The Theoretical Foot (4 page)

iv

In the half-second before he'd stut the door with a mumble that sounded rather like
jzza en sczzmhm,
Susan had decided that this was the darlingest, but the
darlingest,
boy she had ever seen.

She stood, ecstatically blank, seeing clearly against the soft green wood the rangy figure who'd been standing there, and she could easily imagine his half-shut eyes, as the sleepy garble of astonishment rang again in her ears with all the clarity of a French train whistle, all the magic sonority of an organ in a dim cathedral.

She flattened her flat little belly and reached with her one free hand, without even knowing it, for Joe's handkerchief. She needed a good blow. Her heart thumped delightedly.

“We'll put these things in the kitchen,” Sara muttered. “Damn that lazy boy anyway! Oh, hello, Nor.” She nodded at the tall girl who was arising slowly from the blue velvet chaise longue upon which she had been stretched. “We'll drop these things and be back in a minute to be polite.”

She led them across a long light room toward the open wall along one side of the fireplace.

Sue picked her way down the three broad steps into the room and followed Sara, flicking one terrified look at this new person. Her mouth had turned dry and she was appalled to realized that in spite of her emotional nose-blow in the hall she would once more need to sniff, and
mightily.
Where else in the world were there as many enormous people as she had seen today?

She was used to Joe, so he didn't count, but Sara Porter had always seemed as tall to Sue as the city hall, and now here Sue was, peering up at yet more people who seemed even taller! And they were all thin. Her neck ached and she slowed down in front of the strange girl with a painful feeling that very soon her head would snap off and roll back off her shoulders with a hollow thump on the floor.

Suddenly it all seemed funny. She grinned and looked up into the benign brown eyes of one of the prettiest faces she had ever seen. She had a new certainty that she was after all so small that no matter what she did nobody would notice her.

Hurray, she thought lazily, I'll do what I like! I'll be Mosca the Gadfly. I'll have a little fun, maybe, and stop worrying myself thin over silly old Joe and whether he wants me and how many miles it is to Munich or Babylon or Oxford.

“Hello,” Sue heard herself saying with a kind of passive amazement at her own nonchalance. This girl was one of the handsomest things in the world, certainly, slim, brown, dressed in impeccable white with high-heeled white pumps on her small feet and her silky dark hair piled on top of her head in a way that almost belligerently accentuated her extreme height.

If I didn't feel a little crazy, Susan thought, I'd be paralyzed by her, but
paralyzed
! Poor girl, though, she's so tall I bet it's hard for her to get dates.

“I'm Honor Tennant,” the girl said. She spoke slowly, as if she were thinking of something else.

“I think I saw your brother.”

“Dan? Yes. I heard his door while you were in the hall. That's too bad. I've been meaning to get him up before Sara got home. But he won't be long, now he's seen you. If you'll give me some of your bundles . . . here, let me just put these things on the table and I'll take you upstairs.”

“But what about Mrs. Porter? Hadn't I better . . .?”

“No. Leave them here. Sara will find them. She likes to be let alone when she's cooking. Anyway, I think what's-his-name went into the kitchen with her.”

“You mean Joe?” Sue felt faintly resentful at this tall beautiful girl's complete dismissal of her love. She frowned and went on: “That's Joe Kelly. Please excuse us for not introducing ourselves.”

“Yes, I know,” Honor said, as if bored. “Star football, Rhodes fellow, all that. He looks nice. But don't worry about introductions. Sara should have done it and she always gets into a twitch before meals and I don't know where Tim is. I know you're Susan Harper, though, we we're at least safe on that point. And I do know we're all awfully glad that you're here.”

She started to walk off with the long strides of her long legs toward the wide door through which Sue had just come. Sue ran after as an amused exasperation struggled in her. Suddenly she laughed aloud and darted quickly past Honor and up the stairs to the dim cool hall.

“You know,” she said, her voice sounding rather thick to her own interested ears, “I am really scared to death and so have decided to say just what I want to, for once, while I'm here. I'm catching a terrible, but
terrible,
cold.” She paused, then added, unnecessarily, “In my head.”

Honor stopped her deliberate progress toward the stairs and looked quietly at Sue.

“Gosh, that's too bad,” she said seriously, as if this were somehow an important thing about which she suddenly—in spite of her apparent boredom with the world—felt pierced to the very quick of her being. She looked with real concern in her lovely brown eyes, into the strangely twinkling gray ones of Sue, which—because Sue was above her on the stairs—were on a level with her. Then Honor walked on.

They went on up the twisting stair on granite steps. The walls were rough white plaster. There were green tiles on the little landing and green woodwork. Sue, bewildered and excited though she was, was again overwhelmed by the same aesthetic safistfaction that had risen in her in first seeing La Prairie from the car.

Honor turned a final left, Sue following her into a small airy room. She noticed a beautiful desk, a couch bed, a fat squat chair
covered with pale cretonne, and long white organdy curtains billowing softly between apple-green and white walls, before the two wide windows which seemed half-filled by boxes of opulent petunias, white and purple. This is the room I saw first, she thought, exultantly. I looked up at these flowers and wondered if I should be here! Sue could hear the fountain below.

Honor stood for a minute, her head bent, as if she, too, were listening or waiting for something. Then she said, “You know, I'm really awfully sorry about your cold. They're hell, so ignominious somehow. I'll give you some face tissues, for hankies.

