Colour Scheme (2 page)

“But you’re not really angry.”

Huia looked out of the corners of her eyes at Barbara, pulled an equivocal grimace, and tittered.

“Don’t forget your cap and apron,” said Barbara, and left the sweltering kitchen for the dining-room.

Wai-ata-tapu Hostel was a one-storied wooden building shaped like an E with the middle stroke missing. The dining-room occupied the centre of the long section separating the kitchen and serveries from the boarders’ bedrooms, which extended into the east wing. The west wing, private to the Claires, was a series of cramped cabins and a tiny sitting-room. The house had been designed by Colonel Claire on army-hut lines with an additional flavour of sanatorium. There were no passages, and all the rooms opened on a partially covered-in verandah. The inside walls were of yellowish-red oiled wood. The house smelt faintly of linseed oil and positively of sulphur. An observant visitor might have traced in it the history of the Claires’ venture. The framed London Board-of-Trade posters, the chairs and tables painted, not very capably, in primary colours, the notices in careful script, the archly reproachful rhyme-sheets in bathrooms and lavatories, all spoke of high beginnings. Broken
passe-partout
, chipped paint, and fly-blown papers hanging by single drawing-pins traced unmistakably a gradual but inexorable decline. The house was clean but unexpectedly so, tidy but not orderly, and only vaguely uncomfortable. The front wall of the dining-room was built up of glass panels designed to slide in grooves, but devilishly inclined to jam. These looked across the verandah to the hot springs themselves.

Barbara stood for a moment at one of the open windows and stared absently at a freakish landscape. Hills smudged with scrub were ranked against a heavy sky. Beyond them, across the hidden inlet, but tall enough to dominate the scene, rose the truncated cone of Rangi’s Peak, an extinct volcano so characteristically shaped that it might have been placed in the landscape by a modern artist with a passion for simplified form. Though some eight miles away, it was actually clearer than the near-by hills, for their margins, dark and firm, were broken at intervals by plumes of steam that rose perpendicularly from the eight thermal pools. These lay close at hand, just beyond the earth-and-pumice sweep in front of the house. Five of them were hot springs hidden from the windows by fences of manuka scrub. The sixth was enclosed by a rough bath shed. The seventh was almost a lake over whose dark waters wraiths of steam vaguely drifted. The eighth was a mud pool, not hot enough to give off steam, and dark in colour with a kind of iridescence across its surface. This pool was only half-screened and from its open end protruded a naked pink head on top of a long neck. Barbara went out to the verandah, seized a brass schoolroom bell, and rang it vigorously. The pink head travelled slowly through the mud like some fantastic periscope until it disappeared behind the screen.

“Lunch, Father,” screamed Barbara unnecessarily. She walked across the sweep and entered the enclosure. On a brush fence that screened the first path hung a weather-worn placard: “The Elfin Pool. Engaged.” The Claires had given each of the pools some amazingly insipid title, and Barbara had neatly executed the placards in poker-work.

“Are you there, Mummy?” asked Barbara.

“Come in, my dear.”

She walked round the screen and found her mother at her feet, submerged up to the shoulders in bright blue steaming water that quite hid her plump body. Over her fuzz of hair Mrs. Claire wore a rubber bag with a frilled edge and she had spectacles on her nose. With her right hand she held above the water a shilling edition of
Cranford
.

“So
charming
,” she said. “They are all such dears. I never tire of them.”

“Lunch is nearly in.”

“I must pop out. The Elf is really wonderful, Ba. My tiresome arm is quite cleared up.”

“I’m so glad, Mummy,” said Barbara in a loud voice. “I want to ask you something.”

“What is it?” said Mrs. Claire, turning a page with her thumb.

“Do you like Mr. Questing?”

Mrs. Claire looked up over the top of her book. Barbara was standing at a curious angle, balanced on her right leg. Her left foot was hooked round her right ankle.

“Dear,” said Mrs. Claire, “
don’t
stand like that. It pushes all the wrong things out and tucks the right ones in.”

“But do you?” Barbara persisted, changing her posture with a jerk.

“Well, he’s not out of the top drawer of course, poor thing.”

“I don’t mind about that. And anyway what
is
the top drawer? It’s a maddening sort of way to classify people. Such cheek! I’m sorry, Mummy, I didn’t mean to be rude. But honestly, for
us
to talk about class!” Barbara gave a loud hoot of laughter. “Look at us!” she said.

