Complete Short Stories

Book 358: Virago Modern Classics

by Elizabeth Taylor, Joanna Kingham, Joanna Kingham

Genres: Short Stories; General Fiction; Classics; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Elizabeth Taylor is finally being recognised as an important British author: one of great subtlety, great compassion and great depth - Sarah Waters Elizabeth Taylor, highly acclaimed author of classic novels such as Angel, A Game of Hide and Seek and Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, is also renowned for her powerful, acutely observed stories. Here for the first time, the stories - including some only recently rediscovered - are collected in one volume. From the awkward passions of lonely holiday-makers to the anticipation of three school friends preparing for their first dance, from the minor jealousies and triumphs of marriage to tales of outsiders struggling to adapt to the genteel English countryside, with a delicate, witty touch Elizabeth Taylor illuminates the nuances of ordinary lives. Books included in the VMC 40th anniversary series include: Frost in May by Antonia White; The Collected Stories of Grace Paley; Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault; The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter; The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann; Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith; The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West; Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston; Heartburn by Nora Ephron; The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy; Memento Mori by Muriel Spark; A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor; and Faces in the Water by Janet Frame

Release date: June 21, 2012

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 636

Sample

Muriel’s first sensation was one of derisive relief. The name – Hester Lilly – had suggested to her a goitrous, pre-Raphaelite frailty. That, allied with youth, can in its touchingness mean danger to any wife, demanding protectiveness and chivalry, those least combatable adversaries, against which admiration simply is nothing. ‘For if she is to fling herself on his compassion,’ she had thought, ‘at that age, and orphaned, then any remonstrance from me will seem doubly callous.’

As soon as she saw the girl an injudicious confidence stilled her doubts. Her husband’s letters from and to this young cousin seemed now fairly guiltless and untormenting; avuncular, but not in a threatening way.

Hester, in clothes which astonished by their improvisation – the wedding of out-grown school uniform with the adult, gloomy wardrobe of her dead mother – looked jaunty, defiant and absurd. Every garment was grown out of or not grown into.

I will take her under my wing, Muriel promised herself. The idea of an unformed personality to be moulded and high-lighted invigorated her, and the desire to tamper with – as in those fashion magazines in which ugly duckling is so disastrously changed to swan before our wistful eyes – made her impulsive and welcoming. She came quickly across the hall and laid her cheek against the girl’s, murmuring affectionately. Deception enveloped them.

Robert was not deceived. He understood his wife’s relief, and, understanding that, could realise the wary distress she must for some time have suffered. Now she was in command again and her misgivings were gone. He also sensed that if, at this point, she was ceasing to suspect him, perhaps his own guilt was only just beginning. He hated the transparency of Muriel’s sudden relaxation and forbearance. Until now she had contested his decision to bring Hester into their home, incredulous that she could not have her own way. She had laid about him with every weapon she could find – cool scorn, sweet reasonableness, little girl tears.

‘You are making a bugbear of her,’ he had said.

‘You have made her that, to me. For months, all these letters going to and fro, sometimes three a week from her. And I always excluded.’

She had tried not to watch him reading them, had poured out more coffee, re-examined her own letters. He opened Hester’s last of all and as if he would rather have read them privately. Then he would fold them and slip them back inside the envelope, to protect them from her eyes. All round his plate, on the floor, were other screwed up envelopes which had contained his less secret letters. Once – to break a silence – he had lied, said, ‘Hester sends love to you.’ In fact, Hester had never written or spoken Muriel’s name. They had not been family letters, to be passed from one to the other, not cousinly letters, with banal enquiries and remembrances. The envelopes had been stuffed with adolescent despair, cries of true loneliness, the letters were repellent with egotism and affected bitterness, appealing with naivety. Hester had been making, in this year since her father’s death, a great hollow nest in preparation for love, and Robert had watched her going round and round it, brooding over it, covering it. Now it was ready and was empty.

Unknowingly, but with so many phrases in her letters, she had acquainted him with this preparation, which must be hidden from her mother and from Muriel. She had not imagined the letters being read by anyone but Robert, and he would not betray her.

‘You are old enough to be her father,’ Muriel had once said; but those scornful, recriminating, wife’s words never sear and wither as they are meant to. They presented him instead with his first surprised elation. After that he looked forward to the letters and was disappointed on mornings when there was none.

