The Death of the Heart (27 page)

“Yes, I am,” said Portia a shade shortly. “Are you?”

“No, not at present, but I suppose it’s a thing one is bound to be. The thought of the future rather preys on my mind. I am quite enough of a lone wolf as it is. I get on well with girls up to a certain point, but then they seem to find me too enigmatic. I don’t find it easy to let myself go. I don’t think most girls appreciate friendship; all they want is to be given a rush.”

“I like friendship very much.”

“Ah,” said Cecil, and looked at her gloomily. “But if you will excuse my saying so, that may be because you are so young that no fellow has started to rush you yet. Once that starts, it seems to go straight to a girl’s head. But you have still got a rather timid manner. Yesterday I felt quite sorry for you.”

She did not know how to reply. Cecil bent down and once more studied his plus fours. “Of course,” he said, “these can go to the cleaners, but that all costs money, you see, and I had been hoping to run over to France.”

“Perhaps your mother could get it off with petrol. Butter is always got off my clothes that way.”

“Oh, is it?” said Cecil. “I say,” he added, “I had been rather wondering if you would care to run into Southstone one evening, on the five-thirty bus, and meet me after the office. We could then come in on the second half of the concert at the East Cliff Pavilion, and might get a spot of food there; it is a nice, rather cosmopolitan place. If you would really care—”

“Oh, yes, I should simply love it!”

“Then we might call it a date. We’ll fix the date itself later.”

“Oh, that is kind of you. Thank you.”

“Not at all,” said Cecil.

The game was over: Charlie and Daphne had just beaten Wallace and Evelyn. Evelyn came across and pulled Cecil on to the court, saying he must now play instead of her.
“Sure
you wouldn’t care to try?” she said to Portia nicely. “Oh well, I see how you feel. I tell you what, you ought to come round one week-day and have a knock up with Clara.
She
wants practice, you know. Then you could play next time… . My goodness,” exclaimed Evelyn, “we do want some air in here! The ventilation is awful!”

Kindly pulling Portia along by one elbow, she went to the end of the court and threw open a door. The garden, after the glare of the court lights, was in very dark blue dusk; the door opening made an alarmed bird break out of a thicket. The town lights blinked through bare moving branches: down there they heard the crepitating sea. Evelyn and Portia, standing in the doorway, filled their lungs with the dark sweet salt spring air.

Darling Portia,

What a marvellous idea! Of course I should love to come, but shall I be able to get away? But if they expect me I really must have a try. No, I don’t mind if I sleep in their lumber room. I suppose I shall hear Dickie snore through the wall? We are still making fine hay with Thomas out of the office, and if Mr. Rattisbone doesn’t have one of his phases I do think that I should be able to nip off. Another thing is, though, that I seem to have filled up my next three week-ends. Next week-end, I think, on the whole, should be the easiest for me to get out of—if I make enemies, you must stand by me. If I do come, I will come on that morning train you said. I shall be able to let you know on Friday. I’m so sorry to leave it as late as that.

I do hope all your dashing friends will like me. I shall be so shy. Well, I must stop, you sweet: I’ve had three late nights and I do feel like death. Directly you go away I start to go to the bad, which shows how important you are to me. But I simply have to be out. You know I hate my room.

I had just a line from Anna. She sounds quite pleased with everything. Well, I’ll let you know. I do hope I can come.

All my best love.

Eddie.

This rather tormenting letter came on Wednesday morning—by which time Mrs. Heccomb was already busy beautifying the lumber room. She had fallen in quite serenely with the idea of this visit, for Eddie had, somehow, been represented to her as an old family friend of Anna’s and Thomas’s, coming down to see how Portia was getting on. This seemed to her most fitting. What she could not get herself happily reconciled to was, that any friend of the Quaynes should sleep in her lumber room. But Daphne and Dickie refused to make any offer, and they kept a close eye on her every evening to see that she did not move out of her own room. The more briskly Daphne asserted that the lumber room would not kill Eddie, the more Mrs. Heccomb’s forehead wrinkled up with concern. She could only buy more matting, and move in her Sheraton looking-glass. She also moved in her
prie-dieu
to act as a bedside table, and improvised a red paper frill for the light. She borrowed an eiderdown from Cecil’s mother. Portia watched these preparations with growing misgivings; they made her dread more and more that Eddie might not come. She felt a great threatening hill of possible disappointment rising daily over the household’s head—for even Daphne was not indifferent, and Dickie had taken note that they must expect a guest. In vain, she implored Mrs. Heccomb to remember that Eddie’s plans for the week-end hung on a thread.

