The Death of the Heart (20 page)

Waikiki, Mrs. Heccomb’s house, was about one minute more down the esplanade. Numbers of windows at different levels looked out of the picturesque red roof—one window had blown open; a faded curtain was wildly blowing out. Below this, what with the sun porch, the glass entrance door and a wide bow window, the house had an almost transparent front. Constructed largely of glass and blistered white paint, Waikiki faced the sea boldly, as though daring the elements to dash it to bits.

Portia saw firelight in the inside dusk. Mrs. Heccomb rapped three times on the glass door—there was a bell, 
but it hung out of its socket on a long twisted umbilical wire—and a small maid, fixing her large cuffs, could be seen advancing across the livingroom. She let them in with rather a hoity-toity air. “I have
got
my
latchkey,” said Mrs. Heccomb. “But I think this is practice for you, Doris. … I always latch this door when I’m out,” she added to Portia. “The seaside is not the country, you see… . Now, Doris, this is the young lady from London. Do you remember how to take her things to her room? And this is the matting that the man is just bringing. Do you remember where I told you to put it?”

While Mrs. Heccomb thanked and paid off the driver, Portia looked politely round the livingroom, with eyes that were now and again lowered so as not to seem to make free with what they saw. Though dusk already fell on the esplanade, the room held a light reflection from the sea. She located the smell of spring with a trough of blue hyacinths, just come into flower. Almost all one side of the room was made up of french windows, which gave on to the sun porch but were at present shut. The sun porch, into which she hastily looked, held some basket chairs and an empty aquarium. At one end of the room, an extravagant fire fluttered on brown glazed tiles; the wireless cabinet was the most glossy of all. Opposite the windows a glass-fronted bookcase, full but with a remarkably locked look, chiefly served to reflect the marine view. A dark blue chenille curtain, faded in lighter streaks, muffled an arch that might lead to the stairs. In other parts of the room, Portia’s humble glances discovered such objects as a scarlet portable gramophone, a tray with a painting outfit, a half painted lampshade, a mountain of magazines. Two armchairs and a settee, with crumpled bottoms, made a square round the fire, and there was a gate-legged table, already set for tea. It was set for tea, but the cake plates were still empty—Mrs. Heccomb was tipping cakes out of paper bags. ‘

Outside, the sea went on with its independent sighing, but still seemed an annexe of the livingroom. Portia, laying her gloves on an armchair, got the feeling that there was room for everyone here. She learned later that Daphne called this the lounge.

“Would you like to go up, dear?”

“Not specially, thank you.”

“Not even to your room?”

“I don’t really mind.”

Mrs. Heccomb, for some reason, looked relieved. When Doris brought in tea she said in a low voice: “Now, Doris, the matting…”

Mrs. Heccomb took off her hat for tea, and Portia saw that her hair, like part of an artichoke, seemed to have an up-growing tendency: it was pinned down firmly to the top of her head in a flat bun. This, for some reason, added to Mrs. Heccomb’s expression of surprise. At the same time, her personality was most reassuring. She talked so freely to Portia, telling her so much that Portia, used to the tactics of Windsor Terrace, wondered whether this really were wise. And what would be left to say by the end of the first week? She had yet to learn how often intimacies between women go backwards, beginning with revelations and ending up in small talk without loss of esteem. Mrs. Heccomb told stories of Anna’s youth at Richmond, which she invested with a pathetic prettiness. Then she said how sad it would always be about those two little babies Anna had almost had. Portia ate doughnuts, shortbread and Dundee cake and gazed past Mrs. Heccomb at the vanishing sea. She thought how gay this room, with its lights on, must look from the esplanade, thought how dark it was out there, and came to envy herself.

But then Mrs. Heccomb got up and drew the curtains. “You never know,” she said. “It does not quite do.” (She referred to being looked in at.) Then she gave Portia another cup of tea and told her how much she must miss her mother. But she said how very lucky she was to have Thomas and Anna. For years and years, as Miss Yardes, she had had to be tactful and optimistic, trying to make young people see things the right way. This may have exaggerated her feeling manner. Now independence gave her a slight authority: when she said a thing
was
so, it became so forthwith. She looked at the mahogany clock that ticked loudly over the fire and said how nice it was that Daphne would soon be home. This Portia could not, of course, dispute. But she said: “I think I will go up and brush my hair, then.”

