The Tree of Heaven | Page 7

Grannie and the Aunties are coming."
He ran. It was half a child's run and half a full-grown boy's.
Then Mrs. Anthony addressed her daughter.
"Why did you say his ear's aching when it isn't?"
"Because," said Dorothy, "it is aching."
She was polite and exquisite and obstinate, like Anthony.
"Nicky ought to know his own ear best. Go and tell him he's not to
stand on the top of the wall. And if they're coming wave to them, to
show you're glad to see them."
"But--Mummy--I'm not."
She knew it was dreadful before she said it. But she had warded off
reproof by nuzzling against her mother's cheek as it tried to turn away
from her. She saw her mother's upper lip moving, twitching. The
sensitive down stirred on it like a dark smudge, a dust that quivered.
Her own mouth, pushed forward, searching, the mouth of a nuzzling
puppy, remained grave and tender. She was earnest and imperturbable
in her truthfulness. "Whether you're glad or not you must go," said
Frances. She meant to be obeyed.

Dorothy went. Her body was obedient. For as yet she had her mother's
body and her face, her blunted oval, the straight nose with the fine,
tilted nostrils, her brown eyes, her solid hair, brown on the top and light
underneath, and on the curve of the roll above her little ears. Frances
had watched the appearance of those details with an anxiety that would
have surprised her if she had been aware of it. She wanted to see herself
in the bodies of her sons and in the mind of her daughter. But Dorothy
had her father's mind. You couldn't move it. What she had said once
she stuck to for ever, like Anthony to his ash-tree. As if sticking to a
thing for ever could make it right once. And Dorothy had formed the
habit of actually being right, like Anthony, nine times out of ten.
Frances foresaw that this persistence, this unreasoning rectitude, might,
in time, become annoying in a daughter. There were moments when she
was almost perturbed by the presence of this small, mysterious
organism, mixed up of her body and her husband's mind.
But in secret she admired her daughter's candour, her downrightness
and straightforwardness, her disdain of conventions and hypocrisies.
Frances was not glad, she knew she was not glad, any more than
Dorothy was glad, to see her mother and her sisters. She only pretended.
In secret she was afraid of every moment she would have to live with
them. She had lived with them too long. She foresaw what would
happen this afternoon, how they would look, what they would say and
do, and with what gestures. It would be like the telling, for the
thirteenth time, of a dull story that you know every word of.
She thought she had sent them a kind message. But she knew she had
only asked them to come early in order that they might go early and
leave her to her happiness.
She went down to the terrace wall where Michael and Nicky and
Dorothy were watching for them. She was impatient, and she thought
that she wanted to see them coming. But she only wanted to see if they
were coming early. It struck her that this was sad.
* * * * *
Small and distant, the four black figures moved on the slope under the

Judges' Walk; four spots of black that crawled on the sallow grass and
the yellow clay of the Heath.
"How little they look," Michael said.
Their littleness and their distance made them harmless, made them
pathetic. Frances was sorry that she was not glad. That was the
difference between her and Dorothy, that she was sorry and always
would be sorry for not being what she ought to be; and Dorothy never
would be sorry for being what she was. She seemed to be saying,
already, in her clearness and hardness, "What I am I am, and you can't
change me." The utmost you could wring from her was that she
couldn't help it.
Frances's sorrow was almost unbearable when the four women in black
came nearer, when she saw them climbing the slope below the garden
and the lane.

II
Grannie took a long time crossing the lawn from the door in the lane to
the tree of Heaven.
She came first. Her daughters followed, forced to her slow pace,
advancing with an air of imperfect cohesion, of not really belonging to
each other, as if they had been strangers associated by some accident. It
had grown on them in their efforts to carry off the embarrassment of
appearing as an eternal trio. Auntie Louie carried it off best. Sharp and
rigid, Auntie Louie's figure never lent