Eva Trout (24 page)

Now, like an executioner, he would be consigning her to the train. Then, turning back again into his world of learning, emptying her of hope. Here in this Cambridge taxi, haunted by May Week lovers but more by the many intellects it had carried, Eva was set upon by the swamping, isolating misery of the savage. Already they were in the brick streets. Over her knee, swaying occasionally with the swervings of the taxi, Henry’s two sets of fingers stretched the scarlet cord tense for Jeremy. Was he indeed made of flesh and blood? She ached for him with the whole of her longing being. Was he capable of knowing?—she thought not. During the declaration, she had faced into nothing but the mobile. Later, the whiteness, the look of protracted shock which had accompanied his speaking to her of the death of Louise had appeared to be faintly there. It was now gone—he recovered quickly.

“I sometimes wonder,” said Eva, for no knowable reason, “where Iseult is.”

“She’ll turn up.” As Henry spoke, the taxi was slowing down. “Here we are—I’m afraid.” He and Jeremy disentangled their fingers from the cord.

“Might you, might you come to London, Henry?”

“If we could find your house?”

She prepared the way by making a round of the more illustrious London agents. To be less sceptically shadowed while doing so, she disembarrassed herself of Jeremy by sending him daily to Primrose Hill, where a needy sculptress would teach him to model. Sometimes Eva, sometimes a car-hire car vouched for by Paley’s took him there. The sculptress, when required, kept him for lunch. The organisation which had produced the sculptress had other activities up its sleeve, should Jeremy come to tire of clay—he not only did not, he would not be parted from it; he gummed up Paley’s by bringing lumps of it home wet. Eva fared less happily; as house-huntress she had entered the field late; everything to be looked upon as desirable had by now been snapped up for the Season. Anything still going was, it was made clear, in the white elephant category. She viewed white elephants. One she liked, but feared it might not please Henry—strategically, it was ill-situated; vast, it was made so over again by being decorated with slabs of mirror and by everything buildable-in being built in. Its commodiousness was solid and satisfying, as was its opulence. Personnel difficulties (servants) were hinted at as a reason for its remaining empty; there would be further difficulties with Henry. In this one London interior, Eva “saw herself”; on the
grand escalier
, reflected, she permitted herself for an instant to strike an attitude. There was a ball room, dripping with chandeliers. Value for money … But more and more did she know, it would not do. She returned to Paley’s the sadder, and this continued. One day, however, Father Clavering-Haight took action. He paid a morning call.

House-hunting having lapsed, she had slept late and was not yet out of the quilted robe when they telephoned up to know if the cleric would be acceptable. His card preceded him, on the salver—as to his identity, when shown in, there even without that could have been little doubt. “I hope,” he said, far from hopelessly, “this is not tiresome? Constantine said if I was in this part of town, and in point of fact today I happen to be.”

He was a tall young man, elongated by black, agile. His narrow-oval countenance could have been Byzantine but was contemporary—the Jeremy-like fairness of its colouring was set off by the genuine shell rims of his spectacles, so roomy as considerably to widen the face at the top, at the same time magnifying his gaze, which unrestrictedly wandered about within them, though not dreamily. The lenses were convex: blind as a mole without them? His mouth had a marked look of effectuality. He went on: “I hope you’re well?” in a tone implying that no one had any business to be anything else.

Eva, taking this to refer to her dressing-gown (which the robe was, under another name), replied: “Yes; it is only that I am late.” She had been walking about; seating herself, she arranged the skirts of the robe over her knees into folds which flowed solidly to the floor, erected her spine against the back of the chair, disposed her hands waitingly in her lap, wrists crossed—combining thus the formality of one having decided to grant audience with the deference owing to his cloth. “Please, sit down,” she bade him. Father Clavering-Haight did so, at a small table on which was a litter of correspondence (Eric’s letter, by the way, had turned up) and one of the boxes of apricots, lid half off. She inquired: “Are you coming to see me, or are you coming to see me about something?”

“Both,” said he—surprised, but adjusting. “You are what I have come to see you about, chiefly. That is, if you have no objection?”

“I think,” she pointed out, “I might have been asked.”

“I rather agree. I never believe in shock tactics,” he told her. “Where is the boy?”

