The Heat of the Day (19 page)

the outer world. Roderick, in implying to Cousin Nettie that he had to leave when he did in order to catch his train had been imperfectly truthful: in fact, he had another visit to pay. On his way from the station he had located the church, and he now returned there; once inside the lych-gate he embarked on his search for Cousin Francis. His mother's account had never been very clear; he had no guide--could instinct draw him? It seemed impossible that the old man at this moment should not speak. There would be as yet no headstone. A smell of clay still came up from places too new to be his; no bird sang; here and there flowers of wreaths rotted--he would have no wreath. No, nothing was possible but a general inclination of the head to all who lay here.... A passer-by halted, watching across the wall in November dusk the young soldier wandering bareheaded among the graves.

Chapter 12

"OH, MOTHER?" "Good heavens, Roderick!--Where _are__ you?" "You sound rather breathless." "Sorry; I'm only just this moment in.--Where _are__ you?" "Talking from a box; I'm on my way back, across." "Back?--oh no, you don't mean to say you did go! You didn't get my letter?" "Actually I did; but by that time everything was ar-ranged. And I am glad I went: it was a success." "Oh.--I do hope you haven't goaded Mrs. Tringsby? She really has a good deal to put up with from all of us." "Yes, she said so. The point is, I had a conversation with Cousin Nettie." "How was she? Ought I to have done something about her before now? Yes, I suppose I ought." "No, that has been quite all right, because she hadn't realised you were still alive. However, she asked to be remembered to you.... Mother, she did tell me one extraordinary thing...." "What?" "Well, I don't know that there is time to discuss it now, especially as the box I am talking in is in a station; but I do want to ask you all about it as soon as possible. It throws quite a different light on so much." "Darling, you have to remember the poor thing's off her head." "Oh no; I don't think so." "Oh, now, Roderick, you _haven't__ started anything? I asked you not to. Everything's complicated enough." "What's complicated?--I can't quite hear you; a huge train's just coming in." "Everything!" "Considering everything, I don't wonder. Why did you never tell me anything about the nurse?" "What nurse?--Cousin Nettie's?" "No, no; she hasn't got one. My father's. I mean, the nurse my father--" "I don't quite know what you are talking about." Astounded silence at his end. "Look here, Roderick, can't you come round?" "No. In fact, in a minute I ought to start queueing for my train. You must know the nurse I mean." "Oh, that one? Yes. Very well--what?" "Surely that throws quite a different light--?" "Oh, so that's what she told you?--No, I don't see why. Cousin Nettie may have plenty of time to bring up ancient history; I haven't. I thought you went down there to ask her about Mount Morris? I agree, _this__ doesn't seem to be a thing to discuss on the telephone." "Especially as I'm talking from a station. But it _was__ my father." "Yes.... Well, look, I'll come down and see you as soon as I possibly can. Sunday afternoon?... Sunday afternoon, then." "I don't want to _worry__ you, Mother." "I quite understand." "It's only that it throws such a different light--" "Yes, yes, Roderick--yes." "Well, now I suppose I must start queueing for my train.--I'll be seeing you, then? Goodnight." "Goodnight," she said. "I'll be seeing _you__." Stella, having hung up the receiver, went to the threshold of the open dividing door. "That was Roderick," she explained to Harrison, who, posted on the hearthrug of the other room, was waiting to take her out to dinner. "So I had rather gathered.--Boy not making trouble for you, I hope?" "Apparently there's enough of that already?" "Ha-ha--but no, look, we don't necessarily, yet, have to call it that." "Call it what you like." "We'll just," he suggested, looking deferentially at her, sideways, "have to talk." "Yes, _I__ know, _I__ know, I know!" She disappeared again, to rattle about among her cosmetics on their glass-topped table--she looked round once with a pang at the bedside telephone, asking herself in what state of mind Roderick really had got into the train. "Spending tuppence on asking me _that__!" she exclaimed aloud. "Pardon?" shouted Harrison cheerily, from the other room. "Nothing." She rejoined him, looking correct, sombre, and preceded him silently down the flights of stairs: together they took the blind dive into the street and continued in motion for some time; till she, halting in her tracks, asked him _where__ they were going in a tone which barely politely veiled a disinclination to go anywhere. "That," he replied, "can be more or less as you feel." "These days, _you__ always talk about feeling." "What, I do--do I?" he said, struck. "What I don't feel is, hungry." "That's too bad. There are one or two little places where I had rather thought we might just drop in." "Are there?" she said, with indifferent mistrust. "Or we simply could," he suggested, "walk for a bit?" "We seem to be doing that." But after a step or two she amended: "Sorry to be so shrewish." "Absolutely," he said with fervour, "not! Though you know, I do wish I knew what's rattled you." "Well, really." "No, but I mean just now." He slipped a hand under her elbow, prepared to steer her across a crisis as he would have been to steer her across a street. "For instance, that boy, isn't he starting something? Or is he not?" "Roderick--why?" But she then reversed and went into a nervous rush. "He's been spending the afternoon at Wisteria Lodge." (Quite a thing, she thought, quite in itself a moment, to be telling Harrison anything he did not claim to know.) "What, our old friend the nut-house?