‘No, I am afraid she doesn’t. I liked her better at a distance.’
‘Poor old Hugo,’ said George. ‘He is a dear goose, you know—but
I don’t think we need worry.’
I felt extraordinarily grateful to George for saying that. It
seemed somehow to make it all right. I had been afraid all day,
and before that day; an uncomfortable, unformulated fear that
something had been going to happen to Hugo. I had not defined
my feeling, and it had in an odd way become less, since Paulina
came to tea, and I had seen her myself. What George said comforted
me much more. It was like waking up from bad dreams. I felt suddenly
very fond of George, fonder than usual.
After tea, when the Connells had gone, I walked back with George
and Mollie to their flat.
‘I am rather sorry for that girl,’ said Mollie.
‘Yes, the mother is a terror,’ agreed George, answering, as he
often did, what Mollie had felt and not said.
‘Is Hugo as bewitched as ever, do you think?’ Mollie asked, and
George shrugged his shoulders and looked at me.
‘Helen and I have decided not to worry yet,’ he said.
She gave Hugo a big photograph of herself, with the white furs
close up round her face, and a big hat pulled low over her eyes.
There was a scrawling signature across it. Hugo kept it in his
bedroom on his dressing-table. Guy told Mollie about it, and
said:
‘I don’t like it, Mollie. If he had stuck it in his sitting-room
I wouldn’t have minded it so much.’
And Mollie said:
‘But Hugo wouldn’t put even his wife out in public—his wife’s
photograph, I mean.’
And I remembered how he wouldn’t have Cousin Delia’s photograph
out in his study at school. He took it with him every term, and
kept it in a box, ‘because it was precious.’
And I thought:
‘Well, he doesn’t put Paulina in a box; that is something.’
He wrote a lot of poetry at this time, and did not show it all
to me as he used to. George saw it and said it was good.
We went to the Commemoration Ball that year, and Hugo asked us
to bring Paulina.
Cousin Delia came, and we stayed at an hotel. Guy came up too,
and Anthony Cowper.
Hugo danced with Paulina a great deal. He danced with me too,
of course, but it was not like it used to be. Paulina looked
very lovely. She wore a pale blue gown with sequins embroidered
on it, that shimmered and rippled when she moved, and her hair
shone like corn in the sun.
I sat with Cousin Delia for a bit and watched them dancing, and
I wondered what she was thinking.