The Death of the Heart (42 page)

“Oh God! Is there one?”

“I mean the one you’ve just brought up. It hasn’t got any stamp.”

Eddie stood with the vase and gave a tortured giggle. “Hasn’t it?”- he said. “How extraordinary! She must have sent round by special messenger. I thought that looked like her writing… .”

“Surely you must know it,” said Portia coldly. She put down the daisies and watched them make a viscous pool on the cloth, then she took up the letter. “Or, I will.”

“Shut up. Leave that alone!”

“Why? Why should I? What are you frightened of?”

“Apart from anything else, that’s a letter to me. Don’t be such a little rat!”

“Well, go on, read it. Why are you so frightened?

What are the private things you and she say?”

“I really couldn’t tell you: you’re too young.”

“Eddie …”

“Well, leave me alone, damn you!”

“I don’t care if I’m damned. What do you and she say?”

“Well, quite often we have talks about you.”

“But you used to talk a lot before
you
got to know me, didn’t you? Before you had said you loved me, or anything. I remember hearing you talking in the drawingroom, when I used to go up or down stairs, before I minded at all. Are you her lover?”

“You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I know it’s something you’re not with me. I wouldn’t mind what you did, but I cannot bear the things I think now that you say.”

“Then why keep asking?”

“Because I keep hoping you might tell me you were really saying something not that.”

“Well, I am Anna’s lover.”

“Oh … Are you?”

“Don’t you believe me?”

“I’ve got no way of telling.”

“I thought it didn’t seem to make much impression. Why make such a fuss if you don’t know what you do want? As a matter of fact, I’m not: she’s far too cautious and smart, and I don’t think she’s got any passion at all. She likes to be far more trouble.”

“Then why do you—I mean, why—?”

“The trouble with you has been, from the very start, that you’ve been too anxious to get me taped.”

“Have I? But
you
said we loved each other.”

“You used to be much gentler, much more sweet. Yes,

you used to be, as I once told you, the one person I could naturally love. But you’re all different, lately, since Seale.”

“Matchett says so too—Eddie, will you turn out the fire?”

“What’s the matter—do you feel funny? What’s made you feel funny? Why don’t you sit down, then?” He came hurriedly round the table pinning her with a hard look, as though he dared her to crumple, to drop down out of sight. Then he put one stony hand on her shoulder and pushed her down into an armchair. His high-pitched insensibility was not being acted—he sat on the arm of the chair, as he so often used to do, stared boldly into the air above her head and giggled, as though the scene were as natural as it could ever be. “If you pass out here, darling, you’ll lose me my job,” he said. He took off her hat for her and put it down on the floor. “There, that’s better. I do wish to God you smoked,” he said. “Do you still not want the fire? And why should you pass out?”

“You said everything was over,” Portia said, looking straight up into his eyes. They stayed locked in this incredulous look till Eddie flinched: he said: “Have I been unkind?”

“I’ve got no way of telling.”

“I wish you had.” Frowning, pulling his lip down in the familiar way, that made this the ghost of all their happier talks, he said: “Because I don’t know, do you know. I may be some kind of monster; I’ve really got no idea… . The things I have to say seem never to have had to be said before. Is my life really so ghastly and so extraordinary? I’ve got no way to check up. I do wish you were older; I wish you knew more.”

“You’re the only person I ever—”

“That’s what’s the devil; that’s just what I mean. You don’t know what to expect.”

Not taking her anxious eyes from his face—eyes as desperately concentrated as though she were trying to understand a lesson—she said: “But after all, Eddie, anything that happens has never happened before. What I mean is, you and I are the first people who have ever been us.”

“All the same, most people get to know the ropes— you can see they do. All the other women I’ve ever known but you, Portia, seem to know what to expect, and that gives me something to go on. I don’t care how wrong they are: it somehow gets one along. But you’ve kept springing thing after thing on me, from the moment you asked why I held that tart of a girl’s hand. You expect every bloody thing to be either right or wrong, and be done with the whole of oneself. For all I know, you may be right. But it’s simply intolerable. It makes me feel I’m simply going insane. I’ve started to live in one way, because that’s been the only way I can live. I can see you get hurt, but however am I to know whether that’s not your own fault for being the way you are? Or, that you don’t really get hurt more than other people but simply make more fuss? You apply the same hopeless judgments to simply everything—for instance, because I said I loved you, you expect me to be as sweet to you as your mother. You’re damned lucky to have someone even as innocent as I am. I’ve never fooled you, have I?”

“You’ve talked to Anna.”

“That’s something different entirely. Have I ever not spoken the truth to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, have I? If I weren’t innocent to the point of deformity, would you get me worked up into such a state? Any other man would have chucked you under the chin, and played you up, and afterwards laughed at you for a silly little fool.”

“You have laughed at me. You’ve laughed at me with them.”

“Well, when I’m with Anna you do seem pretty funny. I should think, in fact I’m certain that you’d seem funny to anybody but me. You’ve got a completely lunatic set of values, and a sort of unfailing lunatic instinct that makes you pick on another lunatic—another person who doesn’t know where he is. You know I’m not a cad, and I know you’re not batty. But, my God, we’ve got to live in the world.”

“You said you didn’t like it. You said it was wicked.”

“That’s another thing that you do: you pin me down to everything.”

“Then why do you say you always tell me the truth?”

“I used to tell you the truth because I felt safe with you. Now—”

“Now you don’t love me any more?”

“You don’t know what you mean by love. We used to have such fun, because I used to think that we understood each other. I still think you’re sweet, though you do give me the horrors. I feel you trying to put me into some sort of trap. I’d never dream of going to bed with you, the idea would be absurd. All the same, I let you say these quite unspeakable things, which no one has the right to say to anyone else. And I suppose I say them to you too. Do I?”

