“Is it very hard to just—notfight?”
He blew out smoke and watched it dissipate while she bit her lip at the criticism implicit in her question.She was also struggling not to cough at Pip’s new habit, which reminded her unpleasantly of her late brother.
“Very hard,” he said in a calm voice, “when someone is holding your head under a fountain until you say something beastly about your own mother.”
Una sat up straight.“But surely you’re not in trouble forthat?”
“No.Not for that.I’m in trouble for smashing up the sculptures of the one responsible.They were for his final assessment, you see.I didn’t say it, by the way.”
“Say what?”she asked.
He flicked a bit of ash off his sleeve, which Una tracked to the tiles.The Count, the only salamander presently dwelling in the glasshouse, appeared to be asleep behind a rock—she could just see its little arrowhead-tail from where she sat.Una kept an asbestos blanket hidden behind a potted palm, and she could easily whip it out if the worst happened.
“The thing about my mother,” Pip answered.“I didn’t say it.”
“Ofcourseyou didn’t!“ Una burst out, then offered more hesitantly, “But smashing up his work…was it worth it?Everything you’ve been working towards for years?”
He threw down his cigarette stub.“Whether it was or not, I’m done with it all now.I’ve got to see if I sink or swim as an artist on my own.Just as myself.Philip Dugdale.A nobody from nowhere.”
The bitterness in his voice surprised her.
“You’re hardlythat,“ she said.“We’re famous—too famous.Whohasn’theard of our family?Why,The Stranddid another article on us last year!They sent a photographer out.He made me look like a stricken doe.”
Pip ground the cigarette under his heel and did not look at her, and Una realised belatedly what she had said.
Our family.
It was a common belief in Ormdale that Pip was Una’s illegitimate half-brother.It seemed the most logical explanation when the pretty young housemaid at Wormwood Abbey had produced a baby boy without husband, sweetheart, or any kind of explanation.
Una herself had never questioned Pip’s provenance until her uncle George’s wife, Aunt Emily, had begun educating him along with her own son and nieces.
Una had taken it all as a matter of course—she liked Pip and was pleased to have her lessons with him.
It was when they were having their lesson about the Norman Conquest and Violet would keep saying that coarse word that the French used for Duke William of Normandy that Aunt Emily took them aside.
She told them that Pip’s parents had never been married, and that throughout his life people would probably use that word to hurt him.
“But why didn’t Pip’s father marry Lily, whoever he was?”pestered Violet.“Did Martha scare him off?Or was he just a bad’un?”
Aunt Emily had sighed.“I’m afraid it’s rather more of a muddle than that.For now, please just treat Pip as you would your own brother, if he were alive.”
Their own brother had been very unpleasant, while Pip was disposed to defer to the girls, so this was no hardship.
Before long, Violet had returned bursting with information acquired from children in the village.
“I always suspected Father was a bad’un,” Violet had concluded with satisfaction after she explained what they told her, “and now we have proof.”
All this had developed in Una a strong sense of sisterly obligation towards Pip.While it was George who had been Pip’s closest playmate in their childhood years, it was Una who wrote to Pip at Art School in London, giving him all the Ormdale news.It was Una who worried about whether he was making friends there, and knit him a muffler to protect him from the noxious city fog.
It was Una who kept writing, long after Pip stopped answering.
“Our family?”Pip repeated, bringing her back to the present.
Una swallowed.Yes, she thought,you are my brother, Pip, more than my full-blooded one ever was.
Then she felt a wave of sadness.Both of her sisters had left Ormdale.One had never returned.But good old Pip—at leasthehad come home, instead of running away without a word.Before she could open her mouth to say it, he spoke again.
“Whose family are you talking about, Una?”he said, his eyes cold.“I’m the son of a servant.Or did you forget that?Because I never have.Not even for a moment.”
