Free A Misalliance by Anita Brookner

sit down nicely and talk to me, then. What were you thinking of giving her by way of lunch?’ she asked Blanche.
    ‘I thought, scrambled egg and brown bread and butter, and these stewed apricots. By the way, don’t be surprised if she doesn’t answer. She doesn’t speak,’ she mouthed, over Elinor’s head.
    ‘Oh, maladjusted, is she?’ replied Miss Elphinstone in her normal tone of voice. ‘Obstinate, more like. You’ll mind your manners in this house, miss,’ she added, but when Blanche’s back was turned her long dry hand reached out and stroked the child’s cheek.
    Seated at the table, they both watched Elinor intently, as she ate her lunch with slow but careful movements. Several times Miss Elphinstone reached out and cut up the child’s bread and butter into unnecessarily small pieces. ‘My word, she’s a deep one,’ she remarked to Blanche, accepting another cup of coffee. ‘Seems to have taken to you, though.’ The kitchen, warmed by this unaccustomed activity, presented an uncharacteristic air of disorder. ‘I’ll just give you a hand with these dishes,’ said Miss Elphinstone, reluctant to leave. ‘I expect you’ll want to put her down for an hour.’
    When Blanche returned from the bedroom, it was to find Miss Elphinstone packing her gloves away in her bag and very slowly adjusting her hat in the glass. ‘I could give you a hand with her, if you like,’ she remarked. ‘I’m not wanted at church until six o’clock. And there’ll be trouble there this evening or my name’s not Sylvia Elphinstone.’ Normality required a certain amount of discussion on this matter, so that it was three o’clock before Miss Elphinstone decided to commit herself to the bus that would take her to Fulham, where her basement flat was situated one street away from Bertie’s up and coming semi.
    A child-minder, thought Blanche, moving soundlessly about the bedroom while Elinor, flushed, slept in Blanche’s own bed. And what sort of a woman would entrust her child to a comparative stranger? She is not to know that I am famously above board. And the father away. And themother going out to meet a friend, reluctant to take Elinor with her. Secret lives, she thought, determined to learn more. She telephoned the hospital, obtained Mrs Beamish’s address, which was down by the river, quite near, in fact, and decided to take Elinor home, not wishing, for a reason she preferred to leave obscure, to admit Mrs Beamish into her own flat, and in any event thinking that she would not remember the address, which she had repeated mindlessly in her anxiety to get away to her rendezvous.
    Elinor awoke beautifully from her sleep, drank a glass of milk, and had her hands and face washed. Then they set out on their walk, in the damp but bright afternoon, for it was to have the child’s hand in hers and to see the smiles on the faces of passers-by that Blanche desired, and her desire was almost equal to her curiosity. In the newsagent’s she bought a book about animated trains, which Elinor carried in her free hand. And at four-thirty they descended a set of area steps to what Blanche instantly thought of as Mrs Beamish’s grotto, having it by now firmly fixed in her mind that Elinor’s putative mother was in fact a sort of nymph and thereby related to those persons whose mythological smiles she had questioned so endlessly on those afternoons so different from this one, afternoons which usually ended in a downcast return to her own lumpen status, vainly seeking transcendence, or at least translation, in whatever wine happened to be available that evening.
    But the grotto, to which she was admitted, it seemed to her, after some interval and only after a telephone receiver was at last put down, was dusty, and flies circled above the sugar bowl when the tea-trolley was eventually organized. An imperviousness to contingencies was apparent in the mixture of style and squalor which were the most evident characteristics of the room.