If there were any guilty love, he was the only guilty one. Hester proceeded in innocence; wrote the letters blindly as if to herself or as in a diary and loved only men in books, or older women. She felt melancholy yearnings in cinemas and, at the time of leaving home, had become obsessed by a young pianist who played tea-time music in a café.

Now, at last, at the end of her journey, she felt terror, and as the first ingratiating smile faded from her face she looked sulky and wary. Following Muriel upstairs and followed by Robert carrying some of her luggage, she was overcome by the reality of the house, which she had imagined wrong. It was her first visit, and she had from Robert’s letters constructed a completely different setting. Stairs led up from the side of the hall instead of from the end facing the door. ‘I must finish this letter and go up to bed,’ Robert had sometimes written. So he had gone up these stairs, she thought in bewilderment as she climbed them now.

The building might not have been a school. The mullioned windows had views of shaved lawns – deserted – and cedar trees.

‘I thought there would be goal-posts everywhere,’ she said, stopping at a landing window.

‘In summer-time?’ Muriel asked in a voice of sweet amusement.

They turned into a corridor and Robert showed Hester from another window the scene she had imagined. Below a terrace, a cinder-track encircled a cricket field where boys were playing. A white-painted pavilion and sight-screens completed the setting. The drowsy afternoon quiet was broken abruptly by a bell ringing, and at once voices were raised all over the building and doors were slammed.

When Muriel had left her – with many kind reminders and assurances – Hester was glad to be still for a moment and let the school sounds become familiar. She was pleased to hear them; for it was because of the school that she had come. She was not to share Muriel’s life, whatever that may be, but Robert’s. The social-family existence the three of them must lead would have appalled her, if she had not known that after most meal-times, however tricky, she and Robert would leave Muriel. They would go to his study, where she would prove – must prove – her efficiency, had indeed knelt down for nights to pray that her shorthand would keep up with his dictation.

From the secretarial school where, aged eighteen, she had vaguely gone, she had often played truant. She had sat in the public gardens, rather than face those fifteen-year-olds with their sharp ways, their suspicion of her, that she might, from reasons of age or education, think herself their superior. Her aloofness had been humble and painful, which they were not to know.

When Robert’s offer had arrived, she had regretted her time wasted. At her mother’s death she was seen clearly to be the kind of girl whom relatives must help, take under their roof as governess or companion, or to do, as in Hester’s case, some kind of secretarial work.

In spite of resentment, Muriel had given her a pleasant room – nicely anonymous, ready to receive the imprint of a long stay – no books, one picture and a goblet of moss-roses.

Outside, a gardener was mowing the lawn. There, at the back of the house, the lawns sloped up to the foot of a tree-covered hillside, scarred by ravines. Foliage was dense and lush, banking up so that no sky was seen. Leaves were large enough to seem sinister, and all of this landscape with its tortured-looking ash trees, its too-prolific vegetation, had a brooding, an evil aspect; might have been a Victorian engraving – the end-piece to an idyllic chapter, hitting inadvertently, because of medium, quite the wrong note.

At the foot of the hillside, with lawns up to its porch, was a little church, which Hester knew from Robert’s letters to be Saxon. Since the eighteenth century it had been used as a private chapel by the successive owners of the house – the last of these now impoverished and departed. The family graves lay under the wall. Once, Robert had written that he had discovered an adder’s nest there. His letters often – too often for Hester – consisted of nature notes, meticulously detailed.

Hester found this view from her window much more pre-envisaged than the rest. It had a strength and interest which her cousin’s letters had managed to impart.

From the church – now used as school chapel – a wheezy, elephantine voluntary began and a procession of choir-boys, their royal-blue skirts trailing the grass or hitched up unevenly above their boots, came out of the house and paced, with a pace so slow they rocked and swayed, towards the church door. The chaplain followed, head bent, sleeves flung back on his folded arms. He was, as Hester already knew, a thorn in Robert’s flesh.

In the drawing-room, Muriel was pouring out tea. Robert always stood up to drink his. It was a woman’s hour, he felt, and his dropping in on it was fleeting and accidental. Hugh Baseden stood up as well – though wondering why – until Muriel said: ‘Won’t you sit down, Mr Baseden?’

At once, he searched for reproof in her tone, and thought that perhaps he had been imitating a piece of headmasterliness – not for him. Holding his cup unsteadily in one hand, he jerked up the knees of his trousers with the other and lowered himself on to the too-deep sofa, perched there on the edge staring at the tea in his saucer.

