Eva Trout (20 page)

Work continued, the boy not once looking up. He fingered about with collector’s passion. “Takes after you,” said Henry to Eva.

“You never saw my shells.”

“I was never asked.—What you did go for was, pencils of every colour… Jeremy still doesn’t say much?”

“No,” agreed Eva.

“
Jeremy
!” Henry persisted, loudly.

Not a flicker. Over the happy head, Eva confronted Henry. She did so steadily. She said: “Yes.”

A deaf mute.

Pity mounted in Henry into a wave of hate. He could not contain it. He said: “You were sold a pup.”

She might have heard him no more than did her child, but that, with the old hopeless motion, she dragged a fist, bumping, across her eyes. He went on, one might have thought triumphantly: “You can’t get your money back; you’re wrong with the law.”

The fist dropped, tumbling into her lap. He said: “You mind so much?”

“Mind?” she said. “Mind that you are so cruel?”

He flinched. More unnerved if less desolate than she was, he said: “I am awfully sorry, Eva.”

“How can you
be
so cruel? You might be Constantine— worse.”

“I don’t know what came over me. You don’t understand me. I don’t know that I understand myself.”

Jeremy put the slivers of mirror into sun-rays surrounding the orange button;
his
patterns made sense. He then looked up. “Yes,” assented Henry, quickly, “that’s pretty clever.”

“Or, all the time have you been like Constantine?”

“
That
veteran?”

No longer having it in her to be aghast, she said dully: “You don’t mean you know him, do you?”

“Certainly,” said Henry. “That is, I’ve met him.” Deeply glad to gear down again into narrative, he took up a preparatory new position—leaning, this time, lightly against the chimneypiece, hands in pockets, one foot trailing over the other, on which he stood. The pose put him back some way into equilibrium. Each of his ways of standing, youthfully mannered, had at the same time about it its own authority; each gave emphasis. Now, the nonchalance he enacted quite soon returned to him. “Yes,” he went on. “He came round here, still questing after the Arbles. They, she, gave him the slip, apparently. He had not seen his way to letting the matter drop. He was more thrown out, I believe, than he cared to show. Or just pique, was it? He made himself more than agreeable. He was urged to stay to tea, and gratefully did. Mother looked on him kindly, thought him ‘lonely.’ I thought he was rather moulting, poor Wicked Guardian. The one he did hit it off with was Louise—she was still here then. They talked about snow.”

“Was it snowing?”

“Anything but. A nice warm September. A year-and-a-half ago.—You know, Eva, you gave him such a build-up. I would not exactly say one was disappointed… .”

“Then that was all, then?”

“Yes, so far as I know. To me he said he was anxious to visit Cambridge; but I didn’t think that would do. He might be a bore. Invitations to lunch were issued, but disregarded.—Have
you
seen him yet; I mean, this time?”

“No.”

“Shouldn’t you? That might cheer him up.—Talking of tea, I wonder where Father’s gone. He repeatedly goes out, but never comes in. In the absence of everyone else, we’re keeping house: he and I, I mean.”

“That,” Eva dreamingly said, “must be very nice.”

“No, it isn’t. Father cannot abide me.”

He was wrong, she was certain! “But
Henry
?—he so much loves you.”

“That is the trouble. He doesn’t like me.”

“He was most proud of you.”

“That is the trouble, also.—There was quite a dust-up, you know, about your motor car.”

“You’re so like to each other!”

“You put your thumb on it. Father is sublimatedly heartless. Never mind; I think I will boil the kettle.”

“Take Jeremy with you, will you? He might help.—
Jeremy
!”

That was not to be. Unmistakable sounds proclaimed, Mr. Dancey was back again in the vicarage. “Father,” called out Henry, “we have company!” “Good!” replied Mr. Dancey evenly: nonetheless he continued along the hall, and started upstairs. His step lacked resilience. More loudly, Henry took further trouble: “It’s Eva, actually.” On the staircase, an instant and total pause. Then: “Eva?—why ever didn’t you tell me?” Mr. Dancey turned and came down again. He entered, unhesitatingly exclaiming, “My dear child!” both hands extended.

Jeremy got to his feet, to see who this was. Eva came, magnetised, round the sofa. “Mr. Dancey, I hope you are not angry?” They met midway. He put his hands on her shoulders, holding her for inspection. “You
haven’t
changed,” he said. “I am very glad. The only pity is that my wife should miss you; just now, she’s away.”

“Eva knows,” said Henry.

