Eva Trout (4 page)

“Only it answered ‘yes,’ that he would see me if I was there today. No, it is not what he says; it is what I must!”

Catrina confined herself to stamping her feet, with a trudging though static motion. Eva mourned on: “I am so afraid, Catrina.”

“Well, keep calm.”

“I cannot.”

“You never can, somehow.”

The distracted one ferreted under a gauntlet, laid bare her wrist watch. “My train—my train!” She wrenched the Jaguar’s door open, hurled in her handbag and, made bulky by finery, squeezed herself under the wheel. Hand on the still-open door, she informed Catrina: “I cannot stay much longer where I now am.”

“O-oh?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Have you had a row with them?”

Eva did not reply: she was starting the car. “Most of your coat’s hanging out,” reported the child. Eva hauled in the ocelot, then drove off.

White Kleenex, it was discovered, had run out—more on order, but what was the use of that? A choice between lemon and rose confronted Catrina. “Neither,” she said, “would be very appropriate for my father.” Everyone in the shop agreed fervently. “Still,” she sniffed, “needs must when the Devil drives.” She accordingly went away with a box of each.

My dear Mrs. Arble,

What is all this about? I have had a somewhat dismaying visit from Eva, since when I have half-expected to hear from you. That I have not done so leads me to hope that the situation of which she spoke to me does not, in fact, exist outside her own fancy. That could well be possible. You must, I take it, have known of her trip to London; that you knew of its purpose seems less likely. If you suspected nothing, that reassures me—there may
be
nothing?

Nonetheless, this was the first I had heard of there being anything but harmony at Larkins. And should this be the first you have heard, pray forgive this letter. Perhaps I blunder? Frankly, my own instinct would be to let whatever this is blow over, but Eva is to an extent forcing my hand. She desires to leave your keeping, and has told me so. Not only does she desire to, she intends to. To put it abruptly, she might walk out.

That, as I continue to see it, could be disastrous. I wonder, therefore, whether you and I had not better discuss this apparent crisis? That is to say, meet? I would come to Larkins, but that there would be Eva. If you could make it convenient to be in London, we might lunch? I could, I am certain, so adjust my engagements as as to be free any day you may name. I would suggest that this be a day in the near future.

May I add, it would be a pleasure to me to renew our acquaintanceship.

Yours ever sincerely, Constantine Ormeau.

This letter, far from being a blunder, acted like a tonic on Iseult. It arrived in disguise: two sheets of deep azure monogrammed paper, overflowing with his distinctive handwriting, made their journey to Larkins inside a buff business envelope, the address typed. This precaution against the eye of Eva was not lost on Iseult, herself one of those few people who think of everything. She marked Constantine up for it. Also, the whiff of conspiracy was flattering. As, in the mood engendered, she read, read on, then read again, she found herself thinking surprisingly well of Eva. Yes, decidedly Eva rose in her estimation—the girl had precipitated
something
, which was what everybody needed. The long Larkins bog-down looked like nearing its end. What
had
Eva been up to? Iseult felt stirrings of that original vivisectional interest which had drawn her to her uncouth pupil. In the glow of knowing herself fallen in hate with (for what else was this?) she relived the year at the school, and the years after, during which this organism had so much loved her. She regretted nothing. Might it not be, she wondered, that she and Eva had only now arrived at their true bourne?

And the letter not only revivified, it was balm. Continuously being ignored by Constantine had mortified Iseult more than she admitted. “Our acquaintanceship …” There had been one meeting: the half-day visit by him to Larkins, to assure himself as to its suitability as a repository for Eva, then talk money. He had been more than satisfied on the one score, she on the other. Since then, nothing. Made use of, made sure of, she had been written off: a former teacher down there on a former fruit farm. Now the tune began to be different; or did it not? The reader felt herself smile. Also, the expert in English professionally analysed this document—what a way to write, what garlands of affectation! Yet, to give him credit, this was quite a performance. This mannered manner of his was not quite the thing; no. Yet the ambiguities had one sort of merit, or promise—one was at least on the verge of the Henry James country.

She turned the letter over and over throughout the day on which it arrived. When Eric came home, she turned it over to him. He ingested it slowly. “Well,” he pronounced, “here’s a kettle of fish!”

