Free The Drowning People by Richard Mason

persuaded it into a bob for the occasion. The work of the makeup artist was visible too, in the pink of the lips and the sparkling blue of the eye shadow. The circles beneath her eyes, if they still existed, had been expertly concealed. In a pink floral dress with puffed sleeves, she looked like an Edwardian doll and moved with the stiffness of one. She did not appear to see me.
    “You look
fantastic,
darling!” Camilla, as ever, was the first in the impromptu line that formed to greet the engaged pair. Charles, standing behind Ella in a dark suit, his hair severely parted, glowed with pleasure as his fiancée submitted to the embraces of his friend. I waited with the other guests as he and Ella, relinquished with reluctance by Camilla, came down the line, receiving the congratulations of their parents’ friends and their own.
    Ella saw me while three people still separated us. She was kissing Sarah formally on both cheeks when her eyes, straying down the line, met mine. Instantly she looked away, and I thought that I detected evidence of a real blush beneath the blusher. I glowed at this secret triumph.
    “I didn’t know you’d be here,” she said as she reached me, and made a point of offering her hand rather than her cheek.
    “Camilla invited me,” I said. “And in any case I haven’t had an opportunity yet to congratulate you and Charles.”
    She looked at me for a moment, more embarrassed than hostile, and passed on.
    Charles, when he reached me, greeted me as an old friend.
    “So this is the splendid girl I wasn’t to talk about?” I asked smiling.
    “This is the girl,” he said, looking down the line at Ella. “And she is splendid, isn’t she?”
    “Congratulations,” I said quietly.
    He moved on. The afternoon proceeded. Lunch was served on a long, silver-laden table in the dining room, a lofty, red-papered space with a large reproduction chandelier and a view of the garden. Outside it was raining. I sat between Camilla and Sarah and opposite the girl with the villa in Biarritz, who was sitting next to Charles. The food, as Camilla had confidently predicted, was excellent; the wine, too, was good; tubs of freshly picked roses, pink like Ella’s dress, filled the room with their scent. Occasionally I heard snatches of Ella’s conversation, three places down on my left, tantalizingly close.
    But it was only as the meal progressed and I heard more that I realized that every phrase I caught was precisely as it should have been; that my love was speaking with precisely the same thoughtless, practiced ease of which she had been so critical a few weeks before. Her thanks for people’s presents were pretty; her enthusiasm for the wedding plans nicely put; her secrecy about her dress conventional. Nowhere could I detect any trace of the woman with the gaunt face who had spoken to me of drowning in the darkness of the Boardman stairwell; and this transformation infuriated me. Ella, it seemed, had decided to swim with the current rather than against it; and she was swimming with a rehearsed grace which reminded me of Charles’s and impressed me as little as his had done.
    Yet I did not despair of her wholly. Something in her voice reminded me of the voice I had listened to in the park and in the alcove. I heard again the confusion of her words then, the sincerity with which she had railed against the forces that were … How had she put it? Pulling her under. And Ella pulled under had resolved to put a brave face on it. So I thought, and in so thinking I was half right; I came closer to the truth in that conclusion than in any of my flights of nineteenth-century fantasy. I was wrong only in thinking that I knew what had pulled her down.
    Tantalizing though Ella’s presence was, however, I did not forget my duties as Camilla Boardman’s partner; nor was I allowed to. The infectious laughter of the woman who had brought me, the intimate way in which she confided other people’s indiscretions, the complete