The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (5 page)

‘Now?'

‘As soon as possible.'

‘Look,' he said. He smiled at me in the old, completely captivating way. ‘Let's wait until the bridge is finished. Won't that do?'

‘All right,' I said.

So we waited until the bridge was finished, and until the day the bridge was opened I went about with what must have been an impossibly conceited air of only partially disguised triumph. But it was nothing to the triumph that I saw on my sister's face when she stood with the privileged spectators on the bridge that soft clear November afternoon, with the dead leaves of the neighbouring willow-trees blowing idly along the new white concrete, over the new stone parapets and falling lightly on to the grass, on the railway track and on the clear water of the river below. There were many people there and they cheered loudly as the Minister of Transport, accompanied by a large group of important townsmen, cut the tape and made the usual joke about paying for the scissors and then shook hands with J. Eric Lawrence. The triumph on my
sister's face was at that moment complete. It was wonderfully characteristic: passive, but deep, quite strong, but beautifully unselfish and secure. The most wonderful thing about it was that it lacked all direction; it was not a triumph against anyone. Only my sister can tell what she felt, of course, high up on that shining white bridge in the clear golden November air, but it seemed to me as if she might have regarded the bridge as her own spiritual triumph.

As soon as the bridge was opened the traffic began to drive over it, and shortly afterwards the Minister of Transport and the officials drove back to London, and then my sister, J. Eric Lawrence and I walked slowly home through the town. It had been a tense day for all of us and we did not speak much. My sister was too shy and too passive even to congratulate J. Eric Lawrence on his achievement, but all the time I knew she was still nursing that deep, private sense of triumph.

I too was nursing something, and I knew that I could not keep it much longer. My sister had had her triumph. Now it was my turn. And that evening, just before Miss Millay and Mr. Parker came down to supper, and when there were only the three of us in the sitting-room, my sister smiled at J. Eric Lawrence and said she supposed it was only a question of time now before he packed his bags?

‘You mean our bags,' I said.

My sister did not speak. Her mouth was open a little, and I remember thinking how foolish, unreliant and vacantly frightened she looked.

‘You must have known,' I said, looking straight at her. I had waited so long for that particular moment that now there seemed nothing in it. The tragic surprised vacancy in my sister's face made everything else seem sterile.

‘You must have known,' I said. ‘Now the bridge is finished we're going away together.'

My sister did not speak. I had no more to say either. Somehow the whole thing seemed extraordinarily empty. A fortnight later J. Eric Lawrence left for London. I was to follow him four days later and meet him at the Park Hotel.

It is now summer again and I am back in Parkinford. The summer has been a good one and, contrary to all our early fears, the bridge and the bypass have made no difference to business with us. We have been very busy all summer and by evening, by eight or nine o'clock, after supper is over, we are both tired out. My sister does not go for her walk now, and I do not go out either. I have got into the habit of sitting in
what used to be my father's study. It used to be a very dark, gloomy little room, but it is very light now. The reason for this is that my sister has had all the branches of the lime-tree cut off, leaving the trunk stark and bare, so that now there is nothing to shut out the light.

But this is not what I am trying to say, and perhaps it would be better if I came to the point. I have never been a very practical person and the truth is that there are things about J. Eric Lawrence that I should have found out but which, because I was young and romantic and excitable, I did not trouble about. But then my sister, who is so extremely practical and far-sighted and realistic, did not trouble about them either. Of course we were fools, and it did not occur to either of us that J. Eric Lawrence was a married man who had for some years not lived with his wife. Even now my sister does not know that. She does not know that I went to the Park Hotel and found a letter telling me, in the most charming and persuasive terms of course, that simple and final fact, without giving an address to which I could send an answer. No, she does not know that, and if there is any question of triumph now it lies with her. She knows that my love-affair with J. Eric Lawrence is over. She knows that he will never come back of course, but there must always be for her the secret and perhaps exciting hope that one day he might drop in for tea, stay on to supper, and
talk once again of bridges and tensile stresses and smile at us in the old charming, self-indulgent, impertinent way and proceed to captivate us all completely again.

Of course he won't come. I know that. We were both fools. The strange thing is that I do not hold him responsible. I am responsible. If it had not been for that recurrent and inexplicable feeling of antagonism towards my sister it would never have happened. My sister would have fallen in love with him in her own way, with unspoken passivity, and when he went away she would have locked it all away very nicely in her heart. For a time she would have brooded over it, squeezed from it a few drops of miserable, solitary pleasure, and then probably after a time have got over it.

The point is that it is not all over. J. Eric Lawrence has gone, the bridge has long since become an unnoticed part of our everyday life, the beauty and excitement and trouble of last summer are things of the past; but the antagonism remains.

It is, however, not only that. There is still something else. It might be possible to do something about the antagonism itself, but now something else has happened in this house where for so many years nothing ever happened at all.

We have another permanent guest. He is a youngish man named Barnes, and he has just been transferred
to one of the banks here. He is a very pleasant, courteous, fair-haired man who could not cherish a moment's antagonism against a soul. He is gentle without being at all docile. He rushes to open doors for us, and moves with discretion when he comes in late at night from the bank. He plays the piano rather well, and you get the impression when he plays that the hammers are muffled with wool. There is nothing impertinent or passionate or vain about him, he could never build a bridge over a river, but it seems to me that he is the sort of person in whom you could confide an enormous amount of trouble. He listens with the gravest attention to all you say, and it is obvious he would not hurt a soul. He is like a well-made cushion on which you could rest your head.

And that is exactly how I feel. After the bitterness and shock and tumultuous emotion of the affair with J. Eric Lawrence I feel that I should like to rest. I should like to rest for a long time. I should like to find someone in whom I can confide and who will never think of hurting me – someone who will be decent to me for the rest of my life.

