Eva Trout (3 page)

Never had she uttered a word about the loneliness. She had her brain, of course? The rate she did those translations at was astonishing, the more so when there she was with the house on her hands,
making
work, dating back to the Year One. Yes, looking back, that had been a bad patch. “Go back to teaching again, for a while at least?” he had put forward. “ ‘Back’?” she had cried aloud. “ ‘
Back’
!—I never go
back
!” Dead-white in the face. That had shaken him; he piped down. Later, as things got no better and somewhat worse, some idea of W.E.A. lecturing or some such had come to be entertained. But that meant, out at nights, all over the country. When would they see each other? … Then, just then, Eva had come along.

“Waiting supper for her?” he now asked.

“Why?—No.” She began to get out of her chair.

“No, look—stop a minute!” he interposed. “No such great hurry.” So she settled down again, showing no feeling either way. (Her movements as housewife were those of a marionette: these days they were less frequent, and less compulsive —”help” five mornings a week, and a shining Aga with one of those long-term ovens.) Eric continued: “Speaking of the garage, you do know she’s been on at me about that? She’s got it into her head we could take her on there; and will she take ‘no’ for an answer?—no, she will not.”

“That was quite unknown to me,” said Iseult calmly. “As you say, it would never do.”

“No. We don’t want another hand, and we don’t take learners: that I’ve told her repeatedly.” He pondered. “I see her idea, though, in a way.”

Iseult asked: “What idea do you see?”

“You can’t blame her for wanting to do something with herself, can you?”

“Eric, do I ever blame anyone?”

“I don’t know,” he confessed sombrely. “That, I shall never know.—But Eva,” he went on, with a change of tone, “should have some outlet; or otherwise she’ll run into some other trouble. Not much society round here—is there?”

“That,” Iseult pointed out, “I would hardly know.” She held a hand up, studied the fingertips. “And what would any society do with Eva?”

“Why not?—she’s not defective in any way. And look at her future, look what’s coming to her! We’ve no right to leave her playing cowboys-and-Indians—or
is
that all she’s up to? You don’t think she’s going with anybody we’ve not got wind of? … Izzy, what do we know about that marriage?”

“Chiefly,” she said, exhausted, “that it’s evaporated.”

“Yes. But at the time,” he declared, “we should have known more.”

Iseult drew up her shoulders, as though a wind blew. Then, looking down her Italian cardigan, she began, absorbed, to pluck at the tuft of threads in the place the button was gone from—bother it! “Constantine,” she remarked, as from far away, “seemed to be satisfied: he’s her guardian.”

“Is he up to the job?”

“You should have it, probably?”

Eric’s answer was: silence. He splayed his hands out on the moquette chair arms, put the whole of his weight on them, bent forward, thrust himself upward out of the chair. He was going away? He turned his back on Iseult and went to a window. This Larkins living-room ran through the not great depth of the house, south-north: it had, therefore, a window at either end—the one to which he had gone was the back, or north, one. Outside lay the orchards—the lost acres. Through the gap in the curtains he stared out, trying to decipher the darkness. Nothing. He whistled at nothing, under his breath.

Iseult was frightened, defiant. She ventured: “Sorry.”

“What for?” said he, in no particular tone, not turning round.

“For what I said.”

“Did you?”

“
Please
, Eric!”

“Nothing,” he mused, “makes sense. I don’t; you don’t You and I don’t, too much, Izzy? She makes sense as much as else.” He whistled again.

Too much … Iseult, with a desolate sob, a desperate one, relinquishing life, cast herself back as far as the chair went, head slithering sideways against a cushion that slid with it. Thus she remained: a carcase: only her hands livingly twisting themselves together. “Eric,” her voice began, like a voice recorded how many years ago? “Eric, Eric, Eric.”

“What is it, Izzy?”

“Come back—can’t you come back? Come here.”

He did as she asked.

She unknotted the hands and flung one of them out beseechingly. He half-laughed, sat on an arm of her chair, caught hold of the hand and massaged it with his thumb. “That’s a good girl—eh?” Then, leaning lower over her rigid stillness, he restored the hand to her, pityingly laying it across her breast as he might a dead woman’s. A tear from under a closed lid slid down her cheek. Her lips struggled.

“No, but what
is
it, Izzy?”

