The Heat of the Day (10 page)

experience, under the cloak of sleep, had had its conclusions in that supernatural nearness to her of Robert's face. Those were a series of nights in which one slept, if at all, with an abandonment in itself exhausting; but no kind of sleep accounted for the distance she felt between herself and yesterday--and, indeed, between herself and today. Nothing she saw or touched gave token of even its own reality: even her wrist watch seemed to belie time; she fancied it had lost hours during the night, that this might be midday, even the afternoon--her first act, as she hurried into the street, was to look about in vain for a public clock. So arrested seemed the movement of everything as she went to work that she asked herself whether the war, even, might not have somehow stopped?--she had spoken to nobody, since she woke, but the old mum gardener. Nothing was not possible--even so, she was late. She halted a taxi and stepped in. Ten minutes after she sat down at her desk, Robert rang up: they agreed to lunch together. The restaurant at which they met most often was this morning, he was sorry to tell her, closed--the street roped off: some nonsense about a time-bomb. They would have to try how they liked it somewhere else. To the place he suggested she, it happened, had never been: its name, from being familiar in so many of her friends' many stories, had come to seem to be over the borderline of fiction--so much so that, making her way thither, she felt herself to be going to a rendezvous inside the pages of a book. And was, indeed, Robert himself fictitious? She looked back, on her way to the restaurant, at their short unweighty past. The commissionaire set her spinning inside the revolving door; Robert, inside the foyer, started forward to meet her. She was struck by his limp---a limp so pronounced today that, till he spoke, he seemed like some other man. In a dazzling blend of sun and electric light they sat side by side on velvet, backing on the wall. The pushing in upon them of the table by the waiter had been like the closing of a gate; behind this there was something a little forced about their repeated, fleeting turnings to one another, till the coming of the martinis permitted Robert to frown at, finger, his misted glass. He then broke out: "I'm very glad you are here. I was certain something had happened to you." "Why should it?" "Because that would be exactly the sort of thing that _would__ happen to me!" She did not know, for a second, if he meant her to laugh at this unusual travesty of a glum boy's manner. She stayed with a cigarette--which before he spoke he had been on the point of lighting--held to her lips, looking tentatively at him. He kept his thumb on his lighter. So in the cinema some break-down of projection leaves one shot frozen, absurdly, on to the screen. Here was the face of before she opened her eyes. Its fairness, not quite pallor, had a sort of undertone of exhausted sunburn. To this Impressionistic look of alight-ness, hair, eyebrows gave almost nothing darker, and there was no moustache; the face had only accents of shadow. The effect of his being in uniform was that the claylike khaki threw his features into transparent relief, behind which they were at the moment possessed by tension. That most curious of the qualities he should have, candescence, was at the moment less from his eyes being turned away--their flame-thin blueness was missing. The prolonging of the refusal to look at her became more of an avowal than any look; the fact, for him, of there being nothing more to be said set his mouth in a stone line which itself spoke. To miss from his eyes, mouth, forehead the knowable unguarded play of his nature was for her, for the first time, to be made feel its force. In the unfamiliar the familiar persisted like a ghost--his attitude, the long narrow cast of his head and hands, his youthfulness--something moody, hardy and lyrical which his being some way into his thirties had only brought to a finer point. He was younger than Stella by five or six years. The gilt-faced clock in the sunburst on the restaurant's wall had, like others in London, been shock-stopped. When she began to feel about for her gloves and he began to push out the table, their two wrist watches--which, in the time to come, were to come at some kind of relationship of their own by never perfectly synchronising--found it, respectively, to be a minute before and a minute after half-past two. Half-past two of a day which, having begun late for her, finished late for them both. Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love. In the two years following 1940 he and she had grown into living together in every way but that of sharing a roof. Soon they could both conjecture the ins and outs of each other's days, and of evenings which had to be spent apart they knitted together the stories when they met. Counted, the hours of any week which were their own completely were not many, but those magnetic hours drew from the rest so much that nothing was quite lost, little had gone to waste. His experiences and hers became harder and harder to tell apart; everything gathered behind them into a common memory--though singly each of them might, must, exist, decide, act, all things done alone came to be no more than simulacra of behaviour: they waited to live again till they were together, then took living up from where they had left it off. Then their doubled awareness, their interlocking feeling acted on, intensified what was round them--nothing they saw, knew or told one another remained trifling: everything came to be woven into the continuous narrative of love; which, just as much, kept gaining substance, shadow, consistency from the imperfectly known and the not said. For naturally they did not tell one another everything. Every love has a poetic relevance of its own; each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter. It had been in the course of that first winter that Stella left her lodgings in the square and moved across into the Weymouth Street flat. There, the annoyance of the neo-Regency fallals was cancelled out by possessorship of the whole emptied house below them, from nightfall on: after dark the stairs went up, flight by flight, past door after door of consulting-rooms in which there was now no one to stir or