Eva Trout (2 page)

This was a part of Worcestershire largely given over to fruit farming. Larkins was set in plum orchards, of which acres extended on three sides. The house was itself built of plum-coloured brick. Square, two-storied, five sash windows in front (three above, two below), with a door in the middle, it was not unlike a house in a child’s drawing. Its gaze was forthright. It faced on, though stood a little way back from, a lonely by-road.

Iseult Arble seemed destined to have Eva—destined, she sometimes wondered, never to lose her? Everything had indicated Iseult. She and her husband needed the Eva money, to make ends meet—
could
they, otherwise, have gone on very much longer? She was a highly intelligent person, young still, of pleasing appearance and good character, as to whom there existed but one mystery: why had she thrown herself away? (She apparently had. ) She should know how to deal with Eva, an ex-pupil. Iseult had been teacher of English at a first-rate, unambiguous girls’ school attended by Eva eight years ago. Miss Smith, as she then was, had made an abiding impression. Eva had never lost touch with her. She remained an influence—all the more so by having incurred, it seemed, a lifelong devotion.

Iseult Smith had gone out of her way to establish confidence, for her own reasons—she proposed to tackle Eva’s manner of speaking. What caused the girl to express herself like a displaced person? The explanation—that from infancy onward Eva had had as attendants displaced persons, those at a price being the most obtainable, to whose society she’d been largely consigned—for some reason never appeared: too simple, perhaps? Much went into the effort to induce flexibility. But Miss Smith had come too late on the scene; she had had to give up. Eva by then was sixteen: her outlandish, cement-like conversational style had set. Moreover—the discouraging fact emerged—it was more than sufficient for Eva’s needs. She had nothing to say that could not be said, adequately, the way she said it. What did result from the sessions was, on the girl’s side, awe for the dazzling teacher; also, Eva was left in a daze of gratitude. Till Iseult came, no human being had ever turned upon Eva their full attention—an attention which could seem to be love. Eva knew nothing of love but that it existed—that, she should know, having looked on at it.
Her
existence had gone by under a shadow: the shadow of Willy Trout’s total attachment to Constantine.

The entire cut of the jib of Eva’s father could have given the lie to that obsession; which had, in fact, waited to mark him down till he was into what seemed maturity. Big in height and frame and in a big way easy in movement, stalwart and open in countenance—though under-the-eyes pouches and a tic in the cheek declared themselves under the later pressure—he looked what he otherwise was: a business man fortunate in his background, a crack polo player, with a pretty wife. He had been popular. An apparent artlessness concealed the acumen, approaching genius, through which he had trebled inherited wealth. Possibly the genius side was the rocky side? It was in him to deviate: that, Constantine had unerringly sensed … Willy’s child had not been the only defrauded one. His wife fled, two months after the birth of Eva. Mrs. Trout was then almost at once killed in a plane crash. Willy’s own death, twenty-three years later, was as abrupt, though in a different manner. It left Eva, a legacy, on the hands of Constantine till the Larkins solution came to be found.

After school Eva, accompanying her father on global business trips, had constantly sent picture postcards to Miss Smith from wherever she found herself. She obtained glimpses of Miss Smith when back in London. As a wedding present, she had sent an enormous, glitteringly-fitted picnic basket from Fortnum & Mason’s: the bride would have liked to exchange it for comestibles, but dared not; Eva often visited Larkins. Iseult Smith’s abandonment of a star career for an obscure marriage puzzled those for whom it was hearsay only—but the reason leaped to the eye: the marriage was founded on a cerebral young woman’s first physical passion. The Arbles had now been the Arbles for some years—so far, no children. Accordingly, room for Eva. She had had her way. Visits terminate, visitors have to go—she now was a visitor no longer.

What had deteriorated?

Today, the day of the castle outing, was running out. How fared the benighted Jaguar, over hill and dale? At Larkins, no sign of Eva.