--_What__ a day that was, that day I met you!--With Frankie's old lady? Now, what was he after there?" "Inconceivable as it may be to you, he wasn't 'after' anything. People sometimes are not. He was simply being maddeningly, pigheadedly kind. Or, fair, I suppose, aboveboard--according to his ideas. How is one to know what anyone's, _anyone's__ ideas are till they've acted on them? Still, you're right in thinking he started something--in fact, if you want to know, if he had been you he could hardly have turned up more. Cousin Nettie talked--she told him I'd been the innocent party." "Surely," said Harrison blankly. "That's always rather to the good, on the whole, useful? But innocent party when?" "Years and years ago," she said impatiently, "in the divorce. You know all about that; you've got my dossier. Yes, I divorced Victor; I was officially innocent. But nobody for an instant supposed I was." "But you really were?" "Well, yes. But what does it matter now?" "Absolutely," he said calmingly, "absolutely. But that being so, what's rattling you?" "Having it all dragged up. The inconvenience, the idiocy. Everything disarranged. Being told three times by Roderick that everything's now in a different light. I didn't start the story about my guiltiness, it started itself. It could. I'd always been the bright one, Victor the quiet one; I'd been the flibbertigibbet, he'd been the steady; I'd been, for all the world to see, the spoilt one; he the uncomplaining. Nothing was simpler for everyone than to see things one way--that _I__ had asked for my freedom, for no virtuous reason, and that Victor, too squeamish on my behalf to put me through it (in those days one still talked of the 'mud' of the divorce court) was letting me divorce him; simply being quixotic.--In fact, not. Victor walked out on me." "Must have been mad," said Harrison, with conviction to which was added relief--here at least, at last, one point on which to fix. "Anyhow," she said, "that was how it was." "Oho, oho," he said, turning suddenly, "so you took quite a knock?" "Why, yes." "What, you loved him?" "He said not. And he said he was the one to know. If I imagined I loved him, he said, that was simply proof that I had not, as he'd for some time suspected, the remotest conception what love was--could be. I said, oh hadn't I? and he said no, I hadn't. I said had he, and if so, how? He said, yes he had; he had been loved and he could not forget it. So then he told me about the nurse. I said, if there always had been the nurse, nothing perhaps was really so much my fault then, was it? He said, he was sorry but that was just his point: if I had been, ever, anything he had hoped, he could have quite forgotten her--he had meant to, tried to. She had not been in any way his type--some years older than Victor, nothing special to look at. He'd expected to think no more of her: they had said goodbye. I had seemed to be the person to be his wife; and he had given me--he implied if he did not say--a very fair trial. Somehow I had not made it. Almost any other woman he could have married, other than I, he said, could have made him forget the nurse: unhappily, I and my shortcomings had had the reverse effect. The idea of what it _had__ been like to be loved haunted him. He was sorry, but there, he said, it was.... Of course what it really amounted to was, I bored him.... Any tiresome woman telling you about anything in her past always tells you, 'I was young at the time.' But I _was__ young at the time. I--I. was taken aback. The wind knocked right out of my sails." "Quite a kid...." "No, not even that, unfortunately. Half-baked. Not having found myself, at a time when--how boring it was, how little it matters now!--it was really exceedingly difficult to find anything. Having been married by Victor, having had Roderick like anyone else, made me think I _might__ know where I was. Then, this happened--so, no: apparently not." Harrison, having got Stella across Regent Street and several blocks further east, braked their speed down by a firmer hold on her elbow, cast about for their bearings, then swung her south: she took the corner like an automaton. With extra fervour, possibly to make up for any apparent slackening of his attention, he stated: "You must have gone through hell!" "What I am talking about is the loss of face." "Loss of what?" "Face. How do you suppose that felt? All the world to know. To be the one who was left--the boring pathetic casualty, the 'injured' one.... It was a funny day when the other, the opposite story came round to me--the story of how I had walked out on Victor. Who was I to say no to it: why should I? Who, at the age I was, would not rather sound a monster than look a fool?" He, not having the first idea, wisely let the question by as rhetorical. "Where,' at the start, the story came from I don't know," she went on. "Possibly Victor's family. The point for me was, who was to contradict it?