Free Complete Short Stories (VMC) by Elizabeth Taylor Page B

but only Hester noticed the new warmth, and was embarrassed.
    ‘It will soon be Speech Day,’ Muriel said. ‘Will last year’s hat do, Robert? Or would that look as if the school were going downhill?’
    ‘I should buy a new one – for your sake, not the school’s. I can’t imagine parents remembering a hat from one year to the next.’
    ‘Hester and I can’t agree with that.’
    Hester did not raise her eyes.
    For the first time, Muriel was self-conscious at Speech Day, watched the great marquee going up, arranged flowers, and finally pinned on her new cartwheel hat, feeling unusual sensations of flurried dread. ‘Exquisite!’ Rex whispered, passing her as she crossed the hall. Until that moment, the evening of the dance, for him, might never have been. He was as heedless as a bird snatching at berries along a hedgerow.
    Muriel stood beside Robert and shook hands with the parents and felt that beneath their admiration these people did not like her; fathers were over-awed and mothers were doubtful – unsure as to whether she really loved their sons as they deserved. Hester watched her; Rex watched her; Robert looked away from her; tiredness overtook her.
    In the evening, she telephoned Beatrice – her only friend, she now felt; though more than a friend: perhaps an extension of her own personality and her own experiences (sometimes sullying) greedily grafted on to the weaker parts of Beatrice’s nature. ‘Oh God, let her not be out!’ she prayed, imagining the telephone ringing and ringing in the empty house. But Beatrice, breathless from hurrying, soon answered and lost her mystery in doing so, became accessible, too easily summoned.
    ‘I was in the garden. How did it go, darling? I thought of you. Was the hat right? Did Robert love it?’
    ‘He didn’t say he didn’t.’
    ‘And tea and everything? And Robert’s speech?’
    ‘Yes. Beatrice, if I call in, will you come for a drive before dinner? My head aches. The last ones have only just gone away.’
    ‘Oh, parents!’ she said later. They drove along the lanes, down the hill past the Hand and Flowers, where Mrs Brimmer stood at the doorway in the sun. ‘Perhaps I just hate them because they have children,’ Muriel said.
    The car was open and the soft air flowed over them, lifting their hair, but none of the peace of the evening reached Muriel, who drove fast, noticed nothing, frowned at the road ahead. ‘You’ve had children, Beatrice, and you cannot
know
…’
    ‘Darling, you are overtired …’
    ‘No. For years it has been so improbable that I should ever have a child that I stopped thinking about it … I might have been shocked, perhaps, to find myself pregnant … but now, just lately, knowing for sure that I never could be, that in
this
lifetime, and for
this
woman, it couldn’t ever happen, I feel panicky, want to go back, be different, have another chance. I can’t explain.’ She changed gear badly, was driving carelessly.
    ‘Do slow down,’ Beatrice said.
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘I never think about having children now,’ Beatrice said. ‘All the business bores me enormously, like some hobby one has discarded. When I hear of younger women having them, I even feel slightly surprised, for it all seems so finished with and
démodé
. They think they are being so clever and can’t know how I lack interest. I just think, “Goodness me, are people still doing
that
?”’
    ‘But you’ll have grandchildren and then you’ll be caught up in it again.’
    ‘I suppose so.’ She looked smug.
    ‘Where are we going?’ Muriel asked. ‘I
ought
to be going home.’
    She drove on, brushing the cow-parsley in the ditch, swerving as a bird flew up suddenly from some horse-droppings on the road.
    ‘Very sorry! Then the holidays will soon come,’ she said, as if continuing the same plaint, ‘the three of us left alone together.’
    ‘Has nothing been done about her going?’
    ‘There is nowhere for her to go.’
    ‘You should go