The Death of the Heart (36 page)

“I will later. But just now, don’t hit my head… .
I thought Portia gave us a welcome.”

“Poor child, oh poor child, yes. She stood about like an angel. It was we who were not adequate. I wasn’t very, was I?”

“No, I don’t think you were.”

“But you think you were? You bolted into the study. What’s in your mind, I suppose, is, why should you rise to occasions when I don’t? Let’s face it—who ever is adequate? We all create situations each other can’t live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don’t. One doesn’t have to be in love to be silly—in fact I think one is sillier when one’s not in love, because then one makes a thing about everything. At least, that is how it is with me. Major Brutt sending those carnations has made me hysterical. Did you see them? They were cochineal pink.”

“I don’t create situations, I don’t think.”

“Yes, you do; you’re creating one by having a headache. Besides you are making creases in my quilt.”

“I’m sorry,” said Thomas rising. “I’ll go down.”

“Now you are making another situation. What I really want to do is to dress and not have to talk, but I can’t have you walk out into the night. And Matchett is simply waiting to pop back and rustle about and spring something on me. I know I am disappointing you, darling. I’m sure you would be happier in the study.”

“Portia’s down there, writing to Major Brutt.”

“And if you go down, you’ll feel you will have to say, ‘Well, Portia, how are you getting on with your letter to Major Brutt?’”

“No, I shouldn’t see the least necessity to.”

“Well, Portia would look up until you did. Now, Major Brutt having sent me those carnations is just the sort of thing that Portia really enjoys,” said Anna, sitting down by the dressing-table, unrolling and putting on a pair of silk stockings. “Yes, it often does seem to me that you and I are not natural. But I also say to myself, well, who is natural, then?”

Having put his glass down on the carpet, Thomas boldly swung his legs up on to the bed and stretched out on the immaculate quilt. “I don’t think that bath has done you much good,” he said. “Or is this the way you talk most of the time? We so seldom talk; we’re so seldom together.”

“I must be tired; I do feel rather unreal. As I keep saying, all I want is to dress.”

“Well, do dress. Why can’t you just dress and why can’t I just lie? We don’t have to keep on saying anything. However much of a monster you may be, I feel more natural with you than I feel with more natural people—if there are such things. Must you put on those beastly green suéde shoes?”

“Yes, because the others aren’t unpacked. How hot the afternoon sun is,” said Anna, drawing the curtains behind the dressing-table. “All the time we were
there,
I kept imagining England coolish and grey, and now we land into this inferno of glare.”

“I expect the weather will break. You don’t much like anything, do you?”

“No, nothing,” said Anna, smiling her nice fat malign smile. She finished dressing in the gloom of the curtains, through whose yellows and pinks the afternoon sun beat. The vibration of traffic came through the shut window, through the stiff chintz folds. She gave one more look at Thomas and said: “I suppose you do know that that ruins my quilt?”

“It can go to the cleaners.”

“The point is, it has just come back from there… . How do you think Portia is?”

Thomas, who had just lighted a cigarette (the worst thing for a headache) said: “She says she’s enjoying the spring.”

“Now whatever makes her do that? Little girls of her age don’t just enjoy weather. Someone must have been fussing her up.”

“She may not have been enjoying the spring really, but just felt she must say something polite. I suppose it’s possible she enjoyed Seale—in which case, we might have left her there longer.”

“No, if she’s to be with us she’s got to be with us, darling. Besides, her lessons begin on Monday. If she’s not enjoying the spring (and I can’t make out if your impression was that she wasn’t or that she was) there must be something wrong with her, and you had better find out what it is. You know she will never talk to me. If someone’s let her down that would be Eddie, of course.”

Thomas reached down to knock ash off into his empty glass. “Anyhow, it’s high time the lid was put on that. I don’t know why we have let it go so far.”