Muriel had little patience with gaucherie, though inspiring it. She pushed aside Hester’s clean cup and clasped her hands in her lap.

‘What can she be doing?’ she asked.

‘Perhaps afraid to come down,’ Robert said.

Hugh looked with embarrassment at the half-open door where Hester hesitated, peering in, clearly wondering if this were the right room and the right people in it. To give warning to the others, he stood up quickly and slopped some more tea into his saucer. Robert and Muriel turned their heads.

‘We were thinking you must be lost,’ Muriel said, unsure of how much Hester might have heard.

Robert went forward and led her into the room. ‘This is Hugh Baseden. My cousin, Hester Lilly, Hugh. You are newcomers together, Hester, for this is Hugh’s first term with us.’

Hester sank down on the sofa, her knees an inelegant angle. When asked if she would have sugar she said ‘yes’ in error, and knew at once that however long her stay might be she was condemned to sweet tea throughout it, for she would never find the courage to explain.

‘Mr Baseden is one of those ghoulish schoolmasters who cuts up dead frogs and puts pieces of bad meat under glass to watch what happens,’ Muriel said. ‘I am sure it teaches the boys something enormously important, although it sounds so unenticing.’

‘Do girls not learn biology then?’ Hugh asked, looking from one to the other.

Muriel said ‘no’ and Hester said ‘yes’: and they spoke together.

‘Then that is how much it has all changed,’ Muriel added lightly. ‘That marks the great difference in our ages’ – she smiled at Hester – ‘as so much else does, alas! But I am glad I was spared the experience. The smell!’ She put her hand delicately to her face and closed her eyes. Hester felt that the lessons she had learnt had made her repulsive herself. ‘Oh, do you remember, Robert,’ Muriel went on, ‘last Parents’ Day? The rabbit? I walked into the Science Room with Mrs Carmichael and there it was, opened out, pinned to a board and all its inside labelled. How we scurried off. All the mammas looking at their sons with awe and anxiety and fanning themselves with their handkerchiefs, wondering if their darlings would not pick up some plague. We must not have that this year, Mr Baseden. You must promise me not. A thundery day … oh, by four o’clock! Could we have things in jars instead, sealed up? Or skeletons? I like it best when the little ones just collect fossils or flint arrow-heads.’

‘Flint arrow-heads are not in Hugh’s department,’ Robert said, although Muriel knew that as well as he, was merely going through her scatter-brain performance – the all-feminine, inaccurate, negligent act by which she dissociated herself from the school.

‘They are out of chapel,’ Hugh said. The noise outside was his signal to go. ‘No rabbits, then,’ he promised Muriel and turning to Hester, said: ‘Don’t be too bewildered. I haven’t had much start on you, but I begin to feel at home.’ Then, sensing some rudeness to Muriel in what he had said, he added: ‘So many boys must be a great strain to you at first. You will get used to them in time.’

‘I never have,’ Muriel murmured, when he had gone. ‘Such dull young men we get here always. I am sorry, Hester, there is no brighter company for you. Of course, there is Rex Wigmore, ex-RAF, with moustache, slang, silk mufflers, undimmed gaiety; but I should be wary of him, if I were you. You think I am being indiscreet, Robert; but I am sure Hester will know without being told how important it is in a school for us to be able to speak frankly – even scandalously – when we are en famille. It would be impossible to laugh if, outside, our lips were not sealed tight …’

‘If everything is to be said for me,’ Hester thought, ‘and understood for me, how am I ever to take part in a conversation again?’

From that time, Muriel spoke on her behalf, interpreted for her, as if she were a savage or a mute, until the moment not many days later, when she said in an amused, but matter-of-fact voice: ‘Of course, you are in love with Robert.’

Muriel saved Hester the pains of groping towards this fact. She presented it promptly, fresh, illicit and out-of-the-question; faced and decided once for all. The girl’s heart swerved in horrified recognition. From her sensations of love for and dependence upon this older man, her cousin, she had separated the trembling ardour of her youth and unconsciously had directed it towards the less forbidden – the pianist in the café for instance. Now, she saw that her feelings about that young man were just the measure of her guilt about Robert.

