The Death of the Heart (8 page)

She said, in some confusion: “I do like things to happen.”

Miss Paullie’s father was a successful doctor; her classes were held in a first-floor annexe, built for a billiardroom, at the back of his large house. In order that they might not incommode the patients, the pupils came and went by a basement door. Passers-by were surprised to see the trim little creatures, some of whom hopped out of limousines, disappear down the basement like so many cats. Once down there, they rang Miss Paullie’s special bell, and were admitted to a fibre-carpeted passage. At the top of a flight of crooked staircase they hung their hats and coats in the annexe cloakroom, and queued up for the mirror, which was very small. Buff-and-blue tiles, marble, gilt embossed wallpaper and a Turkey carpet were the note of the annexe. The cloakroom, which had a stained-glass window, smelt of fog and Vinolia, the billiard (or school) room of carpet, radiators and fog—this room had no windows: a big domed skylight told the state of the weather, went leaden with fog, crepitated when it was raining, or dropped a great square glare on to the table when the sun shone. At the end of the afternoon, in winter, a blue-black glazed blind was run across from a roller to cover the skylight, when the electric lights had been turned on. Ventilation was not the room’s strong point—which may have been why Portia drooped like a plant the moment she got in. She was not a success here, for she failed to concentrate, or even to seem to concentrate like the other girls. She could not keep her thoughts at face-and-table level; they would go soaring up through the glass dome. One professor would stop, glare and drum the edge of the table; another would say: “Miss Quayne, please,
please
.
Are we here to look at the sky?” For sometimes her inattention reached the point of bad manners, or, which was worse, began to distract the others.

She was unused to learning, she had not learnt that one must learn: she seemed to have no place in which to house the most interesting fact. Anxious not to attract attention, not to annoy the professors, she
had
learned, however, after some weeks here, how to rivet, even to hypnotise the most angry professor by an unmoving regard—of his lips while he spoke, of the air over his head… . This morning’s lecture on economics she received with an air of steady amazement. She brought her bag in to lessons, and sat with it on her knee. At the end of the hour, the professor said good-morning; the girls divided—some were to be taken round somebody’s private gallery. The rest prepared to study; some got their fine pens out to draw maps; they hitched their heels up on the rungs of their chairs, looking glad they had not had to go out. Some distance away from the big table, Miss Paullie sat going through essays, in a gothic chair, at a table of her own. Because the day was dark, a swan-necked reading lamp bent light on to what Miss Paullie read. She kept turning pages, the girls fidgeted cautiously, now and then a gurgle came from a hot pipe—the tissue of small sounds that they called silence filled the room to the dome. Lilian stopped now and then to examine her mapping nib, or to brood over her delicate state. Portia pressed her diaphragm to the edge of the table, and kept feeling at her bag against her stomach. Everybody’s attention to what they were doing hardened—optimistically, Portia now felt safe.

She leant back, looked round, bent forward and, as softly as possible, clicked open her bag. She took out a blue letter: this she spread on her knee below the table and started to read for the second time.

Dear Portia,

What you did the other night was so sweet, I feel I must write and tell you how it cheered me up. I hope you won’t mind—you won’t, you will understand: I feel we are friends already. I was sad, going away, for various reasons, but one was that I thought you must have gone to bed by then, and that I should not see you again. So I cannot tell you what a surprise it was finding you there in the hall, holding my hat. I saw then that you must have been seeing how depressed I was, and that you wanted, you darling, to cheer me up. I cannot tell you what your suddenly being there like that in the hall, and giving me my hat as I went away, meant. I know I didn’t behave well, up there in the drawingroom, and I’m afraid I behaved even worse after you went away, but that was not altogether my fault. You know how I love Anna, as I’m sure you do too, but when she starts to say to me “Really, Eddie”, I feel like a wild animal, and behave accordingly. I am much too influenced by people’s manner towards me—especially Anna’s, I suppose. Directly people attack me, I think they are right, and hate myself, and then I hate them— the more I like them this is so. So I went downstairs for my hat that night (Monday night, wasn’t it?) feeling perfectly black. When you appeared in the hall and so sweetly gave me my hat, everything calmed down. Not only your being there, but the thought (is this presumptuous of me?) that perhaps you had actually been waiting, made me feel quite in heaven. I could not say so then, I thought you might not like it, but I cannot help writing to say so now.