She agreed. “A bombshell.”

“Not to me,” he declared. “I saw how the wind was blowing —you remember, I told you.”

“No, never, Eric. You never told me.” “Only the other evening, here in this room. Or tried to, but then you became upset.” “Oh, then? I thought you were angry.” “Yes,” he said, “that’s what comes of attempting to talk. Can anybody wonder I keep my mouth shut? Apart from that, though, couldn’t you see for yourself?” “That she hated me?”

“The conclusions you jump to!—and that’s a wicked conclusion. There’s no harm in Eva. Even what it says here—” he gave an emphatic shake to the blue pages—”even what this says gives no ground for that. All this does is, bear out what I told you: she’s disappointed. She’s had her heart broken, here. Isn’t that enough?”

“Enough, it seems, to have made a tremendous scene of,” meditated Iseult.

“Yes, scared the guts out of
him
,” said Eric with relish. “She had to let off to someone—other than us.” “Still, Eric … going behind our backs?” “She had the right, if she wanted to: she’s his business. Why shouldn’t he do something—or would that kill him?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Iseult. “Give me back his letter.” She smoothed it, it being the worse for mauling, folded it, slid it back in its envelope. She then put to Eric: “What ought I to do?”

“What he says, I suppose: see him.”

She fatefully hesitated. “You think I ought to?”

“As things are.”

“I suppose you’re right. Yes, I’m afraid so.”

“I do grant, Izzy, it’s a good deal to ask. That backbreaking train-journey twice over, and the time it wastes. Not to speak of the worry. However. See he pays your expenses.”

“
Eric
!”

He stared.

She covered her eyes. “Oh, Eric—really!”

Constantine’s head was aureoled as he sat down again, repeating: “Yes, this has been more than good of you.” At his back was a window; January sunshine came in, diffused by fibreglass curtains. This office of his had (at least from where Iseult sat) an extensive view of nothing; it was near to the top of one of those crops of skyscrapers which spring up in Knightsbridge overnight. It seemed like him to operate from this area.

The handshake done with, she settled down to facing him: aslant to evade the sun, knees crossed, handbag balanced on them. She inclined her head, but said nothing. Constantine, opening an onyx box, induced her to try an Egyptian cigarette; which, leaning across the ormolu table, he lit for her. He then, flicking his lighter shut, uttered an initiatory sigh. On the table, in addition to the cigarette box, a matching ashtray and an object which probably was an intercom, sat a box file with TROUT XIV written not only on the back but on top. This meeting across an idealised office desk gave the occasion, at least now, at the outset, the character of an interview. “Fortunately,” he added, “it is less cold today. Less bitingly cold, that is—or a little less so.”

Iseult took a sip at the cigarette, then rested it on the lip of the ashtray in order to draw off her right-hand glove. The gloves, fairly fine black suede, were not lost on Constantine: undoubtedly they were new. There had, then, been a moment to shop on the way here? A less wise woman would also have chanced a hat bar; Mrs. Arble had kept her head and stuck to her sleek-feathered turban, which—dating back though it might by a year or two, still was in good shape (not many outings, probably?) and show-cased the forehead loyally: nothing like an old friend.

“You’re well, I hope?” he asked with renewed concern.

“Very. And you?”

“So-so. This is a treacherous time of year.”

“Though spring,” she suggested, “is more treacherous, isn’t it? In winter one at least knows what to expect.”

“How true. Yes, that is very true.”

“Though Eva,” she had to admit, “has a quite bad cold.”

“You astound me—how did she manage that? She seemed very warmly wrapped up when she came here.”

“I imagine she caught it at the vicarage.”

“Vicarage?”

“There, they are six-a-penny.”

“
That
should keep her quiet, at least for a while. Which, under the circumstances—you’d agree?—is something.” He glanced at the file, then away from it. “I hope, Mrs. Arble, my letter was not a shock to
you
?”

“I hope,” she returned, “her visit was not a shock to you?”

He looked out of the window behind him, over his shoulder. So great grew his interest in the empyrean that he shifted, even, some way round on his chair. So intent was his attitude that Iseult stared also, past him, through the synthetic gauze. A helicopter, a kite, a suicide leap?—she found no answer. He slewed suddenly round again; she was caught off guard. With no particular candour, their eyes met. “Between ourselves …” he began.