“Oh, it’s stationary: it’s been like that for months. Evidently you don’t know what Eddie is. He doesn’t have to go far with anybody to fail them: he can let anyone down at any stage. And what do you expect me to say or do? There are limits to what one can say to people and it isn’t really a question of
doing
anything. Anyhow, she’s your sister. As for speaking to Eddie, you must know how touchy he is with me. And she and I feel so shy, and shyness makes one so brutal… . No, poor little Eddie’s not a ravening lion.”

“No, he’s not a
lion.”

“Don’t be malicious, Thomas.”

Glad, however, to find herself dressed again, Anna gave herself a sort of contented shake inside her green dress, like a bird shaking itself back into its preened feathers. She looked for her case and lighted a cigarette, then came over to sit on the bed by Thomas. Rolling his head round, he at once pulled her head down to pillow level. “All the same,” said Anna, after the kiss, sitting up and moulding back with her fingers the one smooth curl along the nape of her neck, “I do think you’ll have to get off that quilt.” While she went back to the dressing-table to screw the caps back on to her pots and bottles Thomas rose and, meticulous and gloomy, tried to smooth the creases out of the satin. “After tea,” he announced, “Portia and I are going for a turn in the park.”

“But do. Why not?”

“If you were half as heartless as you make out, you would be an appallingly boring woman.”

After tea, Thomas and Portia dodged two lines of traffic, successfully crossed the road and went into the park. They crossed the bridge to the far side of the lake. Here stood the tulips just ready to flower: still grey and pointed, but brilliantly veined with the crimsons, mauves, yellows they were to be. Late afternoon sunshine streamed into the faces of people sitting in deck chairs, along the lake or on the bright grass—shading their eyes or bending their heads down or letting the sun beat on their closed lids, these people sat like reddening stones.

The water was animated: light ran off blades of oars or struck through the coloured or white sails that shivered passing the islands. Bending rowers crossed the mirroring view. The etherealisation of the early morning had lifted from the long narrow wooded islands, upon which nobody was allowed to land, and which showed swans’ nests at the edge of their mystery. Light struck into the islands’ unvisited hearts; the silvery willow branches just shifted apart to let light glitter through. Reflections of trees, of sails made the water coloured and deep, and water birds lanced it with long ripples.

People approaching each other, beside the lake or on the oblique walks, looked into each other’s faces boldly, as though they felt they should know each other. Thin hems of women’s dresses fluttered under their coats. Children shuttled about, or made conspiracies that broke up in shouts. But this vivid evening, no grown-up people walked fast: the park was full of straying fancies and leisure.

Thomas and Portia turned their alike profiles in the direction from which the breeze came. Portia thought how inland the air smelled. Looking unmoved up at the turquoise sky above the trees burning thinly yellow-green, Thomas said he felt the weather would change.

“I hope not before these tulips are out. These are the tulips Father told me about.”

“Tulips—what do you mean? When did he see them?”

“The day he walked past your house.”

“Did he walk past our house? When?”

“One day, once. He said it had been painted; it looked like marble, he said. He was very glad you lived there.”

Thomas’s face went slowly set and heavy, as though he felt the weight of his father’s solitary years as well as his own. He looked at Portia, at their father’s eyebrows marking, here, a more delicate line. His look made it clear he would not speak. Across the lake, only the parapet and the upper windows of Windsor Terrace showed over the trees: the silhouette of the stucco, now not newly painted, looked shabby and frail. “We paint every four years,” he said.

In the traffic, half way across the road, Portia suddenly looked up at the drawingroom window, and waved. “Look out!” Thomas said sharply, gripping her elbow—a car swerved past them like a great fish. “What’s the matter?”

“There was Anna, up there. She’s gone now.”

“If you don’t take better care in the traffic, I don’t think you ought to go out alone.”

