Read Online A World of Love by Elizabeth Bowen - Free Book Online Page A

she put an ear to the ground, to one of the turfy spaces between bracken, to seem to be hearing returning footsteps as a pulse in her head started to beat down. Between him and her dwindled the years: where indeed was he if not beside her? They could not now miss one another, surely?
    His letter had been no more than delayed on its way to her.
    Footsteps, however, came no nearer. To bring herself into unmistakable view Jane got up and, dazzled, stood thigh-deep in the bracken, shading her eyes—to be seen, there was no one  this side of the river. Almost in actual despair she walked to the thorn tree, the wicked witness, propitiatingly to rub its bark with her hand.
    ‘What ar e you playing?’ yelled out the observant Maud.
    ‘Nothing,’ Jane cried back—dismayed, affronted.
    ‘Oh, no you’re not!’
    Jane searched the cliff: its face of the clown was gone—below it the water, disenchanted, now wore nothing but Maud’s reflection. And even while one looked the child moved from her station over the pool, edging her way on the narrowing rock-lip till, that ended, she swung on tufts of ivy. Her sister, instinctively fending off, cried: ‘Oh Maud, why can’t you stay where you were?’
    ‘Because it’s teatime.’ Maud, frock stuffed into her drawers, already answered from mid-stream, picking her way onward from shoal to shallow.
    ‘What is?’ Jane asked, backing against the thorn tree.
    ‘Now is.’
    ‘Then don’t tell them I’m here.’
    ‘Who cares? Cousin Antonia’s out—unless that was Satan.’ Maud, having made the landing, tore off fistfuls of bracken to scratch her legs with. ‘Nothing cools my blood today, even water,’ she stated, suffering on the bank; then, with one of her closer looks: ‘What are you pretending about that tree?’
    ‘This tree?’ Jane guiltily dropped her hand.
    ‘Just wondered what you were making up,’ explained the child, with the air of a connoisseur.
    ‘Nothing.’
    Maud raised her eyebrows, causing Jane to go on: ‘I don’t spy on you; why should you spy on me?’
    ‘Why pick on my place, then, to be so peculiar in, when there are miles of places where no one else is? I didn’t bother to watch you, I simply saw you. But you performed as though you meant to be watched. However.’
    ‘“However” is Mother’s word.’
    Maud merely said, ‘What else am I not to tell?’
    ‘Do go and have your disgusting tea.’
    Maud made her sedate way up to the house by the track used by the water-cart; not for her were dog-paths down one of which Jane had made her ecstatic descent. Instinct had not lied: tea was on the table. The early wasp was already probing at last year’s  jam, fatalistically watched by Lilia, who sat there over her lonely cup. ‘No cake?’ Maud asked, looking round as she sat down.
    Her mother replied: ‘Cousin Antonia’s gone to the sea.’
    Maud confined herself to eating and drinking.
    ‘Anyone else would have taken a child like you; as it is, she’s even forgotten Jane.—Where’s Jane?’
    ‘She doesn’t want any tea.’
    ‘I hardly wonder,’ said Lilia, ‘all things considered.’
    ‘Is it five o’clock?’
    ‘How am I to know?’
    The designing glance darted by Maud at the radio in the corner caused Lilia with passion to declare: ‘And I won’t have you running after Big Ben!’ Maud shrugged her shoulders inside her narrow frock; her mother put down her cup, adding: ‘I’m beginning to think I’m ill with all the monomania in this house.’
    She spoke as one in search of a fellow-being; her conviction that she was gripped by something mortal made it frightening to be left alone with a child. Her inner face, by now gaunt with solitude, looked out not without nobility through the big white mask padded with flesh. Sorrow was there in front of her like an apparition: she saw now, with belated dread, what life had proved to be, what it had made of her. Could there have been an otherwise, an alternative? Who was to tell her,