Mr. Dancey brought Jeremy into focus. “And who’s this?” he said—not without apprehension. Eva replied by advancing Jeremy, beautifully—the child looked mildly up at the clergyman. Eva said to him: “This is Mr. Dancey.” The two shook hands. “First visit to England?” asked Mr. Dancey. Jeremy smiled.

“In a manner of speaking,” said Henry, “her little boy.”

“Mr. Dancey,” said Eva, argumentatively, stoutly, and yet beseechingly, “there’s nothing wrong about Jeremy.”

“Nothing,” he said, regarding the child with pleasure, “that
I
can see.—Henry, what about tea?”

“I think, lies were told?”

“So often they are, unhappily.—And all this time you’ve been where? Did I hear, America?”

“Yes. We …”

“Then I do truly envy you. An exciting, I imagine an endless country. Here, we—”

“I am going,” cut in Henry, “to boil the kettle. Eva, better tell Father, or there’ll be bother later.”

“I dislike,” Mr. Dancey said, “being talked across. I am not yet senile.” Henry went to the kitchen. “What did he mean, though?” went on his father. “What am I to be told?” Jeremy made a diversion by towing Mr. Dancey to the hearthrug, to admire the masterpiece. “He’s clever,” guaranteed Eva, following after. “Only, what Henry meant is, he does not hear and does not speak.”

The startled man said: “I should never have known.” He looked the more intently down at the pattern. “Sight to me is the thing—the thing above all things. And more seeing eyes than his I have seldom seen. And they must be, or he couldn’t have made this.” Mr. Dancey, spotting a fragment of Crown Derby, ejaculated: “The last of a wedding present! Twelve of everything—inconceivable now! … But surely, Eva,” he said most earnestly, “in these days, and in that progressive country you’ve been in, something could have been done, has been done: what
is
being done?”

“Everything!—that is to say, very, very much.” Eva spoke with a passion that yet had somewhere in it a hint of evasion. “But Jeremy doesn’t like it; he doesn’t want to. He not only doesn’t co-operate, they all tell me, he puts a resistance up. He is angered by what they attempt to do to him. It upsets him. He would like to stay happy the way he is.”

“Many of us would; but that’s not the thing.—Oh come, Eva, who would not wish to speak?”

“
I
have never wished to. What is the object? What is the good?”

“Or, hear?” he continued—changing his ground. “Crass as sound can be, imagine a soundless world! No, this child has come into your life, however he did, and you must not doom him. I do mean ‘doom’; you doom if you acquiesce. You dare not,” he added,—abating the verb a little by his compassion. “There cannot—somewhere?—be someone who cannot help, cannot handle him. I cannot believe you have yet tried everything: try everything! Search Europe.” He looked at her sadly and said: “You’re a rich woman.”

“I will think,” she assured him.

“Talk to my wife.—You’ll be back, I hope?” He put down a finger and very slightly altered Jeremy’s pattern, then conferred with the boy, sideways: “Is that still better?—Henry,” he told Eva, “thinks I am in favour of resignation: I am not. I most bitterly am not. I abhor loss.”

“Mr. Dancey, I was so
very
sorry …”

“For what now?”

“Louise.”

“Yes—we are one less.”

Henry stood in the door, saying: “Tea’s ready.”

“Well, you were very quick,” said his father, disparagingly if anything.

“I started the kettle off from the hot tap.”

They went into the kitchen, where tea was. A Dutch check cloth askew on the scrubbed table: a loaf, lump of butter, a hacked-about
gâteau
, less than a plateful of fancy biscuits, a pot of jam. “You should officiate, Eva?” said Mr. Dancey, indicating the teapot. She retreated, askance. “I had better,” suggested Henry. Grace not being said at tea-time, they sat down.

Henry, transfixing Eva, said: “Last time you were here, there were macaroons.”

“Eva will make allowances,” said his father.

“I don’t mean that,” the son said, turning away. Returning, he said: “As a matter of fact, I
had
thought there were more biscuits.”

