Eva Trout (26 page)

She did not intend, however, to quit the National Portrait Gallery without having achieved her aim; the less clear she became as to what that had been, the more systematically she stood by it. So, after a lingering last look at Lord Southampton, she went down in the lift—it being on the ground floor, she learned from a custodian, that Victorian notables awaited her, in hosts. And so they did, lantern-jawed, dark as crows. Eva tried to indoctrinate, or at least inspire herself, by studying philanthropists and social reformers, among whom were women—the sex had travelled a long way since its upstairs appearances as brocaded consorts or pearly-bosomed companions each with a sparkling eye to the main chance. After some sobering minutes it struck Eva that she might, now, look up her former Broadstairs neighbour, and also the (from everything Henry said) powerful progenitor of Pippa. Both were at the advantage of being shown here as depicted in youth. Browning looked bothered already; Dickens, fresh as a daisy, lightly-emphatically whirled round on his chair. A beardless boy… So was Henry. And why not?

But, upstairs or down, they
were
all “pictures.” Images. “Nothing but a pack of cards”?—not quite, but nearly enough that to defeat Eva. She could no more—she retraced her way to the foyer and sat down on an unfriendly bench. No, no getting through to them. They were on show only. Lordlily suffering themselves to be portrayed, they’d presented a cool core of resistance even to the most penetrating artist. The most martial extroverts, even, nursed their mysteries. Each was his own affair, and he let you know it. Nothing was to be learned from them (if you excepted learning that nothing was to be learned). In so far as they had an effect on the would-be student, it was a malign one: every soul Eva knew became no longer anything but a Portrait. There was no “real life”; no life was more real than this. This she had long suspected. She now was certain.

Nonetheless, this had been a sociable afternoon. And it had set the mind at rest as to one matter—there is no hope of keeping a check on people; you cannot know what they do, or why they do it. Situations alter for no knowable reason—as though a game continued while you were away from the board or have left the table. See what had taken place during Eva’s absence: lovers become indifferent to each other, enemies friends or at least confederates. One plot unravelled, another knitting. Re-alignments, out-of-character overtures, fresh fancies budding from hoary boughs. Yet here the
personae
were, as before. As ever.

Eva yawned from reaction. A slight gooseflesh crept over her, in the stony foyer; leaving the bench, she dawdled out of the gallery into open sunlight; Charing Cross Road. Its cataracting glaring velocity made her blink, after the twilit arrestedness of history. This now was the rush hour striking up. An ant-hill of aimful and desperate fevers. From where she stood, how many minutes to Primrose Hill? No good being too soon, fetching Jeremy; bad, on the other hand, to be tardy. And above all, ruinous (after yesterday) not to fetch him herself —that she shrank from the studio with its gorgon inmate would be suspected. She side-angled past Foyle’s windows on her way to where the Jaguar was.

Timing proved perfect: just after five Eva drew up at the sculptress’s door, half-heartedly painted yellow. (The woman still occupied what had been the parental home, but let off the top half; she retained use of the garden, into which projected the fateful studio.) Eva rang, hard, then got back into the car. Her wait prolonged itself to three, four minutes—she began to beat a hand on the wheel. Then the door opened. The woman, who wore today more than ever her look of hallowed stupidity, mystical-bovine, was sexlessly belted into a monkish overall with thrown-back cowl, out of which rose a neck corded with tendons, supporting a head which might have been sculpted by herself—or rather projected, begun upon, then abandoned. “Oh?” she inquired in her unfocussed way. “I didn’t imagine it could be anybody. Then, you are wanting something?”

“Jeremy, only.”

“Oh, but he’s gone, you know.”

“But that is impossible. I did not send for him.”

“But your friend came for him. You would know, she told me.”

“No. I have no friend.”

The woman received this extreme statement with apathy, merely saying: “Then I don’t understand.”

Eva broke out of the car, on the off side, and came round the bonnet saying: “I have forgotten your name.”

“Applethwaite, simply.”

“Miss Applethwaite, when was this?—how long ago?”

