Eustace and Hilda (98 page)

“Yes,” he said.

Stephen gave him the old look that seemed to be resting on something behind his head.

“Do you think I should be a shock?” he said.

Eustace did not blush, but smiled under his moustache, ‘sotto i baffi,' as the Italians had it. “A very pleasant one, if so.”

Stephen's face lost all its highly trained composure, and he said hurriedly: “No, no, please, not this time.”

And Eustace, unconsciously remembering another conversation, said, “Well, you know best.”

He turned his back on the lighthouse and began to walk home to a Hilda whom her best friend, perhaps her only friend outside the family, did not want to see. But he, Eustace, wanted to see her: he did not shrink from the change that sorrow had wrought in her. What was it but a little rift within the lute which had indeed muted the music, but not for long? A trifling displacement of matter, a functional disorder of the nervous system which time would put right? The calamity had given them to each other; this helpless, moveless, speechless Hilda was more his than the Sovereign of Highcross Hill, shut off from him by servants and nurses and parents and doctors and—and cripples, and by all the mysteries of practical life in which he had no part. There, in the little room which they had shared as children, the curtains drawn and the alien world shut out, he would recover, he had recovered, the sense of cosiness and snugness, of being together beneath one blanket, two cocoons spun from the same silk, which had made his childhood such rapture to think of. Eustace frowned. No, that was not the right way to approach this assignment; it was retrograde, sentimental, unrealistic. He must prepare her for her return to normal living, forge new links with the outside world, rather than dissolve the old, prevent her from seeing external reality in a mirror set in an ivory tower, like the Lady of Shalott. And in doing so he would cure himself of day-dreaming.

Hic labor, hoc opus est; and to get Hilda out of the house was a step forward, even in a bath-chair, even in the dark, even if they could see nothing beyond their noses, the blind leading the blind. Certainly, for that purpose, the cliff was the right place, almost free from the pitfalls of the streets, the sudden drops and inevitable jolts, the possible collisions with lamp-posts and telegraph-poles and pillar-boxes—dangers that he was right to guard against, for they were real, not imaginary, and even undue precautions taken on behalf of another person—in point of fact one's sister, Hilda—were not so deserving of reproof as those undertaken for oneself. In any case, the habit of self-blame was most unhelpful—even more blameworthy, perhaps, than doing something worthy of blame?

Between Venice and Anchorstone his moods had changed with exhausting and bewildering frequency. He could not keep his identity from one hour to the next: he seemed to be a string of different people. But of one thing he was sure: he would meet a barrage of reproach, everyone would say he was the architect, the prime cause of Hilda's undoing. Yet, apart from that brief passage with Aunt Sarah, no one seemed to blame him. Of course he did not know what Hilda thought; she could not tell him, and owing to her infirmity he could not always read the expression in her eyes. Stephen had apologised handsomely, and afterwards had made no reference to the subject; that might be interpreted either way, but surely he was entitled to claim the benefit of the doubt? And of the others, Barbara and Jimmy and Minney, not one showed a sign of holding him responsible. Minney treated him like a little boy who needed consoling—but not for feeling guilty about Hilda, far from it: for having to spend so much of his time with her. Jimmy was breezy and cheerful, and sometimes, perhaps in his preoccupation with Barbara, he ignored Eustace, would speak as if he were not in the room, or notice his presence with surprise: “Hullo, you're here?” Occasionally his voice betrayed impatience when his and Barbara's plans had to be modified because of Hilda's and Eustace's presence in the house, but if that happened, Barbara always scolded him; their outspokenness with each other was a source of continual astonishment to Eustace. Least of all did Barbara appear to blame him; if she blamed anyone it was Hilda, poor old Hilda, for managing Dick so badly. “I'm sure she bored him to tears,” she once said.

