Eva Trout (31 page)

Eva picked up a paddle and moved the boat, gently. “Oh, you mean what I told you, all you children?”

“We had not a cat’s idea whether to believe you, I do remember. But then, you were altogether out of our. ken, that day—all us children. How dumb with misery we were: frozen! My ears flame with frost-bite, now you remind me!” He flicked at one of them and again looked round him. “This place is always extreme: either winter or summer.”

“
Oh
, no,” she declared, from the depths. “Autumn.”

“That time you lost your heart to it?”

“When I never
was
here was spring.”

“Then next spring, why don’t we?—no, by then it will be teeming with people. Why can’t it stay as it is?” Henry stared rebelliously at the castle, which seemed to be leaning a little back, like a propped-up canvas, against the wall of trees. “No, I suppose it would fall down. But last time we thought it would, and it hasn’t—how tenacious it is!” He refilled a glass and partly crouched, partly reached down the short boat (they were at opposite ends) getting wine to Eva. Both wore bright shirts: hers French, his an unaccounted-for present from Italy. They admired each other, dreamily, as they did the scenery, their voices meanwhile wandering freely, away from them, over the captive lake: impossible to say anything which was not simple. “I don’t think I want to come back,” he said. “This is too lovely.—Oh, but I
would
like, Eva, to go inside!”

“It’s locked, I suppose.”

“Or don’t you want to?”

“We’ll try, Henry.” The blunt boat pushed an onward way through the leaves, on to which drops fell from the slow paddle. They landed, tied up, made their way round the castle into the entrance courtyard steeply impended over by woods. It was green with silence. Everywhere was deserted. Doors of mouldering outbuildings stood ajar. “That is where bicycles were stolen from,” said Eva, indicating one.

Henry walked away from her, to stand in solitude, taking all in.

“Mrs. Stote, there used to be,” mused Eva, as lost to him as he was to her.

Henry exclaimed: “My passion for knowing!”

That that be satisfied, if possible, she went over and wrenched at a rusted door-handle: the central portal’s. From decorations round it stucco had flaked, crumbled, and, smithereened by falling on to the flagstones, powdered those. More was shaken down, by the useless battle, on to Eva’s head, greying her hair—brushing at it, she brushed it in. She grimaced defeatedly at Henry. “Shall you look like that when you are old?” he asked from afar. Penetrating a network of ferny passage-ways, she rattled at service doors, seeing her reflection in glass panes against internal shutters. Nothing yielded. She returned to the courtyard, saying: “I’m sorry, Henry.”

“Well, there it is.”

“We could go to the cottage where someone might have the key if she’s alive.”

“No,
no
; that’s making too much of it.” He took an upward inventory of the sightless windows: on this side, there was something intimidating about the stained, sham castle, saturated in shadow. Evening, even at this hour, possessed it, mockingly exaggerating the height to which it tapered beneath the belittling hills. Its interior—for from
here
there could be no doubt that it had one—could be felt to be full of revengeful unheard echoes. Dungeons within it, even, could be imagined—as though by frivolling with the past the building incurred the past at its nastiest. To top all,
this
elevation had a constricted look she had not remembered. “The Dark Tower,” said Henry. “Let’s go back to the boat and finish the wine.”

Vacating the courtyard, they brushed their way back to the boat through growing grass.

“I wish we’d brought another bottle,” remarked Henry, tilting the one there was to see what was left. They did not untie the boat; she did not get in but sat on the verge, matted with white clover, above it. “You’re more of a bibber than you were, Eva. France, naturally. What did you do in France?— did you fall in love?”

“What a ridiculous question,” she said, bored.

“I’m not so sure.”

“Under the circumstances.”

Measuring out what remained into their two glasses, handing hers up to her, he went on insistently: “I did wonder— considering how inane I’ve been. Paralytic!
I
should have chucked myself twenty-five times over! So then why not a
coup de foudre
, in that amorous land? You’ve seemed remote, somehow—you have, Eva. When you wrote, you wrote a remote letter. All today, it’s been as though you were thinking about something, or somebody. Not that everything hasn’t been wonderful—still, I wondered.” Leaning over, he sank the emptied bottle, gurgling, into the lake. “One never knows,” he said, watching bubbles rise.

