Eva Trout (6 page)

“Oh, do you?—Or, where you live.”

“In an hotel, principally.—What can I next tempt you to? The
profiteroles
here are not always bad; they go down easily, which we may be glad of. Because, we must put our heads together before we part. Don’t you think so? Begin to concoct something …”

TIME, inside Eva’s mind, lay about like various pieces of a fragmented picture. She remembered, that is to say, disjectedly. To reassemble the picture was impossible; too many of the pieces were lost, lacking. Yet, some of the pieces there were would group into patterns—patterns at least. Each pattern had a predominant colour; and each probably
had
meaning, though that she did not seek. Occupationally, this pattern-arriving-at was absorbing, as is a kindergarten game, and, like such a game, made sense in a way.

The day of Iseult’s absence in London was passed by Eva, hazily, in this manner. At Larkins, the girl lay abed with her heavy cold. A slight feverish drowsiness ran the hours together. From noon on, she was alone in the house (Eric at work, the morning woman gone home) but for her bedfellow: this was a princely cold. Could it be a descendant of Mr. Dancey’s? One might hope so. Best of all, she was no longer at bay—for so long, that was, as the cold lasted. Also the cold set up a moratorium; during it, no decision had to be taken, or indeed could be … And, how if Iseult should never return? Suppose she vanished?—women constantly did so.
Then
, it would be unnecessary to leave Larkins.

She felt entrenched by being in bed. “Stay where you are,” had been the injunction (Eric’s). Any show of concern was heart-warming. Seldom in anything but rude health, used to but scanty attention when she was otherwise, she had set store by the hourly cups of tea brought by the morning woman during the morning. The last remained at her bedside, a cherished memento, scum on its dregs. And there was, too, a clouded tumbler of water. This afternoon she ate eucalyptus lozenges, exhumed by Eric from the back of a drawer. He had searced for but failed to find a thermometer. There had ended his doctoring, but for “Keep warm!” She believed herself to be doing so. A once-hot rubber hot water bottle drew comfort from her Viyella thigh. The window was bolted. An electric heater gave forth a smell of scorched dust and ate up oxygen. Over her pyjama-jacket she wore an anorak.

The window looked north. Some time ago, the distances of the country had been thinly painted by sunshine, but that was over; earth and sky had now the same unluminous greyness— which must
be
daylight, for it was waning. Indoors, Larkins mustered its evening shadows. The triumphing calm of its emptiness could be felt: no person troubled that calm by seeing or hearing, thinking or knowing. Only the kitchen would be giving ear to the tip-tap of the drip from the sink tap hitting the upturned plastic bowl. Only the living-room knew of the slow combustion going on inside the banked-down fire. The motherly chair by the hearth would be rejoicing in having no unmotherly occupant. Nobody was down there—nobody to object, nobody to wince. All day, there had been no one to suffer whitely. Up here, one could have been going all out on one’s transistor, full blast. Or one could have roller-skated … One lay in languor.

The bedroom—which, though called Eva’s, continued to be like a spare-room, generally empty, in which an overnight bag has been unpacked hastily—began to darken. Round her, her belongings faded from sight. She owned a couple of hairbrushes with her father’s monogram; a miniature model of a ship’s compass; a jugful of coloured pencils; the claw of a greater eagle mounted in silver; a still-inviolate Elizabeth Arden Christmas casket (from Constantine); a clay cat and donkey, examples of Dancey art, and the transistor, cased in apparent ivory. This last, with a gleam like a forehead’s, stood by her bed—at a moment, she was constrained to reach out and touch it. She received a shock: ice-cold, the thing had become! Angrily ice-cold, colder than anger. Eva drew back her frightened, rejected hand, rolled over and lay on top of it, to console it. The tide of the day turned, against it and her; down once again on her came the enormous sadness which had no origin that she knew of. She cowered away from it under tangled blankets.

What are you doing, Eva, lying in the dark?

Lying in the dark.

Supposing somebody came in softly, saying, “How is my darling?” She
had
heard somebody saying, “How is my darling?”—but when? where? Some other child had been present, a very sick one: “Darling.” Eva searched through her store of broken pieces of time, each one cut out more sharply by fever, looking for an answer. The voice had come in as a door opened—but what door? where?

That Eva had been to two schools was little known. She so seldom spoke of the first that she could be taken to have forgotten it. Even Iseult (then Smith) had, during the great research, uncovered practically nothing on that subject—she had perhaps not probed deeply enough? Before being sent to Lumleigh, where Miss Smith was, the girl had, for just less than a term, been one of the twenty guinea-pigs at the lakeside castle.

