Maud was glad Thomasina was so pleased, and relieved Thomasina had not seen her first attempt at the sketch. Halfway through she had suddenly seen that she had drawn Thomasina as immensely tall, with dreadful greedy eyes and large teeth, like the ogresses in the stories, whose appetites were inclined towards human children, and who plotted to steal them away. How dreadful of her, after all Thomasina’s kindness.
During breakfast, opening her letters, Thomasina said, in what Maud thought was a slightly too casual voice, that she had invited her cousin Simon to stay at Quire for a week or so.
‘And he’s written to say he’ll be here this afternoon. He’s in financial difficulties again of course–that’s a common occurrence with Simon–but he’s the nearest thing I’ve got to a brother. He spent a lot of his school holidays at Quire; my father always thought him a bit weak and too much of a drifter to ever do any good, but he’s a charming drifter and an entertaining companion so I shan’t mind having him around. If he gets bored he can go rough shooting with Cormac Sullivan.’
Maud thought it was nice that Thomasina’s cousin would be there for her birthday dinner, and Thomasina said they would have a very good evening. After dinner Maud could play some music, providing it was not one of those gloomy pieces by that man who had been refused Christian burial or something, so that his coffin had languished in a cellar for months. Paganini, was it? Well, whatever he had been called, they did not want him tonight.
Thomasina seemed quite excited about Simon’s arrival; Maud even began to wonder if there could be something romantic between them, although that was not very likely. Thomasina had no time for men and she looked on Simon as a brother, she had said so.
But there was a hectic colour in her face which was unusual because she was normally sallow-skinned, and her eyes had a glittery look. Maud hoped it did not mean Thomasina wanted ‘It’ to happen that night. For the last few nights she had pretended to fall asleep as soon as she got into bed, and it was nearly a week since ‘It’ had happened. So Thomasina might consider it was time for a particularly strenuous session, and since it was her birthday Maud supposed it would be ungenerous to refuse. But the prospect was daunting. There were nights when the stroking and poking seemed to last for hours, and Maud’s hands sometimes ached the next day from doing the things that Thomasina liked her to do.
(‘Dear me, rheumatism at your age,’ Maud’s father had said when she had visited him, seeing her unconsciously massaging her fingers, and Maud had had to laugh and say that of course it was not rheumatism; she had been practising a particularly difficult piece on the piano. It was unthinkable that her father should so much as suspect what she and Thomasina did together.)
At dinner Simon was very attentive to Maud, passing dishes to her and pouring wine into her glass. Maud tried not to drink too much of the wine because she was developing a headache, but Simon said a glass of good wine worked wonders for headaches, in fact it worked wonders for all areas of the body. Thomasina said, rather sharply, that that remained to be seen, and she would prefer Simon to moderate his drinking tonight, but Simon only grinned.
‘Worried about vintner’s droop? I’ve never been known to fail yet, old girl.’
Thomasina said very sharply that the dinner table was not the place for masculine coarseness, and Simon was not to call her old girl. Maud looked from one to the other in bewilderment.
‘We shan’t need anything else,’ said Thomasina to Mrs Minching when the coffee was brought in. She said this dismissively–she could be quite brusque with the servants–and Maud thought Mrs Minching looked cross as she went out.
Thomasina did not seem to notice or if she did, she did not care. She looked directly at Maud and smiled. Maud felt a nervous tremor at the pit of her stomach. This was the smile she had glimpsed on Thomasina’s face several times recently: the smile that had somehow got into that first shameful sketch; the smile that seemed to come up from Thomasina’s very marrow, and said, I’m going to enjoy you…