HAVING
been seen at the window, having been waved to, made Anna step back instinctively. She knew how foolish a person looking out of a window appears from the outside of a house—as though waiting for something that does not happen, as though wanting something from the outside world. A face at a window for no reason is a face that should have a thumb in its mouth: there is something only-childish about it. Or, if the face is not foolish it is threatening—blotted white by the darkness inside the room it suggests a malignant indoor power. Would Portia and Thomas think she had been spying on them?

Also, she had been seen holding a letter—not a letter that she had got today. It was to escape from thoughts out of the letter that she had gone to the window to look out. Now she went back to her
escritoire
which, in a shadowed corner of this large light room, was not suitable to write more than notes at. In the pigeonholes she kept her engagement pad, her account books; the drawers under the flap were useful because they locked. At present, a drawer stood open, showing packets of letters; and more letters, creased from folding, exhaling an old smell, lay about among slipped-off rubber bands. Hearing Thomas’s latchkey, the hall door opening, Portia’s confident voice, Anna swept the letters into the drawer 
quickly, then knelt down to lock everything up. But this sad little triumph of being ready in time came to nothing, for the two Quaynes went straight into the study; they did not come upstairs.

They did not come up to join her, though they knew where she was. Looking at the desk key on the palm of her hand, Anna felt much more cut off from the letters: one kind of loneliness hammers another in. Directly the two had gone out after tea, she had gone to this drawer with the clearly realised intention of comparing the falseness of Pidgeon with the falseness of Eddie. There are phases in feeling that make the oddest behaviour quite relevant. She had said what was quite true, at least of herself, when she had told St. Quentin, last January, that experience means nothing till it repeats itself. Everything in her life, she could see now, had taken the same turn—as for love, she often puzzled and puzzled, without ever allowing herself to be fully sad, as to what could be wrong with the formula. It does not work, she thought. At times there were the moments when she asked herself if she could have been in the wrong: she would almost rather think that. What she
thought
she regretted was her lack of guard, her wayward extravagance—but had she all the time been more guarded than she imagined, had she been deceitful, had she been seen through? For what had always happened she could still not account. There seemed to be some way she did not know of by which people managed to understand each other.

All I said to Thomas was, to get off my quilt. After that he takes her for a walk in the park.

Ease and intelligence seemed to her to lead to a barren end. Thoughtfully, she put the key of the locked drawer into the inner pocket of her handbag, then snapped the bag shut. Anybody as superficially wounded, but at the same time as deeply nonplussed as Anna seems to himself to be a forlorn hope.
This
is what one gets for being so nicely nonchalant, for saving people’s faces, for not losing one’s hair. She could not think why she fussed so much with this key, for the drawer held no secrets: Thomas knew everything. It was true, she had never shown him these letters; though he knew
what
had happened he did not know how, why. Supposing she were to throw this pack of letters at Portia, saying: “This is what it all comes to, you little fool!”

At this point, Anna lighted a cigarette, sat down by her bag on the yellow sofa, and asked herself why she liked Portia so little. The
idea
of her never leaves me quiet, and by coming into this room she drives me on to the ice. Everything she does to me is unconscious; if it were conscious it would not hurt. She makes me feel like a tap that won’t turn on. She crowds me into an unreal position, till even St. Quentin asks why do I overact? She has put me into a relation with Thomas that is no more than our taunting, feverish jokes. My only honest way left is to be harsh to them both, which I honestly am. This afternoon, directly she heard our taxi, she had to snatch open the door and wait for us, all eyes. I cannot even stand in my own window without her stopping to wave, among those cars. She might have been run over, which would have been shocking.

But, after all, death runs in that family. What is she, after all? The child of an aberration, the child of a panic, the child of an old chap’s pitiful sexuality. Conceived among lost hairpins and snapshots of doggies in a Notting Hill Gate flatlet. At the same time she has inherited everything: she marches about this house like the Race itself. They rally as if she were the Young Pretender. Oh, I know Matchett’s conspiratorial mouth. And it’s so monstrous of Eddie; really it’s so silly. As far as all that’s concerned—well, Heaven help her: I don’t see why I should.