“You, I was thinking about,” Eva said, giving distance to the admission by directing it to a far off skyline.

“How can one think about somebody while they’re with one?—I can’t. I haven’t
thought
about you since today started. I, I think I’m a bit dizzy, or off my head.” “Oh.”

He shaded his eyes. “You look like a statue, up there against the sky! Whatever I do or say, or don’t do or say, do forgive me, Eva! More, everything’s gone to my head: this place, you—. Drink in the afternoon, I should think, too?—Where are the strawberries?”

“There.” Reaching a toe down, she gave a nudge to the punnet. “But birds have been pecking at them, while we went to the castle.”

“Was that a mistake?” He shifted round in the boat, the better to wonder. There it stood, close behind him,—too close to see as a whole. One could measure, however, with what entirety illusion returns. This was a castle for
this
side. A pleasure-ship. It less stood than was—a shimmery image, tethered to its broken watery image down below. “What do you think went on in it originally? No, it is too dreamed-up; it would never do. Would it? But I think it’s just as well we couldn’t get in.”

Eva had, more or. less, vanished from view. She lay flat on the ground. No verdict from her.

“We might,” he said, “have never come out again.”

“No.”

“Don’t go to sleep!—let’s walk.” He got out of the boat, she got to her feet; they meandered along the lush, tufted margin of the lake. Meadowsweet fragrant amongst rushes did not drown the honey tang from the trodden clover; stretching, lonely, the castle’s neglected lands ran away in inlets into the trees—in the far distance only were any cattle. Soundlessly soft was what was underfoot. “That day,” remembered Henry, after what had become a becalmed silence, “all of this was like iron—and so were you, ‘Miss Trout’! An Iron Maiden.”

Eva rolled a vermilion shirt-sleeve further up, the more freely to scratch a bite on her elbow. Insects were beginning again: which? “What?” she said, as an afterthought.

“May I drive,” he asked, “on the way back? I’ve never driven a Jag.”

“Why wouldn’t you let me come in it to Cambridge?”

“Ostentatious. Also, a Jaguar’s still a sore subject. My first infamous brush with Mammon. You caused it. What a nincompoop as well as a crook he thought me: Father, I mean.”

“Yet, you wish to drive this one?”

“Get the better of it.”

“You could have driven this morning.”

“I was too busy talking about myself.” (He had, certainly, put difficulties on record, and released, for the benefit of Eva, apprehensions, indecisions, mortifications owing to rivalries, and his resentment of various kinds of torment, negative or positive, of which, it could be, he could not have spoken so unguardedly to anyone else. One or two pleasures had been slightingly touched on. (She was far from the milieu which gave any of these context. They related, more or less all of them, to Cambridge, being inextricable from his present status, which was given still greater power to hag-ride him by his too well knowing it to be but too temporary. For—
afterwards
?) “You’re quite good,” he said now, “at seeming to listen. Though in at one ear, out at the other, I expect, really? And just as well; I’m a brilliant bore.—But I did at least ask about Jeremy.”

“Yes, you did, Henry.”

“I can’t get over what’s happening; and so suddenly—at the drop of a hat.”

“Not really.”

“Nothing is sudden really,” he said more soberly. “What
will
he be like, do you imagine?”

“I don’t know,” said Eva—this time, not merely meaning she could not say. The torrents of the future went roaring by her. No beam lit their irresistible waters. The Deluge: dead arms flailing like swimmers’. Where were they on their way to being swept to, she, Henry, Jeremy? Who had opened the sluicegates, let through this roaring? The boy, doing so by the same act by which he heaved the lid from his tomb of silence? Jeremy, whose destiny she had diverted? One does not do such a thing with impunity, the priest had said. The doctor had warned her … She absently turned on Henry, at this moment, caverns of apprehension. He, as absently, said: “Those are Millais wild roses at the edge of that wood. Come over and look.”

On the way, the glassy immunity of the evening lessened. Something began to stir, like a moody breeze. Against an overgrown larch plantation, the showering briar’s crimped pink buds and corollas wide-eyed round tawny stamens stood out translucently as though painted—yet the wildness of these clear roses scattered about on their thorny trailers was, though without a quiver, breathlessly living, as in no picture. “They are early,” said Henry of the country childhood. “It’s early for them to be so many. This is an early summer—too early; everything is vertiginous. What’s supposed to be going to happen, Eva?”