Muriel insinuated the idea into the girl’s head, thinking that such an idea would come sooner or later and came better from her, inseparable from the very beginning with shame and confusion. She struck, with that stunning remark, at the right time. For the first week or so Hester was tense with desire to please, anxiety that she might not earn her keep. Robert would often find her bowed in misery over indecipherable shorthand, or would hear her rip pages out of the typewriter and begin again. The waste-paper basket was usually crammed full of spoilt stationery. Once, he discovered her in tears and, half-way across the room to comfort her, wariness overtook him. He walked instead to the window and spoke with his back to her, which seemed to him the only alternative to embracing her.

Twice before he had taken her in his arms, on two of the three times they had been together. He had met her when she came home from Singapore where her father had died, and she had begun to cry in the station refreshment-room while they were having a cup of tea. His earlier meeting was at her christening when he had dutifully, as godfather, nursed her for a moment. The third encounter she had inveigled him into. He had met her in London secretly to discuss an important matter. They had had luncheon at his Club and the important matter turned out to be the story of her misery at living with her mother – the moods, scenes, words, tears. He could see that she found telling him more difficult than she had planned, found it in fact almost impossible. Rehearsing her speeches alone, she had reckoned without his presence, his looks of embarrassment, the sound of her own voice complaining, her fear of his impatience. She had spoken in a high, affected, hurried voice, smiling too much and at the wrong moments, with a mixture of defiance and ingratiation he found irritating, but pathetic. He had had so little solace to offer, except that he was sure the trouble would pass, that perhaps her mother suffered, too, at the crisis of middle-age. At that, Hester had been overcome by a great, glowering blush, as if he had said something unforgivable. He did not know if it were some adolescent prudery in her, or the outrage of having excuses made for her enemy-mother. (For whom excuses might have been made, for she died not long after, of cancer.)

Now, as he stood at the window listening to her tears, he knew that she was collapsed, abandoned, in readiness for his embrace of consolation, and he would not turn round, although his instinct was to go to her.

He said, absurdly: ‘I hope you are happy here,’ and received of course only tears in answer.

Without physical contact he could not see how to bring the scene to an end. Bored, he surveyed the garden and thought that the box-hedge needed trimming. Beyond this hedge, hanging from the branches of fruit trees were old potatoes stuck with goose-feathers. He watched them twirling gaily above the currant bushes, not frightening the birds, but exciting or bemusing them.

She realised that he would not come to her, and her weeping sank into muffled apologies, over which Robert could feel more authoritative, with something reassuring to say in return and something to do. (He fetched a decanter of sherry.) His reassurances were grave, not brusque. He put the reasons for her distress sensibly back upon legitimate causes, where perhaps they belonged – the death of her mother, shock, strain, fatigue.

He sat by his desk and put on his half-moon reading-glasses, peered over them, swung about in his swivel-chair, protecting himself by his best old-fogey act.

‘Muriel and I only want to make you happy.’

Hester flinched.

‘You must never let this work worry you, you know.’ He almost offered to get someone else to do it for her, his sense of pity was so great.

His reading-glasses were wasted on her. She would not look at him with her swollen eyes, but pointed her hands together over her forehead, making an eave to hide her face.

‘But does Muriel want me here?’ she cried at last.

‘Could you be here, if she did not?’

‘But do you?’

In her desperation, she felt that she could ask any questions. The only advice he ever wanted to give young people was not to press desperation too far, uncreative as it is; not to admit recklessness. Muriel had once made similar mistakes. It seemed to him a great fault in women.

‘I shall only mind having you here if you cry any more. Or grow any thinner.’

He glanced down at his feet. She was not really any thinner, but Muriel had begun her work on her clothes, which now fitted her and showed her small waist and long narrow back.

‘You are bound to feel awkward at first with one another,’ Robert said. ‘It is a strange situation for you both, and Muriel is rather shy.’

Hester thought that she was uncouth and sarcastic; but not shy, not for one moment shy.

‘I think she is trying so hard to be kind and sympathetic,’ he continued, ‘but she must make her own place in your life. She would not be so impertinent as to try to be a mother to you, as many less sensitive women might. There is no precedent to help her – having no children herself, being much older. She has her own friends, her own life, and she would like to make a place for you, too. I think she would have loved to have had a daughter … I can imagine that from the interest she takes in your clothes, for instance.’ This was true, had puzzled Hester and now was made to shame her.

Muriel opened the door suddenly upon this scene of tears and sherry. Hester, to hide her face, turned aside and put up her hand to smooth her hair.

