Palladian Read Online Free Page B

“no”.’
    They passed through the gangway, and Margaret walked slightly ahead of them to the car in the station yard.
    ‘I am in luck’s way,’ Mrs Veal said now and again as they drove down the village street, a long piece of ribbon-building with a couple of shops and three or four chapels, ugly in various ways.
    Mrs Veal sat in the back, leaning forward, so that her perfume reached them in little drifts each time she moved.
    ‘Not
a very picturesque village,’ she observed. ‘But you’ll grow to be very fond of it. That I do know. Dead-alive hole I once thought it. Well, it doesn’t
look
much – especially this weather.’
    Margaret’s hair was frosted all over with the fine moisture, her tweeds, too. She drove, with her head a little on one side, her elbow resting on the car window, her large white hands very loose on the steering wheel.
    ‘Here we are, then. What about a cup of tea?’ asked Mrs Veal, as the car slushed into soft gravel in front of a pub. The pub had its door shut. The signboard – or rather piece of tin stamped with a brewery trade-mark – swung on a sort of gallows near the road. ‘The Blacksmith’s Arms’.
    ‘Well, no. I think my mother will keep tea for us at home,’ Margaret was saying.
    Mrs Veal got together her bag and gloves and parcels and stepped out of the car backwards. ‘
Au revoir
, then. Thanks so much.’
    ‘Good-bye,’ said Margaret, and then, to Cassandra as she brought the car on to the road again, ‘I hope she wasn’t an annoyance to you on your journey. She has a heart of gold,’ she added unkindly.
    Cassandra murmured.
    The car slowed and turned off the road into a drive, between gateposts and broken gryphons, past a mouldering lodge where some bits of washing hung limply in the drizzle. They went curving through laurels to the house. Cassandra somehow – while getting out of the car, managing her belongings, and following Margaret – received an impression of the façade and, as well as the rows of sashed windows and not quite central pediment, smaller details were snatched at and relinquished again by her commenting eye; pieces of dismembered statuary, of dark grey stucco fallen from the walls and a wrought-iron lamp at the head of the steps with its greenish glass cracked.
    The front door was open and rain had entered the hall.
    ‘I don’t know what you are going to make of Sophy,’ Margaret said, as they crossed – Cassandra tip-toeing almost – the black and white tiles. Her tone was cold and unpromising, as if she thought ‘Rather you than I!’ But Cassandra had grown up in the dark shadow of her father’s moral courage and could not be daunted so easily or, if daunted, would not show as much or give in.
    ‘
We
make nothing of her,’ Margaret added, as she opened a door. Then, thinking Cassandra looked stricken, she suddenly put her arm across the girl’s back and patted her shoulder in a clumsy, prefectish gesture. Cassandra felt that she would be embarrassed at any moment by some phrase of old-fashioned slang out of Angela Brazil, but Margaret led her forward and introduced her to a spiderish lady sitting by the fire eating a piece of Ryvita.
    ‘This is Miss Dashwood, mother. My mother, Mrs Vanbrugh. Where is Sophy?’
    ‘How do you do, dear. She had some tea and went to her father for her Latin lesson.’ Mrs Vanbrugh brushed crumbs off her skirt into the hearth.
    Margaret laid her hands on the sides of the teapot. ‘Oh, mother, let’s have some
fresh
. I’ll take Miss Dashwood upstairs, but I truly am dying for tea.’
    ‘You ask Nanny then, dear. I hardly like to.’
    ‘Oh, God!’
    Once more they crossed the hall with its oppressive smell of damp stone. Cassandra never allowed herself to have feelings when she was in the company of other people. She was too young to permit herself any forebodings as she followed Margaret upstairs. She was waiting until she should be alone to decide what sort of impression had been made upon