The Finishing Touch Read Online Free

but for its black hairs) and white—sailcloth, Antonia supposed it must be; laundered to nautical pitch, it billowed like sails over the Abbatial podge—the Badessa picking her way across the tiny plot where Hetty tried to grow grass: picking because the Badessa was wearing, of course, those white sandals of hers which pained Hetty by their stiletto heels (ultimate degeneracy into which had descended the old high Italian custom of the stiletto) but which offended Antonia rather by their open front (such sallow, rounded, wriggelly toes had theBadessa) and the fact that their fastening was a large white plastic daisy.
    And yet, thought Antonia peaceably, it was foolish of Hetty to try to grow grass in a climate so plainly non-supporting of it. ‘Where we live’, she had already told Hetty, ‘ lawn means our handkerchiefs.’
    The entire view suggested to Antonia a pleasing sense of activity just sharpened by anticipation: the still, warm air hardly perceptibly quickened in expectation of the luncheon bell; bees suspended above ashy lavender flowers, the two Plash heads (with so much to discuss, of course, about the sailor and his note) buzzing together (they had settled down now, almost out of sight, behind the asparagus trenches); Hetty about to return—surely it was almost time?—from the last of her Sunday expeditions …
    Antonia’s eye discerned Fraise du Bois, the ‘lady from a southern state’ (thus her guardians had described her in their letter of application) actually in —indeed, flat in—the lower asparagus trench: alas, Fraise, only nineteen and already well advanced down the slope pioneered by her cousin Blanche … only nineteen, twice divorced, and already registered as a narcotics addict. (The authorities were not even mean, really, in what they considered an adequate quota.) ‘My dear, we must help thepoor thing’, had been Hetty’s first response when Antonia informed her that the new pupil had been accepted; later, Hetty had begun to dread the responsibility; but when the ‘ unfortunate child’ had been in the School a fortnight Hetty confessed that she was less trouble than all the other pupils put together. ‘Evidemment’, Antonia had calmly replied vindicating her original decision, ‘droguée as the poor creature is from dawn to dusk …’
    Only when the bi-monthly supply was late had there once been trouble.
    The Plash girls were joined by the President’s daughter of what dark republic it was Antonia could never remember; but very dark— évidemment : the black skin, blue-damson-bloomed as night heavens, dustily moved—whispered, it seemed, visually—behind the asparagus ferns.
    (‘I thought …’ Sylvie Plash was explaining all over again; ‘… and then when the door opened and it was only Braid, I burst into tears.’)
    Obviously the girl took after her mother, the President. When the girl first came to the School, Madame President had unfortunately (to judge from the daughter, Antonia would have liked to see her) been too busy to escort her child; she had sent instead a withered black man, one of her Cabinet or, was it?—Antonia could not remember—one of her husbands? One, perhaps,of the girl’s putative fathers? But the girl did not, certainly, resemble him.
    ‘A natural show-case’, Antonia had said when she first saw the bloomy skin,’ for jewels’. And at the School’s anniversary party, the girl had appeared in emeralds (of obvious value; though rather curiously placed). Even so Antonia, though éblouie in all conscience, was not satisfied that every experiment had been made. She would have liked to try sapphires (the lucid on the dusky blue); or even, throwing away value and returning, rapturous, to nature, orchids; even, she now thought from her window , an—here; or perhaps there —asparagus fern. The girl even possessed, so Hetty had reported on returning from one of her tours on affairs of ménage, dusky dusting powder …
    (But was it, Antonia