Eva Trout (34 page)

“What was that about?” Catrina wanted to know.

“Looks like the beginnings of a paper-chase, doesn’t it,” said her brother rapidly.

“What does?”

“Look at the floor …”

“Oh, wake
up
, Henry!—Well, I’m going.”

“Goodbye, Catrina. Bat hard!”

Having waited till the motor bike had sputtered off out of hearing, he went down the street to the village post office. But that closed on Saturday afternoons. He returned to the vicarage and, whistling, took out his father’s car: from the town where he’d been at school, twenty miles away, he got off the telegram to Eva. “
All right, just as you like. When
?” He signed it. Only on the way back did he recollect, telegrams eliminate punctuation. Would this one be comprehensible? Let it ride!

On Sunday, Mrs. Dancey and her remaining daughter went to the eight o’clock. Mrs. Dancey then having things to see to and Catrina being keen to scour the neighbourhood to post mortem the cricket match, it was suggested Henry attend Mattins. Always sad to see no one in the vicarage pew. And at this season every soul present counted: during the fine spell inroads were apt to be made on the congregation by freelance hay-making.

The church atoned for the vicarage by its great beauty, its Perpendicular architecture being almost miraculously untampered-with, but for outside—the foolish addition of a spire to the tower. Within, it was lit by so many and such large, wonderfully-shaped windows as to seem more than half composed of them, and of these the majority were of clear glass: the interior, therefore, at mid-morning was the home of a daylight it not only contained but, as one entered, shed forth. At the East end only was there extraneous colour; elsewhere, nothing but the green of the lime trees shadowing the gravestones out in the churchyard. By clouds gathering or heavy rain falling, blizzards or thunder-storms the place could be penitentially darkened, but those veils soon were withdrawn. Such was the shadowlessness of the church that it became the more onerous to bring sins here, even to lay them down. For Henry, all this had about it something pre-natal—though he in fact had been born at the other end of England. He could have walked up the aisle blindfold; which was as well, for this morning he did so blindly. He turned into the vicarage pew and made his way down its long, haunted, void length. Having reached the end he slid forward on to his knees, bowed his head, knotted his hands.

A thrush had got into the church. It was adolescent; though full-grown still hardly more than a bloated fledgling. Barely yet fit to fly, it did so with arduousness and terror, hurtling, hoping, despairingly losing height, not knowing where it was to land, if it ever did, or how again to take off, if it ever could. Here or there, it beseechingly came to rest, wings widespread, head twisted over its back, beak a-gape, a palpitation in its speckled throat. The slithery, imploring scratching of its claws on time-polished stone or man-polished woodwork hardly was to be told from the choked, protesting noises it attempted to utter. “ ‘Happy birds which sing and fly round Thy altars, O Most High/ ” thought Henry. The bird however avoided the chancel. Everywhere else, it was—or was not: it blotted itself out for minutes together. Preliminary pealings of the organ sent it to cover; it was quiescent when the choir—still the better for Paris?—filed in, followed by Mr. Dancey. The service began.

During it, Henry discovered Louise’s prayer-book to be still among those along the ledge of the pew. This was her juvenile, as it were milk-tooth one—superseded at the time of her confirmation by something with red-gilt edges, in red morocco, which, as things turned out, she had hardly had time to use. (Where had
that
gone to?) This forgotten one showed tooth-marks at the upper corners of its binding: she had been a chewer, salivating as she did so, which accounted for the corners’ discolouration. While there had been Louise, there’d been no occasion to investigate anything she had or did: to each other, Henry and she had been open books. He now (while standing during the psalm) investigated this one. On the fly-leaf was written: Black is the raven,

Black is the rook,

But to Hell goes anybody who steals this book

It is particularly holy,

So Hell will be particularly hot And coal-y.

Those savage lines restored to Henry, for some reason, not so much Louise as the original savagery of loss. Sorrow is anger, of a kind. At his father’s sacerdotal, translated figure he neither looked nor avoided looking: voice did not seem to be packing up, on the whole was as audible as could be expected. For hay-fever reasons, no flowers on or near the altar: nicely-arranged ferns. A parishioner read the First Lesson, badly; a second did better with the Second. The thrush came out and rebounded against a window on the other side of the aisle. The Son of God … On his knees, later, along with everyone else, Henry thought fleetingly—for the first time since he had sent the telegram—of Eva. What had he done? He went ice-cold round the forehead. Stand up for the second hymn (preceding the sermon) “
Jerusalem the Golden
.” Milk and honey—
absolutely
, insanity!

