The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (3 page)

I do not know quite what gave us this idea of a guest house. Parkinford is just a small pleasant country
town, with a thirteenth-century church and a row of almshouses and a tiny square surrounded by sycamore trees; the river flows past one end of the town, under a stone hump-backed bridge past irregular clumps of weeping willow that hang down like disentangled water-weed, brushing the water with their pale green branches in spring and summer. There was a time when I thought it a very dull town. Then I went away from it and – well, I shall come to all that in a moment. All I wish to say now is that apart from the public-houses and a temperance commercial hotel down by the station we suddenly realized that our guest house would be the only place where a certain class of tourist could get a room for the night. The fact that there were very few tourists who wanted to stop a night in Parkinford didn't discourage us; my sister quite rightly reasoned that it was our business to attract tourists. In time we should build up a reputation. Among other things my sister is a beautiful cook. She turns out tarts and pies and a great variety of dishes with the same ease and precise, mathematical beauty as she manipulates figures. I couldn't cook at all, I hadn't the slightest interest in mathematics, but I was young and, that first summer of the new boarding house, I had no doubts about my own beauty. I had very thick deeply-waved blonde hair and clear blue eyes. I was full, too, of that deep
emotional energy that springs naturally with youthful beauty – my heart full of it and hurting and not knowing where to direct itself. There is a snapshot taken of me just about this time: it shows me in a short white dress standing in front of a large lime tree at the back of the house. You can see in this picture a young, eager-looking girl with a smile on her face; but what you cannot see or hear or feel are the millions of delicate blossoms on the lime, the surge of bees in them and the scented honey-dew falling on my hair and on my hands and on the brown summer grass. What this photograph does not show is the dreaming, urgent creature behind the gaiety and the beauty. It does not show how that young girl of twenty-two felt, dreaming and in love with herself and rather foolishly conscious of having a soul.

We opened the guest house at last in the middle of August, and we started off immediately with two guests. One was a Mr. Bernard Parker, who had been my father's clerk for twenty years and had lived in disgraceful back-room lodgings most of the time and had never married; the other was a Miss Millay, librarian at the public library, a studious sort of girl who had been friendly with my sister for many years. These would form the permanent background for casual tourists, for which of course it was really too late that year.

Then, no sooner had we opened, than we had a considerable shock. It was announced in the papers, and soon everyone was talking about it, that a new bypass was to be constructed immediately on the south side, the river side, of Parkinford. This would not only cut out the old hump-backed bridge, but by means of a great new concrete bridge would span the river, the railway line and the meadows that were almost always flooded in winter. It was a project that had been talked of for years and the realization of which had been almost abandoned. Everyone was now very jubilant about it. It was only we who had reason to hate the thought of it. We felt that nothing could have smashed so completely our hopes of tourists and our hope for the future. My sister, less emotional than I, more balanced and more resourceful, took it with a sort of logical stoicism, but from the first I made up my mind I hated that bridge.

The project of the new bridge had been announced about a month and preliminary work had already begun across the meadows by the river and the railway-line when something else happened. I had been down into the town shopping one evening and I came back about seven o'clock to find my sister talking to a young man in what we called the reception room. He had two large leather suitcases with him and I knew, even before my sister spoke, that we had another guest.

‘Oh! there you are, Linda,' my sister said. ‘May I introduce Mr. Lawrence? Mr. Lawrence is coming to stay with us.'

‘Oh!' I said. ‘For long?'

‘Well, for quite a time, I think,' he said. ‘I've a job in the town that'll keep me busy for about eighteen months.'

‘Oh! Yes,' I said.

