The heel of Achilles

by E. M. Delafield

On the former questions she had determined to approach either her uncle or her grandfather after Christmas. Not before, Lydia shrewly decided, or they would say that she was in too great a hurry, that she had not yet had a fair trial of the system of regular lessons at home. In foresight and appraisement of valuation where the touchstone of what she considered to be her own best interest was concerned, Lydia’s judgment and calm, unchildlike tenacity of purpose might have been envied by a financier. But to the question of her own appearance, she brought all the ridiculous finality, childish vanity and exaggeration, of twelve-year-old femininity. She spent a long time in front of her small looking-glass, almost every day, staring at her little pointed face, seeking desperately for traces of beauty in her olive skin and straight brows and wishing that her eyes were blue, or brown, or even grey—anything except a dark, variable sort of hazel. The only satisfaction she got was from the contemplation of her hair, which was long and dark and very thick. Aunt Beryl made her wear it in two plaits, during the day-time, but Lydia did not dislike this; as the plaits undone and carefully brushed out in the evenings, gave a momentary wave to the perfectly straight mass.

Lydia brushed it off her forehead and fastened it back with a round comb, and thought that she looked rather like the pictures of “Alice Through the Looking-Glass.”

She was tall for her age, which was another source of satisfaction, but the length of her slim hands and feet were a terrible portent of inordinate future growth, and Aunt Beryl, with a foresight unappreciated by her niece, insisted upon a precautionary and unsightly tuck in all Lydia’s garments.

But in spite of the tucks, and the frequent east wind, and Aunt Beryl’s lessons, and the complete absence of any society of her own age, Lydia liked Regency Terrace very much.

She had an odd appreciation for the security implied by the very monotony of each day as it slipped by. With her mother there had been no security at all. They had come from China when Lydia was five, and she could only just remember a little about the voyage, and the terrible parting from her Amah. After that, they had been in London, sometimes at a boarding-house sometimes in rooms, once in a big hotel where Lydia had had her first alarming, unforgettable experience of going up and downstairs in a lift. When Lydia was six, and her father had gone back to China, she and her mother had stayed first with one relation and then with another, and none of the visits had been very comfortable nor successful. Lydia’s mother had cried and said that no one understood the sort of thing she was used to in Hong Kong, and what a dreadful change it was for her to be without a man to look after her.

Lydia, a detached and solemn little girl, had retained from those early years a dislike of scenes and tears, and self-pitying rhapsodies, that was to remain with her for the rest of her life.

They were in London when Lydia’s mother became a widow and the next three years had been worse than ever.

Lydia was sent to stay with Aunt Evelyn, and then, just as she was beginning to feel rather more at home with her noisy, teasing cousins, her mother fetched her away again and they went to rooms in Hampstead. But the landlady there objected to the number of times that Lydia’s mother asked her friends, although only one at a time, to come and have supper and spend the evening. The two ladies would sit up very late, while Lydia’s mother talked of all that made her unhappy, and generally cried a great deal, and very often, even after the visitor had gone, would come and wake Lydia up by kneeling at her bedside and sobbing there.

From Hampstead, her mother went as paying guest to a family in West Kensington and Lydia was sent to a boarding-school. She never forgot the mortification of her mother’s sudden descent upon her, when she had been there nearly a whole term, to say that she had come to take her away.

“But she’s getting on so well!” the head mistress, whom Lydia liked, had protested. “You’re very happy with us, aren’t you, dear?”