Eva Trout (28 page)

The reply was:

Yes, Constantine, of course if you wish it I will. I would not for anything shirk your trust, but I must say I am put in rather a fix. I simply cannot subscribe to your “gang” theory: don’t you think you’ve been reading too many stories? Surely professionals don’t work so xnaladroitly? In less than four hours, that little boy of Eva’s blandly gave “them” the slip. Was that not odd?

Must anybody bully the woolly lady? Can you find no other way to make peace with Eva? After all, the boy, like the cat in the song, came back.

Iseult.

In counter-reply:

My dear Iseult,

Do you know, it’s you I think who are odd. Is this extra-sensory? What makes
you
say, “less than four hours”? For how long the boy was missing, I never told you—not in fact knowing.

How do you do your hair, these days? Still showing that wonderful forehead?

Constantine.

Cat-and-mouse again …

Their enticing if saturnine flavour made it hard for Iseult to detach herself from such thoughts, though in a minute she would be needing others. Umbrella up, she advanced on the vicarage through a leaden downpour which rebounded from her silvery raincoat (unlike the yellow Lumleigh oilskin) to splash in over the tops of her matching overboots. The once-familiar village with its flash additions wavered at her through vertical water. A stopped-up gutter on the vicarage porch resulted in cataracts one was obliged to dive through. “I’ve come to see you,” she said to Mrs. Dancey.

“Do come in!” exclaimed Mrs. Dancey, with instant enthusiasm—she never hesitated till later. Now forced to, she scanned her visitor with a pleading wildness. “I
know
who you are; but—”

“My name’s ‘Arble.’”

“Yes, of course! You are not drowned, I hope?”

Across the threshold, Mrs. Arble rustled out of her raincoat, tugged off the overboots. “I’m afraid,” she said, watching the former being hung from a hat-rack, “that will drip all over your floor.”

“Look how ours do! I’m so sorry you’ve never been here before—I don’t think you have? We had always hoped …”

“Larkins,” smiled the
revenante
, “seems so long ago.”

“Yes. The new lady is a keen gardener.” They entered the drawing-room, duskier than outdoors. “I hope you’ve been well?” went on Mrs. Dancey, conscious of hazard. “In France, I fancy somebody said? I’m so sorry my husband’s out; he will be so sorry. By a coincidence, we are just off to France, or rather, Paris. We are taking the choir—that’s to say, going with them, not
taking
them; they’ve saved up-—on one of those three-day tours. We’re flying there. How they have cut down prices, now they’re compelled tol We don’t expect to be comfortable, but it should be interesting—best of all, we hope to be seeing Eva. Do sit down: where would you like to? The sofa looks like a stranger without its cover, which has gone to the wash—I seized the occasion.”

Iseult selected a chair whose woolwork was fast unpicking itself: what a pity, it could have been in fashion! “Oh, then you know where Eva is?”

“Yes. And there’ll be the little boy—I missed him the day she brought him here. I hear he is a darling, and so clever: all the same how heart-breaking, isn’t it!” Mrs. Dancey, beset by some vague idea that there had been some paternity-complication, took thought, hoped for the best, plunged on. “Have you, have you seen him, Mrs. Arble?”

“I’ve not yet seen Eva. She has vanished again.”

“Oh, no; Henry knows where she is. You remember Henry?”

“So well.—Constantine Ormeau’s worried, though. She rushed off without a word to him, other than an alarming telegram.”

“That was too bad,” pronounced Mrs. Dancey. “Poor Mr. Ormeau—when he came to tea he seemed so sincere, sad. Lonely, I thought. But he and our little girl made great friends. At that time, he was looking for you, I think.”

“Yes. What a lot of trouble we all give him.—Henry’s now a young man?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Dancey agreed, with a troubled air. “At Cambridge. I do wish Eva would not be thoughtless!”

“How, Mrs. Dancey?—May I smoke, by the way?”

“Do, do! I’m sorry we haven’t any. What I
am
going to do, though, is make tea.—I mean, telling nobody where she goes.”

Iseult, chucking a spent match into the empty grate, remarked, in a voice as nonchalant as the action: “She told Henry.”

“I imagine she sent him a picture postcard. But from childhood they have been kindred spirits.”

“They weren’t children at exactly the same time.”

