The Death of the Heart (46 page)

“No,” said Anna. “She will have had dinner.” When Phyllis had gone, Anna picked her spoon up, looked at the strawberries, then said: “Oh, did you really, St. Quentin?”

“I suppose you want to know why?”

“No, I’d much rather not.”

“How like Portia—she took no interest, either. Of course, Portia had had a shock, too, and though I felt very much moved to tell her about myself, she was in no mood to listen. As I said to her in Marylebone High Street, how completely closed we are to one another… . But what
I
should like to know is, how do you know she knows?”

“Yes, by the way,” said Thomas, coming alive abruptly, “how do you know she knows?”

“I quite see,” said Anna, slightly raising her voice, “that whatever anyone else may have done—betray confidences, or run off to Major Brutt—it is
I
who have been to blame, from the very start. Well listen, St. Quentin, listen, Thomas: Portia has not said a word about this to me. That would not be her way. No, she simply rang up Eddie, who rang me up to complain how unkind I’d been. That happened today. When did you tell her, St. Quentin?”

“Last Wednesday. I so well remember, because—”

“—Very well. Since Wednesday, something else must have happened to bring all this to a head. On Saturday I did think she looked odd. She came in and found Eddie here at tea. Possibly he and she blew off in some way when they were down at Seale. Perhaps Eddie got a fright.”

“Yes, he’s sensitive,” said St. Quentin. “Do you mind if I smoke?” Having lighted cigarettes for himself and Anna, he added: “How I do hate Eddie.”

“Yes, so do I,” said Thomas.

“Thomas
—you never said so!”

With a gigantic air of starting to ease himself, Thomas said: “Yes, he is such a little rat. And his work’s been so specious. Merrett wants to fire him.”

“You can’t do that, Thomas: he’d starve. Why should Eddie starve simply because you don’t like him?”

“Why should he not starve simply because you do? The principle seems to me the same throughout, and bad. Worse things happen to better people.”

“Besides,” St. Quentin said gently, “I don’t think Eddie would starve. He’d turn up for meals here.”

“No, you can’t do that, Thomas,” Anna wildly repeated, pulling her pearls round. “If he is being slack, simply give him a good fright. But you can’t sack him right out of the blue. You’ve got nothing against him, except being such a donkey.”

“Well, we can’t afford donkeys at five pounds a week.

When you asked me to put him in, you insisted he was so bright—which I must say he was, for the first week. Why did you say he was bright if you say he is such a donkey, and if he’s such a donkey, why is he always here?”

Anna looked at St. Quentin but did not look at Thomas. She left her pearls alone, ate a spoonful of compote, then said: “Because he is running after her.”

“And you think that’s a good thing?”

“I really could not tell you. After all, she’s your sister. It was you who wanted to have her here. No, it’s all right, St. Quentin, we’re not having a scene—If you didn’t like it, Thomas, why didn’t you say so? It seems to me we have talked about this before.”

“She seemed to know what was what, in her own way.”

“In fact, you wouldn’t cope, but you always hoped I might.”

“Look, what did you mean just now about them blowing off at Seale? What business had he down there? Why couldn’t he stay in London? Was that old fool Mrs. Heccomb running a
rendezvous?”

Anna went very white. She said: “How dare you say that? She was my governess.”

“Oh, yes, I know,” said Thomas. “But was she ever much of a chaperone?”

Anna paused, and looked at the candle-lit flowers. Then she asked St. Quentin for one more cigarette, which he with the discreetest speed supplied. Then she returned and said very steadily: “I’m afraid I don’t quite understand you, Thomas. Am I to take it you don’t trust Portia, then? It is you, I suppose, who should know if we’re right to trust her or not. You knew your father: I really never did. I never saw any reason to spy on her.”

“Except by reading her diary.”

St. Quentin, sitting with his back to the window, turned round and had a good look out. He said: “It’s getting pretty dark outside.”

“St. Quentin means that he wishes he wasn’t here.”

“Actually what I do mean, Anna, is, didn’t you say you would telephone Major Brutt?”

“Yes, he’ll be waiting, won’t he? So, I suppose, will Portia.”

“Very well, then,” said Thomas, leaning back, “what
are
we going to say?”

“We should have kept to the point.”

“We’ve kept a good deal too near it.”

“We must say something. He’ll think us so very odd.”

“He’s got every reason,” said Thomas, “to think us odd already. You say, he says she’ll come home if we do the right thing?”

“Do we know what the right thing is?”

“I suppose that’s what we’re deciding.”

“We shall know if we don’t do it. It will be quite simple: Portia will simply stay there with Major Brutt. Oh, heaven keep me,” said Anna, sighing, “from insulting a young person again I But it hasn’t simply been me—you know, we are all in it. We know what we think we’ve done, but we still don’t know what we did. What did she expect, and what is she expecting now? It’s not simply a question of getting her home this evening; it’s a question of all three going on living here… . Yes, this is a situation. She’s created it.”

“No, she’s just acknowledged it. An entirely different thing. She has a point of view.”

“Well, so has everybody. From the outside we may seem worthless, but we are not worthless to ourselves. If one thought what everyone felt, one would go mad. It 
does not do to think of what people feel.”

“I’m afraid,” St. Quentin said, “in this case we may have to. That is, if you are anxious to get her home. Her ‘right thing’ is an absolute of some sort, and absolutes only exist in feeling. There they both are, waiting in Kensington. Really you will have to do something soon.”

“Even supposing one wanted to for a moment, how is one to know how anyone else feels?”

“Oh, come,” said St. Quentin. “In this case, none of us are so badly placed. I am a novelist; you, Anna, have read her diary; Thomas is her brother—they can’t be
quite
unlike. However much we may hate to, there’s no reason, now we have got to face it, why we should not see more or less what her position is—or, I mean more, see things from her position… . May I go on, Anna?”