Mr. Dancey calmly approached the pulpit. He disappeared round the turn of the stairs up to it. He then soared finally into view, with a white movement shaking out the sleeves of his surplice. Something which sublimated his face at the same time made it indistinct to the eyes of Henry. The malady had gone—had it? Not a trace of ravage. The expectant people settled into their places, looking up at the lips. A breath was drawn; the lips opened and moved; not a sound came. Waiting unagitatedly, the preacher, meantime, shed on his people a smile of partly complicity, partly patience. Tension rose, sank, rose in the great light church, about which darted the darkness of the now ceaseless thrush. Mr. Dancey testingly touched his throat, waited for it an instant, tried again. Out boomed the great vocal bell. Out swung the syllables of the selected text. “
I hate the sins of unfaithfulness
,” thundered Mr. Dancey, “
there shall be no such cleave unto me
.” The thrush, gathering velocity from the distance, catapulted beak-on into the glass of the window above Henry. Like a stone it dropped. Henry fainted, alone in his corner of the vicarage pew.

Eva, since last heard of, had made up her mind to return to Paley’s. The removal from that other London hotel where for security reasons she had installed herself, and taking up again of her former quarters, was in fact going on this week-end. The step betokened restored morale; at the same time, there was a reason for it. The decision had been in a way imposed on her. Jeremy was coming to join her, for a week. Mme Bonnard was coming to London for a conference, and would bring him.

This had been suggested, it would not be unfair to say ordained, by the Bonnards. For it happened that the date of Thérèse’s journey synchronised with a key point in her and her husband’s psychological planning for the child. At the stage they perceived Jeremy to be reaching, the removal of any notion of dissolution from his immediate past had become essential. As to one thing, it was imperative that he be reassured; that being, that the (to him) home from which he’d been reft in London, under, as Eva had told them, panic-engendering conditions, had not in fact vanished into thin air. Let it be there, let him find it again. It behoved Eva—as they were confident she herself would agree?—to reassemble the whole thing, or at least reproduce it so far as possible, at top speed (given the shortness of time), to the last detail.

Who was Eva, to gainsay these dedicated zealots, these inspired authorities as to Jeremy? That their project might not happen to chime in with Miss Trout’s own psychological planning did not, evidently, occur to them—or did not in the case of Thérèse; that it at least
might
have in the case of Gerard, Eva inclined to feel, though that faint protest was her only rebellion. She set about her appointed task, which was simplified by what (she supposed?) could be called good luck: owing to the cancellation of a booking, Paley’s top-floor suite could be at her disposition on what was, actually, the eve of Jeremy’s arrival, and for a week. Having waited only for the electric whirlwind of cleaners to subside, she took possession that Saturday afternoon. Whereupon, up streamed her belongings from the baggage room: the amount stunned her. She pushed or pulled about, unproductively, or stood at bay amongst, the mountains of stuff, or turned her back on it, prey to a restless lethargy. At some later time, the telephone rang. Who could
that
be? Nobody. No one. Not a soul had been told she was back. It would be the desk. The budgerigars, borrowed back from the porter’s wife, greeted the sound of the telephone with a joyous chorus which continued throughout her use of the instrument. This was a hotel desk, but not Paley’s: someone spoke from where she had been this morning. (Query: how had
they
tracked her down?) A telegram had come in: what would madam wish done?

“What is it about?”

“You wish it opened?”

“Read it aloud, please.”

That done: “Will you repeat the signature?” asked Eva, glowering at the budgerigars.

”‘Henry,’ madam.”

“Oh. Then will you re-read the message?—No, wait a minute.” She put the budgerigars away in the bathroom. “Yes. Go on.”

They did so.

“Is there a question-mark?”

“Not on the form, madam.”

“There was intended to be one, I suppose.—Well, thank you.”

