Friends and Lovers by Helen MacInnes Page A

pause, and as it lengthened David felt he had to say, “I
    should like to see it very much.” He was as embarrassed as Penny. He had never been adept at simulating admiration: he would say inadequate things, and she would be hurt.
    Penny stood hesitating for a minute, and then, catching the slight nod of command from her mother, who now was quite determined that Mr. Bosworth should not leave with a wrong impression of her daughter’s talents, she suddenly moved towards the hall.
    She led the way, without looking back, and David followed quickly.
    The sooner this was over the better. She was wearing fine silk stockings to-day, and the seams were straight, too, on an excellent pair of legs. He admired them all the way up the two nights of stairs.
    “Penelope insisted on changing her room to suit her own ideas,” Mrs. Lorrimer said, as they passed two sweetly pretty rooms belonging to Moira and Betty.
    There was the slight edge of amused criticism in her voice. Penny said nothing, but her chin was set and determined. David wanted to smile. But instead a look of surprise came into his eyes as he followed her into her room. The walls were plain, unlike the flower-patterned wallpaper which belonged to the other rooms, and they had been painted a strange shade of clouded blue, almost grey. The carpet, also un patterned was the colour of sand.
    Long, straight curtains (no frills and flounces here) were striped in white and coral-red. There were bookcases, open and low, against one wall, and above them a long, deep band of dark green felt over cork had been fixed to the wall. On this were pinned reproductions of pictures cut out of art magazines.
    “Good idea,” he said involuntarily. This was the kind of thing he would like to have in his room at Oxford. He looked at the pictures.
    They varied in emotion from Rem-brandt’s self-portrait through Ingres to Gauguin and the Douanier Rousseau. There was also a magnificent photograph of the detail on the main door to Chartres Cathedral; a reproduction of Durer’s Praying Hands; some British Museum postcards of Attic vases. And there was an excellent camera study, cut out of last month’s Vanity Fair, of a girl’s body stretched, with accent on long, tight thighs and firm, high breasts, against a dark background.
    “Here is Penelope’s workroom,” Mrs. Lorrimer said quickly. I told her yesterday that I didn’t like that thing, she thought angrily. She opened the door which led into Penelope’s small studio.
    As David turned away from the pictures to follow politely he glanced at Penny. She was watching him anxiously, as if she were afraid that he might laugh, as if that were the normal reaction she had come to expect. He said, most honestly,
    “I like this room.” Somehow he felt that in these last two minutes he had known her for two years.
    “It is so very small, of course,” Mrs. Lorrimer said of the workroom.
    It was very small, but it also looked very adequate. There was an easel, a battered table with sketches and pieces of charcoal and tubes of paint and a jar holding brushes, a high stool, a small electric fire, and some canvases standing on the floor with their face to the whitewashed wall.
    “So you paint,” he said, half to himself. Chest of drawers, he remembered, and smiled. Penny’s eyes were laughing.
    “Show Mr. Bosworth your drawings, Penelope, and then we shall go down for coffee,” Mrs. Lorrimer said.
    Penny hesitated. He walked over to the half-finished canvas on the easel.
    It was an Impressionist study of the west shore of Inchnamurren. By the black rock in the foreground two figures were roughly blocked in, but so far only the sky and the sea had been painted.
    “Where are the seals?” David asked.
    “At least you recognized it,” she said delightedly.
    “Mother, there you are! You always say that no one can recognize anything I try to paint. I am doing this as a kind of bread and-butter letter to Grandfather. Do you think he will like