“He is out modelling.”

A misunderstanding, though momentary, threatened to bring down vials of wrath: Father Clavering-Haight’s forehead went deep shell-pink. “
Monstrous
clothes?” he demanded. “Kiddy-capering in front of the camera? The road to narcissism—you wish that?”

Eva could not be bothered. “This sculptress lives near the Zoo, he’s been doing animals. This week he’s doing a head of me.”

“Oh, that kind,” he said, mollified.—”Look here, what always makes you so hard on Constantine?”

“All was pleasant,” said Eva, “the other day.”

“There goes a sad man, you know. An autumnal character.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t like the way you say that. That affair with your father was less discreditable than various thises-and-thats that made hay with Constantine at one time or another, over the years. We’ve had most of that out. Yes, rather a ghastly past, by his own account. Poor chap.—May I eat one of those?”

For a short time, an apricot kept him quiet. She watched him wipe stickiness off his fingers on to a snowy monogrammed handkerchief. “I shan’t have much lunch,” he mentioned, “I am meeting a Buddhist.—What there was between him and your father at least lasted.”

“Yes, till my father killed himself.”

“Two sides to that story. You judge harshly—quite apart from the fact that no one has any business to judge at all. You have no idea what goes on.”

“Yes I have,” said Eva.

“Your attitude,” he made known to her, tucking away the handkerchief, “has disheartened Constantine. He is the brooding type.”

“Very probably that is his bad conscience.”

He heaved his shoulders. “Yet,” he declared, “he’s fond of you.”

“Yes,” agreed Eva. “And I do not mind him so much, now.”

He looked about, as though seeking evidence. “Where are those birds you apparently had?”

“With the porter’s wife.”

Fitting the lid back on to the apricots, properly, he proceeded: “Anyone else you resent?”

“What should make you ask?”

“Wanting to know.”

“Yes. I resent my teacher.”

“We’re not speaking of the subsequent Mrs. Arble?”

“Then you do know.”

“
That’s
a business, apparently, that nobody can make head or tail of. What—exactly—took place?”

“She abandoned me. She betrayed me.”

“Had you a sapphic relationship?”

“What?”

“Did you exchange embraces of any kind?”

“No. She always was in a hurry.”

“Good,” said he, ticking that one off. “Then in what way— I should rather say, in what sense—did she inflict these suppposed injuries?”

“They were not supposed.”

“What did the unfortunate woman do?”

“Everybody,” remarked the incensed Eva, “it seems, was unfortunate but me.”

“Get yourself out of the centre of the picture. What
did
she do?”

“She desisted from teaching me. She abandoned my mind. She betrayed my hopes, having led them on. She pretended love, to make me show myself to her—then, thinking she saw all, she turned away. She—”

“—Wait a minute: what were your hopes?”

“To learn,” said Eva. A long-ago tremble shook her. “To be, to become—I had never been.” She added: “I was
beginning
to be.”

He remarked, with enthusiasm: “A gifted teacher.”

“Yes. Then she sent me back.”

“Sent you away?”

“No; sent me back again—to be nothing.” Eva uncrossed her wrists, freeing one hand; this, in the form of a fist, she brought down not hard but with a dreadful precision, as it were hammering a nail in, in one blow, on to a point in her quilted lap. “I remain gone. Where am I? I do not know—I was cast out from where I believed I was.”

“God—” began Father Clavering-Haight, for the first time. Having begun, he ceased; or perhaps waited? “Why,” he put to her, “do you imagine she acted in this way?”

“I only
imagine
?”

“No,” he said, looking about the table, tugging the letters from under the box of apricots, shuffling them absently through, as he might documents. “Suppose she did; can you imagine why? What made her—have you any idea?”

“I became too much.”

He told her: “You were a problem.”

“Because of what?”

“Don’t revert!—As you say, you became too much. Also she married: you took exception to that?”

“Oh no, never at the beginning. First, I was always glad to be in their house—I even looked on it as home. As you know, I had Constantine put me there. Only then, I saw that she hated me, hated the work she had feared to finish. And I who was that work, who had hoped so much—how should I not hate her? She saw. Twice over. She could not abide me there; I became a witness. How she had cast away everything, she had seen me see.” Eva came to a stop. She smoothed out the dint in her robe left by her fist.