‘Miss Graveney’s address,’ Muriel said. She stood stiffly in front of Robert’s desk while he searched through a file. She did not glance at Hester and held her hand out to take the address from Robert before he could bring it from the drawer.

‘Thank you, dear!’ She spoke in her delicately amused voice, nodded slightly and left the room.

Outside, she began to tremble violently. Misery split her in two – one Muriel going upstairs in fear and anger, and another Muriel going beside her, whispering: ‘Quiet! Be calm. Think later.’

Hester, with her new trimness, was less touching. She lost part of the appeal of youth – the advantage Muriel could not challenge – and won instead an uncertain sophistication – an unstable elegance, which only underlined how much cleverer Muriel was at the same game.

Muriel’s cleverness, however, could not overcome the pain she felt. She held the reins, but could barely keep her hands from trembling. Her patience was formidable. Robert had always remarked upon it since the day he had watched her at work upon her own wedding cake. There were many things in her life which no one could do as well as she, and her wedding cake was one of them. She had spent hours at the icing – at hair-fine lattice-work, at roses and rosettes, swags and garlands, conch-shells and cornucopias. She had made of it a great work of art, and with a similar industry, which Robert only half-discerned and Hester did not discern at all, she now worked at what seemed to her the battle for her marriage.

Conceived at the moment of meeting Hester, the strategy was based on implanting in the girl her own – Muriel’s – standards, so that every success that Hester had would seem one in the image of the older woman, and every action bring Muriel herself to mind. Patience, tolerance, coolness, amusement were parts of the plan, and when she had suddenly said: ‘Of course you are in love with Robert,’ she had waited to say it for days. It was no abrupt cry of exasperation, but a piece of the design she had worked out.

Before Hester could reply, Muriel stressed the triviality of such a love by going on at once to other things. ‘If I were a young girl again I should have a dark dress made, like a Bluecoat Boy’s – a high neck and buttoned front, leather belt, huge, boyish pockets hidden somewhere in the skirt. How nice if one could wear yellow stockings too!’

She rested her hand on her tapestry-frame and forced herself to meet Hester’s eyes, her own eyes veiled and narrowed, as if she were considering how the girl would look in such a dress.

Hester’s glance, as so often in the innocent party, wavered first. She had no occupation to help her and stared down at her clasped hands.

Muriel began once more to pass the needle through the canvas. Diligently, week by week, the tapestry roses blossomed in grey and white and blood-colour.

‘Don’t you think?’ she asked.

She swung the frame round and examined the back of the canvas. It was perfectly neat. She sat sideways in her chair, with the frame-stand drawn up at one angle. Her full skirt touched the carpet – pink on crimson.

‘Why do you say that?’ Hester asked. ‘What makes you say it?’ She sounded as if she might faint.

‘Say what?’

‘About Robert.’ Her lips moved clumsily over the name as if they were stung by it, and swollen.

‘Robert? Oh, yes! Don’t fuss, dear girl. At your age one has to be in love with someone, and Robert does very well for the time being. Perhaps at every age one has to be in love with someone, but when one is young it is difficult to decide whom. Later one becomes more stable. I fell in love with all sorts of unsuitable people – very worrying for one’s mother. But by the time I met Robert I was old enough to be sure that that would last. As it has,’ she added quietly; and she chose a strand of white silk and began to work on the high-lights of a rose petal.

‘I once fell in love with a young man who drank like a fish,’ she continued, for Hester seemed stunned into silence. ‘He was really an evil influence. Very flashy. You remember how I warned you about Rex Wigmore your first day here?’ She began to shake with mirth. ‘Trying to be my own anxious mamma all over again. And all the time it was Robert! How lucky! For Robert is so gentle, so kind. He would never harm you. Nothing but good could come of a girl loving him. Yes, I can see Robert doing very well indeed, until the real one comes along. How furious he would be to hear us discussing him like this – men take themselves so seriously.’

‘I am not discussing him,’ Hester said, an ugly stubbornness in her manner. She snatched a handkerchief from her pocket and began to fidget with it, crushing it and smoothing it and staring at it in a bewildered defiance.

Muriel’s white hand smoothed a woollen rose. ‘I always leave the background till last.’ She sighed. ‘So dull, going on and on with the same colour.’

‘It isn’t true. He’s my cousin, much older … your husband … I … does he know?’