listen--silence, when she and Robert came back together, stood stories deep. Repetition gave increasing magic to those returns--to stepping over and leaving disregarded the letters on her door-mat, to the hasty blacking-out of windows already black with night, to the blind course back through the dark in which Robert waited till her fingers found the switch of a lamp. At the same time, no two meetings were ever quite the same. Roderick, at the beginning, had been the reason why the lovers did not move into the same house--the indifference of the embattled city to private lives, the exiguousness and vagueness of everybody's existence among the ruins could, but for Roderick, have made that easy. But by the time Stella's son, at the end of a phantom year at Oxford, was called up, she and Robert found themselves conscious of a submerged decision to go on as they were, for that "time being" which war had made the very being of time. Wartime, with its makeshifts, shelvings, deferrings, could not have been kinder to romantic love. The two discussed any merging of their postal addresses not more seriously than they discussed marriage--happy to stay as they were, afloat on this tideless, hypnotic, futureless day-to-day. It was more than a dream. More, it was a sort of growing, smiling regard, a happiness of which it seemed that the equilibrium became every day surer. The discovery together, for the first time, of life was serious, but very much more than serious, illuminating: there was an element of awe. Miraculously unhindered, the plan of love had gone on unfolding itself; the testing time, ever to be expected, had never come. There showed no sign of its coming until the Sunday when Harrison paid his evening call. Roderick's unexpected arrival at Weymouth Street, that scarred Sunday night, had had two effects Stella had hoped it might have--that of thrusting Harrison from the immediate forefront, that of keeping her parted from Robert just long enough for the fumes of her conversation with Harrison to have had time to settle: evaporate they could not. Then, at the end of Roderick's leave, the atmosphere of the lovers' next meeting, after what had come to feel like eternity, could not but banish anything foreign to itself. It was not till two or three evenings later, back in her flat again with him, that she remarked suddenly: "Oh, and there was not only Roderick last Sunday--that man called Harrison was here, too." "Which man?" said Robert unconcentratedly. "The one who was at the funeral." "What, him again? What a bother. You seem to be stuck with him for life." "One would think so. London's got too small--wherever there's left to go to, Harrison seems to be." "We've never run into him?" "Never consciously; but he thinks he's seen us. He says he knows you." "How I wish I knew him--but no, incredible as it may sound I don't think I know anyone of that name. Chap with a squint, I think you said?" "Not a squint exactly--more, it's some way he has of using both eyes at the same time. And he has a laugh." "Odd. However, it can't be helped." "What can't be helped?" "My still having no idea who he is. He doesn't sound like anyone very special. I know you said he wasn't a commercial traveller, but I can't remember what you said he was." "I think I just said he was not a commercial traveller.... Yes, he's always about." "Perhaps he listens for careless talk." Robert yanked himself out of the deep armchair to stand scrutinising some part of his reflection in the mirror over the fireplace. "Don't you agree," he asked, "it's about time I scrapped this tie?" She answered: "Why--who's been talking carelessly?" "Everyone, I imagine. You know how _I__ talk." "Only know how you talk to me. I don't count." "Then why don't you ask Harrison, since we hear he knows me.--Darling, it isn't that I'm not interested in your friends, but I do wish you'd give your mind to this tie question." He untied the tie, pulled it off and, having sat down again, examined it closely under a lamp. "A bit off," he said, "honestly, don't you think?" He passed it to her. She said: "Yes, perhaps a bit off." "What are Harrison's ties--nice?" "Don't be perfunctory, Robert." "I am anything but. For all I know, he may be perfectly fascinating. That way of using both eyes at the same time--anybody would think, from the way you talk, you'd always lived with a cyclops, or Lord Nelson." Frowning over the tie she said: "Let me look at this properly...." "Yes; because this does matter." "The thing is," she cried, kneeling by him with the tie in her hands, "that really I cannot judge any tie you wear. Just as I cannot judge... How should I feel, for instance, if somebody tried to tell me something preposterous about you?" "Or you wouldn't simply tell them to go to hell--no?" "How should I even know if it _were__ preposterous?" "Then you simply cannot tell me about this tie?" "Yes, I suppose you're right; I suppose it must go," she said, blindly playing it through her fingers. "That is, when you can remember to buy another--unless you have another?" "You look sad," said Robert, looking down at her face. "What are you thinking--'One tie nearer the grave'? Or has anybody been telling you I'm two-timing?" "No. Are you?" "No. For one thing, where would I get the time?" "Oh, Robert, talking of time, when can we do what we've said we might do--go down and spend a day at your mother's?" "My heavens," he cried, "when I'm only just back from there! Next time I go, we both might--if you still want to. But on the other hand, why?" "Because, why shouldn't we?" "There's no objection; it's simply that there's no point. The only possible point could have been my father, if he hadn't been dead. However, there the other two are, as you know, if you want to see them--if you don't mind there being rather a fuss." "Would they not like me?" He reflected: "I don't see why they shouldn't, except that they never like anybody. No, I just mean fuss at my bringing _anyone__ down. You would not be you. You and I are accustomed to make impressions: unless you can rid yourself of the least expectation of doing that, the day will be rather a flop.--What have you in view down there--research? My case-history?" "Naturally," said she. He reached out for the tie, took it back from her, but at the same time said: "Though, is there much point in my putting this on again?"