At that establishment, she was to be pointed out as the donor’s daughter. Her father had bought the castle to give to Constantine, whose heart had then been set on founding an experimentary school in which to install a friend of his as headmaster. The considerable cost of the enterprise had seemed slight to Willy, should this serve to keep Kenneth elsewhere. Inspirational Kenneth of the unclouded brow and Parthenon torso was on the way to becoming Willy’s nightmare: two hundred miles out of town would be just the place for him. Kenneth together with Constantine had envisaged the school as in Surrey; but nothing doing. “Take it or leave it,” said Willy (whose, after all, was the cheque book). “Castle, or nothing.” Vainly Constantine froze. “Nice lake,” had declared Willy, grinning like a dog, “for water sports. Jolly surroundings, scenery, Nature, so on. Far from the madding crowd.” Though in the throes of a jealousy aggravated by chronic mistrust of Constantine, Willy was not unscrupulous —boys, he would not have signed over like this for a single instant; but in a mixed school could Kenneth get up to much? The mixedness of the school was the whole idea. Kenneth, combining vision with bashful hedging, went into the matter with Willy at large and at length. “Co-education could have averted so many … tragedies.”

“You were not co-educated, I take it?”

“Alas,” sighed Kenneth, nonetheless looking wonderfully complacent, as well he might.

“Don’t think me dense,” said Willy, “but where do you plan to get these various kids from?”

“There will be only too little difficulty about
that
.”

“Aha. And from families who’ll pay up? I’m not going to carry this thing, you know.”

“But
naturally
not!” cried Kenneth. “What an idea!”

“Ken,” Constantine said to Willy, “knows half the world—you don’t seem to grasp.”

“One hopes,” confessed Kenneth, “to cast one’s net fairly wide.
Not
have distinctions of class—”

“—And then who’ll pay up?”

“
Or
of race—

“—Go to the British Council.”

“Sometimes,” Constantine said to Willy, “you make me sick.”

“Why?” asked Willy, whitening. “I’m sending Eva.”

So the girl went. Her goodbye to her father was stoic, as no doubt was Jepthah’s daughter’s. For the first time, she was to be exposed to her own kind: juveniles—a species known to her so far only in parks in the distance or hotels fleetingly. At the castle, inevitably, she did not shine. At fourteen Eva was showing no signs of puberty, which discouraged the matron or house mother, a Hungarian lady; and her negative emotional history made her unlikely material for Kenneth. Her companions supplied in abundance what Eva lacked; they were wealthly little delinquents who knew everything. One and all they’d sized Kenneth up at a glance and were matey in their manner to him accordingly. Exactly how he proposed to run this racket, it was going to interest them to see. Should he give trouble, they were prepared to blackmail him. Boys and girls alike, these children were veterans, some having run out on, others been run out by, a succession of optimistic schools. Bribed into coming here by distracted parents, they might stay on if that were made worthwhile.

A wish to have such children kept off one’s hands and deterred from out-and-out criminality, with few questions asked and at almost any price, had been noted by Kenneth, with sympathy, in the course of his travels, and been had in mind when he visualised his school. This seemed the least he could do for so many people who had been wonderful to him —abroad, chiefly. Set though the sun might on the Union Jack, it remained under contract to golden islands, coasts, lakesides and terraced mountains re-empired by Ken’s abounding friends, whose dominion extended from palm to pine. Only one shadow fell: parental dementia. Could a well-wisher not put things right? As for the children, here was where genius came in! With the young, he was almost psychically understanding—he’d been told so. He could do anything with them. Genuinely, he was certain he had a mission.

The castle turned out, after all, to be just the thing. Better than Surrey—Surrey might not have done. Here, one was virtually in outer space: in these woods, no one but poachers minding their own business and couples abed in the bracken. Live and let live. “You were so
right
,” he wrote, in his generous way, to Willy. To be absolutely frank, one did not miss Constantine. Everyone here adored one, which was dizzying. There were dramas, naturally.

