Eva Trout (13 page)

“What’s it like at the sea? Fresh air, after the inland? Near where she is on the map are the Goodwin Sands, the mariners’ peril. There’s a German poem about them, a schoolroom poem likening them to a snake. ‘
Sie trieben sich langsam, satt und schwer wie eine Schlange, hin und her
.’ Similarities? Though I conclude she went there for no other reason than to be gone from here. So tomorrow (today, in a minute or two) what a surprise for Eva. Or may it not be? Was it by accident that she left those papers? Yes, I’m light-headed with anger, how should I not be? Come, Iseult! Come on, Iseult Smith— your gemlike flame! The horrible thing about intelligence is its uselessness. Will there be spray on the windows, will there be anything to eat? I ought not to say Eric dissimulates; more he tries to conceal his extreme honesty, knowing it to offend. ‘I ought to go,’ he told me, ‘I should go. I have got to go.’ Shining armour … I sent him?—let us be FRANK, like Constantine. I sent him by scepticism. ‘Do go,’ I said, unbelievingly lighting a cigarette. That did it.

“That exasperating drinking, I could not do with.—Time, now? Midnight, exactly midnight. The Equator. Tomorrow’s today. We dawn on a better world, like a Chekhov ending. Dope. This could be the moment for me to go. This is a moment handed me on a plate. Yes, but the car’s gone to the sea. No car: no matter, because I am not going. No intention of going. Here I stay,
ils ne passeron pas
. I married, this is my marriage. This is my crime, I intend living it out. I can’t turn back, the path has grown to behind me. What was I once?— who cares. What can I never be again? Intact.

“Shall I go to bed? Touch is everything. Touch is a leech. Go up and lie by a cold pillow, hearing nobody breathing? Better keep on at this, these are words at least. Eric has a soul, I think? Yes, no query: Eric must have a soul. Shall I ring up the vicarage and ask what that is? What a flurry in the middle of the night, what a lot of sneezing. But shouldn’t a parson answer a sick call?

“Eva is unable to weep, she told me.”

ANYBODY looking in at a window—though who should?— would have seen how fire transformed the room, had he known it any other time. The piled-up driftwood now it had caught alight was burning ethereally, excitably, with a brandy bluishness. The fire was fed: as spar after spar fell in, incinerated and glowing, in were flung more. There was something devotional about this attendance upon the fire by the two persons crouched on the rug in front of it. They seemed unified, and not by their awe of the element and their task only. The zestful blaze, which was still so youthful that it illuminated rather than warmed the hearth, played on two primitive faces not far apart. Now and then hands collided, or shoulders touched.

The dimensions of everything had altered. Furniture, amorphous in the distance, was uncertainly lit by a standard lamp —which, off in a corner, out of the perpendicular, had the air of one street lamp surviving in a ghost city. A parcel shaped like a bottle was on a table. Stark night-filled windows served to mirror the room.

Not a curtain was drawn across, for not one would stir. Against this resistance, Eric had pitted himself in vain—the taffeta rotted by sea damp split at a touch, the runners were rusted on to the rail. The shortcoming had never affected Eva. “But anybody,” he had objected, “can see in.” She assured him, they had the promontory to themselves—and so it sounded; therefore he too forgot. The Cathay universe took the homecomers back again into its absolute, unassailable empty hush; which after the bedlam of the café smote upon them the more commandingly. Taken over by it, they kept their voices low. Stealthily they had carried the driftwood in, like two thieves carrying loot out. The bringing-into-existence of the fire had been gone through with, jointly, in fervent silence; what was burning now burned as softly as silk, with at the utmost a sigh, never a loud one. And a sigh, at last, emanated from Eric also, “Do you know what? I wish I didn’t have to go.” “No,” agreed Eva, still more rebelliously. Once a car could be heard going slowly by, turning and coming past again, still questing; but it either found what it sought or went out of hearing. They less than listened. Between themselves and the roadway ran, like a fortification, the dense hedge.

Yet the car left a psychic wake. Eric remarked: “In a way, I lied to you, Eva.”

Extending the palm of her right hand to be read by the flames, she leaned over the fate-lines in it uncomprehendingly. “Yes?” she asked, with no great concern.

“I did come to fetch you away.”

“That I saw. I said so.”

“What about me, after all? At Larkins, the bottom’s dropped out of the world. It’s like nothing, nowadays.”

“Then you,” she said irrefutably, “stay here.”

“Ha-ha—yes. Walk out on my job?”

“Here we could set up a garage. A splendid garage.”

“I hear you say so.”

“Or airfield, considering all my money. A charter airline.”

“What do you think I am?”

“Or helicopters even, for the time being.”