Also, I once heard you say, in the natural way you say things, that you did not very often get letters, so I thought perhaps you might like to get this. You and I are two rather alone people—with you that is just chance, with me, I expect, it is partly my bad nature. I am so difficult, you are so good and sweet. I feel particularly alone tonight (I am in my flat, which I do not like very much) because I tried just now to telephone to Anna about something and she was rather short, so I did not try any more. I expect she gets bored with me, or finds me too difficult. Oh Portia, I do wish you and I could be friends. Perhaps we could sometimes go for walks in the park? I sit here and think how nice it would be if—

“Portia!”
said Miss Paullie. Portia leaped as though she had been struck. “My dear child, don’t sit hunched like that. Don’t work under the table. Put your work
on
the table. What have you got there? Don’t keep things on your knee.”

As Portia still did nothing, Miss Paullie pushed her own small table from in front of her chair, got up and came swiftly round to where Portia sat. All the girls stared.

Miss Paullie said: “Surely that is not a letter? This is not the place or the time to read your letters, is it? I think you must notice that the other girls don’t do that. And, wherever one is, one never does read a letter under the table: have you never been told? What else is that you have on your knee? Your bag? Why did you not leave your bag in the cloakroom? Nobody will take it here, you know. Now, put your letter away in your bag again, and leave them both in the cloakroom. To carry your bag about with you indoors is a hotel habit, you know.”

Miss Paullie may not have known what she was saying, but one or two of the girls, including Lilian, smiled. Portia got up, looking unsteady, went to the cloakroom and lodged her bag on a ledge under her coat—a ledge along which, as she saw now, all the other girls’ bags had been put. But Eddie’s letter, after a desperate moment, she slipped up inside her woollen directoire knickers. It stayed just inside the elastic band, under one knee.

Back in the billiardroom, the girls’ brush-glossed heads were bent steadily over their books again. These silent sessions in Miss Paullie’s presence were, in point of fact (and well most of them knew it) lessons in the deportment of staying still, of feeling yourself watched without turning a hair. Only Portia could have imagined for a moment that Miss Paullie’s eye was off what any girl did. A little raised in her gothic chair, like a bishop, Miss Paullie’s own rigid stillness quelled every young body, its nervous itches, its cooped-up pleasure in being itself, its awareness of the young body next door. Even Lilian, prone to finger her own plaits or to look at the voluptuous white insides of her arms, sat, during those hours with Miss Paullie, as though Lilian did not exist. Portia, still burning under her pale skin, pulled her book on the theory of architecture towards her, and stared at a plate of a Palladian facade.

But a sense of Portia’s not being quite what was what had seeped, meanwhile, into the billiardroom. She almost felt something sniffing at the hem of her dress. For the most fatal thing about what Miss Paullie had said had been her manner of saying it—as though she did not say half of what she felt, as though she were mortified on Portia’s behalf, in front of these better girls. No one had ever read a letter under this table; no one had even heard of such a thing being done. Miss Paullie was very particular what class of girl she took.
Sins
cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life. So now, not only diligence, or caution, kept the girls’ smooth heads bent, and made them not glance again at Irene’s child. Irene herself— knowing that nine out of ten things you do direct from the heart are the wrong thing, and that she was not capable of doing anything better—would not have dared to cross the threshold of this room. For a moment, Portia felt herself stand with her mother in the doorway, looking at all this in here with a wild askance shrinking eye. The gilt-scrolled paper, the dome, the bishop’s chair, the girls’ smooth heads must have been fixed here always, where they safely belonged—while she and Irene, shady, had been skidding about in an out-of-season nowhere of railway stations and rocks, filing off wet third-class decks of lake steamers, choking over the bones of
loups de mer
, giggling into eiderdowns that smelled of the person-before-last. Untaught, they had walked arm-in-arm along city pavements, and at nights had pulled their beds close together or slept in the same bed—overcoming, as far as might be, the separation of birth. Seldom had they faced up to society—when they did, Irene did the wrong thing, then cried. How sweet, how sweetly exalted by her wrong act was Irene, when, stopping crying, she blew her nose and asked for a cup of tea… . Portia, relaxing a very little, moved on her chair: at once she felt Eddie’s letter crackle under her knee. What would Eddie think of all this?

