Eva Trout (9 page)

“‘But thou art Light,’ ” began Eva—

“‘—But thou art Light and darkness both togeather:

If that bee dark we can not see

The sunn is darker than a Tree,And thou more dark than either.

Yet Thou are not so dark, since I know this,

But that my darkness may touch thine,

And hope, that may teach it to shine,

Since Light thy Darkness is.

O lett my Soule, whose keyes I must deliver

Into the hands of senceless Dreames

Which know not thee, suck in thy beames

And wake with thee for ever.’“

The anxious voice stopped.

“Yes,” said Miss Smith, noncommittally—tolerantly, if anything. She looked about. “How right for this time of day. I wonder … Does it make sense to you, Eva?”

“What it says? Yes.”

“Curious that it should have caught your fancy. I like it. You see how pure language can be? Not more than two syllables—are there?—in any word.”

“I don’t know,” admitted the helpless creature.

“Count, sometime.” Miss Smith picked up a pencil and tested its point, idly, on her thumb. “It’s a pity you began in the middle. Still—thank you!”

“How,” Eva asked unforgivably, “have I made you angry?”

“That’s the last thing I am; but I
am
busy.” The teacher waved round her demanding table.

“Why should I not understand that poem
now
?”

“Or indeed at any time?—All I do wish,” Miss Smith added, lightly, so lightly that it became dismissingly, “is that I understood you.”

“
You
not understand me?—that cannot be possible. All that I know of me I have learned from you. What can you imagine that I would hide from you,
could
hide? What CAN you imagine?”

“Don’t, don’t, don’t be so rowdy!” enjoined Miss Smith, in what was, in reproving contrast to Eva’s, an unaccented and extra low tone. She nursed her forehead. “No wonder we’re both worn down.”

“I am so sorry,” said the inflexible girl. “But—you care for me?”

“As much as I can.”

“Then that is enough.” Eva rose from her chair, to go. She stared down the room—”Don’t you want your jersey,” she asked, “that is on the floor?” She edged past the table, retrieved the cardigan, brought it back as an offering. Miss Smith, shivering absently at the idea of needing it, slung it across herself, knotting the sleeves. “And your lamp?” said Eva. “Will you not soon need your lamp, that is by your … sofa?”

“
No
; I don’t like anybody else carrying it about.”

Eva made for the door. Hand on the handle, she stopped, though not turning round. “Do you know, I have never wept, never cried? Not once. Not as a child, even. I cannot. I am unable to, for some reason.”

“Have you wanted to?”

“Not till tonight. I am so happy.”

“Go downstairs quietly; other people are working.”

“This will not end, Miss Smith?”

The other, folding her arms under the knotted, dangling sleeves of the cardigan, obdurately and honestly said nothing. It could, too, be that a current had started up in her and already was racing her elsewhere.

“I am not mistaken,” said Eva, “being so happy?”

“Time’s very long,” answered Iseult Smith, whom it had not yet troubled. “Very long, very dangerous—how can I tell you?” She looked past the chair left empty, out of the window: the garden chestnut trees, no longer in flower, were beginning to darken, with night, with summer. Trembling with her wish to work, she began to gather the stuff towards her. In a minute, she would be bringing herself her lamp. Gratitude to Eva for being gone, or all but, made Iseult Smith, for an instant, turn to the closing door a face already become unearthly. Before, quite shut, the door became part of the wall, Eva glimpsed that involuntary beauty.

Iseult Arble came back tired from London. Carrying nothing, she made her way from the train, along the platform, heavily and slowly, as though laden. Make-up staled and caked on her face by the long day gave her the feel of wearing her own death-mask. The feathered turban irked like an iron circlet. There stood Eric. “Safe back?”—he did not stay for an answer. They got out of the station, into the Anglia. “You know, you should rightly have stayed the night,” he told her, “while you were about it, and done a show—pity we never thought of that.” “ ‘Show?’ ” she said, “lunch was a show in itself.” “He did you well, then?” “Yes; oysters and so on— Eric, do you mind if I don’t talk now?” “All in, are you?” “Well,
look
at me!” “Can’t see you, just at this minute.” (They sat side-by-side in the dark, rattling back to Larkins; he driving. Mist, at freezing-point, curdled under the headlights.) He added: “That’s always a nice hat, though.” “Yes, you’ve liked it for years.” He grunted a laugh, then couldn’t refrain from asking: “Anything arranged—I mean, sorted out?” “Eric,
do
you mind if I don’t talk now?” “Sorry …” He set the screen-wiper going.

