“But what’s the time?” the child shouted back angrily. “On your watch, I mean.”
Miss Fulkes’s head came through into the light. “Twenty to one,” she called back. “You must be quiet.”
“Why isn’t it one?”
“Because it isn’t. Now I shan’t answer you any more. And if you shout again I shall tell your mother how naughty you’ve been.”
“Naughty!” Phil retorted, putting a tearful fury into his voice—but so softly that Miss Fulkes hardly heard him. “I hate you!” He didn’t, of course. But he had made his protest; honour was saved.
Miss Fulkes went on with her toilet. She felt agitated, afraid, painfully excited. What would they think of Phil—her Phil, the Phil she had made. “I hope he’ll be good,” she thought. “I hope he’ll be good.” He could be an angel, so enchanting when he chose. And when he wasn’t an angel, there was always a reason; but one had to know him, one had to understand him in order to see the reason. Probably they wouldn’t be able to see the reason. They had been away so long; they might have forgotten what he was like. And in any case, they couldn’t know what he was like now, what he had grown into during these last months. She alone knew that Phil. Knew him and loved him—so much, so much. She alone. And one day she would have to leave him. She had no rights over him, no claim to him; she only loved him. They could take him away from her whenever they wanted. The image of herself in the glass wavered and was lost in a rainbow of fog, and suddenly the tears overflowed onto her cheeks.
The train was punctual, the car in attendance. Philip and Elinor climbed in.
“Isn’t it wonderful to be here?” Elinor took her husband’s hand. Her eyes shone. “But, good Lord,” she added, in a tone of horror and without waiting for his answer, “they’re building a lot of new houses on the hill there. How dare they?”
Philip looked. “Rather garden city, isn’t it?” he said. “It’s a pity the English love the country so much,” he added. “They’re killing it with kindness.”
“But how lovely it still is, all the same. Aren’t you tremendously excited?”
“Excited?” he questioned, cautiously. “Well …”
“Aren’t you even pleased that you’re going to see your son again?”
“Of course.”
“Of course!” Elinor repeated the words derisively. “And in that tone of voice. I never thought there was any ‘of course’ about it; but now the time has come, I’ve never been so excited in my life.”
There was a silence; the car drove on windingly, down the lanes. The road mounted; they climbed through beechwoods to a wooden plateau. At the end of a long green vista the most colossal monument of Tantamount grandeur, the palace of the Marquess of Gattenden, basked far off in the sun. The flag flew; his lordship was in residence. “We must go and call on the old madman one day,” said Philip. The fallow deer browsed in the park.
“Why does one ever travel?” said Elinor, as she looked at them.
Miss Fulkes and little Phil were waiting on the steps. “I believe I hear the car,” said Miss Fulkes. Her rather lumpy face was very pale; her heart was beating with more than ordinary force. “No,” she added, after a moment of intent listening. What she had heard was only the sound of her own anxiety.
Little Phil moved about uncomfortably, conscious only of a violent desire to “go somewhere.” Anticipation had lodged a hedgehog in his entrails.
“Aren’t you happy?” asked Miss Fulkes, with assumed enthusiasm, self-sacrificingly determined that the child should show himself wild with joy to see his parents again. “Aren’t you tremendously excited?” But they could take him away from her if they wanted to, take him away and never let her see him again.
“Yes,” little Phil replied rather vaguely. He was preoccupied exclusively with the approach of visceral events.
Miss Fulkes was disappointed by the flatness of his tone. She looked at him enquiringly. “Phil?” She had noticed his uneasy Charleston. The child nodded. She took his hand and hurried him into the house.
A minute later Philip and Elinor drove up to a deserted porch. Elinor couldn’t help feeling disappointed. She had so clearly visualized the scene—Phil on the step frantically waving—she had so plainly, in anticipation, heard his shouting. And the steps were a blank.
“Nobody to meet us,” she said, and her tone was mournful.
“You could hardly expect them to hang about, waiting,” Philip replied. He hated anything in the nature of a fuss. For him, the perfect homecoming would have been in a cloak of invisibility. This was a good second best.
They got out of the car. The front door was open. They entered. In the silent, empty hall three and a half centuries of life had gone to sleep. The sunlight stared through flat-arched windows. The panelling had been painted pale green in the Eighteenth Century. All ancient oak and highlights, the staircase climbed up, out of sight, toward the higher floors. A smell of potpourri faintly haunted the air; it was as though one apprehended the serene old silence through another sense.
Elinor looked round her, she took a deep breath, she drew her finger tips along the polished walnut wood of a table, with the knuckle of a bent forefinger she rapped the round Venetian bowl that stood on it; the glassy bell note lingered sweetly on the perfumed silence.
“Like the Sleeping Beauty,” she said. But even as she spoke the words, the spell was broken. Suddenly, as though the ringing glass had called the house back to life, there was sound and movement. Somewhere upstairs a door opened, through the sanitary noise of rushing water came the sound of Phil’s piercing young voice, small feet thudded along the carpet of the corridor, clattered like little hoofs on the naked oak of the stairs. At the same moment a door on the ground floor