“Stop it, sweetheart—you’re silly. You only hurt me.”

“What did you call me?”

“Sweetheart. We’ve had a good day, haven’t we? A day in a million—wouldn’t you say so?”

“Now,” she said, “you desert me.”

At that, he was rent by a cavernous, groaning yawn, which finished its way out through him in a string of shudders— fatigue, rage, frustration, nervous despair. He was left as though he had vomited. “I’m quite tired,” he vacantly told her. “Imagine I’m looking forward to tonight, going on the road again? Look at last night. Keeping on keeping going, that gets on top of me. Who’d have thought it?—not what I was, I daresay. But that damned black desert everything is when you can’t see it, that damned black desert.
And
alone again … You still wouldn’t think of coming?”

“
Back
?”

“All I meant was, for the ride. No—you wouldn’t do that?”

Eva only replied: ‘You should sleep first.”

“What—here, you mean?”

“You would be wise to, Eric.”

“Forty winks, eh?” The temptation gained on him. A voluptuous stupor, like a fume through the brain, more than half overcame him—he battled, turning the matter over. “I don’t know …” he told Eva warily. “You could be right. I expect I could use an hour.” Back came the shudders.

“I would wake you.”

“I wonder!”

“You say to me ‘Sweetheart,’ then don’t trust me.”

“
I
wonder …” A twitch ran over his forehead. “How late is it?”

“See,” said Eva impartially.

Steadying the wrist wearing the watch, he endeavoured to: spectral delusive firelight danced about in reflection over the watch-glass. Eric had to lumber on to his feet and go away to the lamp to obtain a verdict—she watched even this degree of departure woundedly. “Might be worse,” he reported. “Just five to ten. O.K. then, Eva; you can give me an hour. To the minute—I
mean
an hour. Got that?”

“Give me your watch.”

“Where’s yours?”

“It remained in the train.”

He wondered muzzily: “Why d’you go taking it off?” He unstrapped his watch like a man already asleep—his captor came over and took it from him. “Now, where?” he stood waiting to know. “Up?”

“Yes. There are many beds.”

“One is going to do me. The first I come to.”

“Some you can’t find, the rooms being in the dark.”

“Come on up with me, then—my girl. You had better show me.”

She was at a tum of the stairs, on her way down, when the bell rang. This could only be the front door’s. Its hoarse rasp was totally unfamiliar: it had not occurred before, it had had no cause to. The bell sounded angered—no doubt by the assumption, indeed Eva’s, that like almost all else in Cathay it was out of order. In return Cathay, long untroubled, was appalled by the bell—the stygian service quarters, most affected, went on as though stung by a hornet. Elsewhere, the baronial woodwork crepitated; vibration made any electric candles left in their sockets between the antlers appear to flicker, as might the genuine kind. The owner was no less outraged than was her property; halting, she looked down the stairs aggressively. This attack from the bell—but who had attacked the bell?

Mr. Denge?

No—
his
methods were more circuitous; also would he not by this time of night be encompassed by Mrs. Denge? A telegram? Day-and-night life with Willy had taught his daughter that telegrams detonated at any hour. If so, what sender? Henry, to say he had sold the Jaguar? Elsinore, saying she had not died? … Or was it the dead themselves who were at the door?

The bell, mind conscious of right, sounded again. It drilled deeper, this time. It intended never to cease.

To thwart it, Eva went down and opened the door.

“Good evening,” said Constantine, from the depths of the porch. On the gloom which consumed the gloom of his London overcoat his face hung like a phenomenon: subluminous. “Some little delay? Your
château
is large, of course.”

“This was unexpected,” said Eva dauntingly.

“Rather late,” he agreed. “But one saw you were still about.”

“
How
did you see?”

“Lights in your charming drawing-room. Might one come in?—it’s draughty out here. I shan’t keep you long.”

“How long have you been out there?”

“You have no sixth sense? If you don’t mind, I should like to parley
in
doors. What do I want?—a word with you, just a word or two. Now come on, Eva, don’t act the Iron Guard! Of course, a girl must be careful, all on her own. You are on your own?”

“Yes—Constantine.”

Eva stepped back; Constantine crossed the threshold. “Yes …” he said, registering the interior. He investigated the refectory table, felted with dust—there, one did not put down one’s hat. While he faced the problem, Eva snatched the hat and suspended it from an antler. And the same fate, he foresaw, was to be his overcoat’s. Still (all things considered) wonderfully forbearing, he explained: “I had trouble finding Cathay. My taxi driver maintained it did not exist, and one drew a blank wherever one stopped to ask. One can only think it has faded from human memory.—
A bois dormant
,” he added, though in parenthesis, as they approached the drawing-room. “Otherwise, one had hoped to be with you earlier. A hurried bite at the Albion; one is staying there—unfortunately, less than a glimpse of Broadstairs. All really rather a rush, which does not agree with one.” He brought out a small Fabergé box and swallowed two pills. Eva watched the box back to his pocket: it had been Willy’s.

