Free The Drowning People by Richard Mason Page A

and gratifying attention she paid to my responses, all combined to put me in an agreeable mood. Ella was not the only one, I thought, who could conceal her feelings behind a flow of seemingly effortless social patter. I would show her that I was as adept as anyone. And so I talked—to Camilla, to Sarah, to the girl with the villa in Biarritz—all the while wondering how to get Ella to myself for a moment and resolving not to leave the house without at least making an attempt to do so.
    Sarah Harcourt, rigid in blue linen on my left, spoke to me of her distaste for pink roses. Her criticism, inaudible to her hostess, was more for Pamela than for Pamela’s flowers, I suspected; and I thought that I understood where the disapproval came from. Pamela, for Sarah, was an invader. To begin with, her accent was American and thus hardly to her credit; but what was more to be deplored was her self-conscious attention to the anglicizing of every other personal detail. Pamela’s hair, piled above her head, was impressively Edwardian; her jewelry was heavy and old-fashioned; she addressed the caterer’s maid who waited on her with just the correct amount of polite disdain. All this, I could see, irritated Sarah almost as much as her cousin’s charming conversation irritated me. And although she said nothing, I felt within her the hostility to foreigners, particularly usurping foreigners, which is latent in certain English souls. She sat by my side, hardly touching the food which was put before her, splendidly regal. I noticed that no one spoke to her but that her presence was very much felt, and I thought again that she was someone to be treated with deference but no intimacy: an outsider by choice and circumstance. Even Camilla, though nothing and no one could upset her iron self-assurance, seemed disinclined to engage Sarah in conversation, sensing her to be a difficult conquest. And I, looking at the set lines of Sarah’s mouth and wondering how I could ever have found in her an exact likeness of Ella, felt sorry for her in a way I would never have dared to express. Sarah was the prisoner of her own self-control, I thought; and today, thinking back on her then, I see that I was right.
    Only once did the girl with the villa in Biarritz attempt conversation with Sarah, and her choice of opening was unfortunate.
    “Do you know,” she said from across the pink roses, “I never knew that Ella had a sister. Are you very close?”
    There was the slightest suggestion of a pause; but it was frosty enough to halt the conversation around it in the moment before Sarah smiled and said that she and Ella were only cousins.
    “What? But you could almost be twins,” the girl blundered on, smiling still.
    “We could not be twins,” came the acid reply, just loud enough for Ella to overhear; and by the forced cheerfulness of her conversation it seemed to me that the object of the slight had heard and was consciously ignoring it.
    “Oh you could be,” the hapless girl persisted. “You’re almost identical.”
    “But our styles are quite different,” came the sweetly damming reply; and Sarah leaned back in her chair, languid and serene, as if inviting comparison between her sleek lines and Ella’s painted cheeks. Half smiling, she lit a cigarette with a smooth movement of long fingers and smiled at her cousin; and it was left to Camilla to cover the ensuing silence by redirecting our attention to the splendors of the Chelsea Flower Show.
    Lunch finally came to an end with pungent, sweet-smelling coffee in paper-thin china cups shaped to look like rose buds. There were different colors in the set (mine, for instance, was yellow) and it amused me to see Sarah being handed a pink one. I looked for her eyes, thinking that we might share the joke, but they were set and unseeing. As Camilla exclaimed over the
exquisite
prettiness of the china and asked her hostess where she got it from, I saw Ella’s cousin glance at her watch.
    We left the