Miss Paullie, who had thought well of Anna, was sorry about Portia, and sorry for Anna. She was sorry Portia should have made no friend here but the more than doubtful Lilian, but she quite saw why this was, and it really could not be helped. She regretted that Mrs. Quayne had not seen her way to go on sending someone to fetch Portia, as she had done for the first weeks. She had a strong feeling that Portia and Lilian loitered in the streets on the way home. Miss Paullie knew one must not be old-fashioned, but it gave better tone if the girls were fetched.

Any girls who stayed to lunch at Miss Paullie’s lunched in a morningroom in the annexe basement: down here the light was almost always on. The proper diningroom of the house was a waitingroom, with sideboards like catafalques: where Dr. Paullie himself lunched no one asked or knew.

The lunch given the girls was sufficient, simple and far from excellent—Lilian, sent to lunch here because of the servant shortage, always messed about at it with her fork. Miss Paullie, at the head of the table, encouraged the girls to talk to her about art. This Wednesday, this Wednesday of the letter, Portia seated herself as far away from Miss Paullie as she possibly could, whereupon Lilian seized the place next to Portia’s with unusual zest.

“It really was awful for you,” Lilian said, “I didn’t know where to look. Why didn’t you tell me you’d had a letter? I did think you were looking very mysterious. Why didn’t you read it when you had your breakfast? Or is it the kind of letter one reads again and again? Excuse my asking, but who is it from?”

“It’s from a friend of Anna’s. Because I got him his hat.”

“Had he lost his hat?”

“No. I heard him coming downstairs, and his hat was there, so I gave it to him.”

“That doesn’t seem a thing to write a letter about. Is he not a nice man, or is he very polite? What on earth were you doing in the hall?”

“I was in Thomas’s study.”

“Well, that comes to the same thing. It comes to the same thing with the door open. You had been listening for him, I suppose?”

“I just was down there. You see, Anna was in the drawingroom.”

“You are extraordinary. What does he do?”

“He is in Thomas’s office.”

“Could you really feel all that for a man? I’m never sure that I could.”

“He’s quite different from St. Quentin. Even Major Brutt is not at all like him.”

“Well, I do think you ought to be more careful, really. After all, you and I are only sixteen. Do you want red-currant jelly with this awful mutton? I do. Do get it away from that pig.”

Portia slipped the dish of red-currant jelly away from Lucia Ames—who would soon be a debutante. “I hope you are feeling better, Lilian?” she said.

“Well, I am, but I get a nervous craving for things.”

When the afternoon classes were over—at four o’clock today—Lilian invited Portia back to tea. “I don’t know,” said Portia. “You see, Anna is out.”

“Well, my mother is out, which is far better.”

“Matchett did say that I could have tea with her.”

“My goodness,” Lilian said, “but couldn’t you do that any day? And we don’t often have my whole house to ourselves. We can take the gramophone up to the bathroom while I wash my hair; I’ve got three Stravinsky records. And you can show me your letter.”

Portia gulped, and looked wildly into a point in space. “No, I can’t do that, because I have torn it up.”

“No, you can’t have done that,” said Lilian firmly, “because I should have seen you. Unless you did when you were in the lavatory, and you didn’t stay in there long enough. You do hurt my feelings:
I
don’t want to intrude. But whatever Miss Paullie says, don’t you leave your bag about.”