The Selected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen by Elizabeth Bowen

Author:Elizabeth Bowen [Bowen, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473588844
Publisher: Random House

The Man of the Family

‘Dear William,’ Mrs Peel kept exclaiming. ‘Isn’t William wonderful?’ She was his Aunt Luella, and because his talk was beyond her, and she could not always grasp what he was saying, she kept casting bright sceptical glances around the lunch-table. Her blonde shell-rimmed spectacles gave these glances a twinkle. Lady Lambe, his Aunt Héloïse, however, listened intently; she made little flapping gestures at the butler when he offered her things, as though she could not bear to be distracted. When she noticed the soufflé the others were eating she recalled the butler with an apology.

After each interruption William would raise his voice half a tone and continue patiently. He was on his way across London from Oxford. Patsey, beside him, sat with her hands on her lap twisting her rings about when she was not eating and taking no part in the talk. She was not modern at all and always seemed discouraged. Pretty Rachel sat smiling into the bowl of glass fruit, on which green sunshine, reflected back from the Regent’s Park trees, twinkled and slid.The trees were in full June light, the dining-room in shadow. The table was round, with no ‘head’, so that any difficulty in placing William had been avoided.

Aunt Héloïse was also a Liberal: at the last three elections she had stood for Parliament: she meant to keep on standing. She was not original, but she was sound and receptive; when she came down to Oxford he took her to debates at the Union. Rachel Lambe never came with her mother; she said they all made her feel so terribly old (she was twenty-four). He too seldom saw her; she went out a great deal and seemed to have numerous friends; when they met she, though so naïve, contrived to be very mysterious. She had bronzy-gold hair, parted down the centre, that rippled smoothly against the line of her cheeks, and a smile – subtle, gentle, malicious – that sent curves up under her eyes: a da Vinci smile. An extraordinary daughter for one of one’s aunts to have had.

William always lunched at his Aunt Luella’s on his way across London. The Regent’s Park house was his pied-à-terre; he could put up here even when the family were out of town, and bring friends in to meals – had he wished. Aunt Luella was an irritating, attractive woman; she was thin as a lath, wore a perpetual string of brown amber, and dressed to tone in with it. Her taste in interior decoration made him blush, but she kept an excellent table. She called him ‘the man of the family’ or ‘the head of the family’ (which he in fact was), and scoffed away gently at him. She scoffed at herself, her daughter and everyone else. Patsey was thirty-two, and looked like her mother’s sister. She was statuesque, expensively dressed, and null; she had been engaged twice, but nothing had come of it. Quite a lot of life (he often longed to point out) was before her; interests still offered, but Patsey seemed blind to them.

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