance of renewed amazement at Lilia’s hat. Maud undid the chain, Lilia gave a reproving bow: mother and child set off down the extinct avenue. And there, of course, in front of the house was Fred in the act of starting the Ford to fetch them! Lilia swept indoors past him without a word, hid the fudge in the hall clock and went on into the drawing-room.
    Inside the drawing-room, facing the door, a mirror embosked in gilt ferns filled up an alcove. Lilia therefore advanced to meet a figure fit for the Royal Garden Party—white cart-wheel hat, gloves to the elbow, crepe floral gown. She and her image confronted each other and the day’s disillusionment, of which the marvel was that it should recur—summer after summer, the same story. Who else was to know what had been hoped for, always, in spite of all? Disappointment for ever is fresh and young—she could no longer sustain it; she turned away and, vanishing from her own eyes, starting frowning and fretting over a tea-stain on a fingertip of one of her white silk gloves. Damage: that was what it all came down to!
    Air had died in here, the windows having been bolted before they started for the Fête; nor indeed was the drawing-room often resorted to. Lilia had failed with it—cretonne tacked to the window-seats, one or two ruched taffeta cushions and a magazine-rack only, today, survived from her few attempts to bring the room into line with her ideas. As against that, she had wreaked a negative vengeance on what she found here, on anything which might have been here before. Any charm of a chattery circle had been broken by condemnatory pushing apart and back of armchairs, ‘occasional’ chairs and sofas; exposed to fade still more, an expanse of carpet remained for Kathie to sweep when she had time; and the effect, according to mood, was that either there had lately been a catastrophe or that there was about to be a performance. Ornaments—ruby Bohemian goblets, Dresden cupids, cameos, shells, pagodas, fruit-painted china, filigree silver-ware—detected in a conspiracy to collect dust, had been banished to cabinets behind whose misted glaze they each year more dolefully disappeared. Water-colours, whose justification was that they covered stains on the walls, here or there dotted the damask paper; and pelmets, again with gilded ferns, topped off the windows’