‘You’ve been lovely,’ breathed out Mrs Kerr on a sigh, and behind the mask of her face she perceptibly retreated from consciousness, in the attitude of the Beata Beatrix. Looking down at her he went back through his memory, past his admiration for Rossetti, to the day when at six years old he had called his mother ‘My Beautiful’. As she did not stir and, the Hotel being absolutely silent, there seemed no danger of anybody coming in to disturb her, he sat down again silently on a small chair. From here he could see, to the left of her sofa, the long strip of awning, orange against the sun, and, under it, the blue line of the sea, with clotted geraniums swinging down from their boxes. Across his panel of sea a fishing-boat made a slow progress; this had vanished behind the window-frame and another had followed it before Mrs Kerr opened her eyes again or Ronald stirred from the profound meditation into which, with folded legs and limply hanging arms, he had relapsed.

15

Lucid

VERONICA WAS IN despair. She slipped, after a doubtful tap, round Sydney’s door and, professing acute desire for sympathy and consolation, sank without further explanation into the billows of plump eiderdown on Sydney’s bed, kicked her white suede shoes across the room and flung her hat after them.

‘The floor hasn’t been swept,’ said Sydney, looking up from her book. Notwithstanding the slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon she had been enjoying Jude the Obscure. She did not mind Veronica coming in, but wished she did not have to talk to her.

‘I don’t care if I don’t put any of them on again,’ announced Veronica in the toneless accents of sincerity. ‘They are abominable.’

‘I think the clothes you wear are nice,’ said Sydney. ‘Have you got a pain?’

‘As a matter of fact, I hate all my clothes. And I don’t know what is to become of me. Does it ever occur to you that being alive is a mistake?’ She swung a stockinged foot and sighed. ‘I do wish,’ she said, ‘that I had brought my knitting. I do think conversation when one hasn’t got anything to do with one’s hands feels fearfully awkward, don’t you? And I really should like to talk, if you don’t mind. You’re not doing anything – I mean, only reading?’

‘Why don’t you go out?’