The Rosemary Tree by Elizabeth Goudge

Author:Elizabeth Goudge [Goudge, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: inspirational books, christian Fiction, Elizabeth Goudge, Christian faith, Christian books
Publisher: Hendrickson Publishers
Published: 2015-04-30T22:00:00+00:00

2

“Come in darling,” said Mrs. Belling sweetly, and Mary entered jauntily. She was feeling jaunty, for she had vanquished the demon. Or, to be strictly accurate, at the very moment when she was informing Giles that he was present he had gone to sleep; like having your toothache vanish as you take the receiver off to ring up the dentist. It was out of the midst of the glow of virtue occasioned by his absence that she had been able to ask Giles to go to the concert with her. She felt extremely pleased with herself, and curling her tongue round into the empty place where the late tooth had been and now wasn’t increased her pleasure.

“Sit down, sweetheart,” said Mrs. Belling, and Mary sat, smiling a cocksure smile. Mrs. Belling was also smiling and her pretty blue eyes were fixed unblinkingly on Mary. It was one of her characteristics that she never seemed to blink. She was looking extremely comfortable, propped up against a quantity of soft but not over-clean pillows. A torn lace cap hid her white hair and she wore a quilted pink satin dressing jacket with egg stains down the front. She had not bothered to take off her rings last night and they gleamed on her pudgy fingers. Mary’s smile became a little strained, but she held it. Mrs. Belling had no difficulty in holding hers. Baba was asleep on her soiled pink satin eiderdown and the eiderdown smelled of Baba. Mrs. Belling smelled of the scent she used and the cigarette she was smoking. The fire was alight (Mrs. Belling liked an old-fashioned coal fire in her bedroom) and the window was shut and the room was unbearably close and stuffy. Mrs. Belling’s clothes were on the floor. “This is my bedroom, and me in bed forty-five years from now,” thought Mary, and the cocksureness went from her smile; but she still held it, and still continued to look at her aunt. Mrs. Belling’s smile became fatter and more smug until it seemed as though it were graven into the dough of her face. Her fixed regard became a blank blue stare. It struck Mary suddenly that the terrible emptiness of the stare was entirely evil. The sweat pricked out on her forehead but she maintained her strained smile and though she blinked once or twice she did not look away. To do so would have been to give ground. She was getting a bit dizzy with the heat of the room but she felt it was extremely important that she should not give ground. If only Aunt Rose would speak. Surely one always blinked when one spoke? Mrs. Belling flicked the ash off her cigarette into a dish on the breakfast tray beside her and spoke, but she did not blink, and even while her mouth moved the smile seemed somehow there.

“Mr. Wentworth is a very charming man, darling, isn’t he?”

Mary swallowed. “I don’t know that I should call him charming,” she said. “Courteous and dignified, but not what one is accustomed to call charming.

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