Free The Sleeping Beauty by Elizabeth Taylor

to bed, she began to express her displeasure.
    Vinny, still with the coldness of outdoors about him, alert from his brisk walk back from Isabella’s, seemed too invigorated to sit down. He paced about the room and, as soon as his mother mentioned Emily, began to fill his pipe.
    ‘So it is Emily!’ she thought, noting this sign of discomfiture. She suddenly felt that she did not know her own son – a sensation common enough to most mothers, but new to her.
    ‘So unlike you to be off-handed,’ she said, having touched on everything – the open door, the lack of a ‘good evening’, the turned back, the whistling.
    ‘We should not drink sherry without inviting them to join us. It is under their roof, if our own sherry. Refusal or acceptance is a nice point which we must leave to them. The fact that it is an awkward situation will only mean that they will have adjusted themselves to it by now.’
    ‘As you were already drinking the sherry, I was sure you had offered it,’ he said.
    Mrs Tumulty frowned. As a boy he had never ‘answered back’, or expected to have a last word. She was disturbed, and to be more so.
    ‘To ask,’ he began, wheeling round in a great circle, confronting her, ‘to ask such questions of her … of Emily … of Miss Otway … to force her to answer … surely it was insensitive in the extreme?’
    ‘She had just told me she was in hospital.’
    ‘She
tells
nothing. Merely makes replies.’
    ‘I couldn’t know. I am sorry, Vincent,’ Mrs Tumulty said with dignity. She took off her spectacles and polished them on her handkerchief. Her handkerchiefs had name-tapes sewn on them as if she were at boarding-school. ‘I will apologise.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Please do not speak so fiercely to me.’
    ‘I thought you … stared at her,’ he said in great anguish.
    ‘Nonsense. I merely looked in a kindly way. You are wrong about everything. You know so little about life – shut up at Lloyd’s all day, a bachelor. You have never borne children … ah, you may well smile, but through one’s own pain one learns about human nature.’
    ‘I am sorry I caused you such distress.’
    ‘You are not sorry at all. No one ever is: or grateful, either.’
    ‘You were born yourself.’
    ‘I am only trying to say that I know more of the world than you … there is not a continent I haven’t explored. And where have you been? To the Winter Sports,’ she said scornfully. ‘I have also lived longer than you.’
    ‘That follows from what you were saying previously.’
    ‘I know that people would always rather seem interesting than pitiable. I am not suggesting that Miss Otway is abnormalin any way – if you like those Mona Lisa looks she may seem striking … she lacks vivacity … whether or not as a result of her misfortune neither you nor I can say … If she is sensitive, as likely as not it is on account of other people’s reticence; fear of being thought pathetic. I always think that the deformed and wounded must most of all dread to see strangers turning quickly aside, lowering their eyes, from pity or embarrassment. Very hard to bear. A good
stare
shows interest, not revulsion. I’ve been stared at all my life; by natives; by children. I do not find it disconcerting. Why should Miss Otway?’
    He did not reply.
    ‘Why should Miss Otway?’ she repeated.
    ‘You have been round the world for nothing if, when you return, you have still only yourself to measure her against.’
    ‘It is unlike you to speak so rudely to me, Vincent.’
    She rolled up her knitting and stabbed the needles through the ball of wool. ‘It is also unlike you to smoke your pipe in a drawing-room without permission.’
    His antagonism melted. He began to laugh at her, but in such a way that she smiled, too, and shook her head. She could sense that he was caught up in an adolescent fascination, unbecoming to his years, but perhaps transient.
    ‘He should have married,’ she thought. Although worried by his attitude to