Colour Scheme. Ngaio Marsh

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СКАЧАТЬ the scene, rose the truncated cone of Rangi’s Peak, an extinct volcano so characteristically shaped that it might have been placed in the landscape by a modern artist with a passion for simplified form. Though some eight miles away, it was actually clearer than the nearby hills, for their margins, dark and firm, were broken at intervals by plumes of steam that rose perpendicularly from the eight thermal pools. These lay close at hand, just beyond the earth-and-pumice sweep in front of the house. Five of them were hot springs hidden from the windows by fences of manuka scrub. The sixth was enclosed by a rough bath shed. The seventh was almost a lake over whose dark waters wraiths of steam vaguely drifted. The eighth was a mud pool, not hot enough to give off steam, and dark in colour with a kind of iridescence across its surface. This pool was only half-screened and from its open end protruded a naked pink head on top of a long neck. Barbara went out to the verandah, seized a brass schoolroom bell, and rang it vigorously. The pink head travelled slowly through the mud like some fantastic periscope until it disappeared behind the screen.

      ‘Lunch, Father,’ screamed Barbara unnecessarily. She walked across the sweep and entered the enclosure. On a brush fence that screened the first path hung a weather-worn placard: ‘The Elfin Pool. Engaged.’ The Claires had given each of the pools some amazingly insipid title, and Barbara had neatly executed the placards in poker work.

      ‘Are you there, Mummy?’ asked Barbara.

      ‘Come in, my dear.’

      She walked round the screen and found her mother at her feet, submerged up to the shoulders in bright blue steaming water that quite hid her plump body. Over her fuzz of hair Mrs Claire wore a rubber bag with a frilled edge and she had spectacles on her nose. With her right hand she held above the water a shilling edition of Cranford.

      ‘So charming,’ she said. ‘They are all such dears. I never tire of them.’

      ‘Lunch is nearly in.’

      ‘I must pop out. The Elf is really wonderful, Ba. My tiresome arm is quite cleared up.’

      ‘I’m so glad, Mummy,’ said Barbara in a loud voice. ‘I want to ask you something.’

      ‘What is it?’ said Mrs Claire, turning a page with her thumb.

      ‘Do you like Mr Questing?’

      Mrs Claire looked up over the top of her book. Barbara was standing at a curious angle, balanced on her right leg. Her left foot was hooked round her right ankle.

      ‘Dear,’ said Mrs Claire, ‘don’t stand like that. It pushes all the wrong things out and tucks the right ones in.’

      ‘But do you?’ Barbara persisted, changing her posture with a jerk.

      ‘Well, he’s not out of the top drawer of course, poor thing.’

      ‘I don’t mind about that. And anyway what is the top drawer? It’s a maddening sort of way to classify people. Such cheek! I’m sorry, Mummy, I didn’t mean to be rude. But honestly, for us to talk about class!’ Barbara gave a loud hoot of laughter. ‘Look at us!’ she said.

      Mrs Claire edged modestly towards the side of the pool and thrust her book at her daughter. Stronger waves of sulphurous smells rose from the disturbed waters. A cascade of drops fell from the elderly rounded arm.

      ‘Take Cranford,’ she said. Barbara took it. Mrs Claire pulled her rubber bag a little closer about her ears. ‘My dear,’ she said, pitching her voice on a note that she usually reserved for death, ‘aren’t you mixing up money and breeding? It doesn’t matter what one does surely …’ She paused.

      ‘There is an innate something …’ she began. ‘One can always tell,’ she added.

      ‘Can one? Look at Simon.’

      ‘Dear old Simon,’ said her mother reproachfully.

      ‘Yes, I know. I’m very fond of him. I couldn’t have a kinder brother, but there isn’t much innate something about Simon, is there?’

      ‘It’s only that awful accent. If we could have afforded …’

      ‘There you are, you see,’ cried Barbara, and she went on in a great hurry, shooting out her words as if she fired them from a gun that was too big for her. ‘Class consciousness is all my eye. Fundamentally it’s based on money.’

      On the verandah the bell was rung again with some abandon.

      ‘I must pop out,’ said Mrs Claire. ‘That’s Huia ringing.’

      ‘It’s not because he talks a different language or any of those things,’ said Barbara hurriedly, ‘that I don’t like Mr Questing. I don’t like him. And I don’t like the way he behaves with Huia. Or,’ she added under her breath, ‘with me.’

      ‘I expect,’ said Mrs Claire, ‘that’s only because he used to be a commercial traveller. It’s just his way.’

      ‘Mummy, why do you find excuses for him? Why does Daddy, who would ordinarily loathe Mr Questing, put up with him? He even laughs at his awful jokes. It isn’t because we want his board money. Look how Daddy and Uncle James practically froze out those rich Americans who were very nice, I thought.’ Barbara drove her long fingers through her mouse-coloured hair, and avoiding her mother’s gaze stared at the top of Rangi’s Peak. ‘You’d think Mr Questing had a sort of hold on us,’ she said, and then burst into one of her fits of nervous laughter.

      ‘Barbie darling,’ said her mother, on a note that contrived to suggest the menace of some frightful indelicacy, ‘I think we won’t talk about it any more.’

      ‘Uncle James hates him, anyway.’

      ‘Barbara!’

      ‘Lunch, Agnes,’ said a quiet voice on the other side of the fence. ‘You’re late again.’

      ‘Coming, dear. Please go on ahead with Daddy, Barbara,’ said Mrs Claire.

      III

      Dr Ackrington bucketed his car down the drive and pulled up at the verandah with a savage jolt just as Barbara reached it. She waited for him and took his arm.

      ‘Stop it,’ he said. ‘You’ll give me hell if you hurry me.’ But when she made to draw away he held her arm in a wiry grasp.

      ‘Is the leg bad, Uncle James?’

      ‘It’s always bad. Steady now.’

      ‘Did you have your morning soak in the Porridge Pot?’

      ‘I did not. And do you know why? That damned poisonous little bounder was wallowing in it.

      ‘He never washes,’ Dr Ackrington shouted. ‘I’ll swear he never washes. Why the devil you can’t insist on people taking a shower before they use the pools is a mystery. He soaks his sweat off in my mud.’

      ‘Are you sure …?’

      ‘Certain. Certain. Certain. I’ve watched him. He never goes near the shower. How in the name of common decency your parents can stomach him …’

      ‘That’s СКАЧАТЬ