She would go up and see him tomorrow.'It's just as well Ducane is coming,' said Paula. 'He always does Willy good.''Is Ducane coming?' said Mary. 'I wish somebody would tell me something sometimes!''I suppose you realize the room isn't ready,' said Casie.'I think Kate assumes it's a regular thing now and that's why she didn't tell you.'John Ducane, a friend and colleague of Octavian's, was a frequent week-end visitor.'Casie, would you mind doing the room after tea?''Of course I mind,' said Casie, 'in my one bit of free time; what you mean is will I, yes I will.'At that moment Kate Gray came into the kitchen, followed by Mingo, and at once as if struck by some piercing stellar ray the scene dissolved into its atoms and reassembled itself round Kate as centre. Mary saw, pinioned in some line of force, Paula's keen smiling dog face, felt her own face lift and smile, her hair tossed, blown back. Mingo was barking, Montrose had jumped on to the table, Casie was pouring more hot water into the pot, the twins, disarranging their careful line of stones, were both chattering at once, fastening brown sandy hands on to the belt of Kate's striped dress.Kate's bright round face beamed at them all out of the golden fuzz of her hair. Her warm untidy being emphasized the sleekness, the thinness, the compactness of the other two, Mary with her straight dark hair tucked behind her ears and her air of a Victorian governess, Paula with her narrow head and pointed face and the well adjusted surfaces of her cropped brown hair. Kate, herself undefined, was a definer of others, the noise, the heat, the light which flattered them into the clearer contours of themselves. Kate spoke with a slight stammer and a slight Irish accent.'Octavian isn't coming tonight after all.''Oh dear,' said Mary, 'he won't be here for Barb.''I know, it's too bad. Something's happened at the office.''What's happened?''Some chap killed himself.''Good heavens,' said Paula. 'You mean killed himself, there in the office? T 'Yes. Isn't it awful?''Who was he?' said Paula.'I don't know.''What was his name?''I didn't think to ask. He's not anyone we know.''Poor fellow,' said Paula. 'I'd like to have known his name.''Why?' said Edward, who was experimenting with the tendons of one of the chicken's legs.'Because it's somehow easier to think about somebody if you know their name.''Why?' said Henrietta, who was dissecting the other leg with a kitchen knife.'You may well ask,' said Paula. 'Plato says how odd it is that we can think of anything, and however far away it is our Know msname – 'You are right to think of him,' said Kate. 'You are so right.You reproach me. I feel reproached. I just thought of Octaw vian and Barbara.''Why did he kill himself?' said Edward.'I'll do Ducane's room now,' said Mary to Casie.'No, you won't,' said Casie.They got up together and left the kitchen.The lazy sun, slanting along the front of the house, cast elongated rectangles of watery gold on to the faded floral wallpaper of the big paved hall, which served as the dining-room at week-ends. The front door was wide open, framing distant cuckoo calls, while beyond the weedy gravel drive, beyond the clipped descending lawn and the erect hedge of raspberryand-creamy spiraea, rose up the sea, a silvery blue, too thin and transparent to be called metallic, a texture as of skin-deep silver paper, rising up and merging'at some indeterminate point with the pallid glittering blue of the midsummer sky. There was something of evening already in the powdery goldness of the sun and the ethereal thinness of the sea.The two women swept round the white curve of the stairs, Casie clumping, Mary darting, and disputed briefly at the top.Mary let Casie go on to the spare room and turned herself in the direction of Barbara's room.Mary Clothier and her son Pierce had lived for nearly four years now at Trescombe House. Mary's father, a sickly defeated man, had been a junior clerk in an insurance office, and he and Mary's vague gentle mother had perished together of double pneumonia, leaving their only child, then aged nine, to the care of an elderly and rather needy aunt. Mary had managed, however, by means of scholarships, to win herself a good education, in the course of which she encountered Kate. Kate admired Mary and also quite instinctively protected her. They became firm friends. Much later, at some point in Mary's wanderings as an impecunious and socially uncertain widow Kate had suggested that she should come and live with them, and Mary had come, with many misgivings, for a trial period. She had stayed. Kate and Octavian were well off and enjoyed the deep superiority of the socially secure. Mary, a deprived person who had sometimes come near, rather romantically, to thinking of herself as an outcast, appreciated both these advantages in her friends, and was prepared to be herself propped up by them.But of course she could not have accepted this act of rescue had it not been for an indubitable virtue of generosity in both her hosts, a virtue