Topic Fourteen: Appearance

Dictation 34

Returning Home

I spent two years of my life in Portugal, in Lisbon. I worked in the embassy and finally the expiry date of my contract came… I landed safely at Heathrow airport and forty minutes later I stood facing the house of my childhood. When I entered the drawing room I saw two women sitting in the dim light of the fireplace. They were my Mom and Aunt Diana. Unnoticed I studied them as they talked. How different they were in appearance, these two women of middle age.

Mom was all blonde curls and fair skin, with delicate, perfectly sculptured features. She was a very pretty woman, a cool Nordic type, slim and lissome with some special kind of elegance.

Diana was much darker in colouring, with a lovely golden complexion and straight silky auburn hair, pulled back in a ponytail. Her face was broader, features more boldly defined, and large luminous eyes were blue so pale and transparent that they seemed almost grey.

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She was not quite as tall as my mother. Diana's appeal was in her warm looks; she was a handsome woman by any standard, who like my mother, carried her sixty-one years well, seeming years younger.

Their characters and personalities were totally unlike. Diana was a much more serious woman than my mother was, more studious and intellectually inclined. And the worlds they occupied, the lives they lived, were not remotely similar. Diana was something of a workaholic, running her antique business and loving every minute of it. My mother was a social butterfly who did not care to work, and who fortunately did not have to. She was actually somewhat quiet and shy. My aunt was much more spontaneous and outgoing, filled with joys of life that were infectious. I always felt happy when Diana was around, as she had that effect on everyone.

All of a sudden Diana's eye caught the sight of me, she cried out, sprang to her feet and rushed towards me. The mystery of the moment had gone but an overwhelming feeling of happiness came instead…

Dictation 35

The Engagement

This was the occasion of celebrating the engagement of Miss June Forsyte, old Joylon's granddaughter, to Mr Philip Bosinney. In the bravery of light gloves, feathers and frocks, the family were present – even Aunt Ann, who now but seldom left the corner of her brother Timothy's green drawing room.

Against the piano a man of bulk and stature was wearing a waistcoat on his wide chest and a ruby pin instead of a diamond one of more usual event, and his shaven, square, old face, the colour of pale leather, had its most dignified look. This was Swithin Forsyte. Close to the window the other twin, like the bulky Swithin, over six feet in height, but very skinny, as though destined from his birth to strike a balance and maintain an average, brooded over the scene with his permanent stoop. Not far off, listening to a lady in brown, his only son Soames, dark-haired, rather bald, poked his chin up sideways.

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Seated in a row close to one another were the three ladies — Aunts Ann, Hester (the two Forsyte maids) and Julia. With her elder and younger sister she lived now in the house of Timothy, her sixth and youngest brother, on the Bayswater Road.

In the centre of the room, under the chandelier, as if a host, was the head of the family, old Joylon himself. Eighty years of age, with fine white hair, dome-like forehead, little dark grey eyes and an immense moustache, which drooped and spread below the level of his strong jaw, he had a patriarchal look, and in spite of hollows at his temples, seemed master of perennial youth.

Philip Bosinney was known to be a young man without fortune, but Forsyte girls had become engaged to such before, and had actually married them…