The Death of the Heart (21 page)

Upstairs in Waikiki, the bedroom ceilings sloped because of the roof. Mrs. Heccomb, saying good-night to Portia, had screwed a steel-framed window six inches open, the curtain flopped in the light of a lamp on the esplanade. Portia put her hand up once or twice to touch the slope of ceiling over her bed. Mrs. Heccomb had said she hoped she would not be lonely. “I sleep just next door: you need only tap on the wall. We are all very near together in this house. Do you like hearing the sea?”

“It sounds very near.”

“It’s high tide. But it won’t come any nearer.”

“Won’t it?”

“No, I promise, dear, that it won’t. You’re not afraid of the sea?”

“Oh, no.”

“And you’ve got a picture of Anna,” Mrs. Heccomb had added, with a beatific nod at the mantelpiece. That had already been looked at—a pastel drawing of Anna, Anna aged about twelve, holding a kitten, her long soft hair tied up in two satin bows. The tender incompetence of the drawing had given the face, so narrow between the hair, a spiritual look. The kitten’s face was a wedge of dark on the breast. “So you won’t be lonely,” said Mrs. Heccomb, and, having so happily concluded, had turned out the light and gone… . The curtain started fretting the window sill; the sea filled the darkness with its approaching sighing, a little hoarse with shingle. High tide? The sea had come as near as it could.

Portia dreamed she was sharing a book with a little girl. The tips of Anna’s long fair hair brushed on the page: they sat up high in a window, waiting till something happened. The worst of all would be if the bell rang, and their best hope was to read to a certain point in the book. But Portia found she no longer knew how to read—she did not dare tell Anna, who kept turning pages over. She knew they must both read—so the fall of Anna’s hair filled her with despair, pity, for what would have to come. The forest (there was a forest under the window) was being varnished all over: it left no way of escape. Then the terrible end, the rushing-in, the roaring and gurgling started—Portia started up from where they were with a cry—

“—Hush, hush,
dear! Here I am. Nothing has happened. Only Daphne running her bath out.”

“I don’t know where I—”

“You’re here, dear.”

“Oh!”

“Did you have a dream? Would you like me to stay a little?”

“Oh no, thank you.”

“Then sleep with no dreams, like a good girl. Remember, you can always rap on the wall.”

Mrs. Heccomb slipped out, closing the door by inches. Then, out there on the landing, she and Daphne started a whispering-match. Their whispers sounded like whispers down the clinic corridor, or sounds in the forest still left from the dream. “Goodness,” said Daphne, “isn’t she highly strung?” Then Daphne’s feet, in mules, clip-clopped off across the landing: the last of the bath ran out; a door shut.

Perhaps it was Portia’s sense that by having started awake she had not been a good girl that now kept her in the haunted outer court of the dream. She had not been kind to Anna; she had never been kind. She had lived in that house with her with an opposed heart… . That kitten, for instance—had it died? Anna never spoke of it. Had Anna felt small at day school? When had they cut her hair off? In the electric light, that hair in the portrait had been mimosa yellow. Did Anna also, sometimes, not know what to do next? Because she knew what to do next, because she knew what to laugh at, what to say, did it always follow that she knew where to turn? Inside everyone, is there an anxious person who stands to hesitate in an empty room? Starting up from her pillow Portia thought: And she’s gone. She may never come back.

Mrs. Heccomb must have stayed up to keep Dickie quiet. His no-nonsense step had grown loud on the esplanade. Through the floor, Mrs. Heccomb was to be heard hush-hushing as Dickie crashed open the glass door. Then he rolled an armchair round and kicked the fire: it sounded like a giant loose in the lounge. There was then the muted clatter of a tray being brought: perhaps they were opening the galantine. Mrs. Heccomb may have said something about the bell, for Dickie was to be heard replying: “What is the good of telling me that now?…” Portia knew she must meet him in the morning. She had heard he was twenty-three: the same age as Eddie.