“And I know what you mean about being scared to speak,” she went on almost hurriedly. “I know what you mean. I was too scared when I first came here. It's different now, but my sister's really pretty overpowering. I don't know why . . . I don't think she means to be, but she is. She's nice, though. Wait 'til you see Tim. He'll take the curse off it. And anyhow, I know you won't be scared long.” Then Honor suddenly turned away.

She's embarrassed at talking so much, Susan thought. She watched Honor, as the girl stood by the old wooden desk and stroked a curve of its low fluted backboard with one finger. She's embarrassed, and how queer that her hands are short and plump! Sue laughed again softly. She felt much less intimidated now that Honor Tennant had talked even so inconclusively to her.

“You have a strange name.”

Honor looked up as if she had forgotten for a second that she was not alone. Her face lightened but she only answered briefly, “Yes.” Then, as if ashamed of her curtness, she almost rattled on, “My mother wanted it to be Norah but Father drew the line at that, so it's Honor, which is, of course, even
more
Irish than Norah, though in America there aren't as many cooks named that. Not that I'd mind being one either, just so long as I was a
good
one, cook I mean. Here. This is the dressing room. You'll find everything you want, I think, and that door to the left is the toilet. And help yourself to those tissues, they make swell hankies.”

She smiled vaguely at Sue, ran one hand slowly through the top curls of her pile of soft brown hair, and disappeared rather heavily but majestically down the stairs.

Sue listened to her steps and smiled again to herself. Honor was
nice
and she felt somehow that it was because she herself had adopted an important new policy, clearly and definitely, as she'd stood only a few moments before in the bewildering strangeness downstairs.

That's all I need, she told herself triumphantly. With nerve, anybody can carry off a difficult situation—not that things have been
terribly
difficult so far—but they laughed at me when I sat down at La Prairie. I'll just act silly and say what I think. That will fool them all, all these tall people.

As she washed her hands and dried them sensually on the softest towel she'd used that summer, she wondered—and not for the first time—what made her feel so awkward and timid at the thought of this place. Certainly Joe had never offered anything but glowing praise for La Prairie and the people in it and the food and flowers and drink and the good beds and the freedom—all of it had always sounded pefect to her. She had longed to be here and now she was, if shaking a little again inside at the thought of having to go down those stone steps alone and wishing Honor had stayed with her.

Nonsense, she told herself savagely. You're almost twenty, and even if you are shorter than anybody, you do have a great deal of dignity.

She pulled out her three rather bent gold hairpins, shook her topknot loose, and wrapped it into place again expertly. As she poked the ribbon into place in front of her topknot, she stopped in order to look searchingly at herself in the mirror.

She scowled and—with quick determination—pulled the pins out again and did her hair all over again allowing it to sit in place more softly. It was easy to pinch into place the waves always lurking in her wildly gleaming, white-blonde hair. Yes, Joe was used to her and he didn't matter but she felt sure that Dan Tennant would like her better if she looked a little bit less like she'd been skinned.

She pulled deftly at the curls around her face to loosen them, leaving her fine brow bare, her little eyes looking wide and knowing. Then she moistened one finger and flicked her long eyelashes to point them before she looked at herself in the mirror with satisfaction.

Suddenly another violent sneeze rocked her and—for the second time that day—Sue felt as if she'd been jarred by an exploding charge of dynamite. She was sick and she was also being made dizzy by the realization that she would soon be so far away from Joe Kelly. She had never felt so overwhelmed and for a ghastly second she wondered if she was going to vomit as she stretched out one hand reaching blindly toward the washbasin. Then she stood, waiting impotently for the heartache to ebb away and leave her.

Oh, my poor Joe, she thought wildly, my poor, poor Joe. Why do you love me? What is going to happen to us?

The months and years stretched out like a cold cruel wasteland before her now. She shuddered with nausea, feeling again the loneliness of last year at school without him and the hopeless comfort of his passionate letters from Oxford, whose passion felt to her perfunctory, and knowing that this year they would be fewer and that then soon enough they would cease.

Why was it that she knew Joe could live without her? She didn't mind really that he had slept with other girls and that he would again. But why was it that she knew she herself would nevermore feel interest in any living soul? She knew, irrevocably, that what she gave Joe, her love, she had given him all of it, all! All!
All
!

And now she was shivering.

How long had she been standing there, clutching the side of the wash bowl? Honor would think she'd have gone to sleep—that is, if Honor thought of anything so dull as Sue.

Oh, I wish I were a great big woman, Sue thought. Then all these things would not matter half so much or they'd be more spread out over my more massive existence.

She blew her nose thoroughly. Yes, but
definitely,
a damned cold was creeping up on her. Sue felt utterly miserable and quite
drained of all the excitement that for a few minutes downstairs had made her forget both her aching head and her breaking heart.

With a nervous look through the door into the little bedroom she quickly opened the cupboard nearest the washstand, as embarrassing as it was to poke about in other people's closets. As she'd thought, though, boxes of powder and a few small bottles of perfume stood there neatly on the first shelf. Beside them were two leather boxes, one of which held a manicure set. Susan felt sure that in the other, once obviously used for tiny tubes and bottles, would be odds and ends.

She opened it ferverishly and grinned with triumph. There was a jumble of lipsticks, hairpins, odd mismatched earrings and—yes!—a little flat box of aspirin.

She opened it and emptied three into her trembling hand, then swallowed them with a little water. Then she went quickly through the bedroom and felt her way down the unexpected curves of the dim stairwell and into the living room.

As she went, she touched her hair here and there carefully with an abstract satisfaction in the way it looked; it felt nice to have it loose again. Would that boy notice that she'd changed her hair since his first sight of her?