The Beautiful Visit Read Online Free Page A

concert against speaking first, an awkward calm, which I must clumsily break. I opened the door.
They put down their cups.
    ‘He’s come to tea,’ I said, and turned to him blocking their sight. ‘I can’t remember your name.’
    ‘Michael Latham,’ he muttered as though it meant nothing, and he had learned it by heart.
    ‘Come and sit down, Michael. Milk and sugar, Michael?’ My mother wielded the tea-pot.
    My father resumed his reading of Blackwood’s Magazine . Michael stared at him. My sister lowered her eyes and scraped strawberry jam neatly with her knife. I could think of nothing
to say. There was an exhausted pupil swallowing tea with a pale film; it was cold, and he had been too nervous and depressed to drink it, until he had felt sure that attention was diverted from him
and his tremendous, thick, white hands. Michael ate an enormous tea, punctuated by monosyllabic replies to my mother’s and sister’s small inquisitive advances. He seemed fascinated by
my father, watching him timidly and bending his head abrupt and shy if my father turned a page or stirred his tea.
    How to escape and where? My brothers always seemed to manage it when they had friends to tea. They clattered with one purposeful rush to their large bedroom, where they remained for the evening.
If, for any reason, I had ever gone into their room, they were always to be found standing in a conspiratorial group, quite silent and apparently doing nothing, frozen like animals at an
unavoidable intrusion; hostile, scarcely breathing, with some secret purpose deep in their minds. I could not take Michael upstairs; I knew that for some reason my parents would not like it.
    ‘Are you going to use the studio?’ I asked my father. The pupil wriggled and hid his hands with a desperate little grin.
    ‘I have to play something over once. Why?’
    ‘I thought that if it was empty it would be a good place for us to go,’ I said.
    ‘Do you want somewhere to play?’
    ‘No. It doesn’t matter.’
    ‘Well I want somewhere to play and I can’t move my toys about as you can.’ And he went on reading.
    I saw Michael furiously kneading his bread, with shining eyes. There was a meek little silence; my mother was filling the tea-pot and we were all eating our tea, regardless of anything but our
little personal movements.
    I knew that if we were to escape I must get up and know where we were to go.
    Better get on with it. I rose to my feet and in the same instant I heard Michael say, ‘Could I hear you play, sir?’
    My father looked up, a little pleased. ‘Certainly, if you like.’
    My heart thudded and I felt very cold. There was a general movement and I found myself in the studio, my father at the piano, with Michael and the pupil in appreciative attitudes. He played for
two hours, and then Michael left. He stopped being shy with my father, thanked him with a great jerk of enthusiasm, and shook his hand twice very quickly. I walked with him down the steps to the
gate.
    ‘Well thank you,’ he said. ‘I loved hearing your father play. You never told me how good he was. I wish my family were like that.’
    I was silent.
    ‘Music whenever you like and no one minding who you bring home. Marvellous. Thank you very much. Good-bye.’ And he went off with his kite.
    I walked slowly back up the path. I would go upstairs, and perhaps I would cry a little because it finished a feeling more quickly and it would be easier to start again. It would be better to
stay alone for a bit in order to know how to talk about it at dinner. I was tired; my legs felt heavy and the sides of my forehead ached. In the hall I met my sister who smiled discreetly, as
though she knew the secret wrong thing, and suggested I lay the table for dinner. So I did. The girl who cooked helped me with fat pasty sighs, pushing her mauve fingers through her greasy hair and
saying ‘Yes Miss’ while she smeared boards and tables with a grey stringy cloth. I filled the water