Eustace lifted his eyes from the two footpaths, sometimes unexpectedly accompanied by a third, that the steps of many pedestrians had worn into the turf. People were strolling along, perhaps to have tea at the lighthouse, perhaps just to take an airing. The wide green, which could never be built over, sloped to the cliff's edge, a gentle slope, but steep enough, Eustace thought, for a wheeled vehicle to run down should whoever was in charge lose control of it. Still, he had never heard of such a thing happening. People had fallen over the cliff, of course. Some had ventured too near the treacherous edge; some had blundered over in the dark; some, poor things, had thrown themselves over. Such tragedies seemed impossible this sunny afternoon; but at night it would be legitimate, even praiseworthy, to take extra care.

He passed the sombre Second Shelter, a product of the gloomiest period of Victorian wayside-station architecture, combined with more than a hint of pagoda influence, and now the sun was shining on the pier-head, half a mile away. The rusty iron pillars of the pier-head had ankles bunchy with barnacles and shining, fleshy seaweed; round their feet were pools of incalculable depth, haunted by starfish; spars, black and crumbling as coal, lay about, suggesting shipwreck. It was a place of enchantment, a sudden outcropping of jungle in the well-ordered prairie of the beach, and Eustace felt a powerful longing to go there and look up at the black floor, far above him, and be thrillingly aware of his own littleness. If he were late for tea what matter? Grown-up people were not scolded for being late for tea. And since he came back from Venice, the person under the railway-arch who was always kept waiting by Eustace, and growing ever more angry and grieved and impatient and uncomfortable, yes, and falling seriously ill because he did not come, had dwindled to a speck, a dead fly in the petrifying amber of his conscience.

But none the less he resisted the temptation, for as yet he had not visited the sands. The past, he felt, was all too present there. He had stood among the automatic machines, now much swollen in number, variety, and magnificence, and looked over the concrete cascade of the great stairs, zigzagging its way to the beach; and he had felt that if he went down and crossed the shingle and found himself among the knee-high seaweed-covered rocks among which he and Hilda had made their pond, some virtue would go out of him and he would lose his new-found freedom. Coming up, he might feel compelled to count the steps and even go back to make sure he had not missed one, since Hilda was not there to tell him not to be silly. Later, when his reformed mental habits had hardened into a crust, he would go down and find the site of the pond, and the arena, flattened out by how many tides, where Dick Staveley and his troupe had kicked the sand up. But not now. This decision was not the result of superstition or of lack of confidence in himself: it was a reasonable precaution against a recurrence of infantilism, such as any psychologist would approve of. The past must be put in its place, and that place was a long way at the back of our up-to-date and contemporary hero.

So he turned his shoulder to the sea and the sun, and steered for Mr. Johnson's brown-faced preparatory school, still empty and silent, though in a few days it would be alive with boys. Skirting its walled playground, which he could now easily overlook, he arrived at Cambo and rubbed his eyes, for flanking the bath-chair in the porch and hardly leaving room to pass through was a really splendid cream-coloured perambulator.

Minney met him in the hall and said, “I'm taking your tea up to Miss Hilda's room. I'm sure there's something she wants to tell you. You must find out what it is.”

E
USTACE
did not find out, and wondered if Minney had imagined that Hilda had something to tell him. But he did not think so, for she had spent so much of her life with the inarticulate that she had an uncanny insight into unexpressed desires; a sort of animal sympathy with them. She often surprised him by knowing what he wanted better than he knew himself, and his moods and states of mind, which to him seemed much alike, subdued to the monotone of his life with Hilda, were full of variety to her. When she told him that he looked more cheerful to-day or not so cheerful, more tired or less tired, he generally found she was right. So he looked long and anxiously at Hilda, in the hope of divining what she wanted to say; but just as an over-attentive foreigner loses the meaning of a sentence by listening too carefully to the words, and thus sealing his mind against their sense, so he, by his too close scrutiny of Hilda's face values, missed her meaning, if she had one.

