Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/204

 "Well—if you ask"

"I'm asking you—as a woman"

"She's after the boy."

"Exactly," said Sorrell, picking up his soup spoon.

Life happens less crudely than our descriptions of it suggest, and the human diagrams that we draw lack the subtlety of colour and movement. It was easy for Sorrell to rush at a conclusion, and to make a sketch of Dora Duggan as he saw her, and to compare it with the Dora Sorrell of his married days. In his mental diary he wrote her down a vampire, a woman, who, having had all the satisfactions she desired from men and sex, was seeking other satisfactions. That red mouth of hers was ready to feed upon the young vitality of her son.

The thought enraged him. He was offended by the infernal audacity of her intriguing reappearance. To return, smiling, after a digression that had lasted ten years, sleekly and handsomely prosperous and self-assured, and ready to claim the inevitable flesh-bond.

He could hear her saying—"After all, Stephen, I am his mother." She would say it deliberately, flaunting her grey hairs and her glowing, maternal maturity, suggesting that both he and she had arrived at that autumnal season when life ripens to a bland magnanimity. "I'm growing an old woman, Stephen. I'm through with my adventure. Why not let bygones be bygones?"

Had she other children, young Sampits or young Duggans? Or, now that her wildness was passing, was Christopher to be the one creature to be desired, a young man to be debauched by the maternal passions of a woman who was growing old?

Well, he had hoisted his flag, and he would wait for her to attack. She had engaged her bedroom for a week. Obviously there would be developments in the course of those seven days.

Sorrell decided that he would neither seek nor avoid her. He would order his life as though she had not reappeared on the figure of it with her perilous, easy opulence.

On the first day of the seven they had no speech with each other. Sorrell passed Kit's mother in the lounge, wrapped up in a magnificent musquash coat, and waiting for her car. She was going out for the day.