There is a kind of silence with which we respond to the vices, addictions, self-indulgence of people close to us. It has nothing to do with disapproval. Shell lay very still, watched the snow. She was between the snow and her mother, unconnected to either.
The announcer invited all the boys and girls out there to join the Caravan next week, when they would take a trip to the far-off land of Greece.
“Well, aren’t we the lazy things? Up you get, Miss Dainty.…”
Shell took a long time getting dressed. The house felt very ancient, haunted by the ghosts of old sanitary napkins, exhausted garters, used razor blades. She had encountered adult weakness with none of the ruthlessness of a child.
When her father, coming in red and jolly from walking in the woods, kissed her mother, Shell watched very closely. She was sorry for her father’s failure, which she understood was as much a part of him as his passion for miniature houses, his gentle interest in animals.
It was not too many years before her mother began to exercise the inalienable rights of menopause. She took to wearing a fur coat and sun-glasses in the house at all times. She hinted, then claimed that she had sacrificed a career as a concert pianist. When asked on whose behalf, she refused to reply and turned the thermostat lower.
Her husband kept her eccentricities on the level of a joke, even though her attacks on her young daughters were occasionally vicious. He allowed her to become the baby of the house, kissing her as usual before and after every meal.
Shell loved him for the way he treated her mother, believed herself lucky to grow up in this atmosphere of married affection. His patience, his kisses were tiny instalments on a debt she knew he could never cover.
A damaging consequence of this neurotic interlude was a rivalry between Shell and her sister. Their mother developed and encouraged it with that faultless instinct which people who live under one roof have for one another’s pain.
“I can’t remember which of you hurt most,” she reflected. “Good thing you weren’t twins.”
Shell’s father drove her to school every morning. It was his idea that the girls go to different schools. This was a wonderful part of the day for both of them.
She watched the forest go by. She knew how happy he was that she had inherited his love of trees. This was more important than her own delight, and it ushered her into a woman’s life.
He drove very carefully. He must have been unwilling to turn his head to look at her, he had such a precious cargo. He mustn’t have quite believed he had anything to do with her, she was so lovely, and he must have wondered why she believed the things he told her. When she was sixteen he gave her a car of her own, a second-hand Austin.
The school was a continuation of the house. There were many trees and trimmed bushes, many weathered buildings or buildings constructed to appear weathered. The enrolment represented an impressive concentration of old money, so no one could accuse the authorities of pretensions when they disguised the new junior residence with an Early American façade.
Its curriculum was not designed to produce artists, revolutionaries, or ceramicists. A Wall Street version of the little red schoolhouse, it trained girls to ornament society rather than question or subvert it.
Shell was formal. She sat on the grass with a book in front of the library and arranged her dress over her knees.
Let us say the dress was white and the book one of the interminable dialogues of Ivy Compton-Burnett, and let us say that this time her hair was bound in braids.
If she wished to think about something she laid the book down carefully and leaned on one arm; perhaps with one finger she absently turned a page.
She knew she represented something immortal, she was sure. She was the girl in front of the building. Her age in the foreground, her fifteen-year-old body, her hair in the intermittent wind, were instruments to praise the weather and the old stones. She knew this, so she composed her face.
She must be still so that the unknown elderly man crossing the other side of the quadrangle, if he happened to glance towards where she was sitting, would see the perfect thing, the quiet thing, the girl before the preserved doorway, the scene the heart demanded. It was her responsibility. Therefore she was serious, and the world was crumbling into plastic.
She loved the horizontal afternoon light. It seemed to come right out of the shrubbery, and, for precious minutes, right out of the ground itself.
She must find a way to sit in that light.
2
Breavman was furious. He didn’t want to move the bed. He wanted to climb into it, hold her, and go to sleep.
They had driven all day. He didn’t know where they were, probably Virginia, and he didn’t know the name of the tourist house.
The woodwork was brown and perhaps the loose circus wall-paper hid sinister bugs. He was too tired to care. The last hundred miles her head had slept on his shoulder and he vaguely resented her defection from the ordeal of the road.
“What does it matter where the damn bed is? We’ll be out of here by eight in the morning.”
“I’ll move it myself.”
“Don’t be silly, Shell.”
“We’ll be able to see the trees when we wake up.”
“I don’t want to see the trees when we wake up. I want to look at the dirty ceiling and get pieces of dirty plaster grape-vine in my eye.”
The ugly brass bed resisted her. For generations of sleepers it had not changed its position. He imagined a grey froth of dust on the underside. With a sigh he