But she had more colour since she had agreed to let him take her in the bath-chair, and during their nocturnal rambles, when he could not see her, he often felt closer to her than when they were together in her room. Under cover of darkness he imagined she felt what he felt, and could sometimes bring out a quite unpremeditated remark, a thing he seldom achieved when face to face with her. The cliffs were their almost invariable promenade, the lighthouse the limit of their beat, for between the lighthouse and the cliff the path was very narrow, and Eustace did not like to attempt it in the dark. It was not as if he had himself alone to consider. People they met would pass them like shadows without finding them in any way remarkable; the night lent them anonymity. But near to Cambo they could not avoid passing a street lamp, and here they once encountered a woman with a small boy. The child stopped in his tracks, and Eustace heard the woman say, “Don't be frightened, darling; it's only the funny lady.” He did not mind for himself, he was used to Fate's little ironies; but he saw traces of tears on Hilda's face when they got in, and afterwards he always paused before they reached the lamp to make sure that no one was coming.

Meanwhile, he read his books and began to make up the arrears of work that had accumulated while he was writing his story. The story he dismissed as a pure loss; its theme embarrassed him to remember; it was him at his worst, his most besotted, and he grew hot to think of cool, professional eyes smiling at those egregious pages. Still, writing it had probably helped to rid his system of something which could never return there. When Minney asked him what the book was about, his answer was so short and evasive that she must have gone away with the idea that he had written something improper. And so it was, highly improper; the unconscious self-betrayal of a wish-fed mind.

The Long Vacation was drawing to an end, and he would have to notify the College that he did not mean to come back, and ask his tutor to suggest a new scheme of reading for him. Eustace had never felt more at peace than when he was writing these letters. The immense simplification of aim that Hilda's illness had brought him lapped him round like a hot bath; the conviction that he was delivering himself of a declaration that no one could gainsay, that needed no apology, only a conventional expression of regret, gave even his literary manner, which like him was unsure of itself, a new firmness. He felt he approached the Fellows on their own ground—the ground of mature experience, as man to men. And in the days that followed, his life, which had felt tight and unnatural, corseted by his will and pinched by the routine he had set himself, suddenly relaxed as a new pair of shoes does, and he became what he was trying to be.

Strength of purpose is much, but it is no substitute for completeness of living. It dries up and hardens and encloses; it nourishes the will but starves the spirit; it is a parasite on the other functions of being. Now that Eustace had begun to assimilate his purpose, he felt much happier, and was able to enter into the happiness of those around him, for there was plenty in the house. Minney had preserved intact the freshness and sweetness of her nature. Her theories about life, of which she had many, had not affected her attitude to it; except in memory she did not relate one experience to another; each was a separate problem. Hilda to her was just one of her children who had fallen ill and must be cured; not a shadow on her life. She opened the door into Hilda's room just as she would open any other door, and she could talk to Eustace in front of Hilda in the same voice and with as much detachment as if the silent, motionless figure had been capable of joining in.

Barbara and Jimmy were not able to accept Hilda's presence quite so naturally. Barbara's seeming hardness, her thick-skinned jokes at her sister's expense, were, as Eustace soon realised, a form of self-protection, an attempt to exorcise a phenomenon which did not fit into her happy-go-lucky philosophy; while Jimmy's reticence about her came partly from the same cause, partly from a worrying suspicion that Barbara was worried. But Hilda was not really on their minds; for besides the not-far-off divine event, they had other things to occupy them—bridge, Mah Jong, the cinema, cocktail parties of cheerful young people who talked a lot. Sometimes Eustace listened to their voices from the haven of Hilda's room, sometimes he went down and joined them; occasionally his entrance created a silence, as though he had brought Hilda with him, and once, before he reached the door, he heard the question, “How's the Medusa?” and the laugh that followed. But it was a disinfecting laugh, and Eustace did not resent it. They were all very friendly, and when Venice palled as a topic, they soon found others. He met them in the streets, was asked to their houses, and began to take his place as a member of Anchorstone society.

Such was his position—the position of a plant bedded out but beginning to thrive—when the letters came. They came, as letters will, in a bunch, three of the five bearing the Venetian postmark. There was also a small parcel, forwarded from Willesden; expressed, registered, spotted with black seals that had been broken and red seals that were intact, and looking so urgent and valuable that Eustace felt a twinge of guilt to think that it had lain perhaps half an hour on the breakfast-table unopened.