Free The Shape of Sand by Marjorie Eccles Page B

tonight, thank you.”
    â€œDon’t forget to drink your tisane before it goes cold. Goodnight, Mrs Jardine.”
    â€œGoodnight, Hallam. Oh, draw the curtains back before you go, if you will. Otherwise, it might become too stuffy.”
    â€œIt is very warm. Likely we’re due for a stormy spell. I hope we get it over with before next weekend.”
    â€œOh, don’t even suggest such a thing! I never knew such a Job’s comforter!”
    Hallam smiled thinly, drew back the curtains and left silently.
    Beatrice poured from the silver teapot a cup of the camomile infusion – with perhaps something else in it – that would help her to sleep. She knew it would be made exactly how she liked it. That sort of thing was one of the reasons she kept Hallam on. Such a stiff, unresponsive creature, so
determinedly frumpy and virginal — though with that unfortunate figure, tall, angular and raw-boned, how could she be anything else? She was skilful in her duties, however, and prepared to sit up until all hours to attend to her mistress; she did not chatter or gossip below stairs, and she wielded a needle as delicately as a surgeon used a scalpel: a veritable paragon. Her bony fingers, moreover, were surprisingly effective when massaging Beatrice’s scalp. One might not like her, but one really couldn’t ask for much more.
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    The discussions about Egypt at dinner, which Iskander had deliberately kept going, had upset her, and when the door had closed behind Hallam, Beatrice walked across to the open window and stepped out on to the balcony, where she liked to take a breath of air before bed each night. She placed her cup and saucer on the little wrought iron table there, but did not sit on the chair beside it. Instead, she stood with her hands on the balcony rail, listening to the tinkle of the fountain somewhere below, staring out into the warm, delicious evening, full of the scents of summer, which decidedly did not have the feeling of an approaching storm to her. It still held the heat of the day, but it was not at all sultry. The trees sighed gently, the sky was black and clear, with a crescent moon and a following star. A night for lovers. She could not bear that thought, it twisted inside her breast like a knife. For a second, pierced with the inevitability of what she was now sure must come, she could not bear her life, and in one wild and very nearly irresistible moment, heard the impetuous creature within her whispering how easy it would be to plunge deep down into the soft, enveloping darkness, into … nothingness.
    The impulse was over in a flash, and she drew back sharply, sinking on to the edge of the iron chair, shaken to her core. Her lips trembled against the fluted rim of the delicate china cup as she sipped the tisane, fought for equilibrium and gazed at those stars.
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    One scarcely noticed the stars in Cairo. The sunsets, which were spectacular, yes, one could hardly fail to be bowled over by them. But when the swift darkness fell, there was too much happening below to bother about the heavens, at least in that
first month’s frantic whirl of social activity and gaiety, when Beatrice herself had been full of that new-found energy and sense of well-being that comes with recovery after being ill. Exotic, overcrowded Cairo – dust, heat, colour, noise. She had loved it all.
    Daisy, her youngest and, as she had previously thought, her last child, was almost six years old when Beatrice had suffered the severe miscarriage which had almost cost her own life and had left her languid and depressed, still feeling vaguely unwell, uninterested in anything and unable to banish the unbearable weight of sadness she felt at having lost a child.
    â€œMy dear!” exclaimed Millie Glendinning one day, wafting in to tea at the London house in clouds of Worth perfume, red faille and a new hat. “How pale you look! There’s nothing for it but you must come to Egypt