They rattled onward.

She asked: “How’s Eva?—Oh, no, you wouldn’t know; you’ve been out all day.” “No—in point of fact: having the car with me, when I got out from work I nipped back to Larkins, to have a look-see. She’s getting on all right.” “Sneezing? Playing her transistor?” “Not that I know of, no. A bit drowsy; still got a touch of fever.” “
Fever
, Eric—how on earth would you know?”

Eric said: “She was wandery in the head. There she was, lying all in the dark—then she made me jump. I went soft on opening the door, but she must have heard it; she shot up in the dark and what do you think she said? ‘How is my darling?’”

“That made you laugh?”

“No, not so specially. Should it?”

“I don’t know.”

He manoeuvred the car over an icy patch, in silence.

Iseult, some minutes further along, said: “Strange.”

The car made its usual turn down the Larkins by-road. “And so how,” asked Eric forgetfully, “was our Mr. Sincerely-Ormeau?”

“Eric, do you mind if I
don’t
talk now?”

“O.K.; but half the time you keep asking. Just as you like, though, Izzy—it’s all the same to me.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I suppose it is.”

They reached Larkins, ran the car into the barn and let themselves into the house by the kitchen door. They listened. Tip-tap went the drip from the sink tap on to the upturned bowl. Otherwise, nothing. They went through to the foot of the stairs and listened again. “Asleep, by now,” said Eric, “I shouldn’t wonder.”

“She
is
there, is she?”

“What are you talking about?”

“No; but she could be gone—could have got away.”

“You must be crazy, Izzy. The girl’s ill.”

"How should I sell a Jaguar?”

“How did you buy one?” asked Henry Dancey.

“Constantine did so for me.”

“Couldn’t he hawk it round?”

“No—you stupid boy!”

The unruffled Henry went on: “Then what about Mr. Arble, his garage and all?”

“Not under
these
circumstances,” said Eva heavily.

At that, Henry’s delicate features, which had hitherto had something of the remoteness of the Samurai, lit up. He indulged in a smile of slight speculation. All he remarked was: “Well, I’m afraid you have rather come to the wrong shop.” He looked objectively round the vicarage drawing-room.

He and Eva were seated at either end of a long lean sofa draped in a cretonne cover, facing the fire—a captious late February wind puffed smoke back again down the chimney. The room behind them showed signs of exhaustion, like Mrs. Dancey; but also bespoke, by its very scars—tracks trodden like field-paths across the carpet, veneer chipped from furniture and the wrung-out look of the cabinet wireless in the window—the inexhaustible energy of her brood. Mental avidity showed in cascades of books on the general table and tattered mountains of periodicals on chairs. It was a saying of Mrs. Dancey’s that she liked a room to look lived in, and this did. It also was unmistakably one of those homes there is no place like; and Henry in no way detracted from it in pointing out that it offered no likely mart for a Jaguar.

The vicarage was, this Saturday afternoon, singularly silent —Mr. Dancey upstairs constructing two sermons, Mrs. Dancey gone into town with Louise to have the child’s gumboil dealt with. Catrina and Andrew had biked to a meet that morning and were not back yet. Henry, who weekly-boarded at the grammar school twenty miles away, enjoyed the prestige of a visitor during days at home: he preferred to do nothing and if possible go nowhere, and was allowed to. Eva’s hopes of securing him should she happen in to the vicarage on a Saturday were well-founded.

“Though I daresay,” he decided, “I could find out for you.”

“That was what I had thought,” said Eva in a self-congratulatory tone.

“I might even act for you. On commission, of course.”

“
What
, Henry?”

“That is the done thing. Anything else would be unheard of.”

“All right,” she grumbled.

Henry said briskly: “You want Larkins kept in the dark about this transaction?”

“They know nothing of what I do!”

Henry looked sceptical.

She swept on: “And must never, Henry—
never
!”

The boy took thought. “What about your guardian? You were going to split to him—or Catrina thought so.”

“Never as to the Jaguar. Or, Henry, as to where I am now going.”

“As you don’t know yet, you hardly could have.”

“Constantine,
above all
, must discover nothing. Is all this clear?”

“Fairly,” said Henry reluctantly.