Iseult, having begun to look at the clock, did so each time with increasing hopefulness. The late are apt to be later—
might
not Eric, for once, be the first home? With each five minutes, this became more likely. Only when alone did Iseult betray, by dramatic extremes of attitude, the internal tension she felt at all times. Now she sat erect in a spacious fireside chair intended by nature to be leaned back in, just out of the ray projected by an anglepoise lamp. She had done working: her looseleaf notebook, the old French dictionary and the ultra-new French novel were shoved away on the floor, almost out of sight. Translations, one way of making ends meet (or meet more nearly) in the pre-Eva days, had been resumed as an exercise, a diversion—and, too, on the principle of letting nothing go. For, who knew? From day to day, there was no saying …

To think or not to think—? Iseult, with a gesture more like an exclamation, thrust back her hair, which was dark and springy, from her high white forehead which was strikingly beautiful. By habit, she looked round the room she sat in. Anything she could do to it had been done; what it could do to her seemed without limit. The full-blooded late-Victorian furniture had been Eric’s people’s. Hie carpet had been bought to last, and was lasting. The armchairs and matching settee had been borne home by Eric from an hotel auction during the trauma preceding marriage. The new grate, post-Eva, gave out its advertised glow. So far, the living-room was consistent—Iseult’s own “touches” had been less fortunate: thought-out low white bookcases, now in place, for all their content looked cramped and petty; block-printed linen curtains, skimped by economy, had between them strips of vacuous darkness—as also the room, in the main excluded from the anglepoise’s intellectual orbit, became what it least in the world was: spectral. She would do well to switch on the ceiling light before Eric entered: he liked to see. But the switch was away by the door. Nervosity wired her to her chair.

To atone, she listened. Along the road, both ways, and throughout the orchards—for how far?—there stretched nothing but a mindless silence.

Ultimately, his step
was
to be heard.

Eric never came straight in; he washed first. That meant three-four minutes. The wife grabbed round for a cigarette, lit it, drew on it twice—tensely. She then cast it into the fire and leaned back.

He seldom came in saying anything. He saw no need to. On the contrary, he came back into a room as though not conscious of having gone from it. Once he. was there, he was there. He gave but one sign of having been far afield: invariably he brought back the evening paper. Quite often he quite simply sat down and read it. Who would have thought this man had been gone a day?—but that by what had happened, might have arisen, been done or not done during the day away, he was still to a certain extent preoccupied. This evening, however, he said: “Cold out”—for it truly had been. Also this was his way of letting her know that the warmth maintained, in here, made a grateful contrast. He lowered himself into
his
chair and looked across—she once more wore that terracotta cardigan, reputed to be Italian, still with a button missing. And something other was missing. “Eva?” he asked.

“Out.”

“Where’s she gone off to?”

“I couldn’t tell you.—Anything in the paper?”

“How am I to say when I haven’t looked?”

“I thought you sometimes looked at it on the bus.”

“No, I don’t,” he told her. “Fancy your thinking that.”

“Then look now.”

He stated, more than complained: “Not too easy to see.”

Iseult, twisting round in her chair, readjusted the anglepoise. poise. “Better?”

Anything but. The concentrated 75 watt glare was directed full upon Eric, transfixing him. From where she sat he looked like a searchlit building. The wide-at-the-top face, brows bent by a light but intent frown, faced her without a flicker—the jaws clamped by partly resistance, partly forbearance. Rusty fleckings stood out on the ash-grey irises of the open eyes. Electricity, making just more than lifelike the general ruddiness of the colouring, struck infinitesimal copper glints from stubble faintly beginning on cheeks and chin—clean-shaven, he was less so by the end of a day. The shape of the skull, hair flattened flatter than ever by just-now’s wash up, was cut out sharply, with an extra solidity, against the dimensionless dusk behind.

So, for a minute. He then took evasive action, canting across the right-hand arm of his chair. “Try and not monkey with that lamp,” he advised her, not for the first time. “It does no good.” He got up, went to the switch at the door and bathed the room in normal illumination. Coming back, he asked: “Ought we not to know, though—rightly? Or at any rate, oughtn’t you?”

“What are we talking about?”

“Where Eva’s gone to.”

“Oh,” she said, looking up at the ceiling.

He went on: “That was the understanding, I understood.”

“What understanding?” said she—still to the ceiling.

“When we took her on: that we were to keep an eye on her. What else are we taking all this money for? Already there’s been that muddle about that marriage, and it would be only natural if that unsettled her. Just now, does she seem to you quite herself?”

“ ‘Herself? That would be difficult to say. One thing one can be sure of: she’s at the Danceys’—or with them: where else would she be, these days? … What is the matter all of a sudden, Eric?”

