The Death of the Heart (11 page)

“This won’t really make any difference.”

“I quite understand, darling. But it will have to appear to.”

It turned out to have been hardly goodbye at all. But it was, as Anna said to herself, the start of a third, and their most harmonious, phase. That evening, half a dozen camellias came, and three days later, when he had started work, a letter—the first of a series on the imposing office notepaper. In his open writing, so childish as to be sinister, he wrote how nice they all were in the office. In fact, his resentment against her kind act lasted for some weeks. The letter in which he said that this new start had made quite a man of him Anna tore up: she left the scraps in the grate. She asked Thomas how Eddie was really getting on, and Thomas said he was still showing off rather, but that there seemed no reason why he should not shape up.

Eddie came round to report six evenings later, bearing three sprays of flowering cherry in a blue paper sheath. After that, perspicacity, money to spend or new friends elsewhere made him not repeat the visit for some time. He settled down to a routine of weekly tulips, cosy telephone calls, equivocally nice letters, and after the tulips, roses. Thomas, questioned further, reported that Eddie was doing well, though not so well as Eddie himself thought. When Denis came back from Turkey and wanted his flat, Anna wrote and said the flowers must stop: Eddie would have to begin to pay rent now. The flowers stopped, but Eddie, as though he felt communication imperilled, started coming round more often again. Office or no office, he was once more a familiar feature of Windsor Terrace when Portia arrived to join the family.

IT WAS
half-past ten at night. Matchett, opening Portia’s door an inch, breathed cautiously through the crack: a line of light from the landing ran across the darkness into the room. Portia, without stirring on her pillow, whispered: “I’m awake.” The entire top of the house was, in fact, empty: Thomas and Anna had gone to the theatre, but Matchett never let their going or coming temper her manner in any way. She was equally cautious if they were out or in. But only when they were not out she did not come up to say good-night.

If, after ten o’clock, Matchett sank her voice and spoke still more shortly, this seemed to be in awe of approaching sleep. She awaited the silent tide coming in. About now, she served the idea of sleep with a series of little ceremonials—laying out night clothes, levelling fallen pillows, hospitably opening up the beds. Kneeling to turn on bedroom fires, stooping to slip bottles between sheets, she seemed to abase herself to the overcoming night. The impassive solemnity of her preparations made a sort of an altar of each bed: in big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.

Portia instinctively spoke low after dark: she was accustomed to thin walls. She watched the door shut, saw the bend of light cut off, and heard Matchett crossing the 
floor with voluminous quietness. As always, Matchett went to the window and drew the curtains open—a false faint day began again, tawny as though London were burning. Now and then cars curved past. The silence of a shut park does not sound like country silence: it is tense and confined. In the intricate half darkness inside Portia’s room the furniture could be seen, and Matchett’s apron—phosphorescent, close up as she sat down on the bed.

“I thought you were never coming.”

“I had mending to see to. Mr. Thomas burnt the top of a sheet.”

“But does he smoke in bed?”

“He did last week, while she was away. His ash-tray was full of stumps.”

“Do you think he would always like to, but doesn’t because she’s there?”

“He smokes when he doesn’t sleep. He’s like his father; he doesn’t like to be left.”

“I didn’t think anyone left Father. Mother never did—used
she
to, ever? I mean, did Mrs. Quayne?—Oh Matchett, listen: if she was alive now—I mean, if Thomas’s mother was—what would I call her? There wouldn’t be any name.”

“Well, what matter? She’s gone: you don’t have to speak to her.”

“Yes, she’s dead. Do you think she is the reason Thomas and I are so unlike?”

“No, Mr. Thomas always favoured his father more than he did her. You unlike Mr. Thomas? How much liker are you wanting to be?”

“I don’t know—Listen, Matchett,
was
Mrs. Quayne sorry? I mean, did she mind being alone?”

“Alone? She kept Mr. Thomas.”

“She’d made such a sacrifice.”