The school opened its doors one blazing September. Kenneth’s haul of children were coloured only by having rushed about naked on private beaches—the race experiment having, so far, aborted. So had the one with class: young proletarians made one peevish by being difficult to get hold of—the State was too fussy about them, a real old auntie. One had to keep out of tangles, so far as might be. With that in view, the forewarned Kenneth had also had to look out about education. Once a school was got wind of, down came inspectors— one might not think so, but this was a fact of life. Kenneth was therefore assisted by two B.A.’s with former teaching experience. He’d selected them carefully. This particular two were lucky to find themselves here or indeed anywhere, as he very nicely let them know that he knew. “We’re all re-born
here
!” he’d assured them, giving one then another a vital hand-clasp and dividing between them one of his famous glances, at once frank and hush-hush. “All the same, steady does it!” … The B.A.’s, whose frantic respectability fortunately fascinated the children, taught routine subjects, the more inspirational being reserved for Kenneth. The children had no objection to anybody’s trying to teach them anything. They drifted amiably into the informal classrooms overlooking the water and sat waiting.

Of situations going on in the castle, still more of the castle’s itself being a situation, Eva was unaware. She walked through everything, straight ahead, as a ghost is said to walk through walls. Perpetual changes of
milieu
attendant on being the Trout daughter had left her with no capacity to be homesick —for, sick for where?—and after life with distraught, high-voltage Willy all here seemed calm as the little lake. As for her comrades, she took them with equanimity. She was senior to any of them (in actual age) by a month or two; one of them was taller than she, the rest rather miniature: even the smallest seemed wondrously physically complete to Eva, who had been left unfinished. So these were humans, and this was what it was like being amongst them? Nothing hurt. From being with them, she for the first time began to have some idea what it was to be herself; but
that
did not hurt, so deep-seated was her acquiescence. She took for granted that these others had the blessing of being “ordinary,” which caused her to study one then another of them, for lengths of time, ruminatively rather than inquiringly, with her cartwheel eyes. She attempted to take in at least something of anything that was said. But one and all they affected her very little. She loved the castle.

She did not bring out the worst in the other children, who on the whole were nicer to her than nicer children probably might have been. “Trout, are you a hermaphrodite?” one did ask.

“I don’t know.”

“Joan of Arc’s supposed to have been.”

“Never established,” one of the boys put in, “how could it be?
Elle fut carbonisee
.”

“Then canonised,” said one of the other girls.

Eva pondered. “I’d like to be Joan of Arc.”

“That’s what we’re asking,” said the first speaker. “And she heard Voices.”

“I don’t hear Voices—do I?”

“That’s what we’re asking.”

If Trout was wanting, only look at her father!—imagine sinking one
sou
in a dump like this! What did he expect to get out of it: uranium? Or was he after The Kettle-drum (Kenneth)? Yet the children themselves found the dump rather
simpatico
: a novelty, abounding in unsophisticated pleasures, such as being on the roof in the dark harkening to the owls and answering back; or doing a Dracula up from balcony to balcony; or setting an Oedipus-trap for Tusks (one of the B.A.’s; the other was Jones the Milk) by arranging an effigy of his mother in his bed; or insisting on The Kettle-drum’s taking them all to church, twice a Sunday, to a distant edifice known as The Chapel In The Valley, which meant three taxis as overflows for the beach wagon, when
he
said he felt nearer God in the open air or when contemplating some Greek object. What would the dump do when they all were gone?— fall down? Already the cellars were full of fungus, and you could chip bits off the ornamental stucco with a nail file.

Eva fell in love with the castle at first sight, in the shimmery amber weather of her arrival; but remained true to it when later autumn harshened the trees and dead leaves clotted and marred the lake—mist, those evenings, made a greater and wraithlike lake into which melted the lighted windows. No great gales, that year; only a soughing and undulation along the skylines and, at nights, a whimpering in the tortuous chimneys as though young lost souls had come into harbour. Winter, when it came, only tightened the place’s hold on her heart. How the short days glistened in the transparent woods! Indoors, you might often hear the whir of a bird which had found its way into the heated rooms and was casting its shadowy wingspan this way and that. The corridors and the staircase, lit from tea-time onward by hanging lanterns, became more friendly than any Eva had known—alone, she patrolled them: a by now almost effaced pattern was stencilled over their terracotta walls. Down the perspectives were many painted doors—some of them were unreal; they did not open. This hollow core of the castle was fanned through by a resinous smell of fir cones being consumed: in the grand saloon, a fire was kept burning at each end. In
there
, however, she did not often go, liking better to picture (or recollect) the gorgeousness being given by the flames to rush matting and scattered rattan furniture. The saloon was the common-room. It was seldom empty. She had not, strictly, anywhere of her own.