I
t never rains but it pours …

What TIME was it, even? She had lost her watch, she could find no clock. She wiped her confused and it could be agonised forehead. Joy wrenched at her inwardly, in its own way almost a deathly illness. Act, act,
act
on Henry’s decision! There might be no other. Round her lay everything, everything, like a fallen city: huge or little hide suitcases, canvas ones, copper-bound tea chests and packing-cases, duffel-bags, nylon string bags, cartons with flap-topped lids open at angles, the scooter, over-crammed hampers dwindling to waste-paper- baskets, rug-straps, at least one extraneous parcel, objects half-clad in twiddles of paper …

The malacca cane being in the nude, she leaned it in its habitual corner.—
What
to do about apricots, with tomorrow Sunday?

Everything must be plausible, by tomorrow.

It was. Eva had made it, and with minutes to spare—she deserved credit. Fatigued, yet levitated, she sat about, waiting for Jeremy, up here in the citified-summery Sunday morning’s suspended silentness. In this room was but one outlander: a remaining container, a carton, holding things still to be sorted out, probably jettisoned, such as exhausted picture books, games with pieces missing, over-wound clockwork toys, with on top, intact still, the unappetising parcel. Out-of-the-picture, the carton was slightly behind a curtain. Tubular roses, pink-tinted creamy stock filled vases with the management’s compliments; comatose, the little birds were dotted along their perches. Like a figure wheeling out of a clock, on the stroke of noon Jeremy came in. He greeted Eva with a gay little parody of a French bow.

About his entrance there was already a touch of the executive, however junior. For instance, he was carrying a despatch-case, if of no ordinary kind: of useful size, it was light as a feather—probably?—made of glazed
toile
, a vermilion tartan, stretched on an aluminium frame and fastened with bright hasps, presumably locked. For an instant, Eva took this to be a present for her, from Fontainebleau; that it was not was made clear by Jeremy’s concernedly balancing it on the sofa-cushions, and making certain it was
in
balance, before kissing her. It contained his affairs. (Later, his suitcase made its way in with an unobtrusiveness befitting its lower rank.) After the kiss, he and Eva parted, in order to smile at each other and, as it were, drink one another in—as was appropriate: they had not, after all, seen each other for going on for two weeks.

But it was more than that. They were seeing each other after their first, their one separation since Jeremy had (virtuually) been born to Eva. And what was disconcerting was, not that there was any question of disillusionment, on either side, but rather that the minute was reigned over by a startling, because unavoidable, calmness—a calmness to which there was no alternative. One could have called it, a disinfected one. They were glad to be seeing each other again: anything beyond that, anything primitive, was gone. Who knew when it had breathed its last, or where its grave was? Like as they were, they were
not
of each other’s flesh-and-blood, and they both knew it. The dear game was over, the game was up.

This the boy underlined, yet perhaps lightened, by a sort of mockery which, clearly, he called on Eva to share. He dealt her a fond, glancing, enticing look, as though to say: “Both in the same boat, what do we do
now
?” Her answer was not yet ready. He then resorted to everything that was most natural, flung himself on to the sofa, side-by-side with his despatch-case, and puffed and blew as one is entitled to after an arduous journey. He exhibited pleasure in homecoming like a magazine child. Eva, whose foot-bones ached after the all-but-all-night enslaved activity, reconstructing this, sank into a big chair and kicked her shoes off. Hooking a stool towards her, she swung her feet up. One of her great anticlimatic yawns was torn from her—a lapse of manners: she made a placatory movement of the hand. In return,
he
felt something owing: jumping from the sofa, he worked his way round the whole of the reconstruction, with the earnestness of royalty visiting a fair, overlooking nothing. He paid tribute to the exactitude by righting any few flaws in it—returning, for instance, the silver-mounted claw of the greater eagle to the chimneypiece from the top of the escritoire. Passing the budgerigars, he caressed their cage by trailing a finger over its harp-string bars. Coming to a stop at Eva, he conveyed—to a point, almost, enunciated—”I congratulate you!”

What sort of a dupe had the noble Bonnards imagined this boy to be? As stars in Eva’s firmament, they declined slightly —a fundamental misgiving shook her. Alternatively, were their machinations five fathoms deep? This recherche for the basic they had made such a point of … what of it? Unloading Jeremy on her, for that adduced reason (and at this, of all junctures!) his directors, his psychological engineers could have had an undeclarable motive: what? To bring about this undoing? To rid not only the child of Eva but the child and Eva of one another … ? The emotional tumult raised in the budgerigars by Jeremy’s greeting became insufferable. She got up and put the birds away in the bathroom.