She was also alarmed when she found what a stalwart preconception of Eddie Mrs. Heccomb had—she clearly saw him as a Major Brutt. Daphne knew otherwise: at any mention of Eddie a piglike knowing look would come into Daphne’s eyes. Daphne’s own affairs were not going too well, for Mr. Bursely, in spite of the good beginning, had not been seen since Saturday—Daphne now took a low view of Wallace and Charlie with their civilian ways.

Major Brutt’s second puzzle had come on Wednesday morning, by the same post as Eddie’s letter, and Portia worked at the puzzle at a table in the sun porch, with a diligence that helped to steady her nerves. It soon promised to represent a magnificent air display. That week was very sunny—her eyes dazzled as she fitted piece into piece, and a gull’s shadow flashing over the puzzle would make her suddenly look up. The planes massing against an ultramarine sky began each to take a different symbolic form, and as she assembled the spectators she came to look for a threat or promise in each upturned face. One evening Dickie offered to help her: the table was moved in to under a lamp, and Dickie completed an ambulance she had dreaded to tackle.

She got a postcard from Anna, a short letter from Thomas, a long letter from Lilian, whose sorrows seemed far away.

She went into town every morning with Mrs. Heccomb. Mrs. Heccomb pressed her to drop in on Daphne at Smoots’. The first call was alarming—in the upstairs library heating drew out a gluey smell from the books; Daphne’s nostrils wore a permanent crinkle. In all senses, literature was in bad odour here. The sun slanted its stuffy motes straight on to Daphne’s cross curled head; in the dusk at the back of the library Daphne’s colleague crouched at a table, reading. Contempt for reading as an occupation was implicit in the way Daphne knitted, stopped knitting to buff her nails, and knitted again, impatiently hiking by the long strand towards her her ball of coral wool. The twitch of the coral ball did not disturb the apathy of the library cat—this furious mouser had been introduced when mice began to get at the
belles lettres,
 
but he only worked by night. No subscribers were in the library when Portia came in, and Daphne, already leaning back from her desk, looked up with a quite equable scowl.

“Oh, hullo!” she said, “what do
you
want?”

“Mrs. Heccomb thought you might like me to drop in.”

“Oh, by all means do,” said Daphne. Moving her tongue across from one cheek to the other, she went on knitting. Portia, one finger on Daphne’s desk, looked round and said: “What a large number of books.”

“And that isn’t all, either. However, do sit down.”

“I do wonder who reads them.”

“Oh, that’s quite simple,” said Daphne. “You’d soon see. Does your sister-in-law read?”

“She says she would like to if she had more time.”

“It’s extraordinary how much time people do have. I mean, it really does make you think. I daresay she has a guaranteed subscription? People with those give an awful lot of fuss—they come popping back for a book before one has ordered it. I suppose they feel they are getting their money’s worth. What I always say is—”

Miss Scott, from the back of the room, gave a warning cough, which meant subscribers were coming in. Two ladies approached the table, said “Good morning” placatingly and returned their books. Daphne rolled up her knitting and gave them a look.

“Such a lovely morning… .”

“Yes,” said Daphne repressively.

“And how is your mother?”

“Oh, she’s getting along.”

The lady who had not spoken was already dithering round a table of new novels. Her friend threw the novels rather a longing look, then turned strong-mindedly to the cabinet of
belles lettres.
Raising her nose so as to bring her
pince-nez
to the correct angle, she took out a succession of books, scanned their title pages, looked through all the pictures and almost always replaced them with a frustrated sigh. Did she not know that Daphne hated people to stick around messing the books? “I suppose these is something here I should really like?” she said. “It’s so hard to tell from the outsides.”

