It was at this point that Alison saw the complete futility of further argument.
A couple of days later, she managed to get up her courage once more to speak to her uncle. But, if possible, he was even more baffling, because he was kind about it.
‘Job?’ he said, looking even more surprised than her aunt had done. ‘Why ever should you have a job, my dear? You’re perfectly welcome to a home here until you get married. And, anyway, I don’t approve of women in business,’ he added unexpectedly.
‘Well, then, perhaps I could be a nurse or something,’ cried Alison in desperation. The thought of any decent independence was better than having to ask a grudging Aunt Lydia for the smallest trifle, and, in exchange, to be at her aunt’s beck and call in a way no paid secretary-companion would stand.
But her uncle laughed. ‘Nonsense, Alison. It’s a terribly hard life unless you’re specially suited to it, and you don’t look particularly strong to me. There are plenty of things for you to do enjoying yourself j or I dare say you can help your aunt in small ways if you want to.’
‘But that isn’t quite it,’ Alison explained patiently. ‘It isn’t as though I’m even really your niece, Uncle Theodore. It’s-it’s like taking charity.’
He gave her an odd look. ‘Nor is Rosalie really my daughter,’ he remarked drily. ‘Yet I notice she takes much more of my charity, as you call it, without a qualm. But you’re a good child.’ He patted her shoulder not unkindly. ‘I appreciate your nice independence. But, believe me, my dear, I can well afford to keep you, and I am happy to do so. I don’t know what allowance your aunt gives you, because it goes in with Rosalie’s and the twins’, but I don’t think it can be excessive.’
It was the first Alison had heard of any allowance at all. She was not, however, specially surprised to learn that Aunt Lydia was deliberately exploiting the arrival of the penniless niece in order to increase her own allowance-or perhaps Rosalie’s. Alison was beginning to understand Aunt Lydia very well.
But, aware now, as she was, of her uncle’s excellent intentions, she couldn’t possibly make trouble by disclosing the real situation. And she shrank from saying anything to suggest that she had ever even expected any allowance.
In theory, his generosity made everything simple. In practice, Aunt Lydia ’s meanness hedged her in on every side.
The problem was too much for Alison. It looked as though she were inexorably condemned to the status of unpaid secretary-companion, with the.duties of nursery-governess thrown in-a prospect to terrify any girl of twenty. But then perhaps poor relations must not expect anything else.
It was inevitable, of course, that in the long periods of loneliness she should find her thoughts turning again and again to Julian. His extraordinary kindness to her on her first evening-whatever the motives-was the only really exciting thing that had happened to her. And sometimes she wondered if she had imagined half of that. He certainly seemed to have forgotten all about his half-promise ‘to see a good deal of her.’
And then one evening, towards the end of a hot, airless May, Alison was unexpectedly included in a theatre party -and Julian was there.
She saw him just before the play began, towering over the heads of the people near him. He saw her, too, and smiled slightly at her and bowed.
She was ridiculously, shamelessly conscious of him during the whole of the first act. He was sitting one row in front of her, a little to the side. By turning her head very slightly, she found, she could see his keen, absorbed face in the light from the stage. And after that the play seemed to lose a good deal of its interest for her.
In the first interval she sat there studying her programme with desperate concentration. Would he come and say a word to her? Just one word of greeting. Something different from her aunt’s pettiness or Rosalie’s spitefulness-or even her uncle’s formality.
Aunt Lydia and Rosalie had gone to speak to someone the other side of the theatre and she was quite alone. The seconds crept by. She counted them by the beating of her heart. Oh, it didn’t seem much to ask-just one word of greeting.
‘Well’-his deep, slightly amused voice sounded above her-’are you still following out the role of Victorian heroine and refusing to raise your eyes?’
She looked up then, and smiled as he took her hand.
‘I’m very glad to see you,’ she said simply.
‘Thank you, my child.’ He smiled too, then, very kindly. ‘And so am I glad to see you. Although’-he paused, and then said imperiously-’Look at me again.’
Alison’s startled eyes came back to his face.
‘I thought so.’ He frowned slightly. ‘You’re not looking as well as you should. What is it? Too many late nights?’
‘No!’ She spoke a little indignantly. When did he imagine she could have had late nights?
‘What then?’
But before she could frame any sort of reply her aunt came up, and then, a second later, Rosalie.
‘Hello, darling.’ Rosalie spoke perfectly casually, but she put her hand carelessly over Julian’s as it rested on the back of the seat.
Alison didn’t raise her eyes to his face again, but she watched those two hands. She saw his tighten and tighten under Rosalie’s light grasp, although all the time he was talking calmly to Aunt Lydia about the play. And then in one little, swift movement his hand turned and imprisoned Rosalie’s.
His. voice never altered at all, but when he took his hand away there were little white marks where his fingers had gripped Rosalie’s.
Alison heard her give the very faintest, satisfied laugh. And she thought again, ‘I hate her.’ Then she realised suddenly that she felt slightly sick.
When the curtain rose again she saw nothing of what was happening on the stage. She was dunking, ‘It’s awful to feel like this. It’s wicked, in a way, because he belongs to Rosalie, and it’s no business of mine how much she hurts him.’
But she went on hating Rosalie.
Afterwards they went on somewhere to supper, and; although the party was a big one, Alison had some faint hope that she might have a further word with Julian, and perhaps find out what he had meant by that casual reference to ‘late nights’.
But when they reached the restaurant Julian was naturally firmly annexed to Rosalie’s group, and there seemed little likelihood of Alison’s being permitted to join them.
Instead, she found herself marooned beside an elderly retired colonel whom she had heard someone describe rudely and audibly as ‘very Poona ’.
It seemed he was ‘somebody’s uncle’, but the nephew or niece in question appeared to have left him to make his own amusement. Alison felt sorry for him, particularly as he looked a bit lost and offended after the Poona remark.
She tried, a little timidly, to make conversation with him, but although he seemed grateful, it was rather hard going.
He said, ‘Most extraordinary,’ almost every time there was a burst of laughter at any of the cabaret jokes, and once or twice he asked Alison to explain things that were best left unexplained.
She struggled along bravely, however, knowing from bitter experience how blighting it was to be ignored and cold-shouldered by these people. She guessed that the colonel was sufficiently near the category of ‘rich relation’ to be given a duty invitation to a theatre party, but that to show him a little personal politeness and consideration was beyond the limits of trouble to which his hopeful heirs would go.
Alison by now had taken the full measure of the world to which her aunt and Rosalie belonged.