somehow expressed in their roundness, in Octavian's big spherical bald head with its silky golden tonsure, in Kate's plump face and fuzzy ball of touchable yellow hair. There was a careless magnanimity about them both, something too of the bounty of those who might have been magnificent sinners magnificently deciding for righteousness.They were happily married and spontaneous in their efforts to cause happiness in others. Mary was untroubled by the thought that she was in fact extremely useful to them. Mary ran the house, she controlled the children, she was the one who was always there. But she knew that the benefits to herself were infinitely greater.The presence, more recently, of foxy-faced Paula was something about which Mary had been, at first, not too certain.Paula was a college friend of Mary's, and not known to Kate until the time, after her divorce, when Paula came to stay.'Everyone invites a divorced woman,' Paula had said. Mary had invited her and Kate had adored her. Kate had suggested that Paula should stay with them indefinitely, Octavian had started to make the joke about his harem, and the matter had been fixed up. Paula had been Mary's older and revered college friend. Mary thought it possible that Paula at close quarters might prove exacting; also she was afraid of becoming jealous.Paula was an uncompromising person and at times Mary had experienced her as a sort of unconscious prig. The strength and clarity of her being, her meticulous accuracy and truthfulness, operated as a reproach to the mediocrity and muddle which Mary felt to be her own natural medium. Paula had a hard cool dignity which had been quite unimpaired by her divorce, the details of which Mary never learnt, though it was generally known that Richard Biranne was an irresponsible chaser of WU1JC La1C11, it 11LLIC LOU 111UL:11, 1V1 b'1aULCU. iviaiy way V-paicu to watch, in her nervous hyperconscious way, their interest in each other, and in the first few months of Paula's sojourn Mary suffered acute pains of anticipation. However, in the end it was Paula's coolness, her detachment, her peculiar virtue which soothed Mary's nerves, and even provided Mary with the energy which she needed to see the situation exactly as it was.She soon concluded that there was nothing to fear. The mutual affection of Kate and Paula held no threat to her. There was nothing hidden and no possibility of a plot. With this acceptance came a special pleasure in their existence as a free trio which she knew that the others shared.The quartet of children had also got on reasonably well.They all went away to school now, Pierce to Bryanston, the twins to Bedales and Barbara to La Residence in Switzerland.Their presence, their absence, together with the alternation of week and week-end made of Mary's existence a chequer-board of contrasting atmosphere. When the children were away Kate often spent part of the week at the Grays' house in London, if she was not absent on a trip with Octavian, who treated airline timetables as most people treat train timetables. The arrival of the week-end changed the house with the introduction into it of the mystery of a married pair. Kate and Octavian, charmingly, ebulliently wedded, took, as it were, the thrones which awaited them. Paula and Mary then wore their status of women without men. They laughed at Octavian's harem jokes and heard late at night behind walls the ceaseless rivery murmur of the conversing couple. When the children were at home the week-end was a less intensive matter just because the house was fuller and more anarchic and less private. But the children too were altered by it, Barbara becoming suddenly 'the child of the house', a somewhat purdah-like condition, half privilege, half penalty, the nature of which was never questioned by the other three. The presence of men, Octavian and of late John Ducane (it occurred to no one to count Uncle Theo as a man), also made the conduct of the children not exactly more disciplined, but more coherent and self-conscious.On the whole Mary Clothier was satisfied, at least she enjoyed a harassed nervous rather dark content which she told herself was the best she was capable of. Alistair Clothier had died when Pierce was a very small child, leaving his wife with no money. Mary, who had abandoned the university to marry, found it hard to earn. She became a typist. Pierce gained a scholarship at his father's old school. They managed; but Mary had never forgiven the fates for so cheating her over Alistair. A spirit took possession of her which was sardonic, sarcastic, narrow. She had come to expect little and to rail on what she had. Kate, who was not even conscious of Mary as a disappointed person, half cured her. Kate, eternally and unreflectively happy herself, made Mary want happiness and startled her, by a sort of electrical contact, into the hope of it. Kate's more demonstrative affections gave Mary the courage of her own. The golden life-giving egoism and rich self-satisfaction of Kate and her husband