“Miss Scott,” said Daphne plaintively, “can’t you help Mrs. Adams?”

Mrs. Adams, mortified, said: “I
ought
to make out a list.”

“Well, people do find it helps.”

Mrs. Adams did not half like being turned over to Miss Scott, who gave her a collection of well-known essays she was ashamed to refuse. She looked wistfully at her friend, who came back with a gay-looking novel and a happy face. “You really oughtn’t to miss these; they are beautifully written,” said Miss Scott, giving poor Mrs. Adams a shrewish look—in her subservient way, she was learning to be as great a bully as Daphne.

Daphne flicked the subscribers’ cards out of the box and sat with pencil poised, preparing to make disdainful marks on them. It was clear that Daphne added, and knew that she added,
cachet
to Smoots’ by her air of barely condoning the traffic that went on there. Her palpable wish never to read placed at a disadvantage those who had become dependent on this habit, and it was a disadvantage they seemed to enjoy. Miss Scott, though so much more useful, cut no ice: she (unlike Daphne) was not a lady, and she not only read but was paid to read, which was worse. Also, she had not Daphne’s dashing appearance: most of the Seale subscribers were elderly, and age and even the mildest form of intellect both tend to make people physical snobs. There may be libraries in which Daphne would not have done so well. But for this
clientéle
of discarded people her bloom and her nonchalance served, somehow, to place her above literature. These were readers who could expect no more from life, and just dared to look in books to see how much they had missed. The old are often masochists, and their slackening hearts twitched at her bold cold smile. Perhaps there was an interchange of cruelty, for Smoots’ subscribers had, after all, the power to keep this fine girl chained. A bald patch in the carpet under her desk would have showed, had they cared to look, with what restless fury she dug in her heels. On a sunny day they would tell her it seemed hard she should not be out of doors, then they doddered off with their books in the salty sun down the street.

Portia’s respect for Daphne went up with every moment as she watched her flick at the cards in the filing box. Looking up round the shelves she found the authors arranged in quite faultless alphabetical order, and this in itself seemed the work of a master mind. Also, though Daphne loathed print she had rather a feeling for dressy bindings: the books in her keeping had a well-groomed air… . When Mrs. Adams had taken her friend away, Miss Scott returned to her reading with a peculiar smile, while Daphne rose and paced once or twice to the window, with both hands moulding her skirt over her hips. Then she bumped back with a snort and went on with her knitting.

“Heard anything more from your boy friend?”

“Not yet… .”

“Oh well. No doubt he’ll come.”

Late that same Thursday, by arrangement, Portia took the bus into Southstone to meet Cecil. Mrs. Heccomb’s entire confidence in Cecil deprived the expedition of any glamour. Portia, arriving a little too early, waited outside the block of buildings from which Cecil at last emerged, blowing his nose. They walked through draughty streets of private hotels to the East Cliff Pavilion. This vast glassy building, several floors deep, had been clamped skilfully to the face of the cliff, and was entered from the top like a catacomb. Tiers of glazed balconies overhung the sea, which had diluted into a mauvish haze by the time the concert finished. Portia had not a good ear, but she went up in Cecil’s estimation by spotting a tune from
Madame Butterfly
.
In fact, the orchestra played a good deal of music to which she and Irene had illicitly listened, skulking outside palace hotels abroad. At half-past six, attendants drew the curtains over the now extinct view. When the concert was over, Cecil and Portia quitted their plush
fauteuils
for a glass-topped table, at which they ate poached eggs on haddock and banana splits. Though exceedingly brilliantly lit, the hall with its lines of tables was almost empty, and lofty silence filled it. No doubt it would be gay at some other time. Portia listened with an unfixed eye to Cecil’s thoughtful conversation: by this time tomorrow, she would know if Eddie were coming or not. They caught the quarter-to-nine bus back to Seale, and at the gate of Waikiki, saying good-night, Cecil gave her hand a platonic squeeze.