Love for Lydia Read Online Free

inside the overcoat, trying to warm them with the other hand. I could feel a draught of east wind clear as a knife as it whipped under the door, and then with something of the same level steeliness a voice called in a piercing accent from a room at the end of the hall:
    â€˜Mr Bretherton, is it? Is it Mr Bretherton there?’
    â€˜It’s Mr Richardson,’ I said.
    â€˜Mr who?’
    â€˜Mr Richardson.’
    â€˜Mr Richardson? What Mr Richardson is that?’
    â€˜I’m Mr Bretherton’s assistant,’ I said.
    â€˜What is it you wish to speak to me about?’
    â€˜The late Mr Aspen,’ I said, ‘if you would be so kind.’
    She did not answer. A moment later the maid came out of the room, into the long cold hall, and beckoned me in. The voice pierced the air loudly again as I went over the threshold into a room draped everywhere, it seemed, with curtains of plum-red chenille.
    â€˜What is the matter with Mr Bretherton?’
    â€˜Nothing,’ I said.
    â€˜He doesn’t like me,’ she said. ‘He sent you instead.’
    The two sisters were sitting by the fire, one on either side, Juliana still wearing the high mauve scarf pinned round her neck and Miss Bertie still sitting, as she had done in the Daimler, like a pale round dumpling. I began to say something about not disturbing them when I saw, or rather heard, Juliana eating soup from a basin. She took it in with deep broad sucks from a spoon. There were large pieces of bread in the soup and each piece of bread was a suck, short and determined and ferocious.
    When she stopped sucking to speak to me, to turn on me a pair of remarkably blue assertive eyes, she said:
    â€˜How do you get on with Bretherton? What are you doing there?’
    â€˜I’m supposed to be a reporter.’
    â€˜Supposed? Don’t you like it?’
    â€˜No,’ I said.
    She seemed, I thought, to like the candour of this.
    In the moment before taking another suck at the bread she smiled, showing her teeth. They were very long, fang-like, unfortunate teeth. Her lips could not cover them. They were prominent and ugly and yet, whenever she smiled, swiftly, spontaneously, they made her attractive.
    â€˜You needn’t stand up. This is my sister. Does it snow?’
    Miss Bertie nodded her head to me. It was not until afterwards that I knew she was the elder. Her skin, distended and gentle and rosy, had a curious bloom of preservation on it that misled me. She had a sort of dampness about her round soft face, a certain dewiness, that made her seem self-effacive, without power. She was not eating soup. She sat poised instead, rotund and gentle and as if watchfully expectant about something, on the edge of a low chair, her skirts up, so that I could see a pair of soft elephantine calves encased in thick fire-coloured stockings, with sometimes a glimpse of pale brown bloomers falling from above.
    No, I said, it was not snowing any longer, and Miss Juliana took a passionate suck at her soup and said:
    â€˜What have you done to your hand?’
    I told her about the skating. The division of heat and cold in the room was so sharp that when I sat down I felt as if I were perching on a knife. I gave an involuntary excruciating shudder, my face hot from the fire, the back of me iced by the steady whipped draught that came in somewhere through the thick curtains behind.
    â€˜You had better slip off your overcoat,’ she said. ‘You’ll feel the benefit when you go out again.’ She sucked passionately and ferociously at bread and soup as I took off my overcoatand laid it on the back of the chair. ‘You look awfully thin. You ought to have hound’s-tongue for your hand.’
    As she stood up to take more soup from the tureen keeping hot in the hearth I saw that she was very tall. She stood bony and large and monolithic, the mauve scarf round her long neck, her long teeth ugly and attractive and glinting. She