Tea with Mr. Rochester by Frances Towers

Author:Frances Towers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Published: 2024-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

Strings in Hollow Shells

‘It’s divine to be here again,’ Sandra said, tossing her pill-­box of a hat on to a table and burying her face in a bowl of roses. She seemed to be eating them with her greedy carmine lips. ‘I’m so tah’d, Mrs. Prideaux. I don’t think I’ve ever been so tah’d in my life. God knows why one lives in London, when there’s all this.’ She opened her arms to the view, as if she would gather it to her breast. ‘Oh, those hills!’ she said, ‘and the larch-­wood, and the pattern of the fields like a Paisley shawl.’

‘Have some tea,’ said Mrs. Prideaux, drily.

‘Nothing has changed,’ said Sandra, looking about her. She knew the room so well, the shiny white walls with a shinier satin stripe in the paper, the shiny chintz, the pewter and lustre jugs on the chimneypiece, the faded water-­colours—a pleasant, rather characterless country-­house drawing-­room, with a patterned carpet and fat armchairs.

‘To think,’ she said, stroking her delicate arched brows with a pink-­tipped finger, as if to smooth away some small twitching pain, a trick of hers, ‘how much water has flowed under bridges since I was last here!’

There was one person in the room who interpreted correctly the implications of her remark. He knew, the unobtrusive person in the background who had not yet been introduced, that what she had really said was—‘How I have lived and suffered, while you have been existing tranquilly in your backwater!’

Indeed, her next words were—‘What I love about Closters is that nothing ever seems to happen here. One feels so safe . . . like coming home to haven from the high seas.’

‘Except love and birth and death,’ said Mrs. Prideaux, crisply, ‘the usual adventures. After all, the house has been standing for two hundred years.’

‘But it has such an atmosphere of tranquillity. Good, peaceful people have lived here. No one has died at Closters of a broken heart, no one has been betrayed or forsaken. Oh, I know!’ said Sandra. ‘I am very sensitive to atmosphere. The very smell in the hall as one comes in—I don’t know what it is, but it’s been there ever since I was a child, like the Doré engraving and the red lacquer cabinet and your golf-­cape on a peg, a smell of new wool, like fresh fluffy blankets, and wood-­smoke and camphor—so comforting. When something appalling happens, one’s natural instinct is to turn to Closters.’

‘Appalling?’ said Mrs. Prideaux. ‘My dear, I hope not.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I seem to be a person things happen to.’ Sandra’s eyes were dark with her mysterious sorrow. ‘Not that I wear my heart on my sleeve, or anything like that. I’m pretty tough, really. Let’s not talk about me. I just adore being here.’

‘There’s nothing like a nice cup of tea after a journey, I always think,’ said another figure in the background, making her first effort to project herself into Miss Pellew’s consciousness. ‘I don’t suppose you know who I am.

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