inspired in Mary a certain hedonism which, puny as it was by comparison, was for her a saving grace. For the rest, she understood very well indeed the things that hurt her, and on the whole she now accepted them.Mary passed along the top corridor, observing the twins who had emerged on to the lawn in front of the house. They were resuming one of their special games. The twins had a number of private games which they had invented for themselves, the rules of which, though she had many times observed them, Mary was unable to deduce. She sometimes suspected that these games were mathematical in nature, based upon some sort of built-in computer system in those rather remarkable children which they had not yet discovered that other people did not possess. Most of the games had brief and uninformative names such as 'Sticks' or 'Feathers'. The one which was at present being played upon the sloping lawn in an area of rectangles and triangles marked out with string, was called, no one had ever discovered why, 'Noble Mice'.The door of Barbara's room was open and Mary saw through the doorway the intent preoccupied profile of her son as he bent down and peered through horn-rimmed spectacles at the surface of the large table in the window. Pierce, brown UV5V WILLclass="underline" u ucJ..cuucu 111 a J1iaia1LL III1c LLV111 llll VLVVV, s1vlmis – his plump waxen face a somewhat animal quality. An impulse to stroke him down over brow and nose like a pony had already troubled, in half conscious form, a number of people, including some of his masters at school. He had a serious staring gaze which, together with a slow pedantic habit of speech, gave him the air of an intellectual. In fact, though clever, he was idle at school and far from bookish. Mary, still unseen, moved closer and saw that Pierce had covered the table with a complicated pattern composed of hundreds of shells arranged in spirals, tiny ones in the centre, larger ones on the outside.Adjusting the outer edge of the pattern he stopped to select a shell from a heap at his feet.Pierce became aware of his mother and turned slowly to face her. He rarely moved fast. He looked at her without smiling, almost grimly. He looked at her like an animal, cornered but not frightened, a dangerous confident animal. And Mary apprehended herself as a thin dark woman, a mother, a representative somehow of the past, of Pierce's past, confronting him as if she were already a ghost. This came to her in an instant with an agony of possessive love for her son and a blinding pity of which she did not know whether it was for him or for herself. Next moment, as she searched for something to say, she took in the scene, Barbara's pretty room, so tidy and empty now, but already expectant. And with an immediate instinct of her son's vulnerability she saw the huge shell design as utterly untimely. It was something that belonged to the quietness of Pierce's thought about Barbara and not to the hurly-burly of Barbara's actual arrival, which Mary now anticipated with a kind of dread. The careful work with the shells seemed to her suddenly so typical of Pierce, so slow and inward and entirely without judgement.There was a shout from the lawn outside and then the sound of a car upon the gravel and the ecstatic barking of Mingo.Pierce did not move instantly. He held his mother's anguished look for a moment longer and then as she moved back he went unhurriedly past her and along the landing.'Mama, it was so marvellous, I had a fab lunch in the aeroplane and they offered me champagne, oh Mary, you mustn't carry my case, must she, mama, just look at Mingo's tail, it's going round and round like a propeller, down, Mingo, you'll hurt Montrose with your big paws, Montrose knew me, didn't he, mama, where's Uncle Theo gone to, I hardly saw him, Edward don't pull my skirt so, it's new, Henrietta I've got such a sweet dress for you, I got it in Geneva, is Willy all right, I've got him a marvellous pair of binoculars, I smuggled them, wasn't I brave, I've got presents for everybody, laisse donc, Pierce, que to m'embetes, mama, I went riding every day and my French is so good now and I practised my flute such a lot, I played in a concert, and aren't I brown, just look how brown I am, I've got some lace for you, mama, and a brooch for Mary, and a clock for papa, Henrietta could you take Montrose, do be careful with that suitcase it's got Italian glass in it, just put it on the bed, could you, Mary, oh it's so heavenly to be home, I do wish papa was here, everything looks so wonderful, I shall walk up and see Willy, what on earth are all those shells doing on my table, just push them up in a pile will you, oh damn they're falling all over the floor, Casie I do wish you'd keep the twins out of my room, now you can put the other suitcase on the table, that's right, thank you so much, and mama it was marvellous I went to such a fab dance, we all had to dress in black and white, and I went up in a helicopter, I was so frightened, it's not a bit like an aeroplane…'