“Sacrificers,” said Matchett, “are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those that they sacrifice. Oh, the sacrificers, they get it both ways. A person knows themselves what they’re able to do without. Yes, Mrs. Quayne would give the clothes off her back, but in the long run she would never lose a thing. The day we heard you’d been born out there in France, she went on like a lady who’d got her first grandchild. She came after me to the linen room to tell me. The sweet little thing,’ she said. ‘Oh, Matchett!’ she said, ‘he always wanted a girll’ Then she went down in the hall to telephone Mr. Thomas. ‘Oh Thomas, good news,’ I heard her say.”

Fascinated as ever by the topic, Portia turned over on to her side, drawing up her knees so that she lay in a bend round Matchett’s sitting rump. The bed creaked as Matchett, bolt upright, shifted her weight. Sliding a hand under her pillow, Portia stared up through the dark and asked: “What was that day like?”

“Where we were? Oh, it was quite a bright day, springlike for February. That garden was very sheltered; it was the sunny side of that hill. I saw her go down the lawn without her hat, and across the stream Mr. Quayne made: she started picking herself snowdrops down there the other side of the stream.”

“How could he
make
a stream?”

“Well, there was a brook, but not where Mrs. Quayne wanted, so he dug a new ditch and got it to flow in. He was at it all that summer before he went—how he did sweat: I could have wrung his clothes out.”

“But that day I was born—what did
you
say, Matchett?”

“When she said you were born? I said, ‘To think of that, madam,’ or something to that effect. I’ve no doubt she expected to hear more. But I felt it, the way I felt it quite went to my throat, and I couldn’t say more than that. Besides, why should I?—not to her, I mean. Of course, we had all known you were to be coming: the others were all eyes to see how Mrs. Quayne took it, and you may be sure she knew they were all eyes. I went back to putting away the linen, and what I said to myself was ‘The poor little soul!’ She saw that, and she never forgave me for it—though that was more than she knew herself.”

“Why did you think me poor?”

“At that time I had my reasons. Well, she kept picking snowdrops, and now and then she’d keep stopping and looking up. She felt the Almighty watching, I daresay. None of that garden was out of sight of the windows—you could always see Mr. Quayne, while he was working, just as if he had been a little boy. Then she came back in and she did the snowdrops, in a Chinese bowl she set store by—oh, she did set store by that bowl, till one of the girls broke it. (She came to me with the bits of it in her hand, smiling away she was. ‘Another little bit of life gone, Matchett,’ she said. But she never spoke a cross word to the girl—oh no, she liked herself far too well.) Then, that afternoon, Mr. Thomas came back by a train from Oxford: he felt he ought to see, I daresay, how his mother really
was
taking it. I made up his room for him, and he stayed that night. He went about looking quite taken aback, with three snowdrops she gave him stuck in his buttonhole. He stopped and looked at me once, by the swing door, as though he felt he ought to say something. ‘Well, Matchett,’ he said to me, rather loud, ‘so I’ve got a sister.’ ‘Yes, indeed, sir,’ I said.”

“Was that all Thomas said?”

“I daresay the house felt funny that day for a young fellow like him, quite as though there had been a birth there. It did to us all, really. Then later on, Mrs. Quayne sat down and played the piano to Mr. Thomas.”

“Did
they look at all pleased?”

“How should I know? They kept on at the piano till it was time for dinner.”

“Matchett, if Thomas does like a piano, why haven’t they got a piano here?”

