Collected Stories by Elizabeth Bowen

Author:Elizabeth Bowen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446496879
Publisher: Random House

Maria

‘WE HAVE GIRLS of our own, you see,’ Mrs Dosely said, smiling warmly.

That seemed to settle it. Maria’s aunt Lady Rimlade relaxed at last in Mrs Dosely’s armchair, and, glancing round once more at the Rectory drawing-room’s fluttery white curtains, alert-looking photographs, and silver cornets spuming out pink sweet-pea, consigned Maria to these pleasant influences.

‘Then that will be delightful,’ she said in that blandly conclusive tone in which she declared open so many bazaars. ‘Thursday next, then, Mrs Dosely, about tea-time?’

‘That will be delightful.’

‘It is most kind,’ Lady Rimlade concluded.

Maria could not agree with them. She sat scowling under her hat-brim, tying her gloves into knots. Evidently, she thought, I am being paid for.

Maria thought a good deal about money; she had no patience with other people’s affectations about it, for she enjoyed being a rich little girl. She was only sorry not to know how much they considered her worth; having been sent out to walk in the garden while her aunt had just a short chat, dear, with the Rector’s wife. The first phase of the chat, about her own character, she had been able to follow perfectly as she wound her way in and out of some crescent-shaped lobelia beds under the drawing-room window. But just as the two voices changed – one going unconcerned, one very, very diffident – Mrs Dosely approached the window and, with an air of immense unconsciousness, shut it. Maria was baulked.

Maria was at one of those comfortable schools where everything is attended to. She was (as she had just heard her Aunt Ena explaining to Mrs Dosely) a motherless girl, sensitive, sometimes difficult, deeply reserved. At school they took all this, with her slight tendency to curvature and her dislike of all puddings, into loving consideration. She was having her character ‘done’ for her – later on, when she came out, would be time for her hair and complexion. In addition to this, she learnt swimming, dancing, some French, the more innocent aspects of history, and noblesse oblige. It was a really nice school. All the same, when Maria came home for the holidays they could not do enough to console her for being a motherless girl who had been sent away.

Then, late last summer term, with inconceivable selfishness, her Uncle Philip fell ill and, in fact, nearly died. Aunt Ena had written less often and very distractedly, and when Maria came home she was told, with complete disregard for her motherlessness, that her uncle and aunt would be starting at once for a cruise, and that she was ‘to be arranged for’.

This was not so easy. All the relations and all the family friends (who declared when Sir Philip was ill they’d do anything in the world), wrote back their deep disappointment at being unable to have Maria just now, though there was nothing, had things been otherwise, that they would have enjoyed more. One to his farm in fact, said Mr MacRobert, the Vicar, when he was consulted, another to his merchandise.

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