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Page 41
"Lady Caroline has a headache," said Mrs. Arbuthnot, re-entering
the dining-room and sitting down in her place next to Mrs. Fisher. "I
can't persuade her to have even a little tea, or some black coffee. Do
you know what aspirin is in Italian?"
"The proper remedy for headaches," said Mrs. Fisher firmly, "is
castor oil."
"But she hasn't got a headache," said Mrs. Wilkins.
"Carlyle," said Mrs. Fisher, who had finished her omelette and
had leisure, while she waited for the next course, to talk, "suffered
at one period terribly from headaches, and he constantly took castor
oil as a remedy. He took it, I should say, almost to excess, and
called it, I remember, in his interesting way the oil of sorrow. My
father said it coloured for a time his whole attitude to life, his
whole philosophy. But that was because he took too much. What Lady
Caroline wants is one dose, and one only. It is a mistake to keep on
taking castor oil."
"Do you know the Italian for it?" asked Mrs. Arbuthnot.
"Ah, that I'm afraid I don't. However, she would know. You can
ask her."
"But she hasn't got a headache," repeated Mrs. Wilkins, who was
struggling with the maccaroni. "She only wants to be let alone."
They both looked at her. The word shovel crossed Mrs. Fisher's
mind in connection with Mrs. Wilkins's actions at that moment.
"Then why should she say she has?" asked Mrs. Arbuthnot.
"Because she is still trying to be polite. Soon she won't try,
when the place has got more into her--she'll really be it. Without
trying. Naturally."
"Lotty, you see," explained Mrs. Arbuthnot, smiling to Mrs.
Fisher, who sat waiting with a stony patience for her next course,
delayed because Mrs. Wilkins would go on trying to eat the maccaroni,
which must be less worth eating than ever now that it was cold; "Lotty,
you see, has a theory about this place--"
But Mrs. Fisher had no wish to hear any theory of Mrs. Wilkins's.
"I am sure I don't know," she interrupted, looking severely at
Mrs. Wilkins, "why you should assume Lady Caroline is not telling the
truth."
"I don't assume--I know." said Mrs. Wilkins.
"And pray how do you know?" asked Mrs. Fisher icily, for Mrs.
Wilkins was actually helping herself to more maccaroni, offered her
officiously and unnecessarily a second time by Francesca.
"When I was out there just now I saw inside her."
Well, Mrs. Fisher wasn't going to say anything to that; she
wasn't going to trouble to reply to downright idiocy. Instead she
sharply rapped the little table-gong by her side, though there was
Francesca standing at the sideboard, and said, for she would wait no
longer for her next course, "Serve me."
And Francesca--it must have been wilful--offered her the
maccaroni again.
Chapter 10
There was no way of getting into or out of the top garden at San
Salvatore except through the two glass doors, unfortunately side by
side, of the dining-room and the hall. A person in the garden who
wished to escape unseen could not, for the person to be escaped from
could be met on the way. It was a small, oblong garden, and
concealment was impossible. What trees there were--the Judas tree, the
tamarisk, the umbrella-pine--grew close to the low parapets. Rose
bushes gave no real cover; one step to right or left of them, and the
person wishing to be private was discovered. Only the north-west
corner was a little place jutting out from the great wall, a kind of
excrescence or loop, no doubt used in the old distrustful days for
observation, where it was possible to sit really unseen, because
between it and the house was a thick clump of daphne.
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