“I should think, an hour. About an hour.
I
,” the woman explained, with the melted smile of a martyr out of the flame, “was working.” More directly addressing Eva than she had so far, she pointed out: “And still am. She interrupted us both; but he then went away with her willingly; I assumed he knew her. Usually it’s hard to make him break off, but all today there had been some kind of hitch or disturbance. He lost his way with that head, I think, since you saw it… Could she be some friend he has made unknown to you?”

“No. He is not confiding. Nor is he ever out of my sight, except when here, where I thought him safe.”

“Then,” said the woman passively, “it is quite a mystery.”

“No. It is quite simple. He has been stolen.”

“I expect,” said the woman, in an unaltered tone, “you had better come in, hadn’t you, and sit down?” She hypnotised Eva into entering a front room, of some sort—Eva saw nothing. The woman, locked in dubiety or in some kind of travail, stayed at a distance—attempting, possibly, to recall Civil Defence directive as to handling of bomb shock? She resorted to fishing out of her garment a veteran packet of cigarettes—she shook one out, offered it, uncomplainingly waited for some reaction, then took it back and lit it herself. The two or three pulls she took on it boned her up: resistance began to formulate. “But you know,” she told Eva, “if you had any reason to think anything like this was liable to happen, you should have told me. In that case, I would not have accepted Jeremy. I undertake to in so far as it may be possible teach children, not body-guard them. This was unfair to me.”

“What did she look like?” asked Eva, rousing herself.

“I can never describe anyone. Words do not connect, for me; I am visual purely. And tactile, naturally.”

“That does not alter the fact that he is gone.”

“Breathe,” advocated the sculptress suddenly, visited by at least a fragment of recollection, “deeply. Deeply and slowly. You will be all right.”

“Had she dark hair, very white forehead?”

Hard put to it, Applethwaite queryingly knocked on her own forehead with a thumb-knuckle;
she
breathed deeply. “The hair was dark, but worn in a bull fringe coming low down, like a Knossos dancer’s or in a Zola film, so that one could not see what was underneath. One was not meant to? It was as though to hide something, some disfigurement, scar or burn or a birth-mark. It overhung the eyes, and they looked dilated. The rest of the face had been made look pale; whether it
was
pale I cannot say. Remember, I only saw her for a minute.”

“You lost little time in letting Jeremy go.”

“Miss Trout,” said the woman, more with regret than passion, “that is an intolerable remark.”

“This is an intolerable thing.”

“You have to realise that I was working. Then, it is difficult not to be lost to everything.”

“How long could it take to travel from Reading?”

“I do not know where it is, I have never been there.”

“No, I suppose not. You are not helping me.—You did not notice her hands?”

“The nails were painted, but bitten. She wore bracelets.— Miss Trout, have you some enemy?”

“I don’t know.”

The sculptress again proffered a cigarette. Her spatulate fingers, unexpectedly lively, were deeply mahoganied by nicotine—they started tapping about her, over various surfaces, unrewardedly hunting for something: matches? During the interregnum, Jeremy appeared to flit like a marsh-light across the invisible room. Un-tensed by coming upon the matches, Applethwaite said: “He and I hit it off. That happens so rarely. Jeremy was remarkable. One wondered what he thought, what he might have said.
You
must have wondered?”

“Nothing was lost on Jeremy,” said Eva.

“Miss Trout, you ought not to speak of him in the past tense.”

“You did.”

The woman said lifelessly: “I did not intend to.”

Eva, faltering in every part of her body, became afraid: perceiving some sort of ottoman or divan she got to wherever it was and let herself drop. The thing was against a wall, to which she was able to turn her face, at the same time muffling her mouth with both hands. Then, gradually loosening her fingers, she said between them: “If he
is
in the past, there is no future. He was to be everything I shall not be.”

The woman rebuked Eva. “This is too soon.”

“What is too soon?”

“This—this abandonment. It is premature. What real reason is there why harm should come to him?”

“Is it not harm being in evil hands?”

“Do you,” inquired Applethwaite, looking with abhorrence towards her telephone, “wish me to let the police know?”

“No!”

“I do not want to, but might it not be advisable?”

“No, it would not be advisable. They would ask questions.”

“There is nothing to hide?”

“This is not the first time Jeremy has been stolen.”

“Ought you to communicate with your lover?”

“Henry is not.”

“Or former lover. The boy’s father.”

“There is no such person.”