It is the simplest, most natural desire in the world, and yet I am immensely frightened of it. And I am frightened of it because my sister has begun to think exactly as I do. She is also thinking of Mr. Barnes. There is something in her quiet, passive nature which
would appeal enormously to a man like him, and it is easy to see that in a very prosaic, very inglorious sort of way he could fall in love with her.

I am at the moment sitting in my father's former study, looking out of the window. In my absence last winter, as I said, my sister lopped the branches of the lime-tree. A few fresh twigs, now a deep claret colour, have shot out from the trunk, but there are no flowers this year, and what was once a large, dark, graceful tree now looks hateful. You would not believe what a difference it makes. You see things you could never see before, and there is light everywhere.

Downstairs in the drawing room Mr. Barnes is very softly playing the piano. I have been listening to him, but I cannot tell exactly what it is he is playing. It is something very soothing and subdued, in a minor key, and I have no doubt that somewhere in the house my sister is listening too.

It is almost dark and I have been looking and listening for a long time. The bridge has been built. I have been away and have come back again. My sister has lopped the branches of the lime-tree and now in the house there is the sound of this gentle Mr. Barnes playing the piano. Things have changed, and yet in a way they have remained the same. For God's sake what is going to happen now?

He wanted to put his feet up on his own fireplace, but he was well aware that twenty-eight weeks of idleness had lost him that privilege.

‘And don't keep muttering at the girl!' his wife said. ‘You mutter all day at me. Then when she comes home at night you start muttering at her. Can't you think of anything else to do? Go for a good walk.'

‘I don't hold wi' this gadding out o' nights,' he said. ‘I don't hold wi' it.'

‘You never hold wi' anything,' she said. ‘The girl wants some enjoyment, don't she?'

‘I should think so!' the girl said. ‘Who do you think you are?'

The words struck him into silence. He sat gazing heavily at the miserable little fire, backed up earlier in the day with a mass of wet potato-peelings, scraps of brussel-sprouts and a small quantity of wet slack. Damp clothes were drying about the overcrowded kitchen on lines and chair-backs. He was a heavy-boned man, with loose grey flesh and awkward hands rather like dead crabs. Twenty-eight weeks ago they had laid him off at the tannery. Now he looked indeterminately at the dead crust of fire and longed to
poke it into flame. In the past his first act on coming home from work had been to seize the poker, exuberantly smash the fire into a blaze, and then put his feet on the hob. These acts had given him prestige. He could see even now where his feet had scarred the lid of the side-boiler. Yes: feet on the hob, then a kipper or a piece of haddock or eggs with his tea, then hot water from the boiler and a smoke and a look at the paper in his shirtsleeves before going out to the club.

Now things had changed. It was the girl who had the kipper, with the paper independently propped up by the teapot. It was she who brought the money home. It was she who had the prestige and kept things together.

The odour of fish made savagely delicious stabs at his senses. The girl, alternately intent on fish-bones and the paper, did not look at him. She was just twenty. One day she had been at school; the next day as it were he had looked up to see her fully grown, swinging her hips. She was pretty in a ripe, haughty sort of way. She earned good, easy money in a large machine laundry. She used lipstick and sometimes wore Woolworth earrings that made her look much older and, to him, almost a stranger. And now, for some time, he had been worried because she was having a gay time, staying out at all hours of the night.

As he sat there defeatedly contemplating the fire she
got up from the table. He looked up, and a spark of the old authority sprang up in him.

‘Jist you be in a good time,' he said.

‘Ah! start that again!' the woman said. ‘Start that again!'

‘Well – '

‘Well what? The girl earns good money, don't she? She's only young, ain't she? She's entitled to a few minutes' enjoyment, ain't she? The way you talk to her anybody'd think she couldn't look after herself.'

‘You harbour her in it. That's what,' he said. ‘I tell you.'

‘Well, tell somebody else!' she said. ‘I'm sick of it. All you do all day is maunder over the fire and jaw at folks. Take and get out and walk it off!'

‘Yes!' the girl said again, ‘who do you think you are?'

When he left the house, five minutes later, it was as if these words drove him forward. After the bright gas-light of the crowded little room, with damp clothes drying on the ceiling-line and on the horse by the fire, the streets seemed very dark and empty. The sky was starless and quiet over the town. He heard the moan of trams rising and falling above the murmur of other traffic and saw above the darker horizon of buildings the great reflection of lights flowering in apricot and rose.

Well, who was he? The question, not answered, settled at the back of his mind, dully pricking his consciousness. He walked with his hands in his pockets, staring at the slightly wet pavements. At the bottom of the next street there was a corner pub, The Flying Horse. He went past it. He would have liked a glass of mild-and-bitter, an hour in the smoke of the bar, but he knew it was not possible. Nothing was the same now. He had lost the right to put his feet on his own fireplace, the right to have a drink, the right to expect a civil answer from his own daughter. Well, who was he? Who did he think he was?

He walked on into the centre of the town. Fragmentary moments out of the past flashed across his mind exactly as the sparks flashed along the elevated tram-wires. He did not consciously think of things as they had been. It was not possible to grasp the pictures of himself, independent, in regular work, able to demand a thing and pay for it or ask a question and get an answer, before despondence absorbed and extinguished them again.

Five minutes later he was down among the shops. It was Tuesday and now he saw that there was a street-market. He walked slowly past stalls on which pyramids of fruit glowed orange and green and scarlet under white gas-flares. The odour of celery was clean and sweet in the damp, wintry air. The light broke
up into diamond and multi-coloured sections the sloping counters of sweets and cakes iced with sugar and coconut.

He went slowly past them, as if not interested. He was not hungry. Hunger had nothing to do with it. Some part of himself had simply been taken away and in his wretchedness he was not able to place what it was. It had something to do with his daughter.