Eva Trout (22 page)

“Little boys who eat too many sweets get spots,” said Constantine, addressing this generality to Jeremy. “Or did in my day.”

“Jeremy doesn’t.”

“Evidently,” he said, approvingly, “not.” He transferred his gaze, without loss of a single drop of its content of benevolence, to Eva. “Time has treated you kindly?”

To reverse the query, how had time treated him? One saw no particular or outstanding answer. Eight years, for one thing, were but a sliver in relation to his presumed age. He had formed the habit of living, of being Constantine, and habit itself had formed an undintable surface. Henry’s reported impression, “moulting,” at this moment seemed to have been a biased one—or, an exhibition of that
dégagé
spitefulness by which youth betrays original sin. Constantine was not to be thought of in terms of plumage, like him or not. Display had never been his method of working. His physical smooth collectedness, imperviousness, his look of being once and for all assembled, and staying thus, accounted in great part for his effect on others, whether or not diabolical, and, with that, for his extraordinary lastingness in their memories. The history—or was it the legend?—of his cruelties had as source his huelessness, his “vanishingness” when to be vaniished from could be torment, his semi-deliberate, semi-reluctant pouting enunciation of (it might be terrible) words used. Not an extravagance, ever—he had nothing to shed. What had he to lose? Yet, was
he
reduced? This touch of the genuine he was showing … A plea, almost? A plea pleading not to be too late?

She did not reply.

“I’m thinking,” he suddenly said, “of selling the castle. If you don’t want it?”

“No,” she said, startled. “No—not now.”

“There’s been an offer. Some community industry. Weaving, pottery, so on. Highly innocuous.” One cheek crinkled, somewhat disreputably—he ran a hand up it lightly. “What an affair that was!”

“How is Kenneth, I wonder?”

“I’m unable to tell you.—The roof is going.”

“It’s gone on being empty?”

“But for occasional summer camping,” he said with noticeable sentimental reserve. “But you, Eva: how did your travels go?”

She was about to tell him when in again rolled the trolley, now with afternoon tea on it.—”Was there a letter left on this?” “I’ll inquire, madam.”—She returned, to give Constantine ample benefit of the recital flinched from by Henry. San Francisco, quite a spell there. Indianapolis. Cleveland. Dallas. Seattle. Kansas City. Brooklyn—no, not New York. Last lap, Chicago. Finances (of interest to her once trustee) had not been difficult, thanks to the extensiveness plus the solidarity of the Trout interests.

“Chiefly,” he commented, finally, touching his handkerchief to his forehead, “you seem to have opted for big cities.”

“Chiefly,” agreed Eva—herself exhausted.

“As more anonymous?”

She did not appear to know what that might be. “I was seeking for specialists, for Jeremy.”

“Of course. But you made—or renewed—some contacts, I should imagine? Your father’s daughter …”

“Oh yes,” said the father’s daughter. “But you see, I had in addition those of my own, of long ago, formed by me while waiting about for Father. In many cities. Kind friends to return to, of many sorts. Should I need anything, I was shown where to go.”

“Nothing, I hope, that Willy would not have approved of?”

“Was my father particular?” she asked Constantine.

“Very, on your behalf.”

“Jeremy, Mr. Ormeau has no tea-cake.” Jeremy flourished the lid off the plated hot dish. Eva Trout looked into the teapot, and went on to replenish it with hot water, before reminiscently nodding—”For me, no underworld.”

“What since?”

She selected a buttery quarter of tea-cake and bit deep. Munching, she remarked: “I have now no guardian.”

“Wicked or otherwise.”

The sun came out. Jeremy, whom Constantine did not rivet, went off to seek his malacca cane. New as a possession, indeed his latest, this as a near-antique had been priced accordingly: its silver band, just tarnished enough, bore the florid initials of some dandy, dead or if living senile. Elegant, as was the boy, it was too long for him; he made surprising play with it in the course of the energetic stroll now set out upon, round the room, round the tea trolley, round the other two. Constantine took the hint. “How,” he said, “if we all went out for a turn?”

