• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

"You leave my brother out of it!" Daphne screamed. "My goodness, who do you think you are?"

Portia, her hands behind her, murmured something uncertain.

"Pardon? What did you say?"

"I said, I didn't know.... But I don't see, Daphne, why you're so shocked with Eddie. If what you and he were doing was not fun, why should I be jealous? And if you hadn't liked it, you could always have struggled."

Daphne gave up. "You're completely bats," she said. "You'd better go and lie down. You don't even understand a single thing. Standing about there, not looking like anything. You know, really, if you'll excuse my saying so, a person might almost take you for a natural. Have you got no ideas?"

"I've no idea," said Portia in a dazed way. "For instance, my relations who are still alive have no idea why I was born. I mean, why my father and mother—"

Daphne bulged. She said: "You'd really better shut up."

"All right. Would you like me to go upstairs? I'm very sorry, Daphne," said Portia—from the far side of the puzzle, her downcast eyes meanwhile travelling from Daphne's toe caps, up the plump firm calves stretched out on the chaise longue to the hem of the "snug" wool dress—"very sorry to have annoyed you, when you have always been so nice to me. I wouldn't have said about you and Eddie, only I thought that was what you were talking about. Also, Eddie did say that if I didn't understand about people feeling matey, I'd much better ask you."

"Well, of all the nerve! The thing is, you and your friend are both equally bats."

"Please don't tell him you think so. He is so happy here."

"I've no doubt he is—Well, you'd better run on up. Here's Doris just coming to lay."

"Would you rather I stayed upstairs for some time?"

"No, stupid, what about dinner? But do try and not look as though you'd swallowed a mouse."

Portia pushed round the chenille curtain and went up. Standing looking out of her bedroom window, she mechanically ran a comb through her hair. She felt something in the joints of her knees, which shook. The Sunday smell of the joint Doris was basting crept underneath the crack of her door. She watched Mrs. Heccomb, with umbrella and prayer book, come happily down the esplanade with a friend—a lunch hour breeze must have come up, for something fluttered the wisps of their grey hair; and at the same time the hems of her short curtains twitched on the window sill. The two ladies stopped at Waikiki gate to talk with emphasis. Then the friend went on; Mrs. Heccomb waved her red morocco prayer-book at the window, as she came up the path, jubilantly, even triumphantly as though she brought back with her an extra stock of grace. While Portia stood at the window there were still no signs of Eddie and Dickie, but later she heard their voices on the esplanade.

The set of temple bells had not yet been struck for dinner, so Portia sat down near her chest of drawers and looked hard at the pastel-portrait of Anna. She did not know what she looked for in the pastel—confirmation that the most unlikely people suffer, or that everybody who suffers is the same age?

But that little suffering Anna—so much out of drawing that she looked like a cripple between her cascades of hair—that urgent soul astray in the bad portrait, only came alive by electric light. Even by day, though, the unlike likeness disturbs one more than it should: what is it unlike? Or is it unlike at all—is it the face discovered? The portrait, however feeble, transfixes something passive that stays behind the knowing and living look. No drawing from life just fails: it establishes something more; it admits the unadmitted. All Mrs. Heccomb had brought to her loving task, besides pastels, had been feeling. She was, to put it politely, a negative artist. But such artists seem to receive a sort of cloudy guidance. Any face, house, landscape seen in a picture, however bad, remains subtly but strongly modified in so-called real life—and the worse the picture, the stronger this is. Mrs. Heccomb's experiment in pastels had altered