Free Sunflower by Rebecca West Page B

blue-grey envelope, beautiful as a Chinese print with the exquisite web of his serene and delicate handwriting. His head ducked. It was apparent that he remembered. But in a moment he recovered himself. ‘My God! How you love leaving letters about!’ he said.
    ‘There’s nothing in it but “Evescote” and your initials,’ she mumbled. She was shivering, partly because of her humiliation, partly because she was afraid that he had gone mad. There was a magical and ventriloquous quality about his rage. It was as if the voice that seemed to come out of his mouth came really from some lonely, bewitched and baying beast, far out in a desert. There was a silence, so she murmured, ‘I’ll go and tidy.’
    ‘You will not,’ said Essington. ‘You will sit down. Then Mr Pitt can sit down. Then I can sit down. Where’s Parkyns? She ought to be here. My God, your wayward, woodland charm shows nowhere more strongly than in your domestic arrangements.’ He stamped on the electric bell till Parkyns came in; she too was shivering. She had, Sunflower now realised, been shivering when she opened the door. ‘Take your mistress’s coat and hat. And bring in the soup.’
    ‘I don’t want any,’ said Sunflower. ‘I’ll start where you are.’
    ‘Oh, no. Oh, no. You’re going to see the kind of dinner we had. We’ll wait.’
    ‘Ah, now,’ objected Francis Pitt, ‘the dinner’s been grand,’ and his sallow sister broke into a corroborating murmur.
    They all sat down. Sunflower felt half-asleep. The misery that filled her mind was not Essington’s behaviour, which was so awful that it was raised to a kind of remoteness, like some calamity read of in the newspapers, but the way she looked. She had cried a little in the car, thinking of Alice Hester, and had not troubled to powder; and her hat had been a close one. It was horrid, because Francis Pitt was the sort of man who cared about people being well-groomed. Though his sister was plainly indifferent to those things, since her thick eyebrows were not plucked, she had been drilled into quite a good black dress of the Handley-Seymour sort. And he himself, though his red-brown hair straggled over his ears in bearish disorder, was dressed even more carefully than Essington. He had pretty studs.
    She put up her hand to see what she could do with her hair, but Essington said, ‘Don’t fuss! Don’t fuss!’ and added, ‘Parkyns, turn on all the lights.’
    But Parkyns was very nice. She brought Sunflower only a very little soup and hardly any fish. And meanwhile, Francis Pitt leaned forward, chuckling again, and said, ‘You’ll not be able to guess what I’ve been doing today.’ Sunflower liked the way he laughed on no particular cue, but just on general principles. Essington never laughed except at the exact point of something that was certifiably funny. The little man’s way took her back to contacts of her youth: when one went on a visit to Cousin Gladys who was married to the stationmaster at Redhill. She opened the front door, and there was laughter. Then she kissed Mummie and you, and there was laughter. Then one went upstairs. ‘This is your room’; more laughter. ‘Oh, it’s ever so nice’; more laughter. ‘Well, I’ll be downstairs getting the tea, and you’ll come down when you’re ready’; more laughter, senseless and kindly. Those were easy days.
    ‘What was that?’ asked Essington. She was amazed at his interest. He must really respect the little man.
    He chuckled again. ‘I went down to my old school in South London and gave the little boys some good advice. I hope to God they don’t follow it, or I shall have a grave responsibility on my soul. For I didn’t dare tell them the truth about the way I made my money, and maybe what I told them they won’t find quite so useful.’
    ‘What school was that?’
    ‘Oh, a rotten private school down at Dulwich. I have no pleasant memories of it, God knows, but the old man who runs it came up to my