Bliss | Page 9

photographs of his office
there before and after building, and the signed photos of his business
friends, and that awful enlargement of Isabel lying on the mat in her
singlet." Her angry glance swept the placid kitchen. "I know what I'll
do. I'll hang them here. I will tell Stanley they got a little damp in the
moving so I have put them in here for the time being."

She dragged a chair forward, jumped on it, took a hammer and a big
nail out of her pinafore pocket and banged away.
"There! That is enough! Hand me the picture, mother."
"One moment, child." Her mother was wiping over the carved ebony
frame.
"Oh, mother, really you need not dust them. It would take years to dust
all those little holes." And she frowned at the top of her mother's head
and bit her lip with impatience. Mother's deliberate way of doing things
was simply maddening. It was old age, she supposed, loftily.
At last the two pictures were hung side by side. She jumped off the
chair, stowing away the little hammer.
"They don't look so bad there, do they?" said she. "And at any rate
nobody need gaze at them except Pat and the servant girl--have I got a
spider's web on my face, mother? I've been poking into that cupboard
under the stairs and now something keeps tickling my nose.
But before Mrs. Fairfield had time to look Beryl had turned away.
Someone tapped on the window: Linda was there, nodding and smiling.
They heard the latch of the scullery door lift and she came in. She had
no hat on; her hair stood upon her head in curling rings and she was
wrapped up in an old cashmere shawl.
"I'm so hungry," said Linda: "where can I get something to eat, mother?
This is the first time I've been in the kitchen. It says 'mother' all over;
everything is in pairs."
"I will make you some tea," said Mrs. Fairfield, spreading a clean
napkin over a corner of the table, "and Beryl can have a cup with you."
"Beryl, do you want half my gingerbread?" Linda waved the knife at
her. "Beryl, do you like the house now that we are here?"
"Oh yes, I like the house immensely and the garden is beautiful, but it

feels very far away from everything to me. I can't imagine people
coming out from town to see us in that dreadful jolting bus, and I am
sure there is not anyone here to come and call. Of course it does not
matter to you because--"
"But there's the buggy," said Linda. "Pat can drive you into town
whenever you like."
That was a consolation, certainly, but there was something at the back
of Beryl's mind, something she did not even put into words for herself.
"Oh, well, at any rate it won't kill us," she said dryly, putting down her
empty cup and standing up and stretching. "I am going to hang
curtains." And she ran away singing:
"How many thousand birds I see
That sing aloud from every tree ...
"... birds I see That sing aloud from every tree ... " But when she
reached the dining-room she stopped singing, her face changed; it
became gloomy and sullen.
"One may as well rot here as anywhere else," she muttered savagely,
digging the stiff brass safety-pins into the red serge curtains.
The two left in the kitchen were quiet for a little. Linda leaned her
cheek on her fingers and watched her mother. She thought her mother
looked wonderfully beautiful with her back to the leafy window. There
was something comforting in the sight of her that Linda felt she could
never do without. She needed the sweet smell of her flesh, and the soft
feel of her cheeks and her arms and shoulders still softer. She loved the
way her hair curled, silver at her forehead, lighter at her neck and bright
brown still in the big coil under the muslin cap. Exquisite were her
mother's hands, and the two rings she wore seemed to melt into her
creamy skin. And she was always so fresh, so delicious. The old
woman could bear nothing but linen next to her body and she bathed in
cold water winter and summer.

"Isn't there anything for me to do?" asked Linda.
"No, darling. I wish you would go into the garden and give an eye to
your children; but that I know you will not do."
"Of course I will, but you know Isabel is much more grown up than any
of us."
"Yes, but Kezia is not," said Mrs. Fairfield.
"Oh, Kezia has been tossed by a bull hours ago," said Linda, winding
herself up in her shawl again.
But no, Kezia