Henry by Elizabeth Eliot

Author:Elizabeth Eliot [Eliot, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2019-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

Mrs Isaacs spent the interval in sending notes round to her friend whose name was Gloria. This was more difficult than it sounds, for the Theatre Royal, Torness, is not constructed for the passing of notes between audience and players.

Henry and George went off to the bar. Nurse Brawn tried to explain to me which of the tiny flea-bitten tots she had liked best. Pamela regretted aloud that Matron had had to miss this treat. Nurse Brawn nudged me in the ribs and whispered that it was a jolly good thing; she wouldn’t have felt a bit free if Matron had been there listening to everything that was said.

‘Don’t you like Matron?’

Nurse Brawn said, ooh, yes, she liked her all right, but it didn’t seem natural somehow being friendly with someone in a blue dress. I imagine that that is the point of view which tends to narrow hospital life.

Mrs Isaacs was talking to Pamela. There was a bright gleam in Mrs Isaacs’s eye, a high colour in her cheek. They might be due to excitement or the heat of the theatre. They might mean that Mrs Isaacs was ‘up to no good.’ Why should Mrs Isaacs be ‘up to no good’? It was all very well to be adult and to understand other people’s moods. It was another thing altogether to invent the moods for them. I was reminded of over-understanding women whom I had met in the past. They were a menace; there was something vaguely obscene about them.

All the same, I found myself watching Mrs Isaacs carefully. She wasn’t trustworthy. Anybody could see that; I hoped that Pamela could.

Mrs Isaacs had known Pamela’s father and mother. In the end the much-tried George Merritt had hopped it. But where to, and with whom? I hadn’t allowed Mrs Isaacs to tell me.

Pamela hardly ever spoke of her childhood, but why should she? One’s childhood is the least interesting time of one’s life. She spoke sometimes of her training at St Gregory’s Medical School. Later she had been an interne at St Gregory’s. Then she had come to London and held appointments in various clinics and been assistant to that doctor in Fulham. There had been the unsatisfactory affair with the Hungarian.

I wondered what it would have been like to have been brought up in a provincial city. It might have been cosy. You would have next-door neighbours, like the people who wrote letters to the Daily Mirror. ‘My neighbour says . . .’ At Trelynt we had no neighbours. There had been us and there had been the village.

Pamela was in love with Henry. When he came into a room her whole face changed. When he snubbed her she was bitterly hurt. But she tried to possess him. I thought of her as one of those over-understanding women. They tried to possess one, even for the space of a conversation.

Henry had wanted to live for a few years at Trelynt on the money he had won at Newmarket. Pamela

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