“Not so all of a sudden,” he remarked—though as though to himself, or at least absently. He scooped up the newspaper, squinted along the headlines, then let it drop: instead, he perused his wife, across their hearth, at once warily and resignedly—the habituated manner, it might be said, of one who has yet to find the right answer. “This,” he went on, “has for some time been on my mind; but you and I seem to have never a chance to talk—I mean, as things are. She has the right to be with us; but there it is. There
she is
.”

“You are telling me,” said Iseult.

“And yet when she’s not, there’s come to be quite a gap.”

“We are never alone—you realise?—except in bed.”

“That’s putting it strongly! And for that matter, Izzy, what are we now?”

“Waiting,” said Iseult, “for her to come back.”

“Then we’d better step on the gas and get this said. The Danceys—you mean at the vicarage? They’re all right; they like her. But where’s she going to turn to after the holidays? Those kids are going to have to go back to school; and if you ask me, they’re the attraction.”

“Horrid little Henry?”

Yes,
he’s
sharp for his age.—The Reverend and Mrs. Dancey are busy people.”

“You understate that, Eric; they are all but demented, from what I’ve seen of them—which is not much.” (Iseult, geographically a parishioner of Mr. Dancey’s, was not a churchgoer. He had called, but it had not been a success.) “He always has such a blinding cold that he’s really rather a menace on the roads, darting about in that vapoured-up little car; and she’s muddle-headed and bleats like a worried sheep. Still, any port in a storm.”

“What d’you mean exactly by
that
?” he asked, with a genuine deepening of the frown. “There’s no storm here.”

“Storm or not,” said Iseult, “Eva’d rather go anywhere than be here—now.”

“So out she goes. So what are you grumbling for?”

“I am not, Eric.
You’re
the one who’s been grumbling—’a gap,’ you say.”

“I’m sorry I spoke,” he said. “But yet in point of fact, Izzy, I don’t believe you. I can’t believe you. The sun rises and sets on you, where Eva’s concerned; always did, and surely it always will? She asked no better than to be under this roof. And you,
you
liked her—you must have done, or why did you interfere with her at the outset? There was some reason.”

She looked along the books on a chair-side shelf, sighing: “Yes, I suppose so.”

“Not,” said Eric, “that a thing always works out as one foresaw.—Or had hoped,” he added. “And in that case, no use asking whose fault. A person—though that they were not to know—may actually never have had it in them to make a go of whatever it was that they thought they could. It had been a case of trying the wrong road. All the same, who’s to say it was wrong to try? You can
but
try … However,” he ended up, “that you and I have reason to know. Eh?”

“You prefer the garage.”

He had failed as a fruit farmer. Too much had been against him, beginning and ending with not having enough capital to surmount bad years or buy back mistakes due to inexperience. Always he had wanted to be a fruit farmer, or thought so. He had put his back, together with all he’d got from selling up a small business left him by his father, into the enterprise known as Larkins Orchards. Tremendous unsparing worker, he set out with what had not been unreasonable expectations —or, they were reasonable till Iseult fomented them. She had burned with them from the instant she fell in love. She never foresaw their marriage, its days and nights, other than as embowered by dazzling acres, blossom a snowy blaze and with honeyed stamens, by sun then moonlight, till came later— fruited boughs bowed, voluptuous, to the ground, gumminess oozing from bloomy plums. She had been a D. H. Lawrence reader and was a townswoman. By the end, he was lucky not to have come out worse than he did. They sold off the orchards but kept the house, which the purchaser did not want, a lopsided barn, a half-acre of land. Nor did Eric step off into a void: a garage-proprietor cousin of his in the local town happened to be looking round for a foreman—and Eric, it was to turn out, filled the bill. For this reason: Eric had profited, hands down, by his military service—he came out of three years with a mechanised unit a first-rate mechanic: clearly, he’d been a born one. (And good with men.) Possibly that should have been his line from the start?—from, that was, when he first came out of the Army? He might have had a garage of his own by now, who knows? Anyway, no good thinking … As it was, he nowadays daily caught the 7.30 a.m. bus into town, intercepting it at the crossroads, and usually made it home on the 6.30 p.m. In the Larkins barn sat an old Anglia, bought when they’d sold the van—but if he took that, what was Izzy to do all day?