“I didn’t mean to be terrible.”

“If she’s going to get on your nerves she had better go.”

“Then what would become of us?”

“We made out before,” he said, though with shaken certainty.

“No, we didn’t.” She butted her head further into the cushion. “You know we didn’t—I cracked.”

He considered that. “Then need she get on your nerves?”

“Always there, always there, always there.”

“I know, I know, I know: but what about it? Old Eva— what can she do to you? Or what
does
she do?” She turned in her chair—he received a sudden, as it were a stolen, view of her face: its bereftness, its unresigned weariness of its exile. He took a leap in the dark. “Remind you of what you
could
do?—of what you
used
to be when you liked?”

Instantly the eyes opened. Tear-blotted as they were, they dilated at him. “What do you mean?”

“How can I tell you?”

“Don’t go away from me—don’t! I love you, I love you. What does she do to
us
?”

“We’re all right.—Smile at me, Izzy?”

“We don’t make sense, you just said.”

“Well, nor we do.—But go on, smile at me, Izzy!”

She smiled like the girl she had been.

“So you see?” he said. Frowning lightly, intently, he moved her hand from her breast to put his in its place. This hand of his went about till it felt her heart beat. She said: “We never make love.”

“
What
…?”

He reached round her, got his hand under the cushion and raised up the cushion, her head and all. Feeling his breath on her lips, Iseult gave a final sigh, as though falling asleep.

Then, sharply, he turned his head away, listening sharply.

“—Eric—?”

“I’m just listening.”

“I know you are.” They both listened. “Yes,” he said, “that’s the Jag. Here she comes …”

THE VICARAGE had witnessed various scenes of clerical life. Not old, it was elderly, landed on this village by a wave of ecclesiastical betterment in the 1880’s. In many ways it was a dreadful building: narrow-visaged, four stories high, topped by peaky gables. The windows were church-like, as was the porch. Internally it was no better: an ill-lit staircase climbed up a shaft in the middle, conducting draughts. Draughts also rose from between floorboards, causing the ascetic carpets to billow. There was no hope the place would ever be sold, allowing the Danceys to move into a bungalow, as did more fortunate clergy, for who would buy it? As Mrs. Dancey said, “If it had been Queen Anne …” The best to be said for it was, she thought, that it at any rate was not infested like Borley Rectory: no occult manifestations, which was as well, for the hollow plan of the house made home life already noisy enough.

For that reason, Mr. Dancey’s study was at the top. Amid starlings chittering round the chimneys he had wedged an attic with stuffed bookcases, from which his oil-heater drew a musty smell. He secured a degree of peace, not much, and least of all during the Christmas holidays, with indoor children at large in the rooms below or gathering for conference on the stairs. No door but his was ever shut, though some banged fitfully when a wind blew.

Yesterday’s outing to the castle had emptied the vicarage, but for Mr. Dancey; which he had found ideal. This, by contrast, was a terrible morning. All at once he came bursting out of his study, with a choked roar. “Stop that!”

Silence.

Determined not to have worked himself up for nothing, he reiterated: “Stop it, I say!”

“We have, Father.”

“Yes, I daresay,” he said, in a scoffing tone, not unlike Henry’s. “For how long?”

“We have to be somewhere.”

“What are you doing, for instance?”

“Waiting for Eva.”

“That reminds me, Catrina, I’m out of Kleenex.”

“You
can’t
be, Father!” His elder girl, beginning to come upstairs, gave a bothered and busy toss to her yellow plaits.

“Yes, I can, and I am.” He gave the child an as nearly malignant look as his nature permitted. He revengefully told her: “I’m down to handkerchiefs.”

“Goodness. How many?”

“Three.—No, four,” he announced, going through his pockets.

“Give them to me; I’ll boil them.” Catrina held out a masterful hand.

“Hi, you can’t take them all away! What am I to do?”

“That inhalant I gave you should dry your nose up.”

“It makes my eyes water.”

“Writing that book again?” She looked superstitiously past him into the study. Chaos reigned on his desk.

“I had thought of doing so.”

“Give me all of those handkerchiefs, then I’ll get you more Kleenex.”

“What am I to do in the meantime?”

“You can contain yourself for a minute or two, surely, Father?”

