Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann

Author:Rosamond Lehmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2015-03-03T21:51:45+00:00

Part Four

1

She was ready for the picnic. She wore a yellow linen frock and a hat of brown straw, shaped like a poke bonnet and trimmed with a beautiful yellow ribbon. It was Mamma who tied the ribbon in a great bow: the loops fell in the nape of her neck and the ends ran down between her shoulder blades.

‘Lovely young creature,’ said Mamma dispassionately observing her.

Judith had been home more than a week, and Mamma was being charming. She had taken her to London to buy frocks. They had stayed at Jules for a couple of nights, and Mamma had ordered pretty clothes generously from her own dressmaker. She had said at last in her curious, harsh yet beautiful voice, with a shrug of her shoulders, as Judith paraded before her in the fifteenth model:

‘As you see, everything suits that child.’

And the dressmaker had solemnly agreed.

They had been together to a play, and to the opera; and every morning and every night Judith sat on Mamma’s bed and they chatted together with friendly politeness, almost with ease.

She was a woman exquisitely dressed, manicured, powdered and scented. Her face did not age, though the colourless cheeks were now a little hollowed, and the eyes sharper. Her eyes were like blue diamonds, and she had an unkind reddened mouth with long pointed corners. The bones of her face were strong and sharp and delicate, and something in the triangular outline, in the set of the eyes, the expression of the lips, made you think of a cat.

She was elegant in mind as well as in person, capable, quickwitted. Her conversation was acute and well-informed over a wide field, – and men admired and delighted in her. She had always, thought Judith, seemed to move surrounded by men who paid her compliments. She had no woman friends that you could remember. She remarked, now and then, how much she disliked women; and Judith had felt herself included in the condemnation. She had never been pleased to have a daughter: only a handsome son would have been any good to her. Her daughter had discerned that far back in a childhood made vulnerable by adoration of her.

There was scarcely anything about Mamma to remember: nothing but a vague awestruck worshipful identification of her with angels and the Snow Queen.

There was one night when she had come in, dressed for a dinner party, all in white, with something floating rosy and iridescent about her. The dress had geraniums on it, at breast, waist and hem, a bunch on one shoulder, and flowing geranium-coloured ribbons. There were diamonds in her fair cloud of hair. She bent over the cot, smiling secretly with eyes and lips as if she were very pleased; and Judith hid her face from that angelic presence; and neither of them spoke a word. A man’s voice called: ‘Mildred!’ from the door: not Papa.

‘Come in,’ she said, ‘here’s the child.’

Somebody tall and moustached came and stood beside Mamma and looked down, making jokes and asking silly questions, and laughing because she would neither answer nor look at him.

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