This Real Night Read Online Free Page A

juicy stalk, and put it in his buttonhole. But he looked down on the dark rosette and grew sad again. ‘When things go well,’ he said apologetically to Mamma, ‘one cannot help feeling cheerful.’
    ‘Why not?’ said Mamma.
    He hesitated. ‘Surely it’s a kind of treachery’, he said, ‘to all the things that haven’t gone well.’
    ‘Such a ridiculous idea would never have come into your head,’ said Mamma, ‘if it had not been for all that cooking in oil.’
    Mary soon found an excuse for not going with us, I thought rather unscrupulously, by converting what had been a vague suggestion into a firm promise and then pressing on one of Mamma’s most sensitive points. We all knew perfectly well which day we were going to Mr Morpurgo’s house, but Mamma did not mention the exact date till some time had passed, and then Mary started and exclaimed, ‘The tenth! Well, Mamma, you must tell Mrs Bates that I cannot play at the St Jude’s Charity Concert that afternoon.’ At once Mamma replied, as Mary had known she would, ‘What! Is that the same day? Can you get back in time? No, I suppose you cannot. Well, you cannot break a promise to play just to keep a social engagement. You must never, never do that. What a pity! I will write at once to the Morpurgos.’
    I kicked Mary under the table, quite viciously, for we carried on a permanent quarrel over this issue of going out into the adult world. Mary thought that the people we would meet there would be just as tiresome as the girls and the teachers at school in Lovegrove, and that we should make up our minds to have nothing to do with them except play to them at concerts. There would be a few nice ones, just as at school there was Ida, who meant to be a doctor and had a mother who played Brahms quite well, but we would get to know these people anyway, they would be on the outside like us. And anyway, Mary said, we need not fear loneliness, for there were enough of us at home to give us all the companionship we needed. We were numerically quite strong. Now that Rosamund and her mother, Constance, were living with us for good, we were eight, including Kate our servant, who was completely one of us; and nine, if we counted Mr Morpurgo, and he seemed to have joined us; and if Papa came back we would be ten. What did we want with anybody else, Mary asked. But I held that it must be worth while exploring the territory outside Lovegrove because there must be people who were like the characters in books and plays. Authors could not just have made them up out of nothing at all.
    This luncheon-party had raised this hope of mine in a most attractive form. It seemed certain that Mrs Morpurgo must be kind and noble, for her husband said she was beautiful, and no beautiful woman would have married such an ugly man, had she not valued goodness above everything. We were very fond of George du Maurier’s novels, and of Peter Ibbetson specially, and I saw Mrs Morpurgo as the saintly and gigantic Duchess of Towers. She would be a little different; because she was a Jewess her hair would be black and not copper-brown, as du Maurier says that the Duchess’s was. But like Mary Towers and all the great ladies du Maurier drew, she would be very tall, and would lean slightly forward, her brows clouded with a concern which was not irritable but tender, provoked by fear that since she was so tall she might have overlooked some opportunity for kindness. I thought Mary a fool for throwing away her chance of meeting this splendid person, and I told her so on the day of the party while she was doing up the buttons at the back of my best blouse. But when she had finished and I faced her I saw she was looking cold and fierce and this was a sign that she was afraid. She looked like that when any of us were ill. So I simply called her a fool, to make her think I had not noticed anything, and went downstairs.
    In the drawing-room Cordelia was sitting on the sofa, ready dressed, even to her gloves,