THERE ARE FOUR SEASONS by Richmal Crompton

Author:Richmal Crompton [Richmal Crompton]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Chapter Fourteen

VICKY stood before the full-length mirror in her bedroom, giving the final touches to her toilet. She was going to a tea-party at Lady Sybil’s and she had put on a new dress of tartan silk, heavily flounced and trimmed with fringe. Her hair was done in a single loose curl on the top of her head, and she wore one of the tiny fashionable hats that were more like stringless bonnets.

She studied the effect anxiously, hoping that her pregnancy did not show too plainly. Philip had been extravagantly delighted when she told him that she was going to have a child, but already he was bored and irritated by the prospect, and any reminder of it was enough to dispel his precarious good humour. He hated specially to see her slender graceful figure growing large and ungainly, and she did her best to hide it, lacing her stays as tightly as she dared, and wearing dresses with flounces and furbelows.

They had been settled at the Hall for several months now. Mrs. Carothers had moved into Ivy Lodge, taking with her two maids and what furniture she wanted, Miss Boniface had been dismissed, and Celia packed off to a boarding-school. Mrs. Carothers filled her time with household tasks and parish work, but there was still something mechanical about her briskness, as though the essential part of her had died with her husband.

Vicky would have liked to draw nearer to her now that Papa was no longer there between them—she often felt the need of help and advice from an older woman in her new life—but Philip disliked her and would not allow Vicky to visit her or ask her to the Hall more often than convention demanded.

“I haven’t got a mother-in-law, thank God,” he said, “because your real mother doesn’t count, and I’m damned if I’m going to let you give me one in that old harridan. I’m not having her or anyone coming over and telling us what to do and how to do it. I want you to myself, and I’m going to have you to myself.”

He enjoyed being the master of a house and household and was still passionately in love with Vicky, bringing back some presents for her whenever he went to London—once a diamond brooch that had cost £200, and that he bought on an impulse when he had missed his train and had to wait an hour for the next. (“I couldn’t just hang about the beastly station, so I thought: ‘I’ll go and buy Vicky something’.”)

He had turned part of the park into an artificial lake, built a boat-house, and purchased two boats. His delight in it was like a child’s delight in a new toy. He loved to paddle about by moonlight and would often make Vicky get up in the middle of the night to accompany him. Moonlight on water always held a strange fascination for him, and he would never tire of watching the reflections and the ripples made by the oars.

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