The Clayhanger Trilogy: Clayhanger, Hilda Lessways & These Twain (Complete Edition). Bennett Arnold
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upon him, and then he immediately became self-conscious and awkward.
“Hello, Clara!” he greeted her, with his instinctive warm, transient smile, holding out his hand sheepishly. It was a most extraordinary and amazing thing that he could never regard the ceremony of shaking hands with a relative as other than an affectation of punctilio. Happily he was not wearing his hat; had it been on his head he would never have taken it off, and yet would have cursed himself for not doing so.
“We are grand!” exclaimed Clara, limply taking his hand and dropping it as an article of no interest. In her voice there was still some echo of former sprightliness. The old Clara in her had not till that moment beheld the smart and novel curves of Edwin’s Shillitoe suit, and the satiric cry came unbidden from her heart.
Edwin gave an uneasy laugh, which was merely the outlet for his disgust. Not that he was specially disgusted with Clara, for indeed marriage had assuaged a little the tediousness of some of her mannerisms, even if it had taken away from her charm. He was disgusted more comprehensively by the tradition, universal in his class and in most classes, according to which relatives could not be formally polite to one another. He obeyed the tradition as slavishly as anyone, but often said to himself that he would violate the sacred rule if only he could count on a suitable response; he knew that he could not count on a suitable response; and he had no mind to be in the excruciating position of one who, having started “God save the Queen” at a meeting, finds himself alone in the song. Why could not he and Clara behave together as, for instance, he and Janet Orgreave would behave together, with dignity, with worldliness, with mutual deference? But no! It was impossible, and would ever be so. They had been too brutally intimate, and the result was irremediable.
“She’s got no room to talk about personal appearance, anyway!” he thought sardonically.
There was another extraordinary and amazing thing. He was ashamed of her condition! He could not help the feeling. In vain he said to himself that her condition was natural and proper. In vain he remembered the remark of the sage that a young woman in her condition was the most beautiful sight in the world. He was ashamed of it. And he did not think it beautiful; he thought it ugly. It worried him. What,—his sister? Other men’s sisters, yes; but his! He forgot that he himself had been born. He could scarcely bear to look at Clara. Her face was thin, and changed in colour; her eyes were unnaturally lustrous and large, bold and fatigued; she looked ill, really ill; and she was incredibly unornamental. And this was she whom he could remember as a graceful child! And it was all perfectly correct and even laudable! So much so that young Clara undoubtedly looked down, now, as from a superior height, upon both himself and Maggie!
“Where’s father?” she asked. “Just shut my sunshade.”
“Oh! Somewhere about. I expect he’ll be along in a minute. Albert coming?” He followed her into the shop.
“Albert!” she protested, shocked. “Albert can’t possibly come till one o’clock. Didn’t you know he’s one of the principal stewards in Saint Luke’s Square? He says we aren’t to wait dinner for him if he isn’t prompt.”
“Oh!” Edwin replied, and put the sunshade on the counter.
Clara sat down heavily on a chair, and began to fan herself with a handkerchief. In spite of the heat of exercise her face was of a pallid yellow.
“I suppose you’re going to stay here all morning?” Edwin inquired.
“Well,” said Clara, “you don’t see me walking up and down the streets all morning, do you? Albert said I was to be sure and go upstairs at once and not move. He said there’d be plenty to see for a long time yet from the sitting-room window, and then afterwards I could lie down.”
Albert said! Albert said! Clara’s intonation of this frequent phrase always jarred on Edwin. It implied that Albert was the supreme fount of wisdom and authority in Bursley. Whereas to Edwin, Albert was in fact a mere tedious, self-important manufacturer in a small way, with whom he had no ideas in common. “A decent fellow at bottom,” the fastidious Edwin was bound to admit to himself by reason of slight glimpses which he had had of Albert’s uncouth good-nature; but pietistic, overbearing, and without humour.
“Where’s Maggie?” Clara demanded.
“I think she’s putting her things on,” said Edwin.
“But didn’t she understand I was coming early?” Clara’s voice was querulous, and she frowned.
“I don’t know,” said Edwin.
He felt that if they remained together for hours, he and Clara would never rise above this plane of conversation—personal, factual, perfectly devoid of wide interest. They would never reach an exchange of general ideas; they never had done. He did not think that Clara had any general ideas.
“I hear you’re getting frightfully thick with the Orgreaves,” Clara observed, with a malicious accent and smile, as if to imply that he was getting frightfully above himself, and—simultaneously—that the Orgreaves were after all no better than other people.
“Who told you that?” He walked towards the doorway uneasily. The worst was that he could not successfully pretend that these sisterly attacks were lost on him.
“Never mind who told me,” said Clara.
Her voice took on a sudden charming roguish quality, and he could hear again the girl of fourteen. His heart at once softened to her. The impartial and unmoved spectator that sat somewhere in Edwin, as in everybody who possesses artistic sensibility, watching his secret life as from a conning tower, thought how strange this was. He stared out into the street. And then a face appeared at the aperture left by the removed shutter. It was Janet Orgreave’s, and it hesitated. Edwin gave a nervous start.
Four.
Janet was all in white again, and her sunshade was white, with regular circular holes in it to let through spots of sunlight which flecked her face. Edwin had not recovered from the blow of her apparition just at that moment, when he saw Hilda Lessways beyond her. Hilda was slate-coloured, and had a black sunshade. His heart began to thump; it might have been a dramatic and dangerous crisis that had suddenly come about. And to Edwin the situation did in fact present itself as critical: his sister behind, and these two so different girls in front. Yet there was nothing critical in it whatsoever. He shook hands as in a dream, wondering what he should do, trying to summon out of himself the man of the world.
“Do come in,” he urged them, hoping they would refuse.
“Oh no. We mustn’t come in,” said Janet, smiling gratefully. Hilda did not smile; she had not even smiled in shaking hands; and she had shaken hands without conviction.
Edwin heard a hurried step in the shop, and then the voice of Maggie, maternal and protective, in a low exclamation of surprise: “You, dear!” And then the sound of a smacking kiss, and Clara’s voice, thin, weak, and confiding: “Yes, I’ve come.” “Come upstairs, do!” said Maggie imploringly. “Come and be comfortable.” Then steps, ceasing to be heard as the sisters left the shop at the back. The solicitude of Maggie for Clara during the last few months had seemed wonderful to Edwin, as also Clara’s occasional childlike acceptance of it.
“But you must come in!” he said more boldly to the visitors, asking himself whether either Janet on Hilda had caught sight of his sisters in the gloom of the shop.
They entered, Hilda stiffly. Each with the same gesture closed her parasol before passing through the slit between the shutters into the deep shade. But whereas Janet smiled with pleasant anticipation as though she was going into heaven, Hilda wrinkled her forehead when her parasol would not subside at the first touch.
Janet talked of the Centenary; said they had decided only that morning to come down into the town and see whatever was to be seen; said with an angelic air of apologising to the Centenary that up at Lane End House they had certainly been under-estimating its importance and its interest as a spectacle; said that it was most astonishing to see all the shops