The Death of the Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

slid down her thin hips, and she nervously gripped at it, pulling it up. Short sleeves showed her very thin arms and big delicate elbow joints. Her body was all concave and jerkily fluid lines; it moved with sensitive looseness, loosely threaded together: each movement had a touch of exaggeration, as though some secret power kept springs ing out. At the same time she looked cautious, aware of the world in which she had to live. She was sixteen, losing her childish majesty. The pointed attention of St. Quentin and Anna reached her like a quick tide, or an attack: the ordeal of getting out of the drawingroom tightened her mouth up and made her fingers curl—her wrists were pressed to her thighs. She got to the door, threw it ceremonially open, then turned with one hand on it, proudly ready to show she could speak again. But at once, Anna poured out another cup of cold tea, St. Quentin flattened a wrinkle out of the rug with his heel. She heard their silence till she had shut the door.
    When the door shut, St. Quentin said: “Well, we might do better than that. You did not do well, Anna—raving about those bears.”
    “You know what made me.”
    “And how silly you were on the telephone.”
    Anna put down her cup and giggled. “Well, it is something,” she said, “to be written up. It’s something that she should find us so interesting. If you come to think of it, we are pretty boring, St. Quentin.”
    “No, I don’t think I’m boring.”
    “No, I don’t either. I mean, I don’t think I am. But she does, if you know what I mean, rather bring us up to a mark. She insists on our being something or other—what, I’m not quite sure.”
    “A couple of cads—What a high forehead she’s got.”
    “All the better to think about you with, my dear.”
    “All the same, I wonder where she got that distinction. From what you say, her mother was quite a mess.”
    “Oh, the Quaynes have it: one sees it in Thomas, really,” Anna said—then, palpably losing interest, curled up at her end of the sofa. Raising her arms, she shook her sleeves back and admired her own wrists. On one she wore a small soundless diamond watch. St. Quentin, not noticing being not noticed, went on: “High foreheads suggest violence to me… .Was that Eddie, just now?”
    “On the telephone? Yes. Why?”
    “We know Eddie is silly, but why must you talk to him in such a silly way? Even if Portia were here. ‘I’m not here; I never am here.’ Tcha!” said St. Quentin. “Not that it’s my affair.”
    “No,” Anna said. “I suppose it isn’t, is it.” She would have said more, had not the door opened and Phyllis sailed in to take away the tea. St. Quentin looked at his handkerchief, frowned at the butter on it and put it away igain. They did not pretend to talk. When tea had gone, Anna said: “I really ought to go down and talk to Thomas. Why don’t you come too?”
    “No, if he’d felt like me,” said St. Quentin, without resentment, “he’d have come up here. I shall go very soon.”
    “Oh, I wanted to ask you—how is your book going?”
    “Very nicely indeed, thank you very much,” said he promptly, extremely repressively. He added with some return of interest: “What happens when you go down? Do you turn Portia out?”
    “Out of her brother’s study? How ever could I?”

    Thomas Quayne had been standing near the electric fire, holding a tumbler, frowning, trying to shake the day off, when his half-sister came round the study door. Her face—hair back in a snood from the high temples, wide-apart unfocusing dark eyes—seemed to swim towards him over the reading lamp. To come in here at all was an act of intimacy, for this was Thomas’s own room. He never studied down here, except in so far as his relaxation was studied, but the room had been called the study to suggest importance and quiet. It had matt grey walls, Picasso-blue curtains, armchairs and a sofa covered in striped ticking, tables for books, book-shelves,