The Beautiful Visit Read Online Free PDF Page A

stiff collars; a long thin jersey; and a pair of thick shoes. I was very quiet and did not
argue over her choice of colours. She looked at me once in an unusually penetrating manner, and then led me to another part of the shop where she bought a beautiful frock, of rose-coloured silk,
with knife thin pleating round the hem and foaming soft lace at the neck; a perfectly grown-up dress. She said that now I was sixteen I must put up my hair.
    The dress fitted without any alteration, and my mother seemed gently pleased. She smiled and said would I like it? ‘There is sure to be a party and I want you to look nice,’ she
said.
    The pleasure of the frock, its glowing colour, its delicate silky polish under my fingers, its grace and beautifully fitting silk, was so sharp that my eyes were liquid; I felt myself blushing
deeply and couldn’t speak for enchantment.
    ‘I don’t think we need try any more,’ my mother was saying to the assistant, and they went out of the little room. When they came back, I was still standing, staring at myself
in the dress. When I had taken it off, the assistant swung the frock with a delicious rustle over her arm.
    ‘Thank you. It’s beautiful. The most beautiful frock. Thank you.’
    They both smiled. I had never seen my mother so much alive, and I felt a little thrill of sympathy as a cord between us: as though we had some private vague plan. I must glitter and be decked
and the reason was clouded and hidden: only they knew a little, I not at all. The assistant went away for wrappings and a pair of pink shoes: we were left alone, with the frock on the counter
between us.
    ‘Yes, it’s a pretty frock. I hope you have a good time in it,’ said my mother.
    She seemed almost wistful. Suddenly I thought of red carpets under glass porches; men in top hats with dark green silk umbrellas helping her out of carriages to the golden luxury of a house
filled with lights and tiny little pink ices and a great shining hard floor on which to dance in a rose-coloured frock – all the things I imagined she had had before she married my father.
She fingered the frock and I could feel her looking ahead for me into those ten days, and beyond, as though I were a pebble to be dropped into water and she an exhausted outside ripple from the
pebble before. I was filled with a pity and distaste for her life, and the ten days suddenly became significant and timeless. I touched the frock: there was a heavy sweet taste in my mouth and the
resistance of panic mounting to a recklessness so that I couldn’t bear to be silent.
    ‘I can’t go. I don’t want to go. Don’t make me. Say I’m ill. I am ill. I shall be ill if I go. I can’t be ill in a strange house. It wouldn’t
matter if you said I couldn’t go. Please mother I can’t go away’ ... My voice stopped. I was crying tears on to the frock, soaking little dark pink circles; and in a minute the
assistant would come back. I felt a handkerchief soft in my hand; I smelt lavender water, and the warm sweet smell of my mother: which made it much worse. I couldn’t speak, or stop crying:
and then I was in the fitting-room again, sitting on a round chair, blowing my nose, and feeling incredibly stupid and sad. My mother was treating me as a child; holding my shoulders, and seeming
beautiful and necessary again; saying that she understood, but of course I must go, and things were nice once you had started them, and I should soon be back, and so sad that it was over. Now I
must stop crying and come home and be pleased about my frock. So I stopped and we went home. I didn’t feel less terrified about going away, only a little relieved that my mother knew, and I
was not entirely alone with my fears.

 
    CHAPTER FOUR
    I was not ill. The morning arrived when I came down from my room with its bare dressing-table and my small trunk packed and strapped in the middle of the floor; and was
enjoined to eat a good breakfast.
    My father took me to the