Chapter 6

THE visit to Robert's mother took place some weeks later. It was an early October Saturday afternoon when he and she stepped out of the train at a Home County station--while Robert, in a sort of rapid somnambulism, steered her towards a footbridge over the line, Stella kept glancing about at the other platforms, the shabby initialled seats, rusting enamelled advertisements which must have been here ever since Robert's boyhood, and the new posters up to discourage travel. Laudably little travel was on her conscience: since last May's expedition to the funeral she had left London not more than once or twice. This railway station made her think of the one at which she had waited with Harrison for the London train. The alikeness was less a matter of architecture (today's being that of a different company, running more decidedly to the Gothic and realising itself in yellow rather than plum brick) than of position: in both cases a high embankment, on which the station stood, intersected a sunk concentration of roofs and roads and trees; in which, looking down from the platforms, you saw one kind of pattern of English life at its most incoherent and reassuring. The platforms themselves seemed to bear the mark of breadwinners' contented evening returns--_here__ no one did anything but keep house. The two stations also, in Stella's mind, became epitomes of the two most poignant seasons--in spring, in autumn everything telegraphs its mystery to your senses; nothing is trite. And more: in these years the idea of war made you see any peaceful scene as it were through glass. Only, while that day in May had been moody and overcast, this in October was elatingly sunny--and she was here with Robert, not Harrison. They stepped into a taxi, which if not bespoken for Robert showed no surprise, and slid off down the station hill, passing fronts of shops which also seemed to link up with the Tringsby country. Holme Dene, Mrs. Kelway's house, was apparently three miles from the station. Stella, her arm through Robert's, exclaimed: "I forgot to ask you--what have you told them?" "That we are coming down to go for a country walk." "If I had known I would have worn other shoes. Not that I couldn't walk in these, but they look silly." Robert glanced without worry at her extended foot, saying: "Ernestine's not so subtle as all that." "But anyway, who will she think I am?" "I think I have got it firmly into her head that you are someone working in a government office, and that we go for tramps on Saturday afternoons." "So, what did she say?" "She said, 'You mean hikes.' What my mother thinks I have no idea: we shall see." "Does that mean we shall have to go for a walk?" "We may be glad to--remember, there will be hours before our train." The first intimation one had of approaching Holme Dene was a notice saying CAUTION: CONCEALED DRIVE: this projected from a ribbon of evergreens, above which rose some fine deciduous trees. The trees, to be seen going back and back, gave a ground of depths of interesting shadow to the otherwise bald white gates, and also provided the only reason why a house should occur at just _this__ point along the otherwise empty road. There was no lodge but there was a letter box on a white stake, which seemed hardly less an accessory of the Kelways' gateway, and whose slight grin still reflected Holme Dene's triumph at wresting this amenity out of the G. P. O. Here Robert stopped the taxi and they got out; Stella having agreed that, as they had no luggage, there was no point in their chuffing up to the door. A break in the evergreens of the drive allowed the first view of Holme Dene, across paddock and lawns. The house, which must have been built about 1900, was of the size of a considerable manor, rose with gables to the height of three ample stories, and combined half-timbering with bow and french windows and two or three balconies. The façade was partially draped with vir-ginia creeper, now blood red. In the fancy-shaped flowerbeds under the windows and round the sweep the eye instinctively sought begonias--one or two beds, it was true, still showed late roses; in the others, vegetables of the politer kind packed the curves of crescents and points of stars. Immediately round the beds the lawns had been mown in wavering stripes; one might guess by Ernestine or the children. A backdrop of trees threw into relief a tennis pavilion, a pergola, a sundial, a rock garden, a dovecote, some gnomes, a seesaw, a grouping of rusticated seats and a bird-bath. Stella, who could not stop looking, could think of nothing to say, and Robert saw no reason to say anything: they thus were not interrupted, though she was startled, by somebody's shooting out round a corner of laurustinus to stand in the drive ahead of them, laughing heartily. "Why, hullo, Ernie," said Robert, "where are _you__ off to now?" Ernestine answered: "What's become of the taxi?" "We sent it back." "Of course, you have come to walk," said Ernestine, looking still better pleased by her instantaneous grasp of the situation. She had swooped upon Stella's hand rapidly, as though securing a bargain, before Robert was under way with the introduction. "Well, I must say," she said, "you've hit on topping weather. Not that there's anything picturesque round here." Stella knew Ernestine to be her brother Robert's senior by about twelve years: widowed, she was Mrs. Gibb. Between her and Robert came Amabelle, who, having married into the I. C. S., was now confined by the war to India. Amabelle's children were safe at Holme Dene, in the keeping of their grandmother and aunt--these children, the Joliffes, a girl and boy, would presumably play some part in the afternoon. Ernestine's own son, Christopher Robin, was at Woolwich this autumn, quite liking it. His being Roderick's age, in the Army and also an only son, might, Stella had hoped on the way down, furnish some point of contact between the two mothers: face to face with Ernestine, she now saw why Robert had been less optimistic. Ernestine's features, which taken one by one might not have been so very unlike Robert's, were so arranged as to make her look rather like a dog. Her face was long, her body short; both were lean. Though standing still for the moment