She turned to face him, and he, chuckling beneath his blond moustache, raised the steaming glass to her lips. Then he noted the glint of a tear in her hooded eyes, and with brusque determination set down the glass and caught her hands in his.
‘There, there now, tell me what happened. Was it something between you and Betsy? Go on, you know you can tell me everything.’
He cast her a look of reproof with his uncomprehending, trusting eyes like those of a good-natured Newfoundland dog.
. .
Only then, in a voice broken with sobs, did she let loose a torrent of misery, for no apparent reason other than the prompting of his voice and his eyes. The urge to pour her heart out was too strong to resist. What was she living for? What use could she be to anyone? She wandered about the room, wringing her hands and lamenting without pause. She didn’t care if she died within the hour, she didn’t care about anything at all, it was just that her existence was so futile, so useless, without anything she could wholeheartedly devote herself to, and it was all becoming too much to bear.
Henk sputtered in protest, discomfited by the scene, which was no more than a repetition of so many previous ones. He began to talk about Betsy and Ben, their little boy, and about himself, and he was on the point of mentioning that she too would be mistress of her own home one day, but then thought that might be indiscreet. She for her part shook her head like a stubborn child refusing to be distracted after not getting its way, and then, in desperation, hid her face against his shoulder and sobbed there, with her arm entwined around his sturdy neck. Her nerves were frayed from the lonely hours spent in an overheated room, and she resumed her halting tirade, bemoaning the pointlessness of her existence, the wretched burden life was to her, and in her tone he detected a hint of reproach directed at him, her brother-in-law, for being the cause of all her woes. He was much confused, and also touched by the warmth of her fragrant embrace, which he could hardly return with equal tenderness. All he could do to stem the flow of disjointed sentences was murmur trite words of consolation.
Slowly, slowly, to the soft tones of his sonorous voice, she cast off her melancholy mood, as though scattering rose petals on a stream.
She fell silent at last and took a deep breath, but continued to rest her head on his shoulder. Now that she had calmed down, he thought it incumbent on him to chide her for her foolishness. What nonsense it all was, to be sure! A lot of fiddlesticks! Because, dash it all, there was no call for such a fuss, now, was there?
‘But Henk, truly—’ she began, raising her moist eyes to his.
‘My dear girl, all this talk about there being no sense to your life — whatever gave you that idea? You know we all love you dearly.’
And, recalling his earlier, unspoken consideration of her eventual marriage, he added:
‘Fancy a young girl like you complaining of the futility of life! My dear sis, you must be quite mad!’
Tickled by this thought, and feeling there had been enough philosophy for now, he gave her arms a firm shake and tweaked her sad lips into a smile. She resisted, laughing, and it was as though the balance in her mind had been restored by her outburst. When a few moments later they started up the stairs together, she could barely suppress a shriek of laughter as he suddenly swept her off her feet and carried her the rest of the way while she, fearing a fall, half-ordered and half-begged him to desist.
‘Now Henk, let me go! Don’t be silly! Put me down at once, Henk, do you hear?’
III
Eline Vere was the younger of the two sisters, with darker hair and eyes and a slimmer, less rounded figure. The lambent darkness of her gaze, in combination with the translucent pallor of her skin and the languishing quality of certain of her gestures, gave her something of an odalisque lost in reverie. Her beauty was of great concern to her; she made it glow and sparkle like a treasured jewel, and this sustained attention rendered her almost infatuated with what she considered her best features. She would gaze at her reflection for minutes on end, smiling as she traced the line of eyebrows and lashes with the tip of a rosy fingernail, pulling the lids sideways a fraction to make almond eyes, or rumpling her mass of brown locks into the wild exuberance of a gypsy girl. Her wardrobe, too, was the object of long and earnest meditation, involving the effects and harmonies of the cold sheen of satin, the warmer, changeable shades of silk plush, the froth of tulle and gauze, and the sheerness of mousseline and lace. From the quivering flashes of her diamond ring to the subtle emanations of her scented sachets, the assortment of fineries gave her a pleasant sensation of luxury and delicate femininity.
. .
Being somewhat dreamy and romantic by nature, she would sometimes while away the hours in self-indulgent remembrance of her childhood. Her memories were like beloved relics to her, to be taken out and freshened up at regular intervals, and in the course of her contemplations she would quite deliberately replace the more faded images with new, idealised ones. Calling them to mind again later, she would lose sight of what was true and what invented, and would, with complete assurance, relate all manner of trivial episodes of the old days in this polished, poetic form. Betsy, with her more practical, matter-of-fact turn of mind, never missed an opportunity to tone down anything resembling glorification of the past, and for all her nostalgic leanings, Eline, when thus corrected, would usually succeed in distinguishing the bare facts from the fantastic blooms of her imagination.
She recalled her father, a painter, a man of refined, artistic temperament but wanting in the strength to create, married at a young age to a domineering wife several years his senior. He had felt oppressed by her, and his highly-strung nerves, like those of a noble musical instrument, had quivered beneath the roughness of her touch, much as Eline’s now quivered beneath that of her sister. She recalled her father’s features of yellowed ivory, and his pallid, transparent fingers lying idle and listless while he cogitated on some painterly masterpiece that would be abandoned after the first few brushstrokes. She had been his little confidante, as it were, and in her mind his embattled genius matched that of the great Raphael, painter of sad-eyed Madonnas with flowing tresses. Her mother had always inspired a quiet fear in her, and as her memories of the disillusionments of childhood were primarily bound up with her, she was unable to idealise her mother as she did her father.
She recalled how, after the death of her father in the disaffection of an unfulfilled life and the subsequent demise of her mother due to heart failure, she and her sister had lived under the kindly guardianship of a widowed aunt. Old-fashioned, thin and upright, with a mournful cast to her regular features of erstwhile beauty, she loomed in Eline’s memory as a figure behind a plate-glass window, her time-worn hands working four shiny knitting needles in a measured, tremulous minuet. Aunt Vere spent her days in her spacious front room amid the gently stultifying trappings of her wealth, invariably clad in sweet-smelling, velvety garments, with a thick Deventer rug underfoot, a flaming log in the grate, and by the door a Japanese screen of yellow silk embellished with scarlet peonies and storks on the wing.
The two sisters, growing up together under the same tutelage and in the same surroundings, developed along parallel mental and moral lines, but as the years went by each followed the bent of her individual temperament. Eline’s languorous, lymphatic disposition entailed the need of tender reassurance and warm affection, and her nerves, delicate as the petals of a flower, often suffered, despite the plush comfort of her surroundings. She was overly sensitive to any opposition or impediment, and in self-defence took to bottling up her feelings, which led her to harbour a host of small, private grievances. Release from her long-pent-up emotion would come with the occasional outburst of temper. In Betsy’s more full-blooded nature there grew an inclination to take control, which was exacerbated by Eline’s want of self-reliance. At times her dominance was such that she could almost enter into the psyche of her sister, who, after the initial shock, would soon swallow her pride and even experience a measure of calm and satisfaction in being taken in hand. But neither Eline’s highly-strung sensitivities nor Betsy’s overruling egotism had ever precipitated a tragic crisis, for within the cushioned confines of their aunt’s residence the contrasting hues of their personalities blended into a uniform shade of grey.