“He sold the piano when she died. Oh, she was fair to me, the fifteen years I was with her. You couldn’t have had a better employer, as far as the work went: the one thing that put her out was if you made her feel she wasn’t considerate. She liked me to feel that she thought the world of me. ‘I leave everything in safe charge with you, Matchett,’ she’d say to me on the doorstep, times when she went away. I thought of that as I saw her coffin go out. No, she’d never lift her voice and she always had a kind word. But I couldn’t care for her: she had no nature. I’ve often felt her give me a funny look. She liked what I did, but she never liked how I did it. I couldn’t count how often I’ve heard her say to her friends, ‘Treat servants nicely, take an interest in them, and they’ll do anything for you.’ That was the way she saw it. Well, I liked the work in that house, I liked that work from the first: what she couldn’t forgive me was that I liked the work for its own sake. When I had been the morning polishing in my drawingroom, or getting my marbles nice with a brush and soft soap, she would come to me and she’d say. ‘Oh. it does all look nice! I am so pleased, I am really.’ Oh, she meant well, in her own way. But with work it’s not what you show, it’s what you put into it. You’d never get right work from a girl who worked to please you: she’d only work to show. But
she
would never see that. Now, when Mr. Quayne would come on me working in his smokingroom, or working in any place that he wanted to be, though he was so sweet-tempered, he’d give me a black look as though to say ‘You get out!’ He’d know well I was against him, working in his smokingroom where he wanted to be. If he found a thing left different he used to bellow, because my having my way had put him out. But then, Mr. Quayne was all nature. He left you to go your own way, except when it started to put him out. But she couldn’t allow a thing that she hadn’t her part or share in. All those snowdrops and that piano playing—to make out she’d had her share in your being born.

“The day she died, though I wasn’t up in her room, I could feel her watching how I’d take it. ‘Well,’ I said to myself, ‘it’s no good—
I
can’t play the piano.’ Oh, I did feel upset, with death in the house and all that change coming. But that was the most I felt. I didn’t feel a thing here.” With a dry unflinching movement, Matchett pressed a cuffed hand under her bust.

She sat sideways on the bed, her knees towards Portia’s pillow, her dark skirts flowing into the dark round, only her apron showing. Her top part loomed against the tawny square of sky in uncertain silhouette; her face, eroded by darkness like a statue’s face by the weather, shone out now and then when a car fanned light on it. Up to now, she had sat erect, partly judicial, partly as though her body were a vaseful of memory that must not be spilt—but now, as though to shift the weight of the past, she put a hand on the bed, the far side of Portia’s body, and leant heavily on it so that she made an arch.

Through this living arch, the foot of the bed in fluctuations of half-darkness was seen. Musky warmth from her armpit came to the pillow, and a creak from the stays under her belt as she breathed in the strain of this leaning attitude. She felt as near, now, as anyone can be without touching one. At the same time, as though to recreate distance, her voice pitched itself further away.

“Oh, I felt bad,” she said, “because I couldn’t forgive her. Not about Mr. Quayne—I could never forgive her that. When the nurse sent down word Mrs. Quayne was going, cook said maybe we should go up. She said, having sent word they’d expect us to do something. (Cook meant,
she’d
expect us to do something.) So cook and I went up and stood on the landing: the others were too nervous; they stayed below. Cook was a Catholic, so started saying her prayers. Mr. and Mrs. Thomas were there in the room with her. We knew it was over when Mrs. Thomas came out, quite white, and said to me, ‘Oh Matchett.’ But Mr. Thomas went by without a word. I had had his whisky put out in the diningroom and quite soon I heard them both in there. Mr. and Mrs. Thomas were different to Mrs. Quayne: they had their own ways of passing a thing off.”

“But Matchett, she meant to do good.”

“No, she meant to do right.”

Tentatively sighing and turning over, Portia put on Matchett’s knee, in the dark, fingers that by being urgently living tried to plead for the dead. But the very feel of the apron, of the starch over that solid warm big knee, told her that Matchett was still inexorable.

“You know what she did, but how can you know what she felt? Fancy being left with somebody gone. Perhaps what was right was all she had left to do. To have to stay alone might be worse than dying.”

“She stayed there where she wanted, go who might. No, he had done her wrong, and she had to do herself right. Oh, she was like iron. Worse than dying? For your father, going away was that. He loved his home like a child. Go?—He was sent. He liked his place in the world; he liked using his hands. That stream wasn’t the only thing he’d made. For a gentleman like him, abroad was no proper place. I don’t know how she dared look at that garden after what she had done.”

“But if I had to be born?”

“He was sent away, as cook or I might have been— but oh no, we suited her too well. She stood by while Mr. Thomas put him into the car and drove him off as if he had been a child. What a thing to make Mr. Thomas do to his own father! And then look at the way your father and mother lived, with no place in the world and nobody to respect them. He had been respected wherever he was. Who put him down to that?”