The Death of the Heart (25 page)

“Well, I always tell a girl. If one is to know a girl, it is much better to tell her what one thinks. Another thing I don’t like is messed-up mouths. When I give a girl tea, I always look at her cup. Then, if she leaves any red muck on the rim, I say, ‘Hullo, I didn’t know that cup had a pink pattern.’ Then the girl seems quite taken aback.”

“But suppose the cup had really got a pink pattern?”

“In that case, I should say something else. Girls make a mistake in trying to be attractive in ways that simply lose them a man’s respect. No man would want to give his children a mother with that sort of stuff all over her face. No wonder the population is going down.”

“My sister-in-law says men are too particular.”

“I cannot see that it is particular to have ideals. I should only care to marry a girl who seemed natural and likely to make a good home. And I think you would find that the majority of fellows, if you asked them, would feel the same. Will you have some lemonade?”

“No, thank you; not yet.”

“Well, if you’ll excuse me, I think I must fix myself up for this next dance. You and I might have the sixth from now. I will look for you by the gramophone.”

Portia was going to sit beside Mrs. Heccomb when Cecil came up and asked for the next dance. “You were swept away before I could speak,” he said—but all the same, he looked at her with respect. Cecil’s method of dancing was more persuasive, and Portia found she did not get on so well. She took a look at Clara’s mouselike hand splayed rather imploringly on a partner’s shoulder (Dickie was waltzing with a fine girl in orange) and saw Clara wore no varnish on her nails. Dickie’s partner did. After that, she kept twisting round to look at every girl’s hands, and this made her collide and bump with Cecil. After three rounds he suggested another talk: clearly he liked her more on the mental plane. They sat down on the settee, in a draught from the sun porch, and Portia began to reproach herself for feeling that Cecil’s manner lacked authority. Cecil stopped talking to give a glare. “Here comes that fellow Bursely from the School of Musketry. He seems to think he can behave all anyhow here. I don’t think Dickie really thinks much of him. We must let him see that we are deep in talk.”

But though she obediently fixed her eyes on Cecil, Mr. 
Bursely bumped on to the settee on her other side. “Am I butting in?” he said, but not anxiously.

“You should know,” muttered Cecil.

Mr. Bursely said brightly: “Didn’t catch what you said.”

“I said, I am going to look for a cigarette.”

“Now, what’s eating him?” said Mr. Bursely. “As a matter of fact,” he went on, “you and I were introduced, but I don’t think you heard: you were looking the other way. I asked Daphne who you were the moment you buzzed in, but she didn’t seem to be too keen we should meet. Then I asked the old lady to put us in touch, but she couldn’t make herself heard above the uproar. Quite a little gathering, what?”

“Yes, quite.”

“You having a good time?”

“Yes,
very
, thank you.”

“You look it,” said Mr. Bursely. “The eyes starry and so on. Look here, like to slip out to the so-called bar? Soft drinks only: no licence. Some little bird told me that was the drill here, so I had one or two in the mess before pushing round.” This was more or less evident. Portia said she would rather stay where they were. “Oh, right-o,” said Mr. Bursely: sliding down on the sofa he stuck his feet in their tan shoes a good way out. “You a stranger in these parts?”

“I only came on Thursday.”

“Getting to know the natives?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not doing badly, either. But of course we mostly cut into Southstone.”

“Who is we?”

“We licentious soldiery. Listen: how young are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“Gosh—I thought you were about ten. Anyone ever told you you’re a sweet little kid?”

Portia thought of Eddie. “Not exactly,” she said.

“Well, I’m telling you now. Your Uncle Peter’s telling you. Always remember what Uncle Peter said. Honestly, when you first keeked round that door, I wanted to cry and tell you about my wicked life. And I bet you take a lot of chaps that way?”

Not happily, Portia put a finger inside her tight snood. Mr. Bursely slewed right round on the sofa, with one arm right along the back. His clean-skinned face, clotted up with emotion, approached Portia’s—unwilling, she looked at, not into, his eyes, which were urgent blue poached eggs. Her unnerved look seemed to no more than float on his regardlessness of it.

