Blaming (Virago Modern Classics) by Elizabeth Taylor Page B

couples. The men wore flowered shirts or silk sweaters, the women caftans with jewellery or ornaments collected on holidays abroad – Berber beadwork, strings of seeds, hands of Fatma, tasselied worry beads.
    After drinks in the sitting-room, they went down the creaking stairs to the kitchen. In the candlelight, and after the
taramasalata
had been praised and exclaimed about, Maggie ladled
boeuf Strogonov
onto the same used plates. Fuss she scorned and went to some trouble to make none. All meals, in her house, were eaten in the kitchen, which meant a lot of tidying up beforehand. Food was never dished up, but went from stove to plate. The dining-room on the ground floor was full of dolls’ prams and tricycles, but the children never played there. Ernie would be horrified, Amy thought. He had never been in this house, but he had asked many questions about it, as he had about Gareth’s, and Amy had answered in a vague way. “You can’t
make
wine, madam,” he had once protested, when she had been trying to describe a party there. But James did make wine, and it was now being sniffed at, and held to the light by other wine-makers. (Of course, that “Madam” of Ernie’s Maggie despised as much as fuss. “I can’t stop him,” Amy had said.)
    People were kind to her at this party. They spoke to her of her loss with brief sympathy, and would have gone on longer if she had desired. The death could not have been ignored, she knew; as she was for a time in a special case. But that subject having beenopened, having been closed, they led her to talk of other things. Like an elderly person, she stayed in one place, sitting on the edge of a clapped-out sofa, forking up rice, or reaching precariously for her precarious wine. The young people came in turns to tower over her, or squat at her feet. They were all so articulate, and being married, having children, going to work, was not enough for them. They also put in hours at family-planning clinics, sat on benches, fought pollution, visited prisons or were marriage-guidance councellors. Amy, who had never done anything but look after Nick and one child, and was now herself looked after, felt old stirrings of inadequacy.
    Hoping to help, she took some empty dishes out to the little scullery. Dora’s paintings were stuck upon the white-washed walls, and a Chagall print, which Amy thought like another of Dora’s paintings, and a drawing of Nick’s of a little girl playing the piano, with feet dangling above the ground. It was a favourite of hers and, although they had had the sense to glaze it and frame it, she considered a scullery an off-hand place to hang it.
    Stacking up plates, putting forks into a jug of water – and all as quietly as she could, for Maggie had said she must not help – she suddenly heard Isobel yelling in the back bedroom two flights up. She slipped away quietly, through the kitchen, where they were now eating cheesecake from the delicatessen. James was still hovering with a bottle and conversation was louder. She hurried up the two flights of stairs, half wondering why she was fleeing from one strain to another. The children’s room was almost dark. Thenightlight was at its last flicker in its saucer of water. Isobel sat up, sobbing, but with a pause every now and then to sniff and listen.
    Dora lay propped on one elbow, waiting to see who would come, hoping for some sort of behaviour. “I shall never be fit for school tomorrow,” she said in her father’s manner. “I do think that white blouse suits you, Grandma. It doesn’t show the dandruff.”
    At once, Amy’s scalp began to itch, and she felt gooseflesh over her body. It was an added affliction to grief – a little shame she had tried to hide, even from Gareth.
    Isobel, having been quite interested in the dandruff, now wished for attention. She rubbed her fists about her face, and yawned and whimpered.
    “What is wrong, Isobel?” Amy asked.
    At that, Isobel began to scream for all her