“Be quiet, you two! Tell us, Anita! A life of her? Is that it? Ah, well,
I always suspected your note-book. Did she know you Boswellized?”
“She?” There was the strangest mixture of scorn and admiration in the
voice. “As if one could let her know! That was the difficulty with
Madala Grey: she wouldn’t take herself seriously. She had—” a pause and
a search for the correct word—“what I can only call a _perverted_ sense
of humour. If she’d known that I—noted things, she’d have been quite
capable of falsifying all her opinions, misrepresenting herself
completely, just to—throw me out, as it were. Not maliciously, I don’t
mean that. But she teases,” finished Anita petulantly. “She will do it.
She laughs at the wrong things. Of course she’s young still.”
“Yes, she’s young—now. She stays young now. She gains that at least,”
said the woman in the shadows.
Anita made a quick little sound, half titter and half gasp.
“Oh!” she cried—and her voice was as grey as her face—“I forgot. Do you
know—I forgot! It’s going to be ghastly. I believe I shall always be
forgetting.”
I glanced up at Kent Rehan. It made me realize that I had been listening
with anxiety, that I was afraid of their expressive sentences. They had
words, those writing people. They knew what they thought: they could say
what they thought: and what they thought could hurt. I didn’t want him
to be hurt. I said, under my breath—
“Oh, why do you stay here? They aren’t your sort.”
But he had heard nothing. He was poring over the long tassel of the
blind, weaving it into a six-strand plait. I couldn’t help watching his
fingers. He had the most beautiful hands that I’ve ever seen on a man.
They looked like two alive and independent creatures. They looked as if
they could do anything they chose, whether he were there to superintend
or not. And he was miles away. I was glad. Anita’s voice was rising like
a dreary wind.
“Just that is so strange. All the time I’ve known her I’ve thought of
her in the past tense. Her moods, her ways, her actions, were finished
things to me—chapters of the _Life_. I _wrote_ her all the time. But
now, when she _is_ mine, as it were, now that she exists only in my
notes and papers and remembrance of her, now it comes that I’m shaken. I
can’t think of her as a subject any more. I shall be wanting
her—herself. I can’t think clearly. It’s frightening me, the work there
is ahead of me. Because I’ve got to do it without her. She’s lying dead
down there in Surrey—now—at this minute. And there’s that man—and a
child. One’s overwhelmed. It’s so cruel. The only creature who ever
cared for me. Think of Madala, quite still, not answering, not lighting
up when you speak to her, staring at the ceiling, staring at her own
coffin-lid. In two days she’ll be under the ground. Do you ever think
what that means—burial—the corruption—the——”
“Stop it, Nita!” Miss Howe’s movement blotted out my cousin’s face. “Do
you hear? I can’t stand it. Here—drink some coffee. Jasper! Say
something!” I heard the coffee-cup dance in its saucer.