Eva Trout (25 page)

“I should have thought, I—”

“Far from it. Anyway, off the record: this is my day out.”

“What shall you do, with this Buddhist?”

“Steer a course, I expect, through the V. & A., where there are various things; look in on my mother, who’s in Harrington Gardens; finishing up at the six o’clock, Brompton Oratory.”

She objected: “That is a Catholic church.”

“My dear
girl
,” he exclaimed, “what a way to talk!”

On that note of indignation, he went away. Eva at once dressed, then made for the restaurant, where she fell on the
plat du jour,
Lancashire hotpot, being in the grip of a nervous vacuum. Gradually, her fork slowed down. She reflected, frowned. She sent for a glass of wine.

Since Cambridge, she had till this morning conversed with nobody. The irruption of Father Tony could not, had he known, have been more cunningly timed. What was this lack she had felt?—it was foreign to her. How came it that she could feel it? The fact was, since the return to England her mistrust of or objection to verbal intercourse—which she had understood to be fundamental—began to be undermined. More than began; the process had been continuous. Henry, Mr. Dancey, Constantine, Henry again, and now finally Father Clavering-Haight: each had continued the others’ work. Incalculable desires had been implanted. An induced appetite grew upon what it fed on.

She was ready to talk.

Did this make her traitorous to the years with Jeremy?—the inaudible years? His and her cinematographic existence, with no sound-track, in successive American cities made still more similar by their continuous manner of being in them, had had a sufficiency which was perfect. Sublimated monotony had cocooned the two of them, making them near as twins in a womb. Their repetitive doings became rites. Harmony had been broken in upon only by the tussles with ear-and-speech men, or women, to whom she faithfully took him. (She
had
, so far as she knew, tried everything, everyone. Jeremy and his rejections came out victor, each time, as she’d told Mr. Dancey.) Each time, what lessened the force of the disappoint ment? Insidiously, something had compensated. She had felt, and had come to feel more, each time, exonerated by having at least tried.

Yes: during the at-large American years, insulated by her fugue and his ignorance that there could be anything other, they had lorded it in a visual universe. They came to distinguish little between what went on inside and what went on outside the diurnal movies, or what was or was not contained in the television flickering them to sleep. From large or small screens, illusion overspilled on to all beheld. Society revolved at a distance from them like a ferris wheel dangling buckets of people. They were their own. Wasted, civilisation extended round them as might acres of cannibalised cars. Only they moved. They were within a story to which they imparted the only sense. The one wonder, to them, of the exterior world was that anything should be exterior to themselves—and
could
anything be so and yet exist?

Moments of joyful complicity had abounded. Sunrises with Jeremy capering naked on Eva’s bed like Cupid cavorting over the couch of Venus. Horseback dashings out into forest fires of fall colouring. Mimicries and secret signals. Stinging of their same faces by spray from cataracts too loud to be heard even by Eva. True, Jeremy looked more deeply into some of the images than she did. Torn skies, curdled waters, hieroglyphic smoke he had had a particular way of scanning: seeking for portents?—if so, rightly.

The return to England, bringing Jeremy with her to face the music, had been a step taken by Eva for his advancement. That was to say, that was how she saw it. She had been brought to it by sighting premonitions of manhood in his changeable eyes. High time for Jeremy, scion of Willy Trout, to be other than a rumour. She had not computed the cost for him of entry into another dimension. What he had been thrust into the middle of was the inconceivable; and the worst was its not being so for her. He was alone in it. Void for him, this area was at the same time dense with experiences which by claiming her made her alien, and it could be possible that he hated it—it could not be possible that he hated her. He could not but know her to be exhilarated. The music he’d watched her nerving herself to face now stirred her. Were they to be sundered?—there was a very great inequality in their roles. Unlike the little Lord Fauntleroy, Jeremy had not landed here as a future earl: little awaited him but curiosity, sentiment roused by his looks and by his being, whether or not in the usual sense, a love-child, and what childhood least relishes, compassion. Over all, he was regarded—and must sense this—as the latest, in some ways the most outrageous, while at the same time the most thriving, of Eva’s peccadilloes. And, so far, he had been denied a home. That England was to provide one had been implicit. What an error, to grant him a glimpse of Larkins, an afternoon’s habitation of Cathay. Eva had broken a pact, which was very grievous.

Does one love more when things go badly? From what Eric said, it could seem so. Never till now had the love between Eva and Jeremy had more dissidences, yet been more mutually imploring. Never before now had she felt him to manacle her —perhaps he had not?

