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VII
Elizabeth lay on the sofa in the Lackersteens’ drawing-room, with her feet up and a cushion behind
her head, reading Michael Arlen’s These Charming People. In a general way Michael Arlen was her
favourite author, but she was inclined to prefer William J. Locke when she wanted something serious.
The drawing-room was a cool, light-coloured room with lime-washed walls a yard thick; it was
large, but seemed smaller than it was, because of a Utter of occasional tables and Benares brassware
ornaments. It smelt of chintz and dying flowers. Mrs Lackersteen was upstairs, sleeping. Outside, the
servants lay silent in their quarters, their heads tethered to their wooden pillows by the death-like
sleep of midday. Mr Lackersteen, in his small wooden office down the road, was probably sleeping
too. No one stirred except Elizabeth, and the chokra who pulled the punkah outside Mrs
Lackersteen’s bedroom, lying on his back with one heel in the loop of the rope.
Elizabeth was just turned twenty-two, and was an orphan. Her father had been less of a drunkard
than his brother Tom, but he was a man of similar stamp. He was a tea-broker, and his fortunes
fluctuated greatly, but he was by nature too optimistic to put money aside in prosperous phases.
Elizabeth’s mother had been an incapable, halfbaked, vapouring self-pitying woman who shirked all
the normal duties of life on the strength of sensibilities which she did not possess. After messing
about for years with such things as Women’s Suffrage and Higher Thought, and making many abortive
attempts at literature, she had finally taken up with painting. Painting is the only art that can be
practised without either talent or hard work. Mrs Lackersteen’s pose was that of an artist exiled
among ‘the Philistines’–these, needless to say, included her husband–and it was a pose that gave her
almost unlimited scope for making a nuisance of herself.
In the last year of the War Mr Lackersteen, who had managed to avoid service, made a great deal of
money, and just after the Armistice they moved into a huge, new, rather bleak house in Highgate, with
quantities of greenhouses, shrubberies, stables and tennis courts. Mr Lackersteen had engaged a horde
of servants, even, so great was his optimism, a buder. Elizabedi was sent for two terms to a very
expensive boarding-school. Oh, the joy, the joy, the unforgettable joy of those two terms! Four of the
girls at the school were ‘the Honourable’; nearly all of them had ponies of their own, on which they
were allowed to go riding on Saturday afternoons. There is a short period in everyone’s life when his
character is fixed for ever; with Elizabeth, it was those two terms during which she rubbed shoulders
with the rich. Thereafter her whole code of living was summed up in one belief, and that a simple
one. It was that the Good (‘lovely’ was her name for it) is synonymous with the expensive, the
elegant, the aristocratic; and the Bad (‘beastly’) is the cheap, the low, the shabby, the laborious.