Behind the roses, the vanishing aisles of crushed, tasseled larch boughs, baffled by want of space, preoccupied her—as had the Cambridge mobile. She felt as she then did. “Why?” was her answer.

“Why am I asking, or why should anything happen: which do you mean?” Henry asked, with dogmatic distinctness which was a danger-signal. “In either case, you should know; you are the authority—if there is one? Neither of us seems to know what we are doing.”

“What makes you angry with me suddenly?”

“Nothing is sudden.”

“Then why have you been angry?”

“You shilly-shally.”

“So do you, Henry.

“No I don’t, he said, furious. “Or if I do, what else is there to do?
You
precipitate things, then behave as if there were nothing and never had been. You know as well as I do, something started when you came marching back from America.
And
that it got more while you’ve been in France. But own up to it, cope with it? Oh, no. It’s left to me to make scenes. You go remote.”

“I am shy.” It amazed her he should not know.

She emphasised shyness reaching the point of panic by wading away from Henry into the briar bush, less a bush than a tangled prickly terrain of vigorous arabesque trailers and eager suckers: these seized on her skirt and harried and savaged her bare legs. He was agitated. “What do you think you are being, a nymph in flight? Come
out
of that, Eva; you’ll be like Abraham’s ram! All I was doing was asking you your intentions.” “Oh.”

“Naturally!” shouted Henry.

She turned about in the briar, prepared to parley. “Should you be sorry if I hadn’t any? How sorry?”

He examined the question. “I should feel rather … flat.” He then laughed wildly. “I’d consider I had been led up the garden path!”

“Well, then,” said Eva. That settled that. Partly with his aid, she tore and trampled her way out of sanctuary: she bled, in places. Knocking her hair back, she indicted Henry: “All this, because for a minute I thought of Jeremy—when all today it’s been you! What are your intentions?”

“I know what they aren’t,” he said, goaded, “and that is, to be one more of your inexplicable experiences! But if not, what? You never seriously have thought we could marry, have you? Or you’ve never seriously thought we could have a love affair?”

“Not merely love,” said Eva positively, “of course not.” Licking a finger, she expunged a runnel of blood from round a wrist, before looking him in the face. “But to marry, yes.”

“That did once flash through my head, but as something crazy. I couldn’t let you look absurd—it could make both of us look absurd, even. It would be unheard-of. Your horrible money, my miserable age. It could make me almost another Jeremy.
You
ought to make a tremendous marriage. A dynastic one. Or, I think sometimes, simply not marry anyone: why should you?”

“Why should I never?” she cried aloud.

“I don’t know. That’s just my idea of you.”

“You, you, you—you would never love me?”

“I don’t
know
, Eva, I tell you, I don’t
know
!”

She said: “Let’s go back to the lake.—No; will you give me a rose to wear, first?”

She watched him tug vainly at one, then at the next. “Your hand’s shaking,” she said. “I am very sorry.”

Over the far-off boat was a whirr of wings; there
they
were again, back at the strawberries! Or so Eva saw; Henry walked looking at nothing but the ground. “I wonder,” he said, “whether, in spite of all I was telling you this morning, you can conceive what a state I am in and how chaotic it is.
Feel
?—I refuse to; that would be the last straw! There’s too much of everything, yet nothing. Is it the world, or what? Everything’s hanging over one. The expectations one’s bound to disappoint. The dread of misfiring. The knowing there’s something one can’t stave off. The Bomb is the least. Look what’s got to happen to us if we do live, look at the results! Living is brutalising: just look at everybody! We shan’t simply toughen, Eva, we shall grossen. We shall be rotted by compromises. We shall laugh belly-laughs. We—”

“—Your father doesn’t.”

“No, but he’s in a way mad; that’s a preservative.—You remember he once was writing a book? Well, he still is. Every now and then, he comes up against something which makes him have to go right back and re-cast the whole thing from the beginning. It’s called The Faulty Scales.”

“What’s it about?”

“Justice. For a year he left it, the year Louise died.—Ought we to go back to the boat and collect the things?”

“What things?”

“The glasses, and so on.”