Free The Bazaar and Other Stories by Elizabeth Bowen Page B

Sibella’s bacon, because her young
man, though gentle, was quite inexorable. He said that all the twoand-threepenny was of the same quality, similar in streak and of
superlative excellence. He remarked with a shade of reproof, when
Sibella implored him to cut the rashers fine, that they always cut
rashers fine unless requested not to.
     
He took Mrs. Willyard-Lester’s name perfunctorily; he did not
seem to wonder who Sibella could be, or how so young a girl came
to be buying bacon so efficiently. Sibella went gratefully back to the
other young man. On the way she came to the fancy biscuits.
     
The fancy biscuits, occupying a table like an altar, vomited
opulently out on to plates from a cornucopia. They first became 3 noticeable to Sibella by their fragrance, sweet and nutty. They
seemed a whole mint of sugar coinage, lemon, chocolate, mauve and
pink, auburn scalloped edges of the biscuit showed around the
margin of the sugar. Sibella was hungry: the breakfast provided by
the temporary had been slighter and less appetising than Elizabeth’s.
As she approached, some vibration made a pink biscuit, balanced at
the apex, clear a plate’s rim and quiver to stillness at the very edge
of the table. Sibella, scarcely pausing, brushed the biscuit into her
jersey pocket.
     
The first young man, throughout so sympathetic, helped her pack
parcels into her satchel: they just fitted. She was so much overcome,
she forgot to give him the account address: he asked for it with
infinite delicacy. He bowed even lower as he said “Good morning,”
and when she turned again and caught his eye, he bowed again. She
passed out; the plate-glass door sighed gently as it swung behind
her. Her feet were sucked once more into the mat. Sibella, detaching
herself, came to a full stop of contemplation before the swooning
pig. Here, shifting the now weighty satchel, she ate the biscuit. She
alternately licked the sugar and nibbled the biscuity part under
neath. The surface was delectable to the tongue; its glaze was
dimming; it became gradually moist and porous. The biscuity part
had a flavour caramels missed. Sibella had never found a biscuit half
so good; she only wished she had been able to take another.
     
Suddenly Conscience woke, flinched, stared and veered gigan
tically round upon Sibella . . . How had Sibella come by the biscuit?
It was STOLEN.
     
Sibella had never met a thief; Nancy had once spoken to a
housemaid who had been later arrested. A captured thief was
dragged off, horribly resistant. A thief was less outrageous than a
murderer, but more dowdy; a person quite unclean and scabrous, like
a rat. One had only to cry “Stop, thief!” and the jolly world was after
him. He wasn’t killed, he didn’t die – he ended. And people,
munching over morning papers, said “How dreadful!” Sibella stared
at the split pig in Markham’s window with eyes that might have
scorched a brand upon its flank. Then she thought that she must fly
     
– soon, now – before they came out after her.
     
The satchel swung against her thigh at every step; the little
crocks and bottles in it rattled. In the pale social stare of April
sunshine she darted down the verdant avenues of Folkestone. When
she came out on the Leas she walked more slowly: people must
not notice. She looked straight ahead, her eyes were caverns, her
parched palate echoed with the biscuit. Her tongue, investigating
fearfully, dislodged some crumbs. She increased her pace, the
satchel whirled, the handle-strap cut deep into her arm. When she
reached her aunt’s house she stood looking up. In the first floor
window, between looped-up curtains, Mrs. Willyard-Lester sat in
profile at her writing table in the sunshine, by a vase of daffodils.
She was still immune, ignorant. She should be spared, she loved
Sibella . . . Sibella realised it would not be fair to go into her aunt’s
flat and be there arrested. Homeless she sat down on an iron seat,
stared out across the sea, and tried to