He leaned sideways, to see from another angle. “You say, ‘She cast away everything.’ Why did she?”

“Oh, all for Eric.”

“So then, you annexed her husband?”

“No I did not, eventually.”

“You had a good try, though. Love or revenge?”

“At that time, I was anxious to start a garage.”

“You afterwards led her—”

“—Have you,” broke in Eva, greatly exasperated, “nothing but scandals to think about in your clergy-house? I understood you to be devout and busy.”

“You were misinformed,” said Father Clavering-Haight. This was lost on Eva. He laid aside irony with a forbearing sigh. “Did it never occur to you that you might pity her?”

“It did so only the other day.”

“Better late than never.”

“
I
am in love.”

He took no notice.

“Get,” he said, “those resentments out of your system.”

“Oh yes. By what means?”

“Pray.”

“I’m unable to.”

“That we shall have to go into.—Though not this morning,” he added, with a glance at his watch. “Then I tell you what: think about something else.”

“I more and more do,
now
!” she exclaimed—transfigured. She continued: “You do not ask who he is.”

Father Clavering-Haight’s brown clouded. Their conversation had owed its speed and efficiency, so far, to having been mapped out:
this
came under no heading. So far as he could be thrown out, this threw him out. He specialised in iniquity: off his subject, he objected to being impounded as confidant. Eva sank in his estimation, and he showed it—he looked again at his watch, this time less regretfully. “Should I?” he asked, with secular languor. “Would that convey much?”

She considered it ought to; she came out with all particulars, more with zeal than coherence, ending up with: “And knows you.—Or certainly, knows about you.”

“That’s just possible. But I’m sorry; I haven’t been near Cambridge,” said the unwilling celebrity, “for I don’t know how long, one way and another. No, can’t place him.—Unless he’s been to any of our Reteats?”

“I should not think so. His father is already a clergyman.”

“But you can’t mean this is serious?” asked the priest, really almost seriously concerned, examining Eva as though a question of sanity were at issue. “A nebulous undergraduate of twenty …
Do
you think that would do?”

“No. But …”

“There is no ‘but.’ “

“I am not so old,” she said.

“Old enough, I should have thought, to have more sense.”

So, she decided to change the subject. “Constantine says you are absolutely selfless.”

“Not absolutely. Everything is comparative.
He’s
had a try for the better, from time to time—pity that school got off on the wrong foot; it embodied a certain idealism. Now the camping has been a flop, as he may have told you. Dicky drains from the beginning, now dry rot.”

“The roof, he said.”

“The roof was the least. I am all for a barn, as I always was; but from the point of view of the poor chap, you see, yet another set-back. ‘Say not the struggle naught availeth,’ I told him.” Heaving his shoulders, he went back to the agenda. “Talking of boys—” he began, in a threatening tone.

“Yes?” asked Eva, re-crossing her wrists.

“
Your
first charge must be the one you made off with. When you did that, you did the most awesome thing—did you then realise? If not, I suppose it’s dawned on you since? You know what you’re up against, do you?”

“Jeremy? Yes.”

“You incurred him—humanly speaking—by criminality. Regard yourself as wholly committed to him. Anything else you may want you may have to sacrifice. There is no way out of that. You have no option. The circumstances are dreadful: he’s in your power.”

“No, Father Clavering-Haight, I am in his. Jeremy’ll never let
me
go.”

“Retribution. I’d like to have had a look at him.”

“You believe in retribution?”

“Not for a minute!”

“Then why—?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted, colouring, mortified, “it came out… Well: sorry I missed him. Nice to have had a word; that is, the equivalent. Just conceivably, I—”

“You are very kind,” she murmured correctly. He slid his eyes round in the spectacles, but let that pass. “If,” she went on to propose, “you would stay for lunch, I could have him at once returned.”

“No, he said, charmingly standing up. “Pity; but next time —I must be off to Harrods. Told you, I’m meeting a Buddhist. Think all this over, won’t you; then when you’re ready come and make your confession. Tuesdays or Fridays, or one could make an appointment.”