“You know, this will ruin me,” interjected the sculptress, starting moving about and across the carpet, in her sere and it now seemed penitential garment, with a masochistic, doomed, acquiescent smoothness, as though taking part in an
auto-da-fé
procession of one. “Whatever happens. Sooner or later. When that agency hears of this, it will drop me. No more pupils; what do I in future live on? I have never been ‘recognised’; I have been passed by. ‘Applethwaite’ would have been a name to have made, I have sometimes thought, just the kind of name; but no one has ever heard it. No one has heard of me. My work means nothing to the world; I try not to let it mean more to me for that very reason.—Why, I wonder?” she went on, in the same monotone. “Or, why not—what is it that has not happened? Why has nothing put a stop to the blindness, their blindness that I am right in the middle of? It makes me no money, naturally—my work—and not only that but what I need for it costs money, so that if I have none I cannot go on. Apart from rent from above”—Applethwaite nodded up at the ceiling—”I have nothing to keep going on but rich children, and who will send those any more to where one was taken from? No, this is the end of me. Still, it cannot be helped.—Can it, Lucius?”

A cat answered: rearing its head up, it stretched open its mouth to the widest. Its eyes were slits. Brindled so darkly as to be blackish, it had been sleeping, flat, on a blackish chair. The woman gathered the cat up and held it splayed against her concave chest—with a hind paw, claws out, it scrabbled for foothold in the region of the monastic belt. She fitted a finger under the paw, resisting its violent downward mistrustful thrusts. Doing so, she asked Eva: “You never felt he could become an encumbrance?”

“
What
? I don’t understand.”

“You might not want to. The little boy, I mean—as he is.”

Only slowly, to Eva, did the import of the outrageous question come seeping through. So righting her attitude on the ottoman, or divan, as to rid it of the indignity of collapse, she said: “You say this to justify your own carelessness.”

“Lucius does not encumber me; but then, he is an animal.”

“Are you human, Miss Applethwaite? At such a moment as this?—you must be infernal. I not only don’t understand what you say to me, I do not understand how you dare say it.”

“One dares to wonder—always, I suppose,” said Applethwaite vaguely, studying the fur on the skull of the cat. She added: “I did not do more than that. But you may be right; I should not have asked you. As you say, at
this
moment—but then, it was this moment which made me ask. I am not unfeeling; I feel solicitude for you. I have no future, for reasons which I have told you; but you have, and yours might take any course—yes, really any, I should imagine. You are a person who would expect your future to be according to your desires; you would not, would you, suffer obstruction gladly? All I have done, as I said, is, wonder; you are wildly agitated, so take that badly—I cannot blame you.”

“Would you expect me to be calm?” asked Eva, more terribly than she had ever spoken.

“No; but it would have been better if you had tried to be. It is the extreme way you have gone on which made me wonder. You so immediately, I would say almost eagerly, jumped to the very worst, most frightful conclusions. You have worked yourself up and worked yourself up. Any less frightening explanation—and there could be several—as to what may have happened to Jeremy, you have swept aside. If you do fear the worst, why object to taking what would then be the rational course, notifying the police? But no, you prefer to cling to fearing the worst, without aid and without reason. I am sorry, but it is a known fact that people most dread what they subconsciously desire, or, if not desire, could assent to with little trouble. Suppose you to have a lover, or wished-for lover, or wished-for husband, who could come into conflict with the exactions of Jeremy? Might not, then, the little boy be an obstacle, and an obstacle not to be overcome?”

“Words,” said Eva, “do
not
seem to disconnect from you, Miss Applethwaite.”

“It is simply that I cannot describe people.”

“You are jealous, and wish to acquire Jeremy. I could see that, when we were in the studio.”

The woman pressed the sufficient cat nearer her breast, saying: “I don’t think so.” She pondered, then went on: “Perhaps I have said too much. Regard me as having been talking to myself; it in fact is my habit to think aloud. I wonder what should be the next step; that is, what you had better do?—I am sorry, I should have been glad to help you. Should you, perhaps, return to your hotel and await developments? I cannot believe you have no friends; surely somewhere there must be some who could advise you, or perhaps even throw some light on the matter. I shall remain here, as I do usually. Should I hear anything, or should anything further happen, or should I think of anything, I shall of course—”