Mrs. Claire edged modestly towards the side of the pool and thrust her book at her daughter. Stronger waves of sulphurous smells rose from the disturbed waters. A cascade of drops fell from the elderly rounded arm.

“Take
Cranford
,” she said. Barbara took it. Mrs. Claire pulled her rubber bag a little closer about her ears. “My dear,” she said, pitching her voice on a note that she usually reserved for death, “aren’t you mixing up money and breeding? It doesn’t matter what one
does
surely…” She paused. “There is an innate something…” she began. “One can always tell,” she added.

“Can one? Look at Simon.”

“Dear old Simon,” said her mother reproachfully.

“Yes, I know. I’m very fond of him. I couldn’t have a kinder brother, but there isn’t much innate something about Simon, is there?”

“It’s only that awful accent. If we could have afforded…”

“There you are, you see,” cried Barbara, and she went on in a great hurry, shooting out her words as if she fired them from a gun that was too big for her. “Class consciousness is all my eye. Fundamentally it’s based on money.”

On the verandah the bell was rung again with some abandon.

“I must pop out,” said Mrs. Claire. “That’s Huia ringing.”

“It’s not because he talks a different language or any of those things,” said Barbara hurriedly, “that I don’t like Mr. Questing. I don’t like
him
. And I don’t like the way he behaves with Huia. Or,” she added under her breath, “with me.”

“I expect,” said Mrs. Claire, “that’s only because he used to be a commercial traveller. It’s just his way.”

“Mummy,
why
do you find excuses for him? Why does Daddy, who would ordinarily loathe Mr. Questing, put up with him? He even laughs at his awful jokes. It isn’t because we want his board money. Look how Daddy and Uncle James practically froze out those rich Americans who were very nice, I thought.” Barbara drove her long fingers through her mouse-coloured hair, and avoiding her mother’s gaze stared at the top of Rangi’s Peak. “You’d think Mr. Questing had a sort of
hold
on us,” she said, and then burst into one of her fits of nervous laughter.

“Barbie darling,” said her mother, on a note that contrived to suggest the menace of some frightful indelicacy, “I think we won’t talk about it any more.”

“Uncle James hates him, anyway.”

“Barbara!”

“Lunch, Agnes,” said a quiet voice on the other side of the fence. “You’re late again.”

“Coming, dear. Please go on ahead with Daddy, Barbara,” said Mrs. Claire.

Dr. Ackrington bucketed his car down the drive and pulled up at the verandah with a savage jolt just as Barbara reached it. She waited for him and took his arm.

“Stop it,” he said. “You’ll give me hell if you hurry me.” But when she made to draw away he held her arm in a wiry grasp.

“Is the leg bad, Uncle James?”

“It’s always bad. Steady now.”

“Did you have your morning soak in the Porridge Pot?”

“I did not. And do you know why? That damned poisonous little bounder was wallowing in it.”

“Mr. Questing?”

“He never washes,” Dr. Ackrington shouted. “I’ll swear he never washes. Why the devil you can’t insist on people taking the shower before they use the pools is a mystery. He soaks his sweat off in my mud.”

“Are you sure…?”

“Certain. Certain. Certain. I’ve watched him. He never goes near the shower. How in the name of common decency your parents can stomach him…”

“That’s just what I’ve been asking Mummy.”

Dr. Ackrington halted and stared at his niece. An observer might have been struck by their resemblance to each other. Barbara was much more like her uncle than her mother, yet while he, in a red-headed edgy sort of way, was remarkably handsome, she contrived to present as good a profile without its accompaniment of distinction. Nobody noticed Barbara’s physical assets; her defects were inescapable. Her hair, her clothes, her incoherent gestures, her strangely untutored mannerisms, all combined against her looks and discounted them. She and her uncle stared at each other in silence for some seconds.

“Oh,” said Dr. Ackrington at last. “And what did your mother say?”

Barbara pulled a clown’s grimace. “She
reproved
me,” she said in a sepulchral serio-comedy voice.

“Well, don’t make faces at me,” snapped her uncle.

A window in the Claires’ wing was thrown open, and between the curtains there appeared a vague pink face garnished with a faded moustache, and topped by a thatch of white hair.

“Hullo, James,” said the face crossly. “Lunch. What’s your mother doing, Ba? Where’s Simon?”

