Free Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner Page B

hand to strike at her when she bent down to smooth the damp curls; a devil with a thick strange voice answered her from Damian’s mouth — mocking her with answers at random.
    The doctor was there, waiting for her arrival. He had sent for a Mrs. Kerridge, who would do everything, who understood these cases.
    “The less you see them,” said he, “the better.”
    “Infection? I don’t fear it. I never catch anything,” she answered.
    He shook his head. “Even so, a stranger is best. In any fever, the essential is discipline.”
    His voice was grim, but his eyes pitied her.
    “Have you no one to be with you?” he said.
    She shook her head. She knew what would come next — a hint, an enquiry, about Frederick. She put out her will and stopped it. Later that evening, wearing a flustered mixture of everyday clothes and a best pelisse and gloves, came the doctor’s wife — a flimsy little boarding-school creature, much too young and genteel, thought Sophia, to be any good to the broad-backed bottle-nosed doctor, a man as stolidly cunning as his hairy-legged hunter. And she could hear the conversation between them. “You must go, my dear. You’re at home in a drawing-room, you’ll understand her better than I.” And then, “Oh no, Henry, I couldn’t dare such a thing. I’m far too shy.” However, the faculty had prescribed her — or perhaps she was the pink colouring. Anyhow, there she sat, crumpling a lace pocket-handkerchief, staring at Sophia and hurriedly averting her gaze to the tea-urn. “I do so feel for you. It is so terrible that you should be alone,” was as far as she got. Yet, silly, common, timid as she might be, there was a certain reviving quality about her company. Like a glass of
eau sucrée
, thought Sophia. It is deplorable that one should find solace in such wash, yet in that year of being finished in Paris under the guardianship of great-aunt Léocadie she had often found pleasure in
eau sucrée
. And those were beautiful eyes, eyes that could be admired without any social embarrassment, for eyes are enfranchised from any question of breeding, a variety of flesh so specialised as to transcend what else conditions a face into being well-bred or common, worn, a precious jewel, in any head. The lips might simper, the hands twist uneasily; but the beautiful eyes dwelt on her with an attention beyond curiosity or adulation. I never want to see you again — thought Sophia, duly begging her visitor to stay a little longer — but I shall never forget your eyes.
    But she was gone, almost running from the room after a sudden awkward embrace. “Mrs. Willoughby, I can’t express to you how I feel!” Hot, a little roughened, her lips had been like those of a child. “She might be in love with me,” said Sophia, picking up the childish glove, so creased and warm. “Now I suppose she will go home and dash off some verses in her album. For she certainly keeps an album. Poor little creature, she must get out of these sentimental ways if she is to be a doctor’s wife.” And putting away the glove in a drawer, she wrote in her notebook a memorandum that to-morrow a glove must be returned, flowers sent to Mrs. Hervey. Left to herself again, the terrors of her situation — strange that a chit like this should have been able to keep them at bay — thundered back on her again, and God was again a louring cloud, and she must do all she could to establish herself as methodical and undismayed.
    The clock struck eleven, its calm silver voice suddenly enlarging the expanse of the empty room. She looked up, raising her forehead from her hand, opening her eyes. She stared about her, searching for a bunch of dying foxgloves in a white jar. Her being had sunk back to the previous night: she was again in the sitting-room of the Half Moon Inn with the lamplight hot on her cold sweating forehead and the moths flying in at the open window, she was locked in the same desperate cold trance. But now she knew what it