Old Filth - Jane Gardam [28]
“How’s your niece, Sir?”
“Done very badly in her Higher School Certificate. And she’s too old to try again. I tell her nobody will ever ask her what she did and she’ll forget it herself in six months. She’ll find a husband. Poor fellow.”
“One can’t be sure,” said Mrs. Ingoldby. “She’s rather secretive. I’ve a feeling that a husband isn’t on the cards. And very stubborn, I’m afraid. I’ve sent her breakfast up as she has a headache. And she’s upset.”
The next day there was a sighting of Isobel Ingoldby pacing about the garden, up and down, up and down in the rain with a haversack on her back.
“Is she going somewhere?” asked Pat.
“She talks of Spain. She has an urge to help the rebels. I thought I might telegraph her parents.”
“Let her be,” said Pat. “She’ll be in for dinner.”
“But did she have breakfast?”
“Well, it was all laid up for her on the sideboard.”
“I wouldn’t want her going home and saying we’d given her nothing to eat. And oh dear, look! Maybe she didn’t have breakfast.”
Isobel could be seen writhing about in her haversack and then disembowelling it on the grass. She took from it a hunk of bread, stood up, tilted back her head and began to devour it. Her eyes seemed closed. Praying perhaps.
“I think she may be a little peculiar,” said Colonel Ingoldby. “There is some of that in the Ingoldbys. Not Pat, of course, dear, and certainly not Jack.”
Elder brother Jack, the beloved, now passed through High House only very occasionally. Sir and the family’s traditional public school had seen him to Cambridge and he was there or abroad most of the time, swooping through his old home, once or twice a summer, bringing rare and various companions, playing wonderful tennis, clean and groomed, at one with his parents’ world. Mrs. Ingoldby, like a dog which awaits its master, seemed to know by instinct when he was on the way. “Just a mo. Isn’t that Jack?” They would listen, then continue life, and a few minutes later would come the splutter and roar of Jack’s car, its silver body tied up with a classy leather strap.
Eddie had an instinct about Jack, too; that Isobel was being kept away from him and that was why she and Mrs. Ingoldby were off to the Lake District. That was why Isobel was peculiar. Seeing Isobel in the garden he could tell that the Lake District and her godmother would not be sufficient for her.
“Oh, do bring her in,” said Mrs. Ingoldby, “or at any rate someone go and talk to her . . . You, Eddie. Would you go? You’ll be new to her—she finds us boring. You could talk to her about the Spanish Civil War. I don’t want any stories about our neglecting her going back to Gerard’s Cross.”
So Eddie had walked rather awkwardly across the lawn and into the trees, on his fourteen-year-old lengthening legs and oval knees. His curly hair; his hands in his pockets like some of the more blasé of the Mr. Smiths’ had been. His feet in scruffy sand-shoes very huge; his height endearing. His voice, breaking, was surprising him all the time by sudden booms and squeaks. Yet there was grace about him. He hadn’t taken in a thing about the Spanish Civil War.
The girl was standing with her back to him. The rain had stopped and it was becoming a warm and honeyed July morning and in the hills below stood the factory chimneys rising brown and mighty like Hindu temples.
“Oh, hullo,” he said.
The girl stopped munching and turned. She stared.
“I’m Edward Feathers. Pat’s friend. I’ve been told to ask if you—well, if you might be coming in for lunch?”
The girl was gigantic; bony, golden and vast; as tall as Eddie and certainly pretty old. She could be twenty. Her face was like a lioness’s—flat nose, narrow brow, wide cheekbones, long green eyes. Supreme self-command. Wow!
Her legs were bare and very long, like his own, and her sandals had little leather thongs separating the toes.
Eddie felt something happening to his anatomy and though he had no idea what it was he began to blush.
She looked him up and down and began to laugh.
“I don’t go in for eating round a polished table,” she said. “I need to be out