Watcher in the Shadows by Geoffrey Household

Author:Geoffrey Household [Household, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Boston, Little, Brown
Published: 1959-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

Benita draws for the sherry people. And lousy sherry it is! Pah! Knows very well I don’t dress when there are guests! Thinks I can’t move with the times!”

The dinner went very well, Georgina being on her Court of Franz Josef behavior, and the admiral and I having primed ourselves to a point of reasonable geniality before the arrival of the guests. Benita was extremely civil, insisting that she had heard so much about me from my aunt and had read my book on the squirrel. She had, too—for she told me that my description of the use of the tail in the gliding jump from branch to branch was misleading.

“Benita, my dear, Mr. Dennim is an authority,” said her father.

Her glance at me was delightful. It suggested, while preserving a proper demureness, that we were two professionals and must be patient with the unseemly interruptions of amateurs.

“This is what happens …” she said.

She borrowed a pencil from the admiral and an envelope from me. With a dozen swift strokes she caught the feathering of the hair and the angle of tail to body. I agreed at once that she was right and that I had very badly described what I had seen.

To describe Benita herself is even harder. Her true interest, so far as I can explain it, was a sort of sensual geography. She adored her own countryside, upland and valley, whatever the weather. If one imagines a tall fairy or wood nymph —not her appearance, but what would go on in her mind if she existed — then one comes somewhere near Benita.

I do not mean that she was a sort of Rima. Far from it. She was not at all a child of nature. She would have been pretty quickly bored watching squirrels. But if squirrel-watching had been a traditional hobby in the Cotswolds, she would have known all about the people who did it, why they did it and where.

Another example. One might almost call her a trained observer of grass. This undoubtedly started from the pleasure of a young and rather lonely child in feeling the soft Cotswold turf under foot, in watching the life of the valleys through the thin, waving stems on the edge of the escarpment. But it led her on to know the whole range of the grasses and the tastes of sheep and cattle.

And now I find myself describing a collector of scraps of useless information. That isn’t right either. And so I return to my romantic conception of her as a nymph — an entity carrying the collective soul of four square miles of country. I am told that this is all very pretty but that I do not understand parsons’ daughters. All the same, I cannot imagine what induced her to become a commercial artist in London. There was never the slightest chance of her becoming, as Georgina said, a namby-pamby old maid.

During the days which I spent cosseted by the admiral and his Frank, I naturally

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