They did so, south along Gloucester Road into Hereford Square. The square, an oblong, lies open to Gloucester Road on its east side: at this hour, going on six o’clock, it had the perfect clarity of a set piece. Westering sun excluded by rooftops. tops, one was the more in a tank of brilliant, water-coloury half-light, not yet dusk. Railings which once caged in the verdant privacy had been immolated to a forgotten war; over a hedge sheathed in wire trellis lolled lilacs, their plumes in red-purple bud, and laburnums not yet quite ready to drip yellow. “Shortly, this should be pretty,” pronounced Constantine. “Not too bad now.” Nice-looking cars were parked all along the kerb under the balconied stucco houses, specklessly painted white, cream, oyster. “The soul,” he said, admiring the fagades, “of normality. We are outsiders, Eva.” The square, as though inhibited by their presence, seemed dead-still, at this otherwise social hour.

He announced: “I do wish you would give up lying like such a trooper.”

“How do you know I do?”

“My dear girl, that’s unavoidable—it sticks out a mile. All of us know.”

“Are
you
truthful?” In the course of a lifetime (hers) this point-blank question had not, for some reason, come up before. She put it to him with unspoiled interest.

“Yes,” he said. “Curiously enough.”

“What do you mean by ‘all of us’?”

“Your, er … circle.”

“Constantine, what were you doing at the vicarage?—Stop that, Jeremy!”

There still were railings topping the basements, and Jeremy, having naturally brought his cane, was voluptuously rattling the cane along them. The remorseless din was the more so for being discontinuous: front-door steps interrupted the railings. “He enjoys,” asked Constantine, raising his voice above it, “doing what he can’t hear?” “It’s the vibration.” “Ah.—Well, stop him; or they’ll have the police in.” Jeremy didn’t desist; she caught up with him, in two or three strides, and shook him. Jeremy bore no malice; he slanted away from Eva across the roadway to peer through the hedge, which was patchy and eaten-looking, into the interstices of the glades within— voluminous golden privet and speckled laurel, serpentine walks, overtopped by ash, sycamore, lime, plane, poplar already leafy enough to enhance the mystery—with the rigid, addicted intentness of a
voyeur
. Eva said: “I wish he could play in there. Might that not be arranged?”

“I should think not.”

“Why not?”

Constantine, halting at a locked wire gate, read aloud from the notice-board there posted. “ ‘No bicycles are allowed. Tricycles cycles are allowed on the paths only.’—that would never suit
you
, Eva, you reckless tricyclist.—’Ball games and dangerous pastimes not permitted.’ Dangerous pastimes? No place for any of us.”

“What
were
you doing at the vicarage?”

“Which vicarage?”

“The Danceys’.”

“Of course, of course.—I thought for a minute,” he said, with a shade of consciousness, “you meant the clergy-house. —Yes, I looked in there. ‘They might always know at the vicarage/ locals told one. A kind welcome, though a forlorn hope. You heard about that?” he asked, not ungratified. “In point of fact, I was acting for your friend Arble.”

“
What
?”

“Yes.” They walked on, towards an extra-vermilion pillar-box at the south-west corner. “He is increasingly anxious to trace his wife, or hear of anything that might lead to her. Still feels the spoor might be picked up somewhere about in the Larkins neighbourhood, but cannot face going back there—
you
may know why? He’s in really rather a fix, so applied to me.”

“But he can’t bear you, Constantine.”

“So he makes clear. One all the more saw what a fix he’s in.”

“He has a Norwegian companion,” Eva said sternly, “and two children. Their names are Diane and Trevor.”

“Yes, very probabjy.—Oh, you are in the picture? Might one ask how?”

“He wrote to me.”

Constantine raised an eyebrow.

They reached the pillar-box; Constantine slapped the top of it, meditatively. They then turned about and retraced their steps. Jeremy was still, always, gummed to the hedge, though he now spied through at a different point—children were playing inside there, where there was grass. “How did Eric get hold of you?” Eva wondered. “And when was this?”