When she came down next morning, at eight o’clock, Dickie was in the act of polishing off his breakfast. There was one particular bus to Southstone he must catch. When she came in he half got up, wiping egg from his chin: when they had shaken hands and both muttered something he bumped back again and went on drinking his coffee, not saying anything more. Dickie was not so enormous as he had sounded, though he was fine and stocky: he had a high colour, a tight-fitting skin, stag-like eyes with a look striking frankness, a large chin, and hair that though sternly larded would never stay down. Dickie, indeed, looked uncompromisingly vigorous. This working morning, he wore a dark suit and hard collar in a manner that made it clear these things were not really his type. The plunging manner in which he bathed and dressed had been, before this, heard all over the house: he had left behind in the bathroom the clean, rather babyish smell of shaving soap. At Windsor Terrace, with its many floors and extended plumbing, the intimate life of Thomas was not noticeable. But here Dickie made himself felt as a powerful organism. With a look past Portia that said that nothing should alter his habits, he now rose, withdrew from the breakfast table and locked himself in somewhere behind the chenille curtain. About five minutes later he emerged with his hat and a satisfied, civic air, nodded the same goodbye to Portia and Mrs. Heccomb (who passed in and out of the lounge with fresh instalments of breakfast as more people came down) and plunged out through the glass door to dispose of the day’s work. Mrs. Heccomb, looking out through the sun porch to watch Dickie off down the esplanade, said: “He is like clockwork,” with a contented sigh.

Daphne’s library was in Seale High Street, only about ten minutes from Waikiki down the tree-planted walk that links the esplanade to the town. She did not have to be on duty till a quarter-past nine, and therefore seldom came down to breakfast before her brother had gone, for she slept voraciously. When Daphne was to be heard coming out of the bathroom, Mrs. Heccomb used to signal to Doris: the egg or kipper for Daphne would then be dropped in the pan. Breakfast here was a sort of a running service, which did credit to Mrs. Heccomb’s organisation—possibly her forces rather spent themselves on it, for she looked fatalistic for the rest of the day. Daphne always brought down her comb with her and, while waiting for the egg or kipper, would straddle before the overmantel mirror, doing what was right by her many curls. She did not put on lipstick till after breakfast because of the egg, not to speak of the marmalade. Mrs. Heccomb, while Daphne saw to her hair, would anxiously keep the coffee and milk hot under the paisley cosy that embraced both jugs. Her own breakfast consisted of rusks in hot milk, which was, as she said to Portia, rather more Continental. Portia sat on through Dickie’s exit and Daphne’s entrance, eating the breakfast that had come her way, elbows in as closely as possible, hoping not to catch anyone’s eye.

But as Daphne took her place she said: “So sorry my bath gave you a jump.”

“Oh, that was my fault.”

“Perhaps you had eaten something?”

“She was just tired, dear,” Mrs. Heccomb said.

“I daresay you’re not used to the pipes. I daresay your sister-in-law has Buckingham Palace plumbing?”

“I don’t know what—”

“That is one of Daphne’s jokes, dear.”

Daphne pursued: “I daresay
she’s
got a green china bath? Or else one of those sunk ones with a concealed light?”

“No, Daphne dear: Anna never likes things at all extreme.”

But Daphne only snorted and said: “I daresay
she
has a bath that she floats in just like a lily.”

At the same time, making a plunge at the marmalade, Daphne sucked her cheeks in at once sternly and hardily, with the air of someone who could say a good deal more. It was clear that her manner to Portia could not be less aggressive till she had stopped associating her with Anna. Anyone who came to Waikiki straight from Anna’s seemed to Daphne likely to come it over them all. She had encountered Anna only three times—on which occasions Daphne patiently, ruthlessly, had collected everything about Anna that one could not like, She was not, as far as that went, a jealous girl, and she had a grudging regard for the upper classes—had she been more in London, she would have been in the front ranks of those womanly crowds who besiege crimson druggets under awnings up steps. She would have been one of those onlooking girls who poke their large un-envious faces across the flying tip of the notable bride’s veil, or who without resentment sniff other people’s gardenias outside the Opera. Contented wry decent girls like Daphne are the bad old order’s principal stay. She delighted to honour what she was perfectly happy not to have. At the same time, and underlying this, there could have been a touch of the tricoteuse about Daphne, once fully worked up, and this all came out in her constantly angry feeling against Anna.

She did not (rightly) consider Anna properly upper class. All the same, she felt Anna’s power in operation; she considered Anna got more than she ought. She thought Anna gave herself airs. She also resented dimly (for she could never word it) Anna’s having made Mumsie her parasite. Had Anna had a title this might have been less bitter. She overlooked, rightly and rather grandly, the fact that had it not been for Anna’s father, the Heccombs could not have opened so much galantine.

