To the North by Elizabeth Bowen Page A

like?” pursued Emmeline gravely.
    “Oh, just a man,” said Markie, bored, bending above the wine-cooler. “I’ve got some new sherry I want you to try; I ought to have opened it—something to do with gas: he directs companies.”
    “She’s rather like you.”
    Suddenly straightening himself to stare at her, holding the bottle and corkscrew, he said: “You do look lovely, Emmeline!”
    Emmeline, like a tall crystal lamp in which the flame springs up, at these words shone taller and brighter. Having turned his way at once absently and intently, she remained still listening, as though he had not yet spoken, her eyes fixed on his with docility as though his pleasure commanded her and she could not turn away.
    “You don’t wish we were going out?” he asked with a certain amount of confidence.
    “No, I like being here.”
    “ I’d much rather.” Drawing the cork, he filled their two glasses. Emmeline took up hers and drank.
    “How do you like it?”
    “Yes,” she said, vaguely sipping.
    “Or don’t you know?”
    “I’m afraid I like almost anything dry.”
    Markie gave Emmeline up, but was pleased with the sherry. “I suppose you do dislike something ” he said, refilling his glass accurately. “But I wonder so much what goes on with you, all the time.”
    Markie’s rather imposing, finished bad manners—which nervousness and a pressing sense of the unusual had accentuated, for he was not himself—were lost on Emmeline: he might have been quite ordinary. With a surprise so mild as to be either innocent or satirical she said: “Do you want to know?”
    Markie, after a moment’s reflection, said perhaps he did not. His eyes were on Emmeline’s cool bare arms held out to the fire. With her clear reticence she was as calm as a stupid woman, without that drag on the nerves.
    “All the same”—he was beginning—when from the neighbourhood of the bookshelves a reedy, ghostly whistle made Emmeline jump. She started violently, spilling her sherry. “What’s that?” she exclaimed.
    “Only the cook whistling.”
    “But why?” This seemed to Emmeline funny, she laughed immoderately. “Why does she do that? What an extraordinary cook! Our cook doesn’t whistle.”
    Markie, whose sense of humour was not agile, saw nothing funny about his domestic arrangements. He was accustomed to lead laughter rather than be surprised by it. He explained rather coldly that the cook, having no other means of communication, whistled up the speaking-tube when dinner was starting up in the lift.
    “But supposing your cook couldn’t whistle?”
    “I suppose we should have a bell.”
    “But why don’t you have a bell anyhow?”
    “I suppose because our cooks can whistle.” He returned the cook’s signal and went to open the hatch: Emmeline, seeing she had annoyed him, waited anxiously. A small table behind the sofa was set with silver and glass on a green damask cloth: Emmeline, self-reproachful and nervous, feared that the lift might stick. She had never dined here before, only come back after a restaurant.
    “I’m so sorry, Markie,” she said. “But it sounded as though your cook had got in behind your books—like a cat, you know.”
    The lift appearing, Markie took out a tureen with plates and some silver dishes which Emmeline helped him put down beside the fire. “I had no idea,” he said, rather slightingly, “you were domestic.”
    “Everything seems like magic in this flat.”
    “Why do you get so rattled?”
    “I’m sorry: I don’t feel rattled. Am I?”
    “My dear, you’ve been like a cat on hot bricks ever since you came.”
    Emmeline, putting hot plates on the table, confessed: “I was startled, meeting your sister.”
    “But I told you she lived here.”
    “Oh, yes.”
    “ Well ?” said Markie, twitching his eyebrows up in exasperation. “I don’t see why that should upset you. I know she’s a bore.”
    “Is she? I’d like to meet her properly.”
    “What, at tea? Of course, if