“I am the explanation,” said Mr. Dancey. “I ate several at two o’clock in the morning.” Jeremy looked about with admiring interest at pots and plans. Eva addressed herself to her host: “I am so happy to see that your cold is gone!” It was not —the reminder was most unfortunate. Crisis having suspended it, he’d forgotten it: in a flash, now, out came the Kleenex, to meet a cataclysm. “Never for long,” he gasped at her, strangulated, contorted. His smile appeared, like a premature rainbow, but then vanished—the blubbered upper lip, the runnels worn by watering eyes, the raw red glaze round the nostrils pushed their way back again into prominence. “Plus,” he managed to say, “an allergy. It’s the flowering currant.” “Could you not,” asked Eva, “have them cut down?” “Spring would not be spring without them, nor would the garden.” Mr. Dancey rocked forward, squeezed saturated Kleenex into a ball and flung it towards the bucket under the sink—blind though the shot had been, there it landed. He brought out reinforcements. His ivory other self, his fine-carved son, sat, meanwhile, vindictive with love, rigid, withheld, furious—it was Henry who suffered the shattered vanity. With each year, this the more galled him. Something could have been done, some thing could have been
done
…

Mr. Dancey drew an experimentary breath, counting up to ten silently, tensely. Yes: a lull! He returned to the world, on factual level. “There’ve been changes here,” he told Eva, “that’s to say, growth. Three new shops, as you may have noticed; not yet a supermarket. Many more council houses. The Grange has become a chicken farm; Major Allsporth died. And”—he continued, in the same voice—”Larkins, of course, has changed hands also: that you would know.”

“Anything but,” interposed Henry.

“Really?” said his father, with some irony.

“She has just been all the way round there, taking her child, only now to find they had flown the coop. She was dumbfounded.”

“Might we not let Eva speak for herself?”

“Why don’t you call me ‘my dear boy’?”

“Because you are not.”

“You are using a ‘dear boy’ tone.—Still,” said Henry, weighing around him the big brown teapot, seeking customers for it: no empty cups yet? “Go on, Eva.”

She said carefully, as though in a court of law: “I received no word from them. Not a word, ever.”

“Had you written? … No? Then how should they know where you were?—we had no idea.”

“I wrote to her from Chicago, before flying.”

“A little late? To be out of touch does damage,” said Mr. Dancey. He withheld himself half a minute, perhaps in prayer, before adding: “Where there is not damage already.” He looked consideringly at Jeremy. Could
one
proceed with this in front of a child, hearing or otherwise?—it seemed unfitting.

Jeremy’s presence, since they had sat down to table, was never not to be felt. Eva, habituated, was least aware of it. There he sat, enthroned on a cushion brought from the drawing-room, on a level in every sense with the rest of the company. His manner of eating and drinking conveyed a pleasure which was in itself good-mannered—he was not greedy. This did not, though, occupy him entirely: at intervals, he turned his candid attention from face to face, from speaker to speaker. Each time, it moved onward only when sated, which happened sometimes sooner and sometimes later. The effect was not so much of mere intelligence as of a somehow unearthly perspicacity. The boy, handicapped, one was at pains to remember, imposed on others a sense that
they
were, that it was
they
who were lacking in some faculty. Henry, of course, most nearly stood up to this; even he showed signs of an uneasiness inculcated, possibly, by a nascent rivalry? What Eva’s little boy knew, what he always had known, and, still more, what he was now in the course of learning, there was no knowing. There was a continuous leakage, and no stopping it. A conviction that the vicarage tea table was bugged, if on an astral plane, gained increasing hold on father and son. One might wonder why this did not inhibit them. It did not: on the contrary, it increased their recklessness with regard to each other. Nonetheless: “Eva,” asked Mr. Dancey, “are you quite sure Jeremy cannot lip-read?”

“Only mine,” she said. “And those he need not.”

Henry said: “Extra-sensory.”

“I cannot,” burst out Mr. Dancey, “go to Larkins—and I do go there, these days I have to—without misery. There’s a terrible painfulness, to me, about that place. What happened there, those last months before they left? Could a hand have been held out?—I shall always wonder. Could daylight have been let in on the situation, whatever it was?—I shall never know. Those two were remarkable people, with staying-power. They did not see their way to going to church; the deplorable thing is, their successors, the present people, are keen churchgoers, active in parish affairs, yet I never find that I can like them so much. A marriage, Eva, does not simply break like a china cup; it ends when it has been infinitely corroded. Perhaps the Arbles spared each other the worst by parting, but why, why, should it have had to come to that? They had surmounted so much.”

“For instance?” said Henry.

“More than you or I might have.—The fruit farm disaster. Their to the outer eye very great incompatability. Their continuing childlessness. They were people of courage; that stood out—what could
not
be surmounted? Don’t think I am blaming you, Eva. At the worst, I suppose you were their mischance—that you should make your home with them seemed right, natural: and so it could have been? I shall never come to the end of my own penitence, felt so much too late, and so unavailing. They were not my flock, God help them—they were my neighbours. What is the good of one?—what’s the good of it all?”