He looked at me and smiled. It was a curious smile. It gave me the strangest sort of feeling: the feeling that I had been singled out to receive it. There are some people who smile with the eyes, hardly moving the lips; others who show their teeth and keep the eyes immovable. This smile came from the slightest quiver of a mouth that did not open. I did not see it then, but it was a weak mouth. It was handsome and impertinent and it seemed to me to have all sorts of subtle and compelling qualities that were not analysable at a first glance, but you could see without thinking that it was vain and passionate and in a way sensitive too. I knew that I was right about the vanity. You could see that by the way he dressed: the smart grey suit, the brown suede shoes, the silk wine-coloured tie, the soft green Homburg hat. Oh! yes, you could see that he felt himself to be somebody that was somebody.

Instantly I didn't like him. I said something about
I hoped he would be comfortable and he said ‘I hope so', almost mocking; and then my sister said she would show him to his room. He insisted on carrying his bags upstairs and in walking behind my sister. I must say that the back view of him was even more impressive than the front. It was curious how you got a feeling of jauntiness and class and vanity from the smooth cut of that grey suit and the even smoother sweep of his very black, oiled hair. It was curious how repellent and attractive it was.

My sister came down again in two or three minutes, and she said at once, ‘Well, what do you think?'

‘Well, he certainly doesn't undervalue himself,' I said.

‘Linda,' she said, ‘I think it ought to be our first rule not to criticize guests. We've set out to make a business proposition of this place, and personalities have got to be kept out.' That was just like Dora: sound and practical and admirably logical. ‘The main point is whether he pays his bill. In any case it's a very good let – eighteen months. It will do something to compensate us for that wretched bridge.'

‘I only hope we're good enough for him,' I said.

‘Well, if you want my opinion,' she said, ‘I think he's perfectly all right.'

‘You didn't ask him what his job was?' I said.

‘No, I didn't. That's something else we ought to
avoid. Inquisitiveness. We'll find out soon enough what his job is.'

My sister was quite right. We did find out. Every morning, before breakfast, we had our separate jobs to do. Dora cooked breakfast and took up early morning tea to the guests; I prepared the tables and tidied the dining-room. We had only one servant, Elsie, and she would be busy stoking the boiler-fire and sweeping the hall and stairs. One of my jobs was to take in the morning papers and the post. The second morning I was astonished to see the size of Mr. Lawrence's correspondence: a dozen or more letters, one registered, and several large flat packages. One of these packages was marked
Ministry of Transport: Urgent
, and then I knew who and what he was.

Soon, of course, everyone knew what I knew. Everyone knew Mr. Lawrence, the government engineer in charge of the new bridge. And everyone, including even my sister, seemed quite honoured by the presence in Parkinford of a government engineer. In fact the instant reaction in Parkinford was a sort of emotional dog-fight – half the women became at once raving jealous over him. Even Elsie and Miss Millay were jealous.

My own instant reaction was quite simple. I disliked him intensely. At twenty-two it is possible to
hate some person or object or creed with a peculiarly pure, straightforward hatred, and to gain some kind of inverse pleasure from that hatred. This is how it was with J. Eric Lawrence and I. You will notice this J. Eric Lawrence – that's how he always styled himself: just that extra initial that put him a little above other men. I hated him more out of deliberation than out of any genuine feeling of revulsion. I cheated myself into thinking I hated him more than anything because he stood for the conception of the new bridge. He stood for something new and aloof and outside us and I took great pleasure in hating that something, whatever it was, tremendously. I also got a special feeling of pleasure out of behaving perversely. If J. Eric Lawrence was nice to me, as he could be so easily and often was, I took great pleasure in being despicably rude and aggravating towards him. I took great pains to be contemptuous of his precious bridge, although it did not begin to take shape until the following spring. Above all I was disappointed whenever he was not there, as I had hoped, to offer himself for one of my attacks. The strange thing was that he did not mind my hatred. He accepted it with a kind of amused amiability. He accepted it with that smile of his: that very handsome, vain and important smile, with its flicker of impertinence.

There isn't much doubt, I think, that all this would have worn off gradually; this childish, mechanized hatred certainly couldn't have gone on forever. But after J. Eric Lawrence had been with us about two months something else happened.