“Just tell me,” said Mr. Bursely, “that you’d be a bit sorry if I was dead.”

“Oh yes. But why should you be?”

“Well, one never knows.”

“No—I suppose not.”

“You
are
a sweet little kid—”

“—Portia,” said Mrs. Heccomb, “this is Mr. Parker, a great friend of Dickie’s. Mr. Parker would like to dance with you.” Portia looked up to find a sort of a rescue party, headed by Mrs. Heccomb, standing over the settee. She got up rather limply, and Mr. Parker, with an understanding smile, at once danced her away. Bobbing, just out of time, below Mr. Parker’s shoulder, she looked round to see Daphne, with set and ominous face, take her place on the settee next to Mr. Bursely.

IN CHURCH
,
during the sermon, Portia asked herself for the first time why what Mr. Bursely had said had set up such disconcerting echoes, why she had run away from it in her mind. There was something she did not want to look straight at—was this why, since the party yesterday night, she had not once thought of Eddie? It is frightening to find that the beloved may be unwittingly caricatured by someone who does not know him at all. The devil must have been in Mr. Bursely when he asked, and asked with such confidence, if she had not been told she was a sweet little kid. The shock was that she could not, now, remember Eddie’s having in effect called her anything else. Stooping down, as she sat beside Mrs. Heccomb, to examine the stitching on her brown mocha gloves—which in imitation of Mrs. Heccomb she kept on while she sat, wrists crossed on her knee—she wondered whether a feeling
could
spring straight from the heart, be imperative, without being original. (But if love were original, if it were the unique device of two unique spirits, its importance would not be granted; it could not make such a great common law felt. The strongest compulsions we feel throughout life are no more than compulsions to repeat a pattern: the pattern is not of our own device.) Had Mr. Bursely had, behind that opaque face, behind 
that expression moulded by insobriety, the impulse that had made Eddie write her that first note? Overlaid, for the rest of the party, by the noise and excitement, was dread that the grace she had with Eddie might reduce to that single maudlin cry. This dread had haunted her tardy sleep, and sucked at her when she woke like the waves sucking the shingle in the terribly quiet morning air.

Everything became threatened.

There are moments when it becomes frightening to realise that you are not, in fact, alone in the world—or at least, alone in the world with one other person. The telephone ringing when you are in a day dream becomes a cruel attacking voice. That general tender kindness towards the world, especially kindness of a young person, comes from a pitying sense of the world’s unreality. The happy passive nature, locked up with itself like a mirror in an airy room, reflects what goes on but demands not to be approached. A pact with life, a pact of immunity, appears to exist. But this pact is not respected for ever—a street accident, an overheard quarrel, a certain note in a voice, a face coming too close, a tree being blown down, someone’s unjust fate—the peace tears right across. Life militates against the seclusion we seek. In the chaos that suddenly thrusts in, nothing remains unreal, except possibly love. Then, love only remains as a widened susceptibility: it is felt at the price of feeling all human dangers and pains. The lover becomes the sentient figurehead of the whole human ship, thrust forward by the weight of the race behind him through pitiless elements. Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.

Frantic smiles at parties, overtures that have desperation behind them, miasmic reaches of talk with the lost bore, short cuts to approach through staring, squeezing or kissing all indicate that one cannot live alone. Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company. The attempt at Windsor Terrace to combat this may have been what made that house so queasy and cold. That mistaken approach to life—of which at intervals they were all conscious, from Thomas Quayne down to the cook—produced the tensions and hitches of an unpromising love affair. Each person at Windsor Terrace lived impaled upon a private obsession, however slight. The telephone, the door bell, the postman’s knock were threatening intimations, though still far off. Crossing that springy door mat, the outside person suffered a sea change. In fact, something edited life in the Quaynes’ house—the action of some sort of brake or deterrent was evident in the behaviour of such people as Eddie. At the same time, no one seemed clear quite
what
was being discarded, or whether anything vital was being let slip away. If Matchett were feared, if she seemed to threaten the house, it was because she seemed most likely to put her thumb on the thing.

