Complete Short Stories (VMC) by Elizabeth Taylor

Author:Elizabeth Taylor
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781405512718
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2012-06-20T22:00:00+00:00

The Prerogative of Love

Where the lawn was in shadow from the house, the watering-spray flung dazzling aigrettes into the air. The scent of the wet earth, the sound of dripping rose-leaves was delicious.

The round marble table was abandoned in the sun, a butterfly hovered above it, both blindingly white. Too hot, Lillah had decided, and had taken her chair and her sewing into the shade; but the damage was done, and she began to feel giddy. Mrs Hatton made her go upstairs and drink salt water and lie on her bed.

‘It’s a swine, isn’t it?’ the gardener said, meaning the weather. He was speaking to the postman, who crunched by on the gravel drive with letters in his hand.

‘Too sudden,’ the postman agreed, stopping for a moment, watching the other man work, the brown hand moving slow as a toad among the geraniums, tweaking up tiny weeds. ‘A criminal colour, that bright red,’ he said. ‘Hurts my eyes to look at it. I always preferred the white ones.’

He continued slowly up the drive, hoping to be seen from the house by Mrs Hatton the cook, and offered tea.

No one saw him, for the curtains, hardly stirring, were drawn across the open windows. He stepped into the hall and laid the letters on the brass tray on the table. He suffered a fit of noisy coughing, stood with bowed head after it, listening, but heard not a sound and made off down the drive again.

The letters – what Lillah would call a tradesman’s lot – stayed there until Richard came home. It was six o’clock then and hardly any cooler. The cats lay on the stone floor like cast-off furs. One of them got up and stretched and came towards him, its sides hanging, very thin, for it did not fancy its food in this weather. Listlessly, it rubbed its head against his leg, smelt the streets of London on his shoes and wandered, repelled, back to its place and flopped again.

Mrs Hatton, neat as a new pin, came down the back stairs to the kitchen, having napped and tidied up and now, ready for the fray, pinned a clean, folded napkin round her head, as if it were a Stilton cheese. She took the grey and white fish off the ice and, looking grim, began to fillet. All her movements were slow, so that she should not get hot. She even sang under her breath; although yearningly – for a Wiltshire woman – about Galway Bay.

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to hold the fort,’ Lillah told her husband. ‘I’ll try again later, but at the moment I can’t put my feet to the ground.’

She lay on the bed, wrapped in a white kimono. The bedroom was cool to Richard, after the hot pavements and the asphyxiating train. His clothes clung to him, he felt that this room was no place for him and longed to plunge into the river, a long dive between the silken, trailing weeds. But Lillah said there would not be time.

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