Some people are moulded by their admirations, others by their hostilities. In so far as anything had influenced Daphne’s evolution, it had been the wish to behave and speak on all occasions as Anna would not. At this moment, the very idea of Anna made her snap at her toast with a most peculiar expression, catching dribbles of marmalade on her lower lip.

The Waikiki marmalade was highly jellied, sweet and brilliantly orange; the table was brightly set with cobalt-and-white breakfast china, whose pattern derived from the Chinese. Rush mats as thick as muffins made hot plates wobble on the synthetic oak. Sunlight of a pure seaside quality flooded the breakfast table, and Portia, looking out through the sun porch, thought how pleasant this was. The Heccombs ate as well as lived in the lounge, for they mistrusted, rightly, the anthracite stove in the should-be diningroom. So they only used the diningroom in summer, or for parties at which they had enough people to generate a sterling natural heat… . Gulls dipped over the lawn in a series of white flashes; Mrs. Heccomb watched Daphne having a mood about Anna with an eye of regret. “But one does not put lilies in baths,” she said at last.

“You might do, if you wanted to keep them fresh.”

“Then I should have thought you’d put them in a wash basin, dear.”

“How should I know?” said Daphne. “
I
don’t get lilies, do I?” She thrust her cup forward for more coffee, and, with an air of turning to happier subjects, said:
“Did
you fly out at Dickie about that bell?”

“He didn’t seem to think—”

“Oh, he didn’t, did he?” said Daphne. “That’s just Dickie all over, if you know what I mean. Why not let you get the man from Spalding’s in the first place? Well, you had better get the man from Spalding’s. I want that bell done by tomorrow night.”

“Why specially, dear?”

“Some people are coming in.”

“But don’t they almost always give a rap on the glass?”

Daphne looked hangdog (her variation of coyness). Her eyes seemed to run together like the eyes of a shark. She said: “Mr. Bursely talked about dropping in.”

“Mr. Who?” Mrs. Heccomb said timidly.

“Bursely, Mumsie. B, U, R, S, E, L, Y.”

“I don’t think I have ever—”

“No,” Daphne yelled patiently. “That is just the point. He hasn’t been here before. You don’t want him to see that bell. He’s from the School of Musketry.”

“Oh, in the Army?” said Mrs. Heccomb, brightening. (Portia knew so little about the Army, she immediately heard spurs, even a sabre, clank down the esplanade.) “Where did you meet him, dear?”

“At a hop,” said Daphne briefly.

“Then some of you might like to dance tomorrow night, I expect?”

“Well, we might put the carpet back. We can’t all just stick around.—Do you dance?” she said, eyeing Portia.

“Well, I have danced with some other girls in hotels …”

“Well, men won’t bite you.” Turning to Mrs. Heccomb, Daphne said: “Get Dickie to get Cecil … Goodness, I
must
rush!”

She rushed, and soon was gone down the esplanade. Daphne used nothing stronger than “goodness” or “dash”: all the vigour one wanted was supplied by her manner. In this she was unlike Anna, who at moments of tension let out oaths and obscenities with a helpless, delicate air. Where Anna, for instance, would call a person a bitch, Daphne would call the person an old cat. Daphne’s person was sexy, her conversation irreproachably chaste. She would downface any remark by saying, “You
are
awful,” or simply using her eyes… . When she had quite gone; Portia felt deflated, Mrs. Heccomb looked dazed. For Portia, Daphne and Dickie seemed a crisis that surely must be unique: she could not believe that they happened every day.

“Remind me to go to Spalding’s,” said Mrs. Heccomb.

At this moment the sun was behind a film, but the sea shone and the lounge was full of its light. Mrs. Heccomb, to air the place after breakfast, folded back a window on to the sun porch, then opened a window in the porch itself. A smell of seaweed stiffening and salting, of rolls of shingle drying after the sea, and gulls’ cries came into Waikiki lounge. One’s first day by the sea, one’s being feels salt, strong, resilient and hollow—like a seaweed pod not giving under the heel. Portia went and stood in the sun porch, looking out through its lattice at the esplanade. Then she boldly let herself out by the glass door. A knee-high wall with a very high and correct gate cut the Heccombs’ lawn off from the public way. Before stepping over the wall (which seemed, in view of the gate’s existence, a possible act of disrespect) Portia glanced back at the Waikiki windows. But no one watched her; no one seemed to object. She walked across to the lip of the esplanade.