Free The Sleeping Beauty by Elizabeth Taylor Page A

Emily, she was at the same time revived by this concern and went to bed with a great taste for the morrow.
    Vinny did not go at once to bed. For some time, he had longed to have the drawing-room to himself. His mother had left the door open as if expecting him to follow her, and, pacing about the room, pretending to be reflectively smoking his pipe, he managed to elbow the door nearly shut; but dared not deliberately latch it. As if he were being watched, he meandered aboutthe room, puffing and humming; sniffed at a bowl of jonquils; folded a discarded newspaper, and was at last fascinated by a large pink sea-shell lying on the top of a bookcase. He picked it up, swung it about at arm’s-length, and then held its freckled lip to his ear as if he were listening to the sea. With the other hand he reached furtively round behind some Dresden figures and drew out two photographs in a leather holder. If the door was opened, he thought he could replace the photographs unseen and would say, in a half-sheepish, half-boyish way, holding up the shell: ‘These things always intrigue me …’ or some other trite remark, to show that he felt himself caught out simply in a piece of childishness. The photographs, however, so beguiled him that when he suddenly sensed somebody in the doorway, he spun round guiltily, dropped the leather folder to the floor, snatched his pipe from his mouth and stood facing Rose in consternation, the shell held out foolishly in his hand, as if to propitiate her.
    She glanced over her shoulder into the hall, then shut the door. When he had picked up the photographs, she crossed the room and took them from him in rebuke.
    His elaborate precautions so often miscarried, because the curiosity and fascination, which made them necessary, also made him preoccupied. Rose, he could tell, was much more annoyed by his prying than was reasonable.
    ‘I can’t resist photographs.’
    It was worse than having to explain about the shell, and it was still not the truth.
    ‘You are a menace to my happiness,’ Rose thought. She looked at the folder in her hands and then opened it. Her own face seemed a creamy-sepia blur. At nineteen, her mouth drooped innocently; her eyes were unclouded by the terrors of love. She looked at the camera with a mingling of trust and doubt, as if crying out: ‘Be good to me!’
    The companion photograph had slipped sideways behind the mica covering and she straightened it.
    ‘Who is it?’ Vinny asked. His rough voice sounded desperate.
    ‘My sister.’
    He did not speak.
    She handed the photograph to him, with an abrupt gesture as if she were thrusting upon him something disgusting which would hurt him only as he deserved. She watched his shock with hatred.
    He wondered how the camera could make such gaiety static. The expression seemed so fleeting that he half waited for it to change, for the mouth to straighten into gravity and the raised eyebrow to relax. He imagined her teasing the photographer, saw the poor flustered man retreating under his black tent, dazzled and confused. Her eyes did not cry out: ‘Be good to me!’ but the tenderness of her expression so triumphed over the mischief that instead she seemed to affirm: ‘I will be good
to you
.’ ‘But in a minute,’ her eyes added. Then, he thought, the face had vanished; before the minute came.
    ‘Well?’ said Rose.
    He had so rarely known hatred in his life that he was now overwhelmed by the sensation he felt towards Rose.
    ‘She looks gay and lovely.’
    ‘You would not have recognised her.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘No one could.’
    ‘Why do you leave this photograph here?’
    ‘I hid it once, but the day I went to fetch her from hospital I brought it out again. I saw that it was worse for it not to be there.’
    ‘Yes, of course.’
    ‘When people try to face the truth one must face it with them.’
    ‘And the truth, after all,’ Vinny said, ‘was only that one kind of beauty replaced another.’
    ‘People did not