“Still,” he said, “here one
is
. Enter the Wicked Guardian. —May a chair be sat in?” No word. He sat down; Eva did not. Elbows spread-eagled slackly over the chair-arms, head back, lids lowered, he let a minute elapse: dosage being given a chance to begin to operate. His lack of objection to his surroundings, or at least his neutrality in regard to them—as in a ship’s saloon or hotel lobby—made clear, they were much as he had envisaged. By so being they gave him, if anything, satisfaction. That “Yes” of his, in the hall, was to be his exhaustive comment upon Cathay, whatever more of its marvels might be to follow—no further reaction must be expected or tribute wrung from him. His ostentatious unseeingness of her drawing-room could hardly more have roused the ire of Eva. She saw it as very much more than slighting: perverse, an evident policy, contrariety. And it occurred to her also that worse was possible—the room was not new to him, having been viewed already. “Viewed”? Better to say, spied in upon!

Posted near his chair, she inquired: “Are you deteriorating?”

“No, I am sorry to tell you—in what way could I?”

“You eat pills now.”

“Ah. But one always carried them, Eva, don’t you remember?”

“Much fades from human memory. Not all, though.”

“True.” The minute now being over, Constantine unhooded his eyes at Eva and levered his torso into the upright. Instantly, his attitude had about it something judicial and puritanical. She was addressed by the Bench. “Is it your aim to fade from human memory? From the way you’ve been going on, one supposes so.”

Eva ruminated. “Oho,” she finally said.

“Your friends are more than concerned, they are distraught.”

Meritorious, she reminded him: “I have soon been found.”

“Naturally,” he returned. “As you always will be. To vanish takes what you have not got; so better put that illusion out of your head. However, that is beside the point—your whereabouts, at this time or any other, give far less cause for anxiety than your, er, state of mind: as to that, there is increasing alarm. And dreadful distress is felt, I need hardly tell you— what are you compelling us to begin to think? What conclusion may we not have to come to? Your behaviour’s seldom been normal; that’s been allowed for—we now face the possibility that it’s something worse.” He paused, “I am sorry, but there you are.”

“Are you so very sorry?”

Constantine laved his countenance with a hand. “It’s good of me,” he pointed out, “to have come.”

“In the middle,” she asked indignantly, “of the
night
?”

“To dry-nurse you is not my
métier
, at any hour. But crisis made this imperative—one had no choice.”

“Then how was it good of you? Crisis, what?”

“Are you aware that you cause uneasiness locally?” She looked blank. “Round here,” he explained, with some patience, “in this vicinity.”

“I do not.”

“That’s what’s come to my knowledge.”

“I do not. Only to Mr. Denge.”

“Listen. Mrs. Arble, seriously disturbed, was on the telephone to me this afternoon. She had just completed another long distance call, the substance of which she relayed to me— one could hardly wonder. She got through, it seems, to the house agent named in the correspondence you left at Larkins, for the perfectly natural and simple reason that she wished to be certain you
had
arrived at Cathay. ‘Yes, indeed,’ she was told, in what struck her as a peculiar tone. She went on to say, she trusted that all was well? The reply was so very evasive that, sensing trouble, she felt it devolvent upon her to know everything. She explained herself as in loco parentis to you— even so, she was met by an extreme caution, an, er, agitated professional discretion that hardly could, she says, have been more alarming. Largely from what was not said in so many words, she gathers that this agent has cause to doubt that you are fit to be tenant of any house, or should stay in this one unless under control. What, she asked, had given him that impression? He disclosed, under pressure from Mrs. Arble, that a violent outbreak had caused him to flee the premises, into which you then barricaded yourself,
as
violently; that a messenger subsequently sent out by him with a kettle had turned tail, leaving the kettle to its fate, on being grimaced at ‘hideously’ from a window, and that no further sort or kind of communication has been had from you since; though sallies into Broadstairs, in incomplete control of a powerful bicycle, have been reported. Not the least of this unfortunate agent’s fears are, that you may blow Cathay up by tampering with, er, intricate gas appliances, or burn the place down—he scented pyromania in your excitability when he struck matches. Nor, Mrs. Arble inferred from a less-than-hint, was that the only mania he scented.—One does not know,” Constantine said distastefully. “In short, his impression was… instability. He has since been—can one wonder?—consumed by worry, not knowing what to do or whom to contact. He confessed himself glad to be speaking with Mrs. Arble.”