“No, not exactly, but Eva’s a child at heart—don’t you think so?—didn’t you always find?”

“Not always,” confessed Iseult, contracting her shoulders.

“Oh, you’re
not
cold? A miserable day like this deserves a fire: who would think this was May? But my husband and I are alone, and we’re in-and-out. So long as May isn’t like this in Paris! Shall I give you Eva’s address?—I shall have to find it.”

“That would be kind. Constantine would be glad.”

“How particularly lucky,” said Henry’s mother, “that Henry sent it!”

“How particularly lucky it came his way!”

For a moment, Mrs. Dancey looked at her visitor, not in alarm, more with concern, wonder. Overtones, also undertones, were beyond her. “What can the matter be?” was her theme song, both in parish and in family life—as a rule, the ejaculation remained in mid-air. “I
must
boil the kettle,” she argued, “or we shan’t have tea. While I do—look, there are some magazines; some of them may be old, I don’t know how old.” She hesitated, flushed, prayed for grace, re-buttoned her cardigan. “Mrs. Arble, will you allow me to tell you, we were so sorry …”

“About our marriage?” Iseult asked, in a bright, jarred voice.

“I wonder if anything human is ever over?”

“This is. Still, thank you very much.”

“Yes, I see,” replied Mrs. Dancey, in such a manner as to make it perfectly clear that she did not. “How nice, though, that you are back. Are you here long?”

“In these parts? No. Just a sentimental journey.”

“Too bad it’s raining.”

“Oh, do you think so? Don’t pity me, Mrs. Dancey. I just wanted to know if I
could
feel. I can’t, I’m cleared. I’m as dead as a doornail.”

“One may,” declared Mrs. Dancey, with unusual vigour, “want to be, but it’s wrong to. One never is. I wonder if anyone told you, we lost Louise.”

She went to the kitchen.

Iseult, after a minute, rose and pottered across to the big chipped writing desk, which yawned open, too overflowing to close. Her intentions were vagrant, and not dishonourable— all she wanted to know was, of just
what
junk this havering life was composed. A snapshot, however, was half-submerged in one of the upper waves of the depths of clutter. She looked closer: this could only be Henry. She extracted him, took him nearer the window. “Yes …” she thought, not altogether surprised. He had not (evidently) posed, but been stolen up upon—he flung round upon the aggressor’s camera. Instantaneousness, as so often, had done the trick: a very great amount of him had been “caught.” Temperament was depth-charged up into features which, by their cast, looked as if they would pride themselves on no show of it. Eight years had made the slip of a schoolboy, with his superciliousness, his taunting disregardfulness, into a fellow to be reckoned with—whether or not he was ready to be reckoned with, just yet. “What an eye,” Iseult ungrudgingly indeed admiringly reflected, “Eva always did have, from the start. She loved me, once.”

The teacher could not have satisfied more fully the curiosity bringing her to the vicarage. She replaced Henry and followed his mother into the kitchen. “Could I help?”

Mrs. Dancey, rummaging among paper bags in the cake-tin, turned round, startled. She took in the re-entering woman with new enlightenment. “I see
now
why I didn’t recognise you—you must have thought me so very stupid. Your hair’s different from once, and it alters you.”

Mother says [wrote Henry, a week later] you seemed very well. She felt bad playing truant from the choir, not to speak of skipping the Tomb of Napoleon, but the afternoon with you was like old times, she says. Your hotel is picturesque, she says. She felt she was very greedy at the patisserie. So it sounds to me as though everything was now back again on a good banal footing, which was my object. I really can only go on on an even keel. Only one thing misfired: why did only she go to see you, not Father too?—surely the choir could have got themselves round the Tomb of Napoleon, they’re not such mutts. What made him shy off? I have a feeling he has got wind of something. And you do realise that would never do, don’t you? He would be appalled; why, I cannot tell you, though I suppose I in a way know. I’m not sure I’m not slightly appalled, sometimes.

No, I know I haven’t written, I’m well aware of that. For one thing I
am
working like a black, you don’t know what it is to be in this torture-house. But also what am I to say? I think it’s just as well you are in Paris, to be honest. What happened the other day, just before we went to your train in Cambridge, was my fault, asking that idiotic question. Let sleeping dogs lie, I ought to have thought—but then you see till I asked I was not certain whether there was a dog. We always have been on extraordinary terms.

