Free A World of Love by Elizabeth Bowen

Lady Latterly’s chauffeur-driven Daimler slid into view and drew up outside the windows. The man sat in profile for long enough to recover from what seemed to be a surprise, then respectfully got out: he placed his gauntlet upon the gate of the little fence. Lilia, appalled, slowly put her hands to her hair; Maud dived under the table, emerged on all fours, in this manner travelled the carpet and, at eye-level with the window-sill, made a swift reconnaissance. A corgi out for the drive and sumptuous daylight, only, occupied the back of the car; the chauffeur, now at the front door, was still failing to find either bell or knocker.
    ‘Come with a note,’ Maud said. ‘It could have come on a bicycle.’ She was off in a flash, however, to the front door, coming back again a degree more slowly to announce to Lilia: ‘It’s addressed to Jane.’
    ‘It’s for her, then. Put it down on the table.’
    ‘They want an answer.’
    ‘I can’t help that, when she’s out.’
    ‘He says her ladyship says, to wait.’
    The idea of that agitated Lilia beyond proportion: the truth was she had a neurosis about anyone standing outside a door—it linked with the sense she’d had since she came to Montefort of being besieged, under observation or in some way even under a threat. Apprehension was seldom at rest in her, nor indeed were there enough comers to Montefort to wear down fear by familiarity—no calls to the telephone for there was not a telephone, no vans delivering, seldom a passer-by, no neighbours to speak of; even the postman, during Antonia’s absences, for days together gave them a wide berth. When in winter, sometimes, the hunt ran over the land and Maud and Kathie ran whooping out, she trembling locked herself into her bedroom. Was it the place itself, her mistrust of Ireland or the uncanny attentiveness of the country which kept her nerves ever upon the stretch? What was unforeseen boded something abnormal. So, as some dread the telegraph boy, she dreaded any comer at all—men wanting Fred, tinkers with their sky-empty blue eyes annihilating their patter of talk, beggar-women sephulchral in black shawls, with the saints behind them. Worst were those who stood at the door mute, neither speaking nor going away.
    But today everything must be faced—Lilia, tightening round the mouth, pushed past Maud to take a look herself. Obliquely, round the bobbled edge of the curtain, she sized up the commissar-like figure of the chauffeur.
    ‘Giving us orders,’ she said to Maud. ‘I suppose you’re expected to find Jane?’
    ‘I could, if I liked.’
    ‘Well, you better had. We can’t have him there.’
    The chauffeur, overhearing or not, reclasped Martian gauntlets behind his back: he was staring in the other direction faceless. That uniform of his was disaster-dark among the feckless front garden roses. Maud, about to make off into the wilds with the note, squinted once more at the written-on blue envelope, remarking: ‘This time a letter is really to her.’ Lilia, rather than hear more, dived her top part out of the open window: she coughed till the chauffeur turned gravely round. ‘Go back and sit in the car,’ she over-loudly said to him, ‘why don’t you?’
    He sprang to the peak of his cap, with a ‘Thank you, madam,’ and she, surprised at his having a face at all, on the instant thought: ‘What waste of a man!’ Weakly elated after the broken nightmare, she tottered back to her place at the tea table to pour herself out yet another cup, to stare fixedly while the man obeyed her: the fence gate twanged, the car door shut. He was again in profile, within watch by her eye should she care to watch. Though with time the Daimler seemed to begin to subside from view, as though there were quicksands in front of Montefort.
    It took the whole of Maud’s cunning to find Jane. Revulsion had driven the elder sister out from the valley, shame drove her far from the river or very thought of it. Humiliation