Palladian by Elizabeth Taylor Page A

nothing. Then Tom asked: ‘Money, you mean?’ and he nodded.
    ‘This money, this house, ruined us both,’ Tom thought, looking round the room, and then at his cousin. ‘It gave you Violet. That was the root of the trouble.’
    ‘It is useless to blame the money,’ Marion was thinking. ‘If I had to go to that office every day, I should be the same man. I should come back eventually to my books and my painted bowls.’ ‘Margaret makes up for us both,’ he said aloud. ‘Look at her energy and her worthiness and her public spirit – all the Committees and the petitions and the campaigns.’
    ‘And now a baby,’ said Tom, looking away. (Violet screaming, he thought. She screamed like an animal, not a human sound. She had frozen the world with terror. She had been beautiful in early pregnancy, had moved him so deeply, reminded him of mediaeval sculpture, the drapery falling, the pleats widening over her belly and her bosom so heavy, so utterly different. Later, she had become swollen, her face, her hands puffed out … But he had promised her not to remember…) He covered his eyes with his hand and one of the bowls fell into the hearth. Now it was a thousand pieces.
    ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Marion.
    ‘I have even broken his bowl,’ Tom thought stupidly. ‘I think I shall go to bed,’ he said.
    ‘Don’t go like that,’ said Marion. ‘Don’t go, feeling sorry for yourself.’
    ‘You know everything, Marion. How is that?’
    ‘I only know things out of books.’
    ‘I think I
shall
go to bed.’
    ‘All right.’
    Tom looked for a second at the smashed china in the hearth. Marion put him at peace with himself. ‘If he knew about Mrs V. even, he would never be disgusted,’ he thought. ‘He would onlyread something to me out of a book.’ ‘All things which the something dawn has what?’ he began.
    ‘Dispersed,’ said Marion.
    ‘I’m sorry about that bowl.’
    Marion said nothing. He had said once that it did not matter and he had spoken the truth.
    ‘Good night.’
    When Tom had gone, Marion knelt on the rug and picked up the pieces of china. He filled another bowl with the coloured fragments and then sat down again and opened his book. The ormolu clock gave out eleven notes and each struck a little chime, a little jarring reverberation from one of the thousandflower bowls upon the mantelpiece.

CHAPTER SEVEN
     
    ‘Some queer things are going on in this house,’ Nanny said to Mrs Adams from the lodge. ‘Things we’ve never been used to. There was Mrs Vanbrugh the other day complaining about the glucose going, then I find me
Picturegoer
in the larder lying there as cool as a cucumber on the shelf. It was the day we saw
Pride and Prejudice
and I left that paper on me rocking-chair. That makes me think, so I take a look around – cream cheese missing, and the bread sawed about anyhow. It’s this so-call governess. Don’t she get enough to eat or what?’
    ‘She don’t look no more like a governess than I do,’ said Mrs Adams, blowing her sandy hair up from her face as she scrubbed.
    ‘Into the corners!’ Nanny suddenly rapped out.
    ‘Thursday’s me day for this floor. I’m only giving it a do-over.’
    ‘Too many do-overs in this house. Nothing done right. Thursday you’ll get one of your funny turns, I daresay. Then where will the floor be?’
    ‘Where it is now,’ Mrs Adams thought. She fanned out the soapy water over the flagstones, then gathered it up on theslimy cloth, wrung it into the bucket and shuffled backwards on her knees.
    ‘She’s no good for gentlemen’s service,’ Nanny thought, watching her. ‘A good do-out of a room, I like,’ she said aloud. ‘Into the corners and behind the pictures. Then you know it’s all sweetness, nothing skimped.’
    ‘You could spend your life on your knees,’ Mrs Adams said, thinking of the great house. ‘We all like our little bit of shut-eye after dinner. And our look at the paper. Half the world scrubbing on their