“Can you not understand me? This is nobody’s business— my own Jaguar.”

“Registered in your name: yes. That ought to be quite plain sailing. But shan’t you miss it?”

“Yes!” cried out Eva. Thumping her chest with a fist, she rocked towards Henry. “Goodbye to it is horrible anguish—no other ever will be the same.”

“Then, why?” asked Henry, in his logical fashion.

“Now I shall tell you—”

—A virulent puff of smoke caused an interruption. Both coughed: Henry with some distinction, Eva rackingly and persistently. Experienced, Henry dug about in the sofa, extracted shreds of Kleenex from its interstices and handed them to Eva to mop her eyes with. Doing so, she told him: “
What
I shall tell you—”

“—I don’t expect you need. You’re doing a bunk?”

She was thunderstruck. “That was extremely secret!”

“You shouted it at Catrina outside the post ofEce, weeks ago. We’ve wondered why you’re still here.”

“Oho—you wondered, you and Catrina? Thank you. There was first my cold, which became bronchitis (never a word from
you
, Henry!). Then, I thought. When I go, I must pay for somewhere to be—till I can, I cannot.”

“You mean to live on the proceeds from this Jaguar?”

“Only till April. Then, all my money!”

“You’ll be rather a millionairess,” said Henry slightingly.

“Can’t you hold your horses till April?”

“My horses, Henry?”

“Stick it out at Larkins? They haven’t eaten you so far. Feb., March, April …” he ticked them off on his fingers. “Just look”—he directed Eva’s attention to a sombre quartette of purple crocuses which had managed to bloom from a bowlful of stones-and-water atop the wireless cabinet— “spring’s in the air!”

“I know what I am doing—you stupid boy!”

“If I’m stupid, why ask me to sell your Jaguar?”

“Because I have to obtain a house.”

“Oh. To reside in?”

“How should I obtain a house?”

“House agents. Where do you want it?”

“Wherever furthest from here. By the sea, I think?”

“You could hardly get further away than that. We shall quite miss you.”

“Shall you?—Oh, shall you really, Henry?” She gazed his way, monumentally shaken. “You’ll come and stay, however?”

“That may rather depend.—What size?”

“Of a size for me,” she said in her lordly way.

Willy-nilly, Henry was fired by the project. “Then if I were you,” he exclaimed, “I’d go all out!—a lounge hall and a sun lounge and a swimming pool.”

Eva, on the other hand, sobered down. “How am I to go there, without my Jaguar?”

“You go by train. Once you get there, you buy a bicycle… But stop a minute, what are we thinking of? There’s that castle, that noble castle we all had a good look at—inhabit that!”

“NO!” she thundered, banging her eyes shut.

“Just as you like,” said Henry—bored, remote again, looking the other way. He so far relented as to ask: “Though, why not?”

“No ‘why’; simply because,
not
.”

“It might,” he conceded, “be dull there with no bridegroom.”

She said nothing.

“And, of course, it belongs to your wicked guardian.”

“They would know!” she explained, in great agitation, bumping up and down on a broken spring in the sofa. “They would guess—they would go and look for me there.”

“You want,” he said, brightening up again, “to elude pursuers?”

“You shall know where I am.”

“Thanks,” said Henry neutrally. He examined a point in the air (as it were, the future) from this then that angle. “I am to cover your tracks?”

“That will be so kind of you.”

“—Psssssst!”

The injunction was hardly necessary. Echoes resounded around the hall. Battle was being given to the front door, which objected to opening on principle. The attackers won— Mrs. Dancey and Louise triumphantly kicked off overshoes on the indoor doormat. Mrs. Dancey’s enthusiastic progress to the foot of the staircase could be followed: she shouted up: “Alaric, we’re back!” From above, silence. “Louise was
very
brave! (Your father can’t hear, I expect, because of the wind.)”

“What about my shilling?”

Now, Mrs. Dancey addressed herself to the drawing-room door—ajar, as ever—though not as yet coming round it. “Who’s in here, I wonder?” she soliloquised. She loved to prolong suspense. Family life abounded in the unforeseen, than which she valued nothing more highly. “Henry, probably?” She entered. “Yes, there you are, Henry.
And
Eva!” (Eva rose, and was kissed.) “How very nice that you’re here, but what sad news!—Henry, the fire doesn’t seem very happy: you could have kept it up, dear?”