Doves of Venus by Olivia Manning

Author:Olivia Manning
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2010-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

8

When Ellie remembered she had promised to go home for Easter, she did not withdraw her acceptance of Tom’s invitation. There was always time to do that. Somewhere at the back of her mind was the certainty she would go to Clopals. Yet she did not write to her mother. She told herself: ‘If I can save my train-fare to Eastsea, I must go,’ knowing how difficult it would be to save her fare.

When her mother wrote, ‘Looking forward to seeing you at Easter,’ Ellie would not believe she was looking forward. She told herself: ‘She has Emmy. She does not want me. She never did want me.’

With a sense of guilt that somehow enhanced the attraction of Clopals, she remembered the smallness and discomfort of her own home. Now it seemed to her scarcely possible that people could live out their lives in rooms as small as that. She thought of Tom’s mahogany dining-table. Nancy had said the table was two hundred years old. For two hundred years people had been polishing it until its surface had a depth like the depth of a pond at night. Once or twice, when she could do it unseen, she had pulled her finger-tips across it. Now, touching it in memory, she felt instead the dry, flawed surface of the table where for years she had eaten every meal.

Nancy, who had made no promises elsewhere, talked freely of Easter at Clopals. She had spent the previous Easter there while Maxine was making her second visit.

‘That’s when she jolly well began patronising me,’ said Nancy, ‘but she won’t do it again.’

And Clopals at Easter? What was it like? Nancy described the rooms in the long spring twilight, a-glitter with lamps and filled with the scent of lily-of-the-valley. In the garden the double lilacs bloomed – the dark, grapepurple bunches; the white sort like clotted cream. The pink chestnuts carpeted the lawn with pink and the lateflowering double cherries put forth blossoms so tender they wrinkled like Jap silk.

As they talked, Clopals encompassed them. For Ellie, Eastsea lost all substance: her promise became less than a shadow.

‘Why did Tom never marry again?’ she asked.

‘He’s too selfish.’

‘But he’s terribly kind.’

‘Yes, if he wants to be.’

‘Well, he does want to be.’

‘He likes girls.’

That was a fact Ellie could appreciate in a region beyond her own advantage. For her, it gave Tom a poetic quality, almost a sort of youth. If he liked girls so much, how could they help but like him in return. Before she eventually spoke of it to Nancy, she thought many times of how he had described girls as the doves of Venus.

She thought of all the girls she had known – some too fat, some too thin, some plain and bespectacled like Nancy, some stupid, some dishonest, some mean, some cruel: all given, at times, to giggling, sniggering, sniffling, smelling of their under-arm smell – and yet, somehow, they were all transmuted by Tom’s admiration into unearthly creatures, silver-white doves, delicate, diaphanous, lovely as female gods.

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