His beguilingness and the manners she had taught him were underlain by hostility to strangers; what was he coming to see
her
as? Yesterday, calling at Primrose Hill for Jeremy at the end of the afternoon, she had penetrated into the studio-shed in which he was at work on the head of her. This was the first view of it; she had not sat to him. It was a large knob, barely representational—only, he had gouged with his two thumbs deep, deep into the slimed clay, making eye-sockets go, almost, right through the cranium. Out of their dark had exuded such non-humanity that Eva had not known where to turn. There stood the sculptress, noncommital, beside her. Jeremy, in one of his silent silences, cryptically stood away from his work. The sculptress, a person of some integrity, did not say that Jeremy was original; all she did volunteer was: “He has
something
in mind—he’s feeling his way.”

—More wine! Hers was a table for two: something was suddenly trying to sit down opposite her at it: tragedy. Twisting away, she started looking about her at related-looking parties and couples at other anemone-decorated tables in Paley’s dining-room (for such the substantial, dadoed crimson interior, nothing but daylight on its napery, managed to appear, rather than a restaurant: it was not febrile). What would it have been like to have had the enjoyment of aunts, uncles, cousins? These existed; but both sides of her family had violently quarrelled with Willy on account of Constantine, raising heaven and earth, writing insulting-denouncing letters and wielding threats, in efforts to get Eva away from him, out of contamination-range. Some even charged him with Cissie’s death, that having arisen from her flight. After Willy’s death, most of them had attempted to re-open relations with Eva, offering her a home, and so on. Consort with her father’s enemies? Never. Yet, a pity. She had first been withheld from then forfeited her birthright of cricket matches and flower shows. Unaided, she was beset by the quandaries of the rootless rich, for whom each choice becomes a vagary … From afar, her study of happy families became what Iseult would have called “consuming.” To solace her, a waiter came to know, what next? Gooseberry tart?

Nothing had been heard from Henry. Not a word, not a postcard.

“Madam, you are wanted on the telephone.”

The page stood at her elbow. Her heart stood still. “Oh?” she asked, suffocated by hope.

“If you would like to take the call in Box 3?”

Eva slowly imbibed the last of her wine, before saying: “Where is it from: Cambridge?”

The page, in a wary tone, said: “I could not say, madam.” In a still warier one, as though loth to connect himself with anything so menacingly improbable, he said: “You are wanted by a Miss Smith.”

Inside Box 3, Eva raised a receiver already speaking. “
Eva?
—good. How are you?”

“Very well.”

“So am I. I was glad to hear you are back. What are you doing?—what are you going to do?” asked the former teacher.

Eva said: “I do not know where you are.”

“That is perfectly simple, I’m in Reading.”

“How do you know where I am?”

“Constantine. This is nice; I wanted a word with you. When we said goodbye, I’m afraid I was in rather a state,” Miss Smith continued, not only lightly but as though speaking of last week. “Partly the heat—it really was blazing, that day.”

“No. My conduct was shocking.”

“Rather extreme, perhaps,” said the other in her most Lumleigh manner. “But how remote it all seems, doesn’t it? I hear you’re selling Cathay? Well, it had a short life, but on the whole, I suppose, really rather a dramatic one.”

“Eric,” said Eva ponderously, “is looking for you high and low.”

“Yes,” said Miss Smith, with a sort of enthusiasm, “to get rid of me. I
should
have thought of that; I thought I had thought of everything, as I do usually. We parted on wonderfully good terms. On the whole I am grateful to you, Eva; if it hadn’t been that it would have been something else. We could never have lasted … What are your future plans?”

“Why have you stayed away so long?”

“Why did you, if it comes to that?”

“Henry says my proclivities are infectious.”

“Henry? Oh, Henry Dancey? My heavens, yes: he must be almost grown up.”

“Yes, almost.”

“Imagine that,” said Miss Smith.

“You left Eric your typewriter,” said Eva.

“Fair’s fair. I took his revolver.”

“There was no firearm in Larkins?”

“As he’d say, ‘Fancy your thinking that!’ Why did I take it? A Hedda Gabler complex.—Talking of that, I hear the amie is a Norwegian.”

“How did Constantine track you down?”

“He is not a bloodhound. I rang him up.”

“He did not,” said Eva sternly, “report that.”

Three pips sounded. “This must be that,” said Miss Smith swiftly. “We could always meet, though—now I know where you are.” She hung up.

Eva came out of Box 3.

What a performance … Was Miss Smith even now asking herself how it had gone? There had been a vivacity not there formerly … Had this been Miss Smith, or was she dead and somebody impersonating her? (For what reason: money?) X certainly had documented herself faultlessly: not a trick missed. But yet in another way she had fallen short, betraying an insufficient grasp of the character, its ins-and-outs. She had somehow falsified it. X could have known Miss Smith only superficially: it surprised Eva to realise how well
she
knew her. Something—who was to say what, exactly?— had not rung true. The voice’s inflexions, even, had been, if not quite parodied, exaggerated, over-stretched, harshened; more than once a hollow ring had been given them. The Lumleigh intonations had been winners, give X that!—had X, possibly, been at Lumleigh? All the same: no. Try as X might, she had not convinced. She almost deserved to.

