介绍:
Earlier in the day she had seen old Hardman going about the house with a wicker basket, replacing electric bulbs. Perhaps there was now a harsher light at the top of the stairs, for she had never had this difficulty with the mirror there before. Even as she approached from a distance of forty feet, she saw that it was not going to let her pass; the pink was in fact innocently pale, the waistline was too high, the dress flared like an eight-year-old’s party frock. All it needed was rabbit buttons. As she drew nearer, an irregularity in the surface of the ancient glass foreshortened her image and she confronted the child of fifteen years before. She stopped and experimentally raised her hands to the side of her head and gripped her hair in bunches. This same mirror must have seen her descend the stairs like this on dozens of occasions, on her way to one more friend’s afternoon birthday bash. It would not help her state of mind, to go down looking like, or believing she looked like, Shirley Temple.
More in resignation than irritation or panic, she returned to her room. There was no confusion in her mind: these too-vivid, untrustworthy impressions, her self-doubt, the intrusive visual clarity and eerie differences that had wrapped themselves around the familiar were no more than continuations, variations of how she had been seeing and feeling all day. Feeling, but preferring not to think. Besides, she knew what she had to do and she had known it all along. She owned only one outfit that she genuinely liked, and that was the one she should wear. She let the pink dress fall on top of the black and, stepping contemptuously through the pile, reached for the gown, her green backless post-finals gown. As she pulled it on she approved of the firm caress of the bias cut through the silk of her petticoat, and she felt sleekly impregnable, slippery and secure; it was a mermaid who rose to meet her in her own full-length mirror. She left the pearls in place, changed back into the black high-heeled shoes, once more retouched her hair and makeup, forwent another dab of scent and then, as she opened the door, gave out a shriek of terror. Inches from her was a face and a raised fist. Her immediate, reeling perception was of a radical, Picasso-like perspective in which tears, rimmed and bloated eyes, wet lips and raw, unblown nose blended in a crimson moistness of grief. She recovered herself, placed her hands on the bony shoulders and gently turned the whole body so she could see the left ear. This was Jackson, about to knock on her door. In his other hand there was a gray sock. As she stepped back she noticed he was in ironed gray shorts and white shirt, but was otherwise barefoot.
“Little fellow! What’s the matter?”
For the moment, he could not trust himself to speak. Instead, he held up his sock and with it gestured along the corridor. Cecilia leaned out and saw Pierrot some distance off, also barefoot, also holding a sock, and watching.
“You’ve got a sock each then.”
The boy nodded and swallowed, and then at last he was able to say, “Miss Betty says we’ll get a smack if we don’t go down now and have our tea, but there’s only one pair of socks.”
“And you’ve been fighting over it.”
Jackson shook his head emphatically.
As she went along the corridor with the boys to their room, first one then the other put his hand in hers and she was surprised to find herself so gratified. She could not help thinking about her dress.
“Didn’t you ask your sister to help you?”
“She’s not talking to us at the moment.”
“Whyever not?”
“She hates us.”
Their room was a pitiful mess of clothes, wet towels, orange peel, torn-up pieces of a comic arranged around a sheet of paper, upended chairs partly covered by blankets and the mattresses at a slew. Between the beds was a broad damp stain on the carpet in the center of which lay a bar of soap and damp wads of lavatory paper. One of the curtains hung at a tilt below the pelmet, and though the windows were open, the air was dank, as though exhaled many times. All the drawers in the clothes chest stood open and empty. The impression was of closeted boredom punctuated by contests and schemes—jumping between the beds, building a camp, half devising a board game, then giving up. No one in the Tallis household was looking after the Quincey twins, and to conceal her guilt she said brightly, “We’ll never find anything with the room in this state.”
She began restoring order, remaking the beds, kicking off her high heels to mount a chair to fix the curtain, and setting the twins small achievable tasks. They were obedient to the letter, but they were quiet and hunched as they went about the work, as though it were retribution rather than deliverance, a scolding rather than kindness, she intended. They were ashamed of their room. As she stood on the chair in her clinging dark green dress, watching the bright ginger heads bobbing and bending to their chores, the simple thought came to her, how hopeless and terrifying it was for them to be without love, to construct an existence out of nothing in a strange house.
大家还在听
