Victory for Victoria. Betty Neels

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СКАЧАТЬ broke off as she saw Victoria. ‘Vicky darling,’ she begged, ‘get her out, I’ll never be ready…’

      Victoria approached the door and knocked gently. ‘Louise?’ she called persuasively, ‘do come and see my dress and tell me what you think of it.’

      The door was flung open and her sister sailed out. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘but let it be now, this minute, so that I’m not interrupted while I’m doing my face. Where’s Amabel?’

      ‘Here.’ Amabel was two years younger than Victoria and the quietest of the four. The two of them followed Victoria to her room and fell on to her bed while she took the dress from her cupboard and held it up for their inspection. It was a midi dress of leaf green crêpe with a demure collar like a pie-frill above a minute bodice and a very full skirt. It was admired and carefully examined and Louise said, ‘You’ll put us all in the shade, Vicky.’

      Victoria shook her head. She was a very pretty girl, but her three sisters took after their mother; they were tall—even Stephanie was five feet ten and she hadn’t stopped growing—and magnificently built with glowing blonde hair and blue eyes. Their faces were beautiful. Victoria, putting the dress away again, looked at them and wondered how it was that she, the eldest, should have copper hair and tiger’s eyes and be of only a moderate height; she was slim too and although she had a lovely face it couldn’t match the beauty of the other three girls. She grinned at them suddenly. ‘Me for the next bath—I’ll be ten minutes,’ and started for the bathroom, shedding the guernsey as she went.

      They collected in her room as they were ready, squabbling mildly and criticising each other’s dresses as she sat at the dressing table putting up her hair. She had combed it back from her forehead and arranged it in three thick loops on her neck and it had taken a long time, but the result, she considered, staring at her reflection in the mirror, had been worth the effort. Rather different from her hair-style of that afternoon—it was a pity… She dismissed the thought and said briskly: ‘If we’re ready we’d better go down.’ She eyed her sisters with loving admiration. ‘I must say you all look smashing, my dears.’ And they did, with their fair hair combed smoothly over their magnificent shoulders and their gay dresses. As usual, they would create a small sensation when they entered the restaurant presently. She smiled proudly at them, for they were such splendid creatures and the dearest sisters.

      Their parents were waiting for them downstairs. Victoria’s mother, splendid in a violet crêpe dress which was the exact foil to her grey, simply-dressed hair, was sitting by the small fire in the sitting room, and her father was standing at the window, looking out on to the harbour, but he turned round as they went in and crowded around him, for they hadn’t seen him since early that morning. He saluted them each in turn with a fatherly kiss and being just a little taller than they were, he was able to look down upon them with benign affection. He said now:

      ‘You all look very nice, I must say. Shall we walk or do you want the car?

      A routine question which was merely a concession to their finery, for the hotel was only a few minutes’ walk away, but it was asked each time they dined there, and that was frequently, to mark each of their birthdays as well as the first evening of Victoria’s holidays. They chorused a happy ‘no, thank you’, picked up their various coats and wraps and left the house in a cheerful chattering group with Mr and Mrs Parsons leading the way.

      The restaurant was full, but they had a table in one of the windows overlooking the harbour. Mrs Parsons, sweeping regally through the doors, acknowledged the head waiter’s bow with a gracious smile and sailed in his wake, seemingly oblivious of the four eye-catching girls behind her, and they, by now used to being stared at and not in the least disconcerted by it, followed her; Stephanie first, then Amabel, Louise and lastly Victoria, quite dwarfed by her sisters and her father behind her.

      They sat down, with Victoria on her father’s left with her back to the semi-circular room, and her parents facing each other at each end of the table. They had finished their soup and were awaiting their crabmeat patties when Stephanie, sitting opposite Victoria, remarked:

      ‘There’s a man across the room—I’ve never seen him before.’ A remark sufficient to awaken interest in the two younger Miss Parsons, for they knew most of the young men on the island and they had deduced, quite rightly, that the man was good-looking and tolerably young—otherwise she wouldn’t have noticed him.

      It was Louise, sitting next to Victoria, who asked: ‘How old? Is he nice-looking? Dark or fair?’ Before her sister could reply her mother interposed.

      ‘Louise, you should know better, encouraging Stephanie like that! We don’t know him, I fancy, do we, dear?’ She raised her eyebrows at her husband, who laughed.

      ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘I can hardly inspect the man without embarrassment on both our parts, but if you’ve never seen him before, then I’m fairly sure that I haven’t either.’

      Victoria speared her last morsel of patty. ‘All the same, I’m dying of curiosity and I can’t turn round, can I?’ She looked enquiringly at her mother, who smiled a little and said, ‘Oh, very well, but he’s with a very pretty young woman, so it really is a waste of Stephanie’s time.’

      Stephanie ignored the young woman. ‘He’s very large and he’s got dark hair and one of those high foreheads—he doesn’t laugh very much, but he looks swoony when he smiles. He’s got one of those straight noses, just a little too big for his face, if you know what I mean—he turns me on.’

      This vivid description met with her sister’s interested approval, but her mother said briskly before any of them could speak:

      ‘That is a vulgar expression which I dislike, Stephanie, you will be good enough to remember that.’

      ‘Amabel says it,’ muttered her youngest born rebelliously.

      ‘Amabel is twenty-one,’ said her mother sweepingly as she helped herself to poached salmon, and Stephanie made a mutinous face so that Victoria said swiftly, before the mutiny should become an open one:

      ‘I thought of going down to Castle Cornet tomorrow to see Uncle Gardener’—the curator and an old family friend, and such a ferocious horticulturist that they had called him by that name all their lives. ‘Anyone want to come with me?’

      A cheerful babble of argument broke out as she had known it would. Her holiday this time was a short one, and her family, anxious that she shouldn’t waste a precious minute of it, were full of suggestions.

      ‘It’ll have to be in the afternoon, then,’ said Amabel. ‘Remember we’re going to the market in the morning and you’ve got some shopping to do—if you don’t do it straight away you’re sure to forget it and go back with only half the things you want.’

      ‘There’s a dress in the Jaguar shop,’ began Louise. They settled down to a happy discussion as to what Vicky should do with her days and the stranger across the restaurant was forgotten—or almost. Only Stephanie glanced across at him once or twice and Victoria, eating her ice pudding with a healthy appetite, wondered if he could possibly be the man she had met that afternoon. It seemed so unlikely that she dismissed the idea from her mind and bent it instead to the conversation going on around her.

      They lingered over the cheese board and the coffee; it was only when Mr Parsons suggested that they should go to the bar below the restaurant for a drink before they returned home that the family made a move. They left as they had entered, Mrs Parsons in the lead, her daughters following and Mr Parsons ambling along behind them, and this time the girls contrived to get a good look at the man Stephanie had СКАЧАТЬ