Had Constantine fallen for this? From the way he’d been ladling out information, one might suppose so. Going back to Box 3, Eva had a call put through to his office. Characteristically, he was out at lunch. Therefore, her stride made long by deliberation, weighty by doubt, she paced and re-paced Paley’s spinal corridor. She went halfway up in the lift, came down again—then, near a sand-filled column inviting rejection of cigarettes, was galvanised. A further possibility had occurred to her—the impersonator of Miss Smith had been Miss Smith, a deceased person purporting to be a living one. Not that she necessarily was in her coffin; no, she could well be walking about in Reading. (“Charles the First walked and talked half an hour after his head was cut off.” You put in a comma somewhere, then that made sense but was not so interesting.) But, she had given an impression of dissolution. Or, if not of that, of a volatility amounting to it. An impression of upborne gas-filled flight, cable cut, ballast cast overboard board. Miss Smith was tied to ordinary earth no longer; in some way she eluded the law of gravity. What had she undergone to attain this state? Had she struck some bargain? There was something alarming about her at large thus. What did she want?—what could still be wanted? What had she in mind?—if she
had
a mind?

Or had all been a trick played by the wire? Alone with a voice, shut up with it, you are fooled by what can be its distortedness. Eva’s could be an over-excitable ear, so long-lasting having been its desuetude. Might the ear not seem to have registered what it had not? Anyhow, what a slippery fish is identity; and what is it, besides a slippery fish? If Miss Smith had not rung up Eva, nobody else had: “X” could be counted out. What is a person? Is it true, there is not more than one of each? If so, is it this singular forcefulness, or forcefulness arising from being singular, which occasionally causes a person to bite on history? All the more, in that case, what is a person? Eva decided to see by examining many. She telephoned for the Jaguar and drove it to the National Portrait Gallery, of which she had heard.

She had trouble in parking anywhere near. As against that, one entered without paying. Of its scattering of visitors, most were foreign; Eva being partially so also. Directed into a lift, she began where the scroll began to unroll. Echo-deadening acoustics increased the hush of pilgrimages over the solid flooring. These portraits went back in history no further than the point where they could be taken to be authentic: one made one’s start with the Tudors, this comprehending the Reformation. This had been an age in which ends were dire: she learned from small placards adjoining the gold frames how very often, if not invariably, initiative, recalcitrance, ambition, ill-spent beauty or indomitability carried their possessors to the block, or, in cases of bishops, to the stake. The over-clever had perished along with the over-brave, not deterring others from doing likewise. Brittle bejewelled fingers and cobweb lace ornamented the surface only: one was in an internally-maniacal, autocratic, dolichocephalic labyrinth. Inexorable pupil-darkened eyes, fumily burning and set in high up, and energetically-compressed lips stabbed at her by reminding her of Henry’s … She went through a doorway into the Stuart area of betrayers and betrayed, of whom the majority, less taut than those in the rooms before, had a free-flowing lavishness and engagingness. Their look of importance—for it was evident that important they were—was etherealised by a graceful, in some cases a glowing, in others a melancholic pensiveness, which made not the youths only appear young. Fatal was to be the division between their fortunes, yet who could guess? Foreknowledge of destiny, or destination, was not easily read into these faces, to which a family likeness had been imparted —though here or there in a physiognomy framed in showering curls and set off by satin were caverns measureless to man, or shadows cast by gathering frowns over eyes a degree, perhaps, too far-sighted. Whatever
did
happen, Eva from now on felt herself getting away from the smell of blood. She had a sensation of greater amenability, of betterment. Divines, for instance, as spiritual ferocity decreased with Eva’s chronological progress, could be fiery without having to enter fires; thinkers and other originals died in their beds, none the less respected, and exile came to be the severest fate meted out to all but the most unlucky careerists … Next, one reacted to an invigorating, outright bravura, set off, for some reason, by Good Queen Anne, though outlasting her. Eva was drawn, more, to the military side of the Age of Reason: surely never had so many glorifying attitudes been struck? Swords were at the moment of being drawn, battle-clouds rolled between parted draperies, carmine hued the cheeks of bellicose admirals. And opulence was as evident as the victories, though rendering nobody inert. Statesmen looking hardly able to contain their potential oratory contended for wall-space, as the decades went on, with actors gesturing with olympian confidence, and men of letters who had adorned the age were fitted into all the interstices. The periwig’s giving place, early on, to bunched-back tresses was accompanied, so far, by no diminution of authoritative vitality. Eva enthusiastically followed the King Georges, I, II, III, IV, over the threshold into the nineteenth century. In that, she instantly felt displaced. She turned round and went back the way she had come.