“No, but . . .” she said in a small voice, and then tears welled up and her mother’s arms were around her. “I am so tired, Mummy.”
“Darling, of course you are . . . oh, how we have missed you.’
The warm air of the house blew over them, the beeswax on the banisters and the Brasso on the stair rods. Faintly, a hint of laundry on the boil. Somewhere far inside, crockery clacking as a maid did dishes, and coal rumbling as it was decanted from scuttle to purdonium.
Behind her mother, the front door closed with a tidy click of the latch. The war was muted. One felt the relief of the heart as it fell in with the old, shuffling rhythms of the maids. Everything would be well again. She would have Alistair—it still seemed only half real. And so what if he had lost an arm? It was easily done in these times. The brooms swished as they swept the quiet chambers of the house. The dusters banged between balusters. In the hall a Christmas tree, decked with Venetian glass, stood in its great brass bowl.
Mary followed her mother through to the drawing room, where Palmer brought tea in blue china. He served Mary’s according to her most recent preference: without milk but with three sugars, the way she had taken it when the morphine had sweetened her tooth.
“Thank you, Palmer, but if it isn’t too much trouble I should like my tea the old way.” She spoke deliberately, making sure her mother understood.
“Very good,” said Palmer, in the neutral tone he used whether one needed him to arrange a taxicab or a resurrection. He produced for her a tea without sugar and withdrew to his own measured bounds.
“Mummy,” said Mary, “I am so sorry for everything.”
“Oh, shh. No one could expect perfection from you, after so much loss. You’ll find your room just as you left it.”
“Thank you—but I’m not moving back.”
“No?” said her mother with the mildest incredulity, as if Mary had declined a macaroon. “But it would be so nice to have you home for Christmas.”
“The thing is, I need to ask you for something.”
“I see. You are yourself again, at least.”
“I haven’t touched morphine in months.”
“I’m glad. It wasn’t you at all. Shall we just forget it? You haven’t done irreparable damage to your father, provided you and I now embark on a comprehensive tour of the salons. When they see you like this again, the rumors will seem far-fetched. You’ll find that I have rather talked up your wound sustained in the line of duty—I hope you don’t mind—since it clothed your more naked indiscretions.”
“I’m sorry for the scene at the Ritz.”
“So am I. The Ritz, with a brace of niggers? If you had to send me a message, it might have hurt less to tie it to a stick and beat me with it.”
“Must you call them ‘niggers’? They’ve done nothing to you.”
“Except to hook my daughter on morphine.”
“The reverse, Mummy. One of them got me off the stuff.”
Her mother blinked. “But then why? Of all the people a girl might consort with.”
“I am not consorting. I’m teaching.”
“Well it kills me that you are doing so on my shilling. At least their parents ought to pay you a wage. Or do they even have parents? One hears that the fathers in particular have no more domestic feeling than do fishes.”
“I don’t feel I give the children any more than they give me, but I will stop drawing the allowance if it pleases you.”
“So what do you want from me if it is neither money, nor sane opinion, nor my simple invitation to make your poor father happy?”
Mary took her mother’s hand. “The man I told you I was keen on. Alistair. I love him.”
Her mother stared for a moment. “I suppose you’ll tell me his people are fascists, or some such thing? You don’t ever make it easy.”
“Oh, he’s from a good family. Before the war he was a conservator at the Tate.”
Mary felt her mother’s hand relax. “When you say a good family . . . ?”
“We don’t know them, if that’s what you mean. But you must imagine there are families, unknown in our circle, that nevertheless orbit the same sun and do so without eclipse or indiscretion.”
“I suppose they are socialists, then.”
“Do you? One day you must teach me how you can tell.”
Her mother took her hand back. “Why do I sense a caveat?”
“Alistair lost an arm in Malta, and—”
“Oh for heaven’s sake, so what? He can always grow a new one.”
Mary smiled. “I do love you, Mother. That’s just what I thought.”
“You are a dear girl. If you weren’t impossible I shouldn’t love you half so much. You’re what I might have been if I’d ever had the courage to tell my mother to mind her own business.”