The uneditedness of life here at Waikiki made for behaviour that was pushing and frank. Nothing set itself up here but the nai’vest propriety—that made Daphne shout but not swear, that kept Dickie so stern and modest, that had kept even Mr. Bursely’s hand, at yesterday evening’s party, some inches above the bow on Daphne’s behind. Propriety is no serious check to nature—in fact, nature banks itself up behind it—thus, eyes constantly bulged and skins changed colour with immediate unsubtle impulses. Coming from Windsor Terrace, Portia found at Waikiki the upright rudeness of the primitive state—than which nothing is more rigidly ruled. The tremble felt through the house when a door banged or someone came hurriedly downstairs, the noises made by the plumbing, Mrs. Heccomb’s prodigality with half crowns and shillings, the many sensory hints that Doris was human and did not function in a void of her own— all these made Waikiki the fount of spontaneous living. Life here seemed to be at its highest voltage, and Portia stood to marvel at Daphne and Dickie as she might have marvelled at dynamos. At nights, she thought of all that force contained in those single beds in the other rooms.

In terms of this free living, she now saw, or re-saw, not only the people she met at Waikiki, but everyone she had known. The few large figures she saw here represented society with an alarming fairness, an adequacy that she could not deny. In them, she was forced to see every motive and passion—for motives and passions are alarmingly few. Any likeness between Mr. Bursely and Eddie her love did still hope to reject. All the same, something asked her, or forced her to ask herself, whether, last night on the settee, it had not been Eddie that emerged from the bush.

Portia felt her sixpence for the collection between the palm of her right hand and the palm of her glove. The slight tickling, and the milled pressure of the new coin’s edge, when she closed her hand, recalled her to where she was—in Seale church, in a congregation of stalwart elderly men and of women in brown, grey, navy or violet, with collars of inexpensive fur. The sun, slanting mol-tenly in at the south windows, laid a dusty nimbus over the furs, and printed cheeks with the colours of stained glass. Turning her head a little, she perceived people with whom she had been to tea. Above the confident congregation the church rose to its kind inscrutable height. Tilting her chin up, she studied the east window and its glittering tale: she had joined the sermon late and just got the gist of it—though it was after Easter, one must not be more callous than one had been in Lent.

Fanned on down the aisle by blasts from the organ, the choir disappeared in the vestry under the tower. Mrs. Heccomb, as the procession passed, cast some appraising looks at the surplices. Brasso and the devotion of her fellow ladies had given a blond shine to the processional cross. As the last chords sounded, discreet smiles were exchanged across the aisle, and the congregation jumbled happily out. Mrs. Heccomb was a great porch talker, and it was therefore in quite a knot of friends that she and Portia at last started downhill. Daphne and Dickie were not great church-goers: the Sunday after a party they always voted against it. Back at Waikiki the lounge, restored to order, was full of sun; Daphne and Dickie read the Sunday papers in a very strong smell of roasting meat. They had not been down at twenty minutes past ten, when Mrs. Heccomb and Portia had started for church. Outside, gulls skimmed in the rather cold air, and Mrs. Heccomb quickly shut the glass door.

“Hullo,” said Dickie to Portia. “And how are
you
this morning?”

“Very well, thank you.”

“Well, at least it is over,” said Dickie, returning to the
Sunday Pictorial.

Daphne was still wearing her red mules. “Oh goodness,” she said. “Cecil is so wetl Coming early like that, then sticking round like that. I don’t know how he has the nerve, really… Oh, and I ought to tell you: Clara’s left her pearl bag.”

Mrs. Heccomb, rearranging one or two objects, said: “How wonderfully you have tidied everything up.”

“All but the bookcase,” Dickie said pointedly.

“What do you mean about the bookcase, dear?”

“We shall need a glazier to tidy up
that
bookcase. Daphne’s soldier friend put his elbow through it—as you might notice, Mumsie, if you cared to look. There seems to be no suggestion that he should foot the bill.”