To do me justice, it wasn’t totally vanity (though it could have been). More, and still more like me, I’m sorry to say, a passion for finding out followed by paralysis when I’ve done so. No, Eva, I’m not going to treat you to a whole lot of adolescent introspection—anyway, oddly enough, that is not my
forte
: perhaps I am not yet fully adolescent? My trouble is, I don’t know how to proceed. Would it be too crude to ask what you want? No, forgive me, to put it like that seems horrible—and, anyway, I quite often think it’s conceivable you don’t know.

How’s Jeremy? Edified, I hope. I must say, in many ways I envy him; I mean, I’d only too well have liked to have come to Paris, to be in Paris. Mother spoke highly of it (I haven’t of course seen her, only a letter). She’ll have told you about the sensational reappearance of Mrs. Arble, like a voluptuous dryad on our doorstep, two days before they came away? I always told you that one would turn up. She obtained, as you’d say, your address from Mother, with a view to handing it on to your lonely Guardian. How could one foresee
that
?—I am very sorry. I hope there’ve been so far no bad results?

When are you back from Paris? I do want to see you, don’t think I don’t. Don’t ever go right away again, will you?—Here comes Parker, as ever, so I must stop.

Love,

Henry.

On learning from the culpable Mrs. Dancey of the leakage as to her whereabouts, Eva at once pulled out of the Left Bank and removed to Fontainebleau, which Jeremy had taken a liking to. Her postcard informing Henry of change of habitat reached Cambridge too late to deflect his letter, which consequently she never received—ceasing to suppose she would hear from him, Eva adhered to her known principle of leaving no forwarding address with any hotel. In the rack of the cross-eyed Paris one, therefore, the letter probably is still, more flyblown with each day.

At Fontainebleau, one is elevated from tourist status by staying on. She and Jeremy, going about their business, came to be recognisable features of the town. She with her mighty gait and unfinished handsomeness, he with the touching aureol of his handicap engaged first interest, later a sympathy warmed by local possessiveness. They received, correctly, absolutely correct overtures, in and around the hotel they remained on in, in shops and the market, in the selecter patisseries and cafés where they partook perpetually of
cafés crémes
. It was, even, intimated to them by residents who, exercising dogs in the
château
park, veered past, though nearer each time, the young woman and child, that they were about to become acceptable. Greetings began to be exchanged, to be widened out into conversations. It was in the course of such conversations that a suggestion was first launched and afterwards urged: Eva ought to, nay, must, contact a couple, doctor and doctor wife, who, in this vicinity, devoted themselves to cases such as Jeremy’s. They worked by a method they had themselves evolved—its success depended on certain factors, in the main psychic; they were known to be scrupulous in refusing children with whom it was unlikely to take effect. Eva, therefore, made herself known to the Bonnards (as their name was). She returned for a second time with Jeremy, whom, at their desire, she left alone with them. They accepted him.

These people lived some kilometres out of Fontainebleau; one could more quickly walk to them through the forest. Their house with its white doves and weathered jalousies, bound round by a patriarchal wisteria, re-inspired in Eva a lost confidence—she had not believed she could ever again leave Jeremy in others’ keeping. Nor was that all: as the month of May went on his lips began to formulate, or attempt to formulate, French words, and he started to accord to the lips of speakers, other than Eva, a level, exacting, scientific attention denied formerly. He had been won over—or, had his going to the Bonnards’ happened to synchronise with a disposition to lower his defences? If the latter, what could have been the reason?—what
had
decided him? One could recollect that, since the flight to Paris, in fact since the eve of the flight to Paris, he had, for all his angel amenability, been withdrawn as never before. To be as others, simply to be as others, had never tempted him—what, as the terms of his lordly, made-magical life were, could (as Constantine had asked) be the inducement? But now, by what means had the idea of
exceeding
been made known to him, or made itself known to him? … He was interacting ideally with the Bonnards, could be on the verge of being one of their miracles—but that they disclaimed miracles. “He requires now, madame,” said Gérard Bonnard to Eva, in his simplicity, “only, the company of an intelligent person. He is going through a phase of enlarged desires, of which all
possible
—I say to you, all possible—should be met.”