“Yes, do. But really we must decide. What are you doing, Thomas?”

“Drawing the curtains. People are looking in… . Are we not to have any coffee?”

“St. Quentin, wait till the coffees come.”

The coffee was brought. St. Quentin, one elbow each side of his cup of coffee, continued slowly to rub his forehead. At last he said: “I think you’re jealous of her.”

“Does she know that? If not, it can’t be called her position.”

“No, she’s not properly conscious of enjoying everything you are so jealous of. She may not enjoy it herself. Her extraordinary wish to love—”

“—Oh, I’d never want
that
back—”

“Her extraordinary expectation that whatever offers offers to lead you somewhere. What she expects to get at we shall never know. She wanders round you and Thomas, detecting what there is not and noting clues in her diary. In a way, of course, she has struck unlucky here. If you were much nicer people, living in the country—”

“What proof have you,” said Thomas, breaking in for the first time “that much nicer people do really exist?”

“Suppose that they did, and you were those much nicer people, you would not be bothered with her—what I mean is, you would not be so concerned. As it is, you are both unnaturally conscious of her: anybody would think she held the clue to the crime… . Your mother, for instance, Thomas, must have been a nice person living in the country.”

“So, as a matter of fact, was my father, until he fell in love. All there is to nice easy people, St. Quentin, is, that they are fairly impermeable. But not impermeable the whole way through. Yes, I know just the sort of people you’ve got in mind—you’re a novelist and you’ve always lived in town—but my experience is that they’ve all got a breaking point. And my conviction is that a thorough girl like Portia would be bound to come to it in them pretty soon. No, the fact is that nobody can afford to have a girl as thorough as that about.” Thomas re-filled his glass with brandy and went on: “I don’t say we might not have kept the surface on things longer if we had lived in some place where we could give her a bicycle. But, even so, could she keep on bicycling round for ever? She’d be bound, sooner or later, to notice something was up. Anna and I live the only way we can, and it quite likely may not stand up to examination. Look at this conversation we’re having now, for instance: it seems to me the apogee of bad taste. If we were nice easy people living in the country we should not for a moment tolerate you, St. Quentin. In fact, we should detest intimacies, and no doubt we should be right. Oh, no doubt we should be a good deal jollier than we are. But we might not do Portia better in the long run. For one thing, we should make her feel pretty shady.”

“Which she is,” said Anna. “Throwing herself at Eddie.”

“Well, what did you do, at not much more than her age?”

“Why always bring that up?”

“Why always have it in mind? … No, she is growing up in such a preposterous world that it’s quite natural that that little scab Eddie should seem as natural to her as anyone else. If you, Anna, and I had come up to scratch, she might not—”

“Yes, she always would. She wanted to pity him.”

“Victimised,” said St. Quentin. “She sees the victimised character. She sees one long set of attacks on him. She would never take account of the self-inflicted wrong —the chap who breaks his own arm to avoid going back to school, then says some big bully has done it for him, the chap who lashes himself to his bedroom chair so as not to have to have to go and cope with the burglar—oh, she’d think he was Prometheus. There’s something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it’s a grandiose form of funk. It takes nerve to make a fuss in a big way, and our Eddie certainly has got nerve. But it takes guts not to, and guts he hasn’t got. If he had, he’d stop Anna having him on. Oh, he won’t stop baying the moon while he’s got someone to listen and Portia’ll listen as long as anyone bays the moon.”

“How right you must be. All the same, you are so brutal. Does one really get far with brutality?”

“Clearly not,” said St. Quentin. “Look where we all three are. Utterly disabused, and yet we can’t decide anything. This evening the pure in heart have simply got us on toast. And look at the fun she has—she lives in a world of heroes. Who are we to be sure they’re as phony as we all think? If the world’s really a stage, there must be some big parts. All she asks is to walk on at the same time. And how right she is really—failing the big character, better (at least, arguably) the big flop than the small neat man who has more or less come off. Not that there is, really, one neat unhaunted man. I swear that each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant—impossible socially, but full-scale—and that it’s the knockings and batterings we sometimes hear in each other that keeps our intercourse from utter banality. Portia hears these the whole time; in fact she hears nothing else. Can we wonder she looks so goofy most of the time?”

“I suppose not. But how are we to get her home?”

St. Quentin said: “How would Thomas feel if he were his own sister?”

“I should feel I’d been born in a mare’s nest. I should want to get out and stay out. At the same time, I should thank God I was a woman and did not have to put up one particular kind of show.”

“Yes,” Anna said, “but that’s only because you feel that being a man has run you in for so much. Your lack of gusto’s your particular thing. If you were Portia, let off being a man, you would find something else to string yourself up about. But that’s not what St. Quentin is getting at. The point is, if you were Portia this evening, what would be the only thing you could bear to have us do?”

“Something quite obvious. Something with no fuss.”

“But my dear Thomas, in our relations with her nothing has ever seemed to be obvious. It’s been trial and error right from the start.”

“Well, I should like to be called for and taken away by someone who would not make any high class fuss. They could be as cross as they liked if they’d cut the analysis.” Thomas stopped and looked sternly at Anna. “She’s not fetched from places nearly enough,” he said. “When she is fetched, who generally fetches her?”

“Matchett.”

“Matchett?” St. Quentin said. “You mean Matchett your housemaid? Are they on good terms?”

“Yes, they’re on very good terms. When I am out for tea I hear they have tea together, and when they think I am out say good-night. They say a good deal more—but what I have no idea. Yes, I have though: they talk about the past.”

“The past?” said Thomas. “What do you mean? Why?”

“Their great mutual past—your father, naturally.”

“What makes you think that?”