Palladian by Elizabeth Taylor Page A

that she was unreal, an engraved figure in the end-piece to an eighteenth-century romance – and Marion as well.
    ‘I believe you tried to spare me something,’ he said. ‘But there was no need, you know. Parents should not have to be protected from their children. What do you think about Sophy? I should like to know.’
    She looked away from the park, the cadenced levels wreathed in mist, and laid her hand flat upon the yellow handkerchief between them, looked at it as if it would give her some inkling of how to express what she felt.
    ‘I think she ought to go away from here. To school,’ she said, thinking of her father, of Mrs Turner, and then of Sophy.
    He took up her hand and let it lie in his own, but his touch was impersonal and light, as if she herself stopped short at her wrist. If it had been a strange flower or shell lying there curved and shallow he could not have looked at it with less reference to emotion. In his searching way, he learnt and analysed. It was the way he had examined her face, she remembered, the first time she had seen him standing by the window in his room in that sudden unfamiliar flood of sunshine.
    ‘If she were to go, you would go too.’
    Her finger-tips crept a little inwards towards her palm and tightened, so that the nails left the imprint of four half-moons in the hollow. Then the fingers uncurled and relaxed. He sensed that she was agitated and he put his thumb over her palm and smoothed out the little dents.
    ‘Apart from Sophy, do you want to go away?’
    In her agitation her heart cried: ‘I love you.’ Aloud in a prim voice, she said: ‘No. You asked me about Sophy. And that was what I told you.’
    The scene somehow missed being quite so idyllic as it would have looked as the tail-piece of an old-fashioned love-story.
    ‘What would you do if you left here?’
    ‘I hardly know.’
    He gave her back her hand as if it were something he had borrowed, that he was punctilious about returning. For the first and only time she imagined what it might have been like to have been Violet, and pitied her; saw with clarity, for what it was, the titillation of Greek lessons, the cerebral intimacy, the impersonal taking up and dropping of hands. When one is young the blood bounds forward at a finger’s touch, something is – not intolerably – suggested, for the touch is an adventure in itself and may be hoarded, taken to bed as a child takes a present, turned over and contemplated and treasured. It is something complete to be kept a lifetime and,moved in a million different lights, remains always the same, unimpaired.
    With mutual assent they began to walk homewards across the park, the sorrel and the coarse, bleached barley-grass whipping at their ankles. As they came near the house they saw that the bluish-green wooden door to the wall-garden was open. It swung back and Tom came out with a woman. She stood by, waiting, while he closed the door, and then they walked away round behind the empty stables, very close together and his hand brushing her thigh as she moved. Her head was bent. She was eating red-currants out of her hand.
    Cassandra blushed. As they passed the wall-garden, a scented warmth seemed to steal out of the bricks. They exhaled a heavy sensuousness, a suggestion of stored ripeness, like the ambient mellowness of a woman very conscious of her power to distract.
    Marion said nothing. His face was quite a blank.
    When Cassandra reached her own room, she stood for a while by the window, turning her hand, the hand, one way and another in the near darkness. Then she curved it so that it was like a scallop-shell and ran a thumb thoughtfully across its palm.

CHAPTER NINE
     
    How obtuse the sensible may be, Cassandra discovered after lunch the next day.
    She was not to be Miss Dashwood any more, it seemed, except to Sophy and Aunt Tinty, for Margaret, opening her bedroom door a little, called across the landing to her, using her Christian name. Sophy was lying on her