--the nurse stayed right out of the picture; Victor first went to ground, and then, as you know, died. Whoever's the story _had__ been, I let it be mine. I let it ride, and more--it came to be my story, and I stuck to it. Or rather, first I stuck to it, then it went on sticking to me: it took my shape and equally I took its. So much so that I virtually haven't known, for years now, where it ends and I begin--_or__ cared. Who does care?--or at least, who did?... But _now__ look what's happened!" "Here," interposed Harrison, "we about are, I think." "Roderick hears from his--" "--Half a minute: here we go down some steps." She came to a stop; he pushed against a door showing a dimmed sign, OPEN. Inside, light came up stone stairs which he took her down; at the foot he held open another door and she walked ahead of him into a bar or grill which had no air of having existed before tonight. She stared first at a row of backviews of eaters perched, packed elbow-to-elbow, along a counter. A zip fastener all the way down one back made one woman seem to have a tin spine. A dye-green lettuce leaf had fallen on to the mottled rubber floor; a man in a pin-stripe suite was enough in profile to show a smudge of face powder on one shoulder. A dog scratching itself under one bar stool slowly, with each methodical convulsion, worked its collar round so that the brass studs which had been under its ear vanished one by one, being replaced in view by a brass name-plate she could just not read. Wherever she turned her eyes detail took on an uncanny salience--she marked the taut grimace with which a man carrying two full glasses to a table kept a cigarette down to its last inch between his lips. Not a person did not betray, by one or another glaring peculiarity, the fact of being human: her intimidating sensation of being crowded must have been due to this, for there were not so very many people here. The phenomenon was the lighting, more powerful even than could be accounted for by the bald white globes screwed aching to the low white ceiling--there survived in here not one shadow: every one had been ferreted out and killed. When Harrison had put his hat on a rack he came back for Stella and put her at a small table--of these there were several along a wall, their tops imitating malachite. He remarked that this place never seemed to him too bad, and was at any rate quiet. Which was true: the clatter could not be heard; mouths worked hard to put out never much more than silence--sound itself seemed flattened out by the glare. As also there was, down here, more the look than fact of overpowering heat: suggestion made Stella take off her coat--unhelped by Harrison, who, throughout the minute, sat in deep brief abstraction. "Well, what about it?" he at last said. "About what?" She withdrew her fingers from her eyelids. "About a spot of something?... A cold cut and salad? Fish? Or I shouldn't wonder if they might not knock us up something a bit more special." "What do you eat?" said Stella, looking at Harrison with one of those renewals of curiosity. Aware, he smoothed the top of his head with an air of--both were rare, one could not say which--either self-effacement or vanity. He considered. "Pretty much what there is where I am, according of course a certain amount to _when"__ He then eyed her throat, at the pearl-level, with some intensity. "But tonight, you know is something of an occasion--that is to say, for me." "I am thirsty," she said. "I would like some lager." In relays everything necessary arrived, including what Harrison, after a _sotto voce__ aside talk, must have decided would be most special--lobster mayonnaise on a bed of greenstuff knifed into dripping ribbons. The dish, in a glaze of synthetic yellow, was put down in a space between knives, forks and glasses to cook in light: Harrison looked at it narrowly but without expression. "Well, we seem all set," he said.--"You were saying?" "That had been quite enough." "On the contrary, anything but. I was listening hard. We turned in here when you were at rather a point." "What a lie-detecting place this is," she remarked, feeling under the china for a fork. "You come here often?" "No, now," he protested, with a twitch of the forehead, "this is bad of you! I've been so awfully touched by your telling me all you did. Aren't I right, that's a story not so many people have heard? It does seem, again, a case of this thing between you and me." She was forced to say: "I'm afraid how it happened was, I happened to be rattled, you happened to be there." "Still, that I _should__ be there, that in itself was something, wasn't it? Up there in your flat with you. After all, it was _I__ who was there." "Yes. But also..." "Well, also?" "This table rocks," she said. "Sorry, I'm probably leaning on it a bit heavily.--I wish you would look at me." "Don't I?" she asked, thereupon looking at him--for this command performance she opened her lids wider than usual, which sent her eyebrows up. Remembering how embarrassingly repugnant the human eye, in almost all cases, was found by Robert, she looked at and into