‘Can’t Mrs Kerr keep an eye on the kettle for you?’ Mrs Hepworth called after her.

‘She forgets about it,’ said Sydney as she left the drawing-room.

9

My Little Boy

THREE DAYS AFTERWARDS the weather along that coast was once more fulfilling the expectation of visitors. Only a little wind remained to disturb the sea, to rustle dryly through the palm trees out on the promontory where the coast road disappeared towards Genoa and to rush to meet one round street corners with a disconcertingly ice-cold whistle. Against an opaque, bright blue sky the expressionless faces of the buildings had again their advertised and almost aching whiteness. The sounds, like the shadows, were exact and clear-cut, no longer blunted by the rain.

From end to end of the town the principal long street ran like a funnel; as Sydney came out of the flower-shop, her side of the street was slate-grey in the shadow of early afternoon. It was characteristic of her as an intelligent young English lady that she should have come to buy carnations during the hour of the siesta, cutting for her a caprice of her own direct across the custom of the land. The carnations, among which, walking slowly, she now was burying her face, were scentless, but gave one an acute pleasure by the chilly contact of their petals. She had an armful of two colours – sulphur with a ragged edge of pink and ashy mauve with crimson at the centre, crimson-veined. Carnations are not costly before they reach the flower-market, grown on terraces that stagger up the hills and picked in the grey quiet of the morning to the accompaniment of singing and of never-answered calls that come dropping down forlornly from terrace to terrace to the coast. On account of their low cost, their strangeness to the Northern eye and the vehemence of their colouring, they have become the vehicle of much emotion. One cannot, however casually, present these native carnations to a friend and remain unaffected, while the pleasure with which carnations are received is intensified by some vague agitation.