While she was up in her room combing her hair back, hearing the tissue paper in her suitcase rustle, watching draughts bulge the new matting strip, she heard the bang that meant Daphne was in. Waikiki, she was to learn, was a sounding box: you knew where everyone was, what everyone did—except when the noise they made was drowned by a loud wind. She heard Daphne loudly asking something, then Mrs. Heccomb must have put up a warning hand, for the rest of Daphne’s question got bitten off. Portia thought, I do hope Daphne won’t mind me. … In her room, the electric light, from its porcelain shade, poured down with a frankness unknown at Windsor Terrace. The light swayed slightly in that seaside draught, and Portia felt a new life had begun. Downstairs, Daphne switched the wireless on full blast, then started bawling across it at Mrs. Heccomb: “I say, when
is
Dickie going to mend that bell?”

WHEN
Portia ventured to come down, she found Daphne pottering round the tea table, biting pieces out of a macaroon, while Mrs. Heccomb, busy painting the lamp shade, shouted above the music that she would spoil her supper. Mrs. Heccomb’s shouting had acquired, after years of evenings with Daphne and the music, the mild equability of her speaking voice: she could shout without strain. There was, in fact, an air of unconscious deportment about everything that she carried through, and as she worked at the lamp shade, peering close at the detail, then leaning back to get the general effect, she looked like someone painting a lamp shade in a play.

As Portia came round the curtain Daphne did not look at her, but with unnerving politeness switched the wireless off. It snapped off at the height of a roar, and Mrs. Heccomb looked up. Daphne popped the last piece of macaroon into her mouth, wiped her fingers correctly on a crêpe-de-chine handkerchief and shook hands, though still without saying anything. She gave the impression that she would not speak till she had thought of something striking to say. She was a fine upstanding girl, rather tall; her close-fitting dark blue knitted dress showed off her large limbs. She wore her hair in a mop, but the mop was in an iron pattern of curls, burnished with brilliantine. She had a high colour, and used tange
rine lipstick. Pending having something to say to Portia, she said over her shoulder to Mrs. Heccomb: “None of them will be coming in tonight.”

“Oh, thank you, Daphne.”

“Oh, don’t thank
me.”

“Daphne has so many friends,” Mrs. Heccomb explained to Portia. “But she says that none of them will be coming in tonight.”

Daphne gave the rest of the cakes a rather scornful once-over, then bumped into an armchair. Portia, as unostentatiously as possible, edged round the room to stand beside Mrs. Heccomb, who worked with her tray of painting materials drawn up under a special lamp. Though all this was alarming, she did not feel so alarmed as she did at Windsor Terrace, where St. Quentin and all those other friends of Anna’s always tacitly watched. On the lamp shade she saw delphiniums and marble cupids being painted in against a salmon pink sky. “Oh,
how
pretty!” she said.

“It will look better varnished. I think the idea is pretty. This is an order, for a wedding present, but later I hope to do one for Anna, as a surprise—Daphne dear, I’m sure Portia wouldn’t mind the music.”

Daphne groaned, but got up and restarted the wireless. Then she kicked off her court shoes and lighted a cigarette. “You know,” she said, “I feel spring in my bones today.”

“I know, dear; isn’t it nice?”

“Not in my bones.” Daphne looked with a certain interest at Portia. “Well,” she said, “so they didn’t take
you
abroad.”

“They couldn’t, you see, dear,” said Mrs. Heccomb quickly. “They are going to stay with people who have 
a villa. And also, Portia comes from abroad.”

“Oh! And what do
you
think of our English policemen, then?”

“I don’t think I—”

“Daphne, don’t always joke, dear. Be a good girl and tell Doris to clear tea.”