I began to notice a remarkable change in my sister.

From the first my sister had accepted J. Eric Lawrence with a sort of frank, business-like cordiality. It was very natural that they had a great deal in common. My sister, with her mathematical, resourceful mind, could understand and be interested in and even become enthusiastic about an engineering project like a bridge. To some people arithmetic is, I suppose, a form of music, and the calculation and planning and creation of that bridge must have had the quality of music to J. Eric Lawrence. And gradually and quite naturally my sister began to take an interest in that music. It began to have the deepest and most disturbing and most beautiful effect on her mind.

It was very strange how I first noticed this. My sister has never been given to very easy self-expression. Any other girl would have begun to express reactions
of love and happiness as soon as the cause of them became clear to her. But my sister is abnormally passive. She is capable of feeling but not of demonstrating any great emotion: so that it is easy for anyone who does not know her to conclude that she is almost incapable of feeling emotion at all. Also she takes after my father, who was a negative, unattractive man with colourless, bony features. She has the trim, practical appearance of a cloth-bound book. In consequence she has no means of expressing by physical beauty any great depth of emotion, however beautiful it is in itself. It is beyond her to fall in love actively. Her way would be to fall in love with dismal passivity, quietly, tragically, out of sight.

There are women who would have found another quite simple way of expressing their feelings, but my sister could not even do that. She could not even cook her way to J. Eric Lawrence's heart. She was too practical for that. All our guests, unless they asked specially, ate the same food. It was against all my sister's principles to make an exception even of J. Eric Lawrence – yet one of her special smoked salmon omelettes, which were delicious and which she only turned out on rare occasions, must have shown him that she had some positive, individual feeling for him. But she couldn't even do that.

No: my sister's way of showing that she was in love
with J. Eric Lawrence was to go for a walk every evening. That was an old habit of hers: a walk into the town to post some letters, or as far as the common, or down to the public library to meet Miss Millay. She had always varied her route. But now it became obvious that her walk every evening was in the same direction and to the same place. She went down to J. Eric Lawrence's bridge.

It did not strike me until later how odd it was that for me the bridge was a means of hatred, whereas for my sister it was exactly the opposite. It was odd how that inanimate and at that time almost non-existent object – there was very little to be seen except huge piles of timber, iron and concrete lying about the meadows – should have affected our lives so much. Of course we were fools. There was I cheating myself into hating the man because I hated the bridge; and there was my sister, too inhibited and passive to express her love, going out every night, wet or fine, to gaze on a pile of raw materials lying in a field and a line of red signal lamps where the road had begun. Can you imagine anything sillier than that?

Perhaps that is what made me so angry. It all seemed so silly and irrational and pointless. It was Miss Millay who first told us about it. ‘Dora always used to meet me out of the library two nights a week,' she said. ‘Now she never does. I can't understand it.'
I couldn't understand it either. Then gradually we found out where she was going, and I began to understand.

Without waiting to think it over, I felt terribly angry. Although I had never been directly angry with J. Eric Lawrence I felt my antagonism suddenly shift from him towards my sister. I found all sorts of reasons for my feelings. There is nothing a woman dislikes more than to see another woman running after a man, and it seemed to me that this was what my sister was doing. Another thing, it seemed cheap; it also seemed very clumsy and, in such a calm, rational person as my sister, very absurd and very childish. No: it did not once occur to me that perhaps she was deeply, terribly, mortally unhappy.

Then I began to notice something else. My sister began to display the strangest and most comprehensive knowledge of bridge construction. It was winter now, and sometimes J. Eric Lawrence spent the evening playing chess with Mr. Parker in the drawing room. One evening I went into the room just in time to hear my sister say:

‘Isn't the chief object of steel in reinforced concrete to resist tensile stresses?'

‘Yes, that's right,' he said.

‘And the concrete, I suppose, offers resistance to compression?'