The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [65]
But as Daphne took her place she said: "So sorry my bath gave you a jump."
"Oh, that was my fault."
"Perhaps you had eaten something?"
"She was just tired, dear," Mrs. Heccomb said.
"I daresay you're not used to the pipes. I daresay your sister-in-law has Buckingham Palace plumbing?"
"I don't know what—"
"That is one of Daphne's jokes, dear."
Daphne pursued: "I daresay she's got a green china bath? Or else one of those sunk ones with a concealed light?"
"No, Daphne dear: Anna never likes things at all extreme."
But Daphne only snorted and said: "I daresay she has a bath that she floats in just like a lily."
At the same time, making a plunge at the marmalade, Daphne sucked her cheeks in at once sternly and hardily, with the air of someone who could say a good deal more. It was clear that her manner to Portia could not be less aggressive till she had stopped associating her with Anna. Anyone who came to Waikiki straight from Anna's seemed to Daphne likely to come it over them all. She had encountered Anna only three times—on which occasions Daphne patiently, ruthlessly, had collected everything about Anna that one could not like. She was not, as far as that went, a jealous girl, and she had a grudging regard for the upper classes—had she been more in London, she would have been in the front ranks of those womanly crowds who besiege crimson druggets under awnings up steps. She would have been one of those onlooking girls who poke their large unenvious faces across the flying tip of the notable bride's veil, or who without resentment sniff other people's gardenias outside the Opera. Contented wry decent girls like Daphne are the bad old order's principal stay. She delighted to honour what she was perfectly happy not to have. At the same time, and underlying this, there could have been a touch of the tricoteuse about Daphne, once fully worked up, and this all came out in her constantly angry feeling against Anna.
She did not (rightly) consider Anna properly upper class. All the same, she felt Anna's power in operation; she considered Anna got more than she ought. She thought Anna gave herself airs. She also resented dimly (for she could never word it) Anna's having made Mumsie her parasite. Had Anna had a title this might have been less bitter. She overlooked, rightly and rather grandly, the fact that had it not been for Anna's father, the Heccombs could not have opened so much galantine.
Some people are moulded by their admirations, others by their hostilities. In so far as anything had influenced Daphne's evolution, it had been the wish to behave and speak on all occasions as Anna would not. At this moment, the very idea of Anna made her snap at her toast with a most peculiar expression, catching dribbles of marmalade on her lower lip.
The Waikiki marmalade was highly jellied, sweet and brilliantly orange; the table was brightly set with cobalt-and-white breakfast china, whose pattern derived from the Chinese. Rush mats as thick as muffins made hot plates wobble on the synthetic oak. Sunlight of a pure seaside quality flooded the breakfast table, and Portia, looking out through the sun porch, thought how pleasant this was. The Heccombs ate as well as lived in the lounge, for they mistrusted, rightly, the anthracite stove in the should-be diningroom. So they only used the diningroom in summer, or for parties at which they had enough people to generate a sterling natural heat.... Gulls dipped over the lawn in a series of white flashes; Mrs. Heccomb watched Daphne having a mood about Anna with an eye of regret. "But one does not put lilies in baths," she said at last.
"You might do, if you wanted to keep them fresh."
"Then I should have thought you'd put them in a wash basin, dear."
"How should I know?" said Daphne. "I don't get lilies, do I?" She thrust her cup forward for more coffee, and, with an air of turning to happier subjects, said: "Did you fly out at Dickie about that bell?"
"He didn't seem to think—"
"Oh, he didn't, did he?" said Daphne. "That's just Dickie all over, if you know what I mean. Why not let you get the man from Spalding's in the first place? Well, you had better get the man from Spalding's. I want that bell done by tomorrow night."