Daphne put her head back and bellowed
“Doris!”
and Doris gave her a look as she nimbled in with the tray. Portia realised later that the tomblike hush of Smoot’s library, where she had to sit all day, dealing out hated books, was not only antipathetic but even dangerous to Daphne. So, once home, she kept fit by making a loud noise. Daphne never simply touched objects, she slapped down her hand on them; she made up her mouth with the gesture of someone cutting their throat. Even when the wireless was not on full blast, Daphne often shouted as though it were. So, when Daphne’s homecoming step was heard on the esplanade, Mrs. Heccomb had learned to draw a shutter over her nerves. So much of her own working life had been spent in intercepting noise that might annoy others, in saying “Quietly, please, dear,” to young people, that she may even have got a sort of holiday pleasure from letting Daphne rip. The degree of blare and glare she permitted Daphne may even have been Mrs. Heccomb’s own tribute to the life force it had for so long been her business to check. So much did she identify noise with Daphne’s presence that if the wireless stopped or there were a pause in the shouting, Mrs. Heccomb would get up from her painting and either close a window or poke the fire—any lack felt by any one of her senses always made her imagine she felt Cold. She had given up hoping Daphne might grow like Anna. But it was firmly fixed in her mind now that she would not wish Portia to return to London and Anna having picked up any of Daphne’s ways.

When tea had been cleared, and the lace cloth folded by Doris and put away in the bookcase drawer, Mrs. Heccomb uncorked a bottle of varnish and with a tense air applied the first coat. This done, she returned to the world and said: “Doris seems to be coming on quite well.”

“She ought to,” said Daphne. “She’s got a boy.”

“Already? Oh dear!
 
Has
she?”

“Yes, they were on the top of the bus I was on. He’s got a spot on his neck. First I looked at the spot, then I looked at the boy, then who should I see but Doris grinning away beside him.”

“I do hope he’s a nice boy …”

“Well, I tell you, he’s got a spot on his neck… . No, but I say, really, Mumsie, I do wish you’d fly out at Dickie about that bell. It looks awful, hanging out at the root like that, besides not ringing. Why don’t we have an electric, anyway?”

“Your father always thought they went out of order, dear.”

“Well, you ought to fly out at Dickie, you ought really. What did he say he’d mend that bell for if he wasn’t going to mend it? No one asked him to say he would mend that bell.”

“It was very good of him, dear. I might remind him at supper.”

“He won’t be in for supper. He’s got a date. He said.”

“Oh yes, so he did. What am I thinking about?”

“Don’t ask me,” said Daphne kindly. “However, don’t you worry: I’ll eat the odd sausage. What is it, by the way?”

“Egg pie. I thought that would be light.”

“Light?”
said Daphne appalled.

“For Portia after the journey. If you want more, dear, we can open the galantine.”

“Oh well,” said Daphne resignedly.

Portia sat at one end of the sofa, looking through a copy of
Woman and Beauty.
Mrs. Heccomb was so much occupied with the lamp shade, Daphne by simply sitting and glooming there, that she wished she could have brought Major Brutt’s puzzle—she could have been getting on with that. But you cannot pack a jigsaw that is three-quarters done. As it was, sitting under an alabaster pendant that poured a choked orange light on her head, she felt stupefied by this entirely new world. The thump of the broadcast band with the sea’s vibration below it, the smell of varnish, hyacinths, Turkey carpet drawn out by the heat of the roaring fire came at her overpower-ingly. She was not yet adjusted to all this. How far she had travelled—not only in space.

Wondering if this could ever make her suffer, she thought of Windsor Terrace.
I am not there.
She began to go round, in little circles, things that at least her senses had loved—her bed, with the lamp turned on on winter mornings, the rug in Thomas’s study, the chest carved with angels out there on the landing, the waxen oilcloth down there in Matchett’s room. Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for
things
.
One’s relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain. Looking back at a repetition of empty days, one sees that monuments have sprung up. Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie: when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness. So, she and Irene had almost always felt sad when they looked round a hotel room before going away from it for always. They could not but feel that they had betrayed something. In unfamiliar places, they unconsciously looked for familiarity. It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home. The need to attach themselves makes wandering people strike roots in a day: wherever we unconsciously feel, we live.