Mr. Dancey did not seem certain, perhaps rightly. At the very thought he had to repress a sneeze, which cost him an agonising contortion. At forty-two, he would have been better-looking than any of his children were it not for the havoc wrought by his chronic affliction. His alive countenance had seldom a chance to be quite itself; vision, discernment and charity shone from it, but often as though through a blurred pane—inflamed eyelids, sore, swollen nostrils, bloated upper lip. There were few intermissions: when winter relaxed its grip he regularly started to have hay fever—April’s first flowering currant bush set him going. He did not allow his handicap to worry him, as apparently nobody could do anything about it (he never was seriously ill) but it did exasperate him occasionally. Occupationally, his anxiety was his voice, which had taken to varying in volume as unaccountably as though a poltergeist were fiddling with the controls, sometimes coming out with a sudden boom or a roar, sometimes fading till off the air. The suspense induced was particularly noticeable in church, and was on the whole enjoyed by his congregation. One and all thought highly of Mr. Dancey.

“What did you say you were doing?” he asked Catrina—in what dropped, without warning, to a conspirator’s whisper.

“Waiting for Eva. We have been, most of the morning.”

“Perhaps she’ll be taking you all out again?” he suggested, brightening.

“We hope not. Today we’re rather exhausted.”

“You did not sound exhausted,” said Mr. Dancey. He turned back into his study and shut the door, reopening it to shout: “
Hurry
!”

It was as Catrina feared: there was no more Kleenex aywhere in the vicarage. Four outsize boxes consumed since January ist!—an ominous opening to the year. For this luxury, since its discovery by Mr. Dancey, was one of the few breaks in the family’s abstemiousness: it sent household bills up worse than anything else. Resignedly the daughter slung on her overcoat and, having waited only to drop the handkerchiefs into the kitchen fish kettle, to simmer, made off at a lope down the village street—long, here and there obsoletely pretty, and this morning made still more torpid by frozen mist. At the far end, Catrina was vexed to perceive the Jaguar contentedly sitting outside the post office, back turned obliviously to the vicarage. Then Eva walked out of the post office, looking
affairée
, larger than life in the frame of the humble door. She wore a Robin Hood hat and an ocelot coat and carried a mighty crocodile handbag. None of this gear had been seen before. Occupied in shovelling money into the handbag, she did not observe Catrina coming alongside. “Good morning,” said Catrina sarcastically.

Eva succeeded in snapping the bag shut. “Oh good morning. I am in quite a hurry.”

“Oh, are you?”

“Yes. I am going to London, to see my guardian.”

“Well, I like
that!
” exclaimed the aggrieved girl. “Last night, you told us all to wait in for you this morning.”

“Last night I had not yet had his letter.”

“Henry,” remarked Catrina, “will be furious.”

Eva heaved a sigh, though pleasurably. “Will he miss me?”

“What Henry wanted to do was, go into town. Now it’s too late; the bus will have gone—so there goes
his
morning!”

Eva shouted: “How can I change—now? I have sent a telegram. He might never, never forgive me. I mean, my guardian.”

“You might have said, though. You could have telephoned.”

“Oh no I could not!” Eva now brought forth from under an armpit, and tugged on, a pair of immense gauntlets, ocelot-backed. Flexing her fingers inside them, she went on darkly: “Telephone? To telephone was impossible.”

Cloak-and-dagger? Catrina deflated
that
by saying, merely: “Is your hat meant to be crooked?”

“I don’t know,” replied Eva, punching it straight. The long pheasant-feather quivered like an antenna.

“
I
am in a hurry,” stated Catrina, looking away from Eva into a shop. “Father, in fact, will be going out of his mind.”

“Give my affectionate greetings to Mr. Dancey!”

The vicarage child (muffling, perhaps, a pang?) asked: “
Driving
to London?”

“No; to the train only. I wish not to be lost in the mists round London; I am not in the mood.” Staring at nothing, Eva beat the gauntlets together. “My hands are gone cold, cold, cold. I am cold all over.”

“It’s a cold day,” said Catrina, nose in the air.

“No, Catrina. Cold since I had his letter.”

“Why? He can’t eat you; or can he?”

“Certainly
not
,” said Miss Trout. (The very idea!) “What did his letter say, then?” pursued Catrina.