“I don’t know what is unspeakable.”

“No, that’s quite clear. You’ve got some sense missing. The fact is, you’re driving me mad.” Eddie, who had been chainsmoking, got up and walked away from the armchair. He dropped his cigarette behind the gas fire, stopped to stare at the fire, then automatically knelt down and turned it out. “Apart from everything else, it’s time you went home,” he said. “It’s going on for half-past seven.”

“You mean you would be happier without me?”

“Happy!”
said Eddie, throwing up his hands.

“I must make some people happy—I make Major Brutt happy, I make Matchett happy, when I don’t have secrets; I made Mrs. Heccomb rather happy, she said… . Do you mean, though, that
now,
you feel you could be as happy without me as you used to be with me when you thought I was different?”

Eddie, with his face entirely stiff, picked up the forgotten dead daisies from the table, doubled their stalks up and put them precisely into the waste paper basket. He looked all round the room, as though to see what else there was out of place; then his eyes, without changing, without a human flicker, with all their darkness of immutable trouble, returned to Portia’s figure, where they stopped. “I certainly do feel that at the moment,” he said.

Portia at once leaned down to reach her hat from the floor. The titter of the silly chromium clock, and a telephone ringing on and on in some room downstairs filled up the pause while she put on her hat. To do this, she had to put down Anna’s letter, which, unconsciously, she had been holding all this time: she got up and put it down on the table—where Eddie’s unseeing eyes became fixed on it. “Oh,” she said, “I haven’t got any money. Can you lend me five shillings?”

“You won’t want all that just to get back from here.”

“I’d rather have five shillings. I’ll send you a postal order for it tomorrow.”

“Yes, do do that, darling, will you? I suppose you can always get money from Thomas. I’ve run rather short.”

When she had put her gloves on, she slipped the five shillings in small silver, that he had rather unwillingly collected, down inside the palm of her right glove. Then she held out her hand, with the hard bulge in the palm. “Well, goodbye, Eddie,” she said, not looking at him. She was like someone who, at the end of a too long visit, conscious of having outstayed his welcome, does not know how to take his leave with grace. This unbearable social shyness of Eddie, her eagerness to be a long way away from here, made her eyes shift round different parts of the carpet, under their dropped lids.

“Of course I’ll see you down. You can’t wander about the stairs alone—this house is lousy with people.”

Her silence said: “What more could they do to me?” She waited: he put the same stone hand on her shoulder, and they went through the door and down three flights like this. She noted things she had not seen coming up— the scrolls, like tips of waves, on the staircase wallpaper, the characters of scratches on the olive dado, the chaotic outlook from a landing window, a typed warning on a bathroom door. For infinitesimal moments in her descent she paused, under Eddie’s hand, to give these things looks, as though it helped to fix her mind on them. She felt the silent tenseness of other people, of all those lives of which she had not been conscious, behind the shut doors; the exhausted breath of the apartment house, staled by so many lungs, charged with dust from so many feet, came up the darkening shaft of the stairs—for there were no windows down there near the hall.

Down there, Eddie glanced once more at the letter-rack, in case the next post should have come in. He swung open the hall door boldly and said he had better find a taxi for her. “No, no, no, don’t: I’ll find one easily… . Goodbye,” she said again, with a still more guilty shyness. Before he could answer—while he still, in some reach of the purely physical memory, could feel her shoulder shrinking under his hand—she was down the steps and running off down the street. Her childish long-legged running, at once awkward (because this was in a street) and wild, took her away at a speed which made him at once appalled and glad. Her hands swung with her movements; they carried nothing—and the oddness of that, the sense that something was missing, bothered him as he went back upstairs.

Here he found, of course, that she had left the despatch case, with all her lessons in it, behind. And this quite small worry—for how on earth, without comment, was he to get it back? This looked like further trouble for the unlucky pupil at Cavendish Square—pressed just enough on his mind to make him turn for distraction to the more pressing, dangerous worry of Anna. He got bottles out of a cupboard, made a drink for himself, gave one of those defiant laughs with which one sometimes buoys up one’s solitude, drank half the drink, put it down and opened the letter.

He read Anna’s note about the office telephone.

THE
Karachi Hotel consists of two Kensington houses, of great height, of a style at once portentous and brittle, knocked into one—or, rather, not knocked, the structure might hardly stand it, but connected by arches at key points. Of the two giant front doors under the portico, one has been glazed and sealed up; the other, up to midnight, yields to pressure on a round brass knob. The hotel’s name, in tarnished gilt capitals, is wired out from the top of the portico. One former diningroom has been exposed to the hall and provides the hotel lounge; the other is still the diningroom, it is large enough. One of the first floor drawingrooms is a drawingroom still. The public rooms are lofty and large in a diluted way: inside them there is extensive vacuity, nothing so nobly positive as space. The fireplaces with their flights of brackets, the doors with their poor mouldings, the nude-looking windows exist in deserts of wall: after dark the high-up electric lights die high in the air above unsmiling armchairs. If these houses give little by becoming hotels, they lose little; even when they were homes, no intimate life can have flowered inside these walls or become endeared to them. They were the homes of a class doomed from the start, without natural privilege, without grace. Their builders must have built to enclose fog, which having seeped in never quite goes away. Dyspepsia, uneasy 
wishes, ostentation and chilblains can, only, have governed the lives of families here.

In the Karachi Hotel, all upstairs rooms except the drawingroom have been partitioned up to make two or three more: the place is a warren. The thinness of these bedroom partitions makes love or talk indiscreet. The floors creak, the beds creak; drawers only pull out of chests with violent convulsions; mirrors swing round and hit you one in the eye. Most privacy, though least air, is to be had in the attics, which were too small to be divided up. One of these attics Major Brutt occupied.