‘Well, I haven’t asked him. Men are too vain. I dare say he knows all right, though. It’s very good for them, at his age … makes them feel young.’

So Hester saw herself thrust into the service of nature, a coarse instrument, as good as anonymous. Muriel, spared such humiliation, could well smile, and congratulate herself. ‘Don’t fuss,’ she said again in her most laughing voice. ‘If I had known you would, I wouldn’t have said it.’

‘I wish I could go away.’ Hester wrung her hands and looked towards the windows as if she might escape through them. ‘You hate me being here. And now …’

‘Now?’

‘Now you believe this about me, how can you bear me to be here? No wife could.’

At this, a stern, fastidious look came upon Muriel’s face. She was silent for a moment, then said in a quiet and serious voice: ‘I … as a wife; Robert … as a husband; our private life together I must leave out of this. It is between us only, and I never discuss my marriage.’

‘There is no need to be rude to me,’ Hester shouted, so great her frustration, so helplessly she felt herself up against Muriel’s smooth contempt. She was forced into childishness.

At her outburst – for all of today was working for Muriel, she thought – the door opened.

‘But surely there is nothing sinister in that?’ Beatrice Carpenter asked. She was Muriel’s closest friend and they were walking in the park before dinner. ‘Young girls often cry. You rather surprise me, Muriel. You sound hysterical yourself.’

‘It was the atmosphere of the room. It trembled with apprehension, and when I opened the door Robert looked at me with a dumbfounded expression, his eyes opened wide over those awful half-moon glasses he will wear, they – his eyes – looked so blue – a little boy’s look, little boy in mischief. “Don’t spank me, Nanny.” I hated him for a moment. Oh, I felt murderous. No, but I truly itched to hurt him physically, by some violent and abusive act, to hit him across the mouth, to …’ She broke off in astonishment and looked about her, as if fearful of being overheard.

‘You are in a bad way,’ Beatrice said. ‘The girl will have to go.’

‘I know. But how? I have to be clever, not insistent. I can’t be put into the position of getting my own way, for it would never be forgotten. It would last all our lives, such a capitulation, you know.’

Other married women always know; so Beatrice only murmured cosily.

Muriel said: ‘The self-consciousness is so deadly. When I go back, he will look at me to see how I am likely to behave. Every time I go into a room, he glances at my face, so that I can no longer meet his eyes.’

‘I never think embarrassment is a trivial emotion,’ Beatrice said.

‘It has altered everything, having her here; for we were just at an age of being able, perhaps, to relax, to take one another for granted, to let ourselves slip a little. It is a compensation for growing old, and one must find a compensation for that, if one can.’

‘I cannot,’ Beatrice said.

‘For a day or two I tried to compete, but I will not be forced into the sort of competition I am bound to lose.’ Muriel frowned and with a weary gesture unclipped her gold ear-rings as if she suddenly found their weight intolerable. She walked on with them clutched, warm and heavy, in her hand. Beatrice could not bear the sight of her fiery ear-lobes. She was upset, as when people who always wear glasses take them off for polishing and expose their wounded-looking and naked eyes. Muriel was never without ear-rings and might have caused only slightly less concern by suddenly unpinning her hair.

Beatrice said: ‘An experienced woman is always held to be a match for a young girl, but I shouldn’t like to have to try it. Not that I am very experienced.’

They sat down on a seat under a rhododendron bush, for now they were in the avenue leading to the house and their conversation had not neared its end, as their walk had.

By ‘experience’ both meant love affairs. Beatrice thought of the engagement she had broken in girlhood, and Muriel thought of Hugh Baseden’s predecessor and his admiration for her, which she had rather too easily kept within bounds. It was, as Beatrice had said, very little experience and had served no useful purpose and taught them nothing.

‘And then,’ Muriel said, ‘there is the question of the marriage-bed.’ She was dropping the ear-rings from one hand to the other in her agitation. Far from never discussing her marriage, as she had assured Hester, she was not averse to going over it in every detail, and Beatrice was already initiated into its secrets to an extent which would have dismayed Robert had he known. ‘There were always so many wonderful excuses, or if none came to mind one could fall inextricably into a deep sleep. He has really been fairly mild and undemanding.’

‘Unlike Bertie,’ Beatrice said, and her sigh was genuinely regretful.

‘Now I am afraid to make excuses or fall asleep. I sce