“A year-and-a-half ago. By the simplest method, walking into my office. He contrived to suggest that he had a right to —there was more than a touch of the injured husband. He over-estimates (that is to put it mildly) such influence as I ever had on Iseult. He can’t get it out of his head that I know where she is—or ought to, or might. Innately suspicious, is he not, to the point of mania? What else he may have contrived to imagine, I didn’t ask—it would have been fatal to laugh. In he marched; his predicament, he explained to me, being one not suitable to put down in writing. It appears, his Norwegian young lady came over here in the first place as an
au pair
girl, and was in that capacity somewhere about in Bedfordshire when romance hit her. All then was forgotten. Her permit expired, unnoticed and unlamented. By continuing without ‘papers’ in this country she’s landed herself and could land Eric in a position which could be fishy. The cohabitation can hardly be passed off as a social visit; it’s been too unusually protracted, not to speak of having been blessed with children. Luton, which they find very congenial, has so far minded its own business; but any outbreak of nosiness and there could be trouble. Trouble on quite a scale: ‘law courts,’ ‘getting into the papers.’ Marriage lines (he holds) could right the matter, like magic. Marriage lines therefore are required. Only one hitch: your friend must get his divorce. But how, without the assistance of Mrs. Arble? ‘Isn’t it seven years or more,’ I put to him, ‘since she walked out? You could bring desertion. You go straight to a lawyer.’ He jibbed at that—terrified like a blackamoor. Sans Mrs. Arble, he cannot proceed one inch. The Macbeth type. Goes to pieces—he did at Cathay, that night. ‘
You
go on,’ he said, ‘you try.’ (Meaning, find her.) ‘You ought to, you should if anyone can.’ So, Eva, that has become my object. One has time, at times—I do also admit, he interests me. Like so many stalwarts, he has a
louche
streak.—You are well out of him.”

She began: “I never—”

“Oh, come, Eva!”

Up in one of the drawing-rooms, somebody was picking out a tune on a piano. Something about the faultiness made it lyrical. The plate-glass sash of the window was slightly lifted; muslin curtains swelled in a breath of evening out of the trees.

Tulips in a bowl, in the earliest, prettiest phase of a dying agony, had writhed open till they became orchids. At any moment, might not a petal give up the game? The two on the pavement watched to see what would happen. “You know,” Constantine told her, “it’s time you married.”

“No. Why do you say that?”

“You can’t continue with this … this harlequinade.”

“Jeremy is not a harlequinade.”

“No; but he bodes no good the way he’s going.”

“Today he’s not at his best,” she said vulnerably.

“Get him a father. Wouldn’t you,” asked he—referring to their surroundings, this enclave—”like any of this? There is much to be said for it.”

“Would you?”

There being no reply, the young woman earnestly examined her former guardian, in what might be a new light. So thorough became the scrutiny that he, with a gesture, protested: “I’m not proposing!—Though, curiously enough, you could do still worse.”

The tune went on being picked out on the piano.

“You mean,” she said, “I could come to a full stop?”

“You don’t feel your life is lacking in… purpose?”

“Again you are trying to frighten me. I should have stayed in America.”

“Don’t be stupid, Eva.—Why are you not at Cathay? What’s gone wrong there? Can you never take root?”

“You are like Mr. Denge.”

“I am very fond of you.”

Leaving behind the house which begat the squabble, they brought themselves to one of the square’s two junctions with Gloucester Road—here, traffic assailed them by roaring by; they beat a retreat. Out of the distance Jeremy came towards them, trailing his cane. He signified, he was bored with Hereford Square. “
Once
more round,” urged Eva, “and then …” Inspiration failed. Constantine filled the breach: “Then, if you won’t think worse of me, I should like a drink. There is a bar I remember in your hotel.” They stood grouped close in to the parapet scarred by its vanished railings; a dangling spray of laburnum trailed over Eva’s head; she reached up and angrily snapped off the budding thing. A trifle on edge?

“What are you going to do about that boy?”

“You mean, he can’t come into the bar?”

“No. His future, his schooling. His disability.—He’s your heir, I suppose?”

“He can understand you,” said Eva. “Please do not, Constantine.”

Giving on the bar at Paley’s is an ante-room to which bar service extends. Here crimson sets off mahogany and mahogany crimson; there is an amplitude of armchairs, wall sofas and miniature tables. The Trout party, not having this place entirely to themselves, settled for the corner most out of earshot and made free with that, pulling the chairs about. Constantine’s magnetism ensured that Eva’s shandy and his brandy and soda were with them promptly—Jeremy’s Orange Crush took longer, having to be sought for in some non-alcoholic region of the hotel; but the child atoned for earlier ups-and-downs by a display of seraphic patience.

“I hope,” said Eva, “the budgerigars are not miserable in the bathroom.”

“They must take the rough with the smooth,” said Constantine. “Most of us do.—Yes,” he reflected, dandling his glass, “what an agreeable afternoon that was.”

“This afternoon?”