It was Innes.
"Go!" said Froken; and eight young bodies somersaulted up on to the high booms. They sat there for a moment, and then rose in unison to a standing position, one foot in front of the other, facing each other in pairs at opposite ends of each boom.
Lucy hoped frantically that Innes was not going to faint. She was not merely pale; she was green. Her opposite number, Stewart, made a tentative beginning, but, seeing that Innes was not ready, waited for her. But Innes stood motionless, apparently unable to move a muscle. Stewart cast her a glance of wild appeal. Innes remained paralysed. Some wordless message passed between them, and Stewart went on with her exercise; achieving a perfection very commendable in the circumstances. All Innes's faculties were concentrated on keeping her standing position on the boom long enough to be able to return to the floor with the rest, and not to ruin the whole exercise by collapsing, or by jumping off. The dead silence and the concentration of interest made her failure painfully obvious; and puzzled sympathy settled on her as she stood there. Poor dear, they thought, she was feeling ill. Excitement, no doubt. Positively green, she was. Poor dear, poor dear.
Stewart had finished, and now waited, looking at Innes. Slowly they sank together to the boom, and sat down on it; turned together to lean face-forward on it; and somersaulted forward on to the ground.
And a great burst of applause greeted them. As always, the English were moved by a gallant failure where an easy success left them merely polite. They were expressing at once their sympathy and their admiration. They had understood the strength of purpose that had kept her on the boom, paralysed as she was.
But the sympathy had not touched Innes. Lucy doubted if she actually heard the applause. She was living in some tortured world of her own, far beyond the reach of human consolation. Lucy could hardly bear to look at her.
The bustle of the following items covered up her failure and put an end to drama. Innes took her place with the others and performed with mechanical perfection. When the final vaulting came, indeed, her performance was so remarkable that Lucy wondered if she were trying to break her neck publicly. The same idea, to judge by her expression, had crossed Froken's mind; but as long as what Innes did was controlled and perfect there was nothing she could do. And everything that Innes did, however breath-taking, was perfect and controlled. Because she seemed not to care, the wildest flights were possible to her. And when the students had finished their final go-as-you-please and stood breathless and beaming, a single file on an empty floor as they had begun, their guests stood up as one man and cheered.
Lucy, being at the end of the row and next the door, was first to leave the hall, and so was in time to see Innes's apology to Froken.
Froken paused, and then moved on as if not interested, or not willing to listen.
But as she went she lifted a casual arm and gave Innes a light friendly pat on the shoulder.
18
As the guests moved out to the garden and the basket-chairs round the lawn, Lucy went with them, and while she was waiting to see if sufficient chairs had been provided before taking one for herself, she was seized upon by Beau, who said: "Miss Pym! There you are! I've been hunting for you. I want you to meet my people."
She turned to a couple who were just sitting down and said: "Look, I've found Miss Pym at last."
Beau's mother was a very lovely woman; as lovely as the best beauty parlours and the most expensive hairdressers could make her-and they had good foundation to work on since when Mrs Nash was twenty she must have looked very like Beau. Even now, in the bright sunlight, she looked no older than thirty-five. She had a good dressmaker too, and bore herself with the easy friendly confidence of a woman who has been a beauty all her life; so used to the effect she had on people that she did not have to consider it at all and so her mind was free to devote itself to the person she happened to be meeting.
Mr Nash was obviously what is called an executive. A fine clear skin, a good tailor, a well-soaped look, and a general aura of mahogany tables with rows of clean blotters round them.
"I should be changing. I must fly," said Beau, and disappeared.
As they sat down together Mrs Nash looked quizzically at Lucy and said: "Well, now that you are here in the flesh, Miss Pym, we can ask you something we are dying to know. We want to know how you do it?"
"Do what?"
"Impress Pamela."
"Yes," said Mr Nash, "that is just what we should like to know. All our lives we have been trying to make some impression on Pamela, but we remain just a couple of dear people who happen to be responsible for her existence and have to be humoured now and then."
"Now you, it seems, are quite literally something to write home about," Mrs Nash said, and raised an eyebrow and laughed.
"If it is any consolation to you," Lucy offered, "I am greatly impressed by your daughter."
"Pam is nice," her mother said. "We love her very much; but I wish we impressed her more. Until you turned up no one has made any impression on Pamela since a Nanny she had at the age of four."
"And that impression was a physical one," Mr Nash volunteered.
"Yes. The only time in her life that she was spanked."
"What happened?" Lucy asked.
"We had to get rid of the Nanny!"
"Didn't you approve of spanking?"
"Oh yes, but Pamela didn't."
"Pam engineered the first sit-down strike in history," Mr Nash said.
"She kept it up for seven days," Mrs Nash said. "Short of going on dressing and forcibly feeding her for the rest of her life, there was nothing to do but get rid of Nanny. A first-rate woman she was, too. We were devastated to lose her."
The music began, and in front of the high screen of the rhododendron thicket appeared the bright colours of the Junior's Swedish folk dresses. Folk-dancing had begun. Lucy sat back and thought, not of Beau's childish aberrations, but of Innes, and the way a black cloud of doubt and foreboding was making a mockery of the bright sunlight.
It was because her mind was so full of Innes that she was startled when she heard Mrs Nash say: "Mary, darling. There you are. How nice to see you again," and turned to see Innes behind them. She was wearing boy's things; the doublet and hose of the fifteenth century; and the hood that hid all her hair and fitted close round her face accentuated the bony structure that was so individual. Now that the eyes were shadowed and sunk a little in their always-deep sockets, the face had something it had not had before: a forbidding look. It was-what was the word? — a «fatal» face. Lucy remembered her very first impression that it was round faces like that that history was built.
"You have been overworking, Mary," Mr Nash said, eyeing her.
"They all have," Lucy said, to take their attention from her.
"Not Pamela," her mother said. "Pam has never worked hard in her life."
No. Everything had been served to Beau on a plate. It was miraculous that she had turned out so charming.
"Did you see me make a fool of myself on the boom?" Innes asked, in a pleasant conversational tone. This surprised Lucy, somehow; she had expected Innes to avoid the subject.
"My dear, we sweated for you," Mrs Nash said. "What happened? Did you turn dizzy?"
"No," said Beau, coming up behind them and slipping an arm into Innes's, "that is just Innes's way of stealing publicity. It is not inferior physical powers, but superior brains the girl has. None of us has the wit to think up a stunt like that."