Patrick White - Voss

Then Dr Badgery turned, straining a little, as well-fleshed men of forty will, and was looking at Laura with the highest hopes. He would have been singularly unsurprised at anything of an oracular nature that might have issued from the mouth of that dark young woman.

Laura, who had looked away, remained conscious of his rather heavy eyebrows.

‘Did you?’ he asked.

And waited.

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘That is to say, my uncle was one of those who subscribed to Mr Voss’s expedition.’

‘And what manner of man is this German?’

‘I do not know,’ said Laura. ‘I cannot judge a person on superficial evidence. Sometimes,’ she added, for she had by now lived long enough, ‘it will even appear that all evidence is superficial.’

‘I have heard the most extraordinary things,’ said the surgeon, ‘of Mr Voss.’

‘Then, no doubt,’ said the young woman, ‘you are better informed than I.’

It was at this point that Dr Badgery realized he should ask Miss Wilson to dance, and she, for want of better opportunities, accepted graciously enough. They went down. Now the surgeon, that ordinarily jolly man, who wrote affectionate letters to young girls long after their mothers had given him up, was engulfed in the tragic hilarity of the polka, as if rivers of suffering had gushed to the surface from depths where they had remained hitherto unsuspected, or he, perhaps he alone had not tapped them.

This was before his sense of duty returned.

‘Do you know Waverley?’ asked the jigging surgeon.

‘Oh, dear, yes. Waverley ,’ sighed, and jigged Miss Chattie Wilson. ‘I know everywhere round here. Although, of course, there are some places where one cannot go.’

‘I was at Waverley recently, in the garden of a Judge de Courcy. Do you know him?’ asked the surgeon, who had heard it done this way.

‘His wife is my aunt’s second cousin.’

‘Is everybody related?’

‘Almost everybody.’ Chattie sighed. ‘Of course, there are some people who cannot be.’

‘I was at Waverley with the Pringles. Miss Bonner and her mother happened to be of the party.’

‘Belle,’ said Chattie, ‘is the sweetest thing. And so lovely. She deserves every bit of her good fortune. Nobody could envy Belle.’

‘And Miss Trevelyan,’ the surgeon suggested.

‘Laura is sweet, too,’ Chattie sighed. ‘But peculiar. Laura is clever.’

They continued to dance.

Or the surgeon was again threading the dark maze of clipped hedges at Waverley. He knew that, already the first day, he was dedicated to Laura Trevelyan, whatever the nature of her subterranean sorrows. So they sailed against the dark waters, trailing hands, she holding her face away, or they walked in the labyrinth of hedges, in which, he knew from experience, they did not meet.

From where she had continued to sit, Laura Trevelyan watched the antics of the fat surgeon, an unlikely person, whom she would have learnt to love, if seas of experience and music had not flowed between them.

Then the dancers stopped, and everybody was applauding the capital music with their hot gloves.

Laura was for the moment quite separate in the roomful of human beings, but as she had outlived the age of social panic, she did not try to burrow in, and presently she saw Willie Pringle, on whom the hair had begun to sprout in unsatisfactory patches.

Willie wandered through his own party, and finally arrived at Laura.

‘I do not care for a ball, Laura, do you?’ the young man asked, with his silly, loose mouth.

‘You are my host,’ Laura answered, kindly.

‘Good Lord, I do not feel like one. Not a bit. I do not know what I feel like.’

Without realizing that this is frequently the case before the yeast begins to work, his mother was in the habit of blaming his ineffectuality on the fact that he had outgrown his strength.

‘Perhaps you will discover in time, and do something extraordinary,’ Laura suggested.

‘In a solicitor’s office?’

That he would find out and do something extraordinary was an eventuality of which Willie was afraid. But, in the meantime, he enjoyed the company of older girls. Not so much to talk to, as to watch. He sensed that mysticism which their presence bred, by secrets and silences, and music of dresses. Intent upon their own iridescent lives in the corners of a ballroom, or seated in a landscape, under trees, their purely formal beauty obsessed him. Often he would turn his back upon the mirrors that could not perpetuate their images.

‘Not in a solicitor’s office,’ he did hear Laura agree. ‘If we were bounded by walls, that would be terrible.’

She seemed to emphasize the we , which made Willie happy, although he wrinkled his forehead prodigiously to celebrate his happiness.

‘Should we dance, Laura?’ he asked, in some doubt.

This was a wholly and unexpectedly delightful prospect to Laura Trevelyan.

‘Do let us, Willie,’ she said, laughing for the approach of tenuous pleasure. ‘It will be fun.’

With Willie whom she had known since childhood. It was so blameless.

So they held hands. To move along the sunny avenues of rather pretty music, produced in the young woman such a sense of innocent happiness she did for a moment feel the pricking of tears. She glanced in a glass and saw that her eyelids had reddened in her pale face, and her nose was swollen. She was ugly tonight, but gently happy.

So the two peculiar people danced gently together. Nobody noticed them at first, except the surgeon, who had been reduced to the company of his own nagging thoughts.

Then Belle saw, and called, across several waves of other dancers, that were separating the two cousins, as at all balls.

‘Laura!’ Belle cried. ‘I am determined to reach you.’

She swam, laughing, through the sea of tulle, and was rising from the foam in her white, shining dress. Belle’s skin was permitted to be golden, while others went protecting their pink and white. At close quarters, changed back from goddess into animal, there were little, fine, golden hairs on what some people dared to refer to as Belle Bonner’s brown complexion . Indeed, there were mothers who predicted that Belle would develop a coarse look later on. But she smelled still of youth and flint, sunlight could have been snoozing upon her cheeks, and, amiably, she would let herself be stroked with the clumsiest of compliments. In which she did not believe, however. She laughed them off.

Now the cousins were reunited in midstream. Tugged at and buffeted, they swayed together, they clung together, they looked in through each other’s eyes, and rested there. All they saw most concerned themselves.

Until Belle had to bubble.

‘Remind me to tell you,’ she said, too loud, ‘about Mrs de Courcy’s hair. You are not moping?’

‘Why should I mope?’ asked Laura, whose sombre breast had begun to rustle with those peacock colours which were hers normally.

Then Belle was whisked away to dance gravely with the judge.

As Willie had wandered off, as he did on practically all occasions, particularly at balls, Laura was left with her own music, of which she dared to hum a few little, feverish phrases. The fringe of metal beads, that hung from the corsage of what had been her dull dress, glittered and chattered threateningly, and swords struck from her seemingly cavernous eyes, from beneath guarded lids.

In consequence, Tom Radclyffe was of two minds when approaching his cousin-to-be.

‘I presume you are not dancing,’ he began.

‘If you would prefer it that way,’ Laura smiled, ‘I am willing to set your feelings at rest.’

She knew that Belle, who was kind by instinct, had come to some arrangement with Tom.