Free A World of Love by Elizabeth Bowen Page B

‘I have not been here in winter for ages either.’
    ‘Oh, so that’s where you’ve always been, is it—not here? Why has nobody told me you existed?’
    ‘I don’t expect it’s very generally known.’
    ‘You go racing, surely? Why have I never seen you?’
    ‘I imagine because I am never there.’
    ‘You ought to do something about that,’ said Lady Latterly, abstractedly leaning forward to view her make-up foreshortened inside the triple glass. She reapplied mascara—in a wrapper she sat with her back to Jane.
    So many hours of the girl’s life had already gone by in women’s bedrooms that Jane, on being shown up here, felt a touch of mutiny. Not for this had she come. She would have liked to wait downstairs in the drawing-room whose theatrical emptiness had been glimpsed through an open door as she was conducted past it. However, with every possible grace she first sat down on the edge of, later reclined across the lustrous oyster quilt of the vibrant low bed, in an attitude of compliant ease. Here it was true, the scene was differently set—no smears, no ash, no feathers on the floor; instead, whole areas of undinted satin, no trace of anything having been touched or used. Here and there only, footprints like tracks in dew disturbed the bloom of the silver carpet. Here, supposed Jane, courteously looking round, must be a replica, priceless these days, of a Mayfair décor back in the 1930s—apparently still lived in without a tremor. Fancy, to know so little when one could spend so much! The necessity, the fragility and perhaps the pathos of all of this as a carapace did not strike the young girl. The bedroom gained still more unreality by now seeming trapped somewhere between day and night—this marvel of marbling and mirror-topping, mirror-building-in and prismatic whatnots being at the moment a battleground of clashing dazzling reflections and refractions. Crystal the chandelier dripped into the sunset; tense little lit lamps under peach shades were easily floated in upon by the gold of evening. Day had not done with the world yet; trees were in the conspiracy. The outdoors, light-shot, uncannily deepening without darkening, leaned through the too-large windows—a blinding ray presently splintered over the dressing table. With a cry, Lady Latterly downed tools.
    ‘I can’t see myself, you see! I can’t see a thing!’
    ‘Oh, I expect it will pass off.’
    ‘Any moment, these bastards will be arriving!’
    Jane asked: ‘Is it a large party?’
    ‘Eight or ten; it depends if some of them come,’ Lady Latterly rose, cast away her wrapper and, in little else, stood vibrating as though with an engine running.
    ‘I could help,’ said the girl, ‘if I knew where anything was.’
    ‘That is so, so sweet of you, but I’ve no idea.’ She set off on a lonely expedition to a hanging closet, and came back dragging a chiffon dress. ‘No notion how to get into this: my maid’s gone.’
    ‘For ever?’
    ‘Yes, couldn’t stand the country. None of these people have any hearts.’
    ‘I thought your butler looked kind.’
    ‘He’s going.’
    It was about two years since Lady Latterly had bought this unusually banal Irish castle, long empty owing to disrepair. Rumours which had preceded her into the country had not yet by any means died down, and were unlikely to. She was raven-haired, handsome, haunted—nobody could be certain by quite what. Her trials, since she took up residence here, had been not less interesting than her reputed fortune—the number of baths she had had installed under dry tanks, the lovers said or servants known to have left her, the failure of her house-parties to arrive or, still worse, leave again, the costly fiasco of her herbaceous border, the delays, non-deliveries, breakages, leakages and general exploitation she had endured lost nothing in telling except sympathy for her: one is as rich as that at one’s own risk. She was nouveau riche; but, as Antonia said, better