The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [3]
"How very unlike Thomas!" St. Quentin said suddenly.
"What is?"
"She must be, I mean."
"Very. But look what different mothers they had. And poor Mr. Quayne, quite likely, never counted for much."
St. Quentin repeated: "'So I am with them, in London.' That's what is so impossible," he said.
"Her being with us?"
"Could it not have been helped?"
"Not when she had been left to us in a will—or in a dying request, which is not legal, and so worse. Dying put poor Mr. Quayne in a strong position for the first time in his life—or, at least, for the first time since Irene.
Thomas felt very strongly about his father's letter, and even I felt bound to behave well."
"I do doubt, all the same, whether those accesses of proper feeling ever do much good. You were bound to regret this one. Did you really imagine the girl would enjoy herself?"
"If Mr. Quayne had had anything besides Portia to leave us, the situation might not have been so tricky. But anything that he died with went, of course, to Irene, then, after her death, to Portia—a few hundreds a year. With only that will to make, he could not make any conditions: he simply implored us to have his daughter in what seemed (when he was dead like that, when, we got the letter) the most quavering voice. It was Thomas's mother, you know, who had most of the money—I don't think poor Mr. Quayne had ever made much—and when Thomas's mother died her money came straight to us. Thomas's mother, as no doubt you remember, died four or five years ago. I think, in some curious way, that it was her death, in the distance, that finished poor Mr. Quayne, though I daresay life with Irene helped. He and Irene and Portia, all more and more piano, trailed up and down the cold parts of the Riviera, till he caught a chill and died in a nursing home. A few days before he died, he dictated that letter to us about Portia to Irene, but Irene, detesting us—and I must say with some reason—put it away in her glove-box till she died herself. Of course, he had only meant it to come into effect in case of anything happening to Irene: he didn't mean us to take the kitten from the cat. But he had foreseen, I suppose, that Irene would be too incompetent to go on living for long, and of course he turned out to be right.
After Irene's death, in Switzerland, her sister found the letter and posted it on to us."
"What a number of deaths in Thomas's family!"
"Irene's, of course, was a frank relief—till we got the letter and realised what it would mean. My heavens, what an awful woman she was!"
"It embarrassed Thomas, having a stepmother?"
"Irene, you know, was not what anybody would want at all. We tried to overlook that for Thomas's father's sake. He felt so much in the wrong, poor old man, that one had to be more than naturally nice to him. Not that we saw him much: I don't think he felt it right to see very much of Thomas—because he so wanted to. He said something one day when we all had lunch at Folkestone about not casting a shadow over our lives. If we had made him feel that it didn't matter, we should have sunk in his estimation, I'm sure. When we met—which I must confess was only two or three times