Balefanio - tmp0

boots. Their grief, which had seemed beautiful and triumphant over death while they were inside the church, was now, under green trees, crude and hypocritical and sordid. Rooks flapped above them, scattering tiny twigs which fell from high aloft, spinning, to lodge on women's hats. People sniffed or cleared their throats. Some were coughing.

With an effort she withdrew her attention from these sounds and fixed it upon the Cross. She liked the design, and would have liked it a good deal better if there hadn't been so much ornamentation on the shaft. But it was in very good taste com­pared with the granite atrocities they were putting up in the neighbouring villages. She wondered what Richard would have thought of it.

Now they were all ready for the dedication to to begin. Lily and Mr. Vernon and Mary were standing almost directly in front of the Cross. Mr. Hardwick was on one side of Papa, Lily on the other. Mary was at Lily's elbow. Edward had with­drawn somewhere into the background.

Lily glanced round for Eric, and saw him stand­ing just behind, with Anne. Anne is getting very pretty, Lily thought. Both Mary's children were good-looking—Maurice even more so than his sister. But I wouldn't change my darling Eric for either of them, Lily thought. And, after all, Anne isn't so pretty as she might be. There's something wrong with the way her forehead comes down. And her face is too broad. As for Maurice, I don't know.

There's something about him one doesn't quite like. He reminds one slightly of his father. But I mustn't go on like this, Lily thought. Why can't I be nicer to Mary and her children? Besides, I see them so seldom. How could I possibly judge?

And now the Bishop advanced with his pastoral staff towards the Cross. Lily crowded all these thoughts out of her consciousness, crammed them into a back drawer of her brain. She was humiliated and penitent that they should be with her at such a moment. She closed her eyes, fastening the eye of her brain upon a needle-point of concentration.

Richard, she thought, Richard.

And now the Bishop turned to the Cross, speak­ing the first words of the prayer:

"O Lord our God, whose only beloved Son did suffer for us the death upon the Cross, accept at our hands this symbol of His great Atonement, wherewith we commemorate the sacrifice which our brothers made: and grant that they who shall look upon it may ever be mindful of the price that is paid for their redemption: and may learn to live unto Him who died for them, Our Lord and Saviour."

Richard, she thought, Richard.

The Bishop's voice, so beautiful, so confident, with such precise modulations, rose and fell:

"To the Honour and Glory of God and in memory of our brothers who laid down their lives for us, we dedicate this Cross in the name of the

Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."

Lily opened her eyes. She saw the Bishop, with his linen sleeves and the medals on his scarf. She saw the tall monument, the work of a good Man­chester firm, tastefully executed and paid for by the large, easily afforded subscriptions of grateful business men. But Richard isn't here, she thought —she knew, with horror: Richard isn't anywhere. He's gone. He's dead.

Giddy on the mouth of a black pit, she faltered, scarcely conscious, swayed forward in an instant's nausea of pure despair, saved herself just con­sciously from the fall.

A moment later she realised that she had caught hold of Mary's hand.

II

Mary was very much startled. She had been won­dering whether she ought to have ordered some more of that New Zealand lamb. There was the week-end to think of. Not that any of them liked it so much as the other. And we really must econom­ise over sugar, Mary decided. Nice-minded people had kept up their war-time habits, had ceased to want now what they couldn't get then. But the War hadn't cured Maurice of liking his three lumps a cup. As for saving, generally, it wasn't in her. She was snobbish about it. The idea of doing things stingily simply revolted her. Cooking in margarine, for instance, which most of their neigh­bours, who were much better off than they were, did as a matter of course. If you hadn't got the stuff—that was a different matter.

She returned to the service with a violent jerk.

"What's the matter?" she whispered to Lily. "Are you all right?"

Lily must have felt faint for a moment, but

she didn't show it now. In fact, she glanced up quite coldly at Mary and said: "Perfectly, thank you."

Mary couldn't help smiling. That was so ex­actly like Lily, to squeeze your hand one minute and snub you the next. But she really is extraordinary, Mary thought. I shall never be able to understand what she's driving at.

How strange it is, Mary reflected, to think of the days when I really hated her—almost as much as I hated Mother. The truth was, I merely wanted a scapegoat, and she was a stranger. It was easier to blame her than Dick. I suppose I was very unfair on her; not that it did her much harm. It wouldn't have kept her awake at nights.

The Bishop turned to address them from the steps of the Cross. He said:

"Today we are gathered together at the foot of this Cross by a common sorrow and with a common purpose."

But no, Mary couldn't believe that she'd ever hated Lily. It was impossible. She still looked so idiotically young. There was scarcely a line in her face, although she couldn't be under thirty-seven. And yet she was frightfully cut up when Dick was killed. That was genuine enough. But it isn't crying that makes you look your age, thought Mary. It's having to buy the dinner every day of the year for eighteen years, wondering what everybody likes and usually guessing wrong, and then to bring it

all home and cook it. Probably Lily had never cooked a meal in her life.

"There are some of us here today," said the Bishop, "who have looked on that scene of terrible desolation, who have seen, as I myself have seen, those shattered villages and streets, those blasted fields and those blackened trees. But to the others, those who have not seen that land, I should like to put this question: What did the War mean to you?"

Mary could answer that straight away. It meant filling in ration-cards, visiting the Hospital, getting up jumble sales for the Red Cross. It had meant coming up from London, because Father, after his stroke, had sent a message through Lily that he wanted her. It had meant leaving the little house in the mews. I'll go back there one day, Mary de­cided, if it's possible. Father, she knew, had wanted her to live at the Hall. And he'd have enjoyed hav­ing the children too. She was sure of that. But she couldn't. She wouldn't. Perhaps that was silly. Time changes everything. When Desmond left her, and Mother sent that message—how she got to hear of it was a mystery—that she could come back if she liked, Mary had torn the letter into little bits and burnt it alive in the stove. But it's no use being hectic. Mother was dead—and Mary was glad to hear of it; and yet it was painful for her to be glad. And when the War had come and she'd heard the last of Desmond and she knew that

Father would never get better, she was in two minds whether to accept. But this compromise had been wiser. She was sure of that, now. Lily and I couldn't have stayed in the same house together, Mary thought, for more than a week. I couldn't ever have lived in Chapel Bridge, and had Father looking in every morning on his way to the Bank. And what had the War meant to Father? Dick being killed, of course. But he had never cared very much for Dick, she sometimes thought. No, the War hadn't been very much to Father, who could still, even when they were shelling Paris, take his drives, which got longer every year, up the Devil's Elbow, away over the moors towards Glossop, the brougham full of cigar smoke and the smell of the rug being scorched by Father's fusees, Kent cursing—back for warmed-up lunch at a quarter-past three. Tea with tea-cakes at half-past four. The evenings upstairs in the attic, reading endless novels by Guy Boothby, William le Queux, Phillips Oppenheim. Sometimes he'd sit for hours holding one of them, upside down, staring at it, breathing heavily. Yet they were soon finished. If you opened them afterwards you would be sure to find a wad of damp tobacco stuck between the pages. Father was what Kent called "a wet smoker." On these novels, on this tobacco, on cigars, on absurd and costly presents to his grand­children—he had once given Eric a mechanical swan which went round and round by clockwork