“She’s coming, Daddy. We’re all coming.
Simon
!” screamed Barbara.

Mrs. Claire, enveloped in a dark red flannel dressing gown, came panting up from the pools, and hurried into the house.

“Aren’t we going to
have
any lunch?” Colonel Claire asked bitterly.

“Of course we are,” said Barbara. “Why don’t you begin, Daddy, if you’re in such a hurry? Come on, Uncle James.”

As they went indoors, a young man came round the house and slouched in behind them. He was tall, big-boned, and sandy-haired, with a jutting under lip.

“Hullo, Sim,” said Barbara. “Lunch.”

“Righto.”

“How’s the Morse code this morning?”

“Going good,” said Simon.

Dr. Ackrington instantly turned on him. “Is there any creditable reason why you should not say ‘going well’?” he demanded.

“Huh!” said Simon.

He trailed behind them into the dining-room and they took their places at a long table where Colonel Claire was already seated.

“We won’t wait for your mother,” said Colonel Claire, folding his hands over his abdomen. “For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful. Huia!”

Huia came in wearing cap, crackling apron, and stiff curls. She looked like a Polynesian goddess who had assumed, on a whim, some barbaric disguise.

“Would you like cold ham, cold mutton, or grilled steak?” she asked, and her voice was as cool and deep as her native forests. As an afterthought she handed Barbara a menu.

“If I ask for steak,” said Dr. Ackrington, “will it be cooked…”

“You don’t want to eat raw steak, Uncle, do you?” said Barbara.

“Let me finish. If I order steak, will it be cooked or tanned? Will it resemble steak or
biltong
?”

“Steak,” said Huia, musically.

“Is it cooked?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you. I shall have ham.”

“What the devil are you driving at, James?” asked Colonel Claire, irritably. “You talk in riddles. What
do
you want?”

“I want grilled steak. If it is already cooked it will not be grilled steak. It will be boot leather. You can’t get a bit of grilled steak in the length and breadth of this country.”

Huia looked politely and inquiringly at Barbara.

“Grill Dr. Ackrington a fresh piece of steak, please, Huia.”

Dr. Ackrington shook his finger at Huia. “Five minutes,” he shouted. “Five minutes! A second longer and it’s uneatable. Mind that!” Huia smiled. “And while she’s cooking it I have a letter to read to you,” he added importantly.

Mrs. Claire came in. She looked as if she had just returned from a round of charitable visits in an English village. The Claires ordered their lunches and Dr. Ackrington took out the letter from Dr. Forster.

“This concerns all of you,” he announced.

“Where’s Smith?” demanded Colonel Claire suddenly, opening his eyes very wide. His wife and children looked vaguely round the room. “Did anyone call him?” asked Mrs. Claire.

“Don’t mind Smith, now,” said Dr. Ackrington. “He’s not here and he won’t be here. I passed him in Harpoon. He was turning in at a pub and by the look of him it was not the first by two or three. Don’t mind him. He’s better away.”

“He got a cheque from Home yesterday,” said Simon, in his strong New Zealand dialect. “Boy, oh boy!”

“Don’t speak like that, dear,” said his mother. “Poor Mr. Smith, it’s such a shame. He’s a dear fellow at bottom.”

“Will you allow me to read this letter, or will you not?”

“Do read it, dear. Is it from Home?”

Dr. Ackrington struck the table angrily with the flat of his hand. His sister leant back in her chair, Colonel Claire stared out through the windows, and Simon and Barbara, after the first two sentences, listened eagerly. When he had finished the letter, which he read in a rapid uninflected patter, Dr. Ackrington dropped it on the table and looked about him with an air of complacency.

Barbara whistled. “I
say
,” she said — “Geoffrey Gaunt! I
say
.”

“And a servant. And a secretary. I don’t quite know what to say, James,” Mrs. Claire murmured. “I’m quite bewildered. I really don’t think…”

“We can’t take on a chap like that,” said Simon loudly.

“And why not, pray?” his uncle demanded.

“He’d be no good to us and we’d be no good to him. He’ll be used to posh hotels and slinging his weight about with a lot of English servants. What’d we do with a secretary and a manservant? What’s he do with them anyway?” Simon went on with an extraordinary air of hostility. “Is he feeble-minded or what?”

“Feeble-minded!” cried Barbara. “He’s probably the greatest living actor.”