On his left, the room had a second window. The man had in consequence two existences: one rather cloudy in silhouette, the other in clear relief, side-lit. This other Iseult examined. The blond, massaged-looking flesh of Constantine’s face seemed, like alabaster or indeed plastic, not quite opaque, having a pinkish underglow. It padded the bone-structure evenly—nowhere were there prominences or hollows or sags or ridges. The features, though cast in a shallow mould and severally unremarkable, almost anonymous, none the less were distinct. Their relation to one another was for the greater part of the time unchanging; this was the least mobile face one might ever have seen. Now and then some few creases came into being, to supply their owner with such degree of expression as at that moment he chose to grant himself—or occasionally (though this was rarer) there was a calculated levitation of the eyebrows. Anything of that sort was, though, almost instantly wiped away.

Colour entered the picture, though used sparingly. Lips, for instance, were the naive fawn-pink of lips in a tinted drawing. Less perceptibly pencilled-in were the eyebrows, lashes, the exhausted pencil employed being gold-red. And the same tone reappeared in the hair; well-nourished, though back from the forehead. And the eyes? These too were in the convention: a water-colourist’s grey-blue. If they glinted beneath their lids, this appeared phenomenal. They were to see with, chiefly.

Why this shadowless face, with its lack of and almost disdain for accentuation, should strike one on the instant as being memorable; how, so unhaunted-looking, it nonetheless conveyed its power to haunt, it was hard to say. He would be fifty? He was in good condition. Celerity, though its use was indolent, characterised his movements. One
can
not so much look youthful as lack age—as time goes by, a frightening deficiency. Most of all, about this ever-freshness of Constantine’s (what had it fed on: life-blood?) and his guard of blankness, there lurked, somewhere, youth’s most dreadful residuum: youthful cruelty.

“Between ourselves—” he repeated.

“Yes?”

He burst out: “What a heredity!”

“That is, Eva’s?”

“Alas, who else’s? You were quite in the dark, as to that? You had no idea?”

“I should have been told, perhaps?”

“One hesitated.” He drew the box file towards him, spread a hand on its top and pronounced: “Poor Willy!”

“Nothing you say will upset me,” she said objectively.

“I’m sure not,” he agreed—in an equivocal tone.

She asked edgily: “Do I give that impression?”

“You give a delightful impression, dear Mrs. Arble. But it’s not a matter of that, it’s a matter of time.—There’s a good deal here,” he went on, pressing down on the file as one might on a tomb, “that I don’t see that you and I need go into. Everything has
some
bearing, of course, on the situation that’s now confronting us; but if we went into everything, where should we be? Well into the middle of next week. And by then our bird might have flown. No, the situation itself is the urgent thing. Though far from being the first of this kind of crisis, it is
a
crisis.”

“Distinctly.”

He sighed, this time with appreciation. “You are highly intelligent. Such an alleviation!” He slid the file away to his right, dismissing it. It struck her to wonder if he had been embezzling. She exclaimed: “Yet how I’ve blundered, apparently!”

“Mrs. Arble, in any dealings with Eva intelligence if anything is a handicap. You are speaking to one who knows: I have found it so—but that is a long history.”

“Then may I ask—?”

“Do!”

“What made you send her to me?”

“There was also your husband.—He’s well, I hope?”

“Very, thank you.”

“Moreover, you—as I’m sure you realise?—were the sole, one person out of heaven and earth with whom Eva then wanted to be. When heartwhole, she’s difficult to oppose.” He uttered a third sigh, his weightiest. “As indeed was Willy.”

Iseult leaned forward, scrutinising the table; she followed a scroll of the inlay with her eye. “There
are
characters it is impossible not to disappoint.”

“A Trout,” he said, “of any kind, is a liability.”

“Yet you took Eva on?”

“That was the least one could do for Willy.” Turning, he addressed himself to the intercom: “The car.” She started to pull on, stroke on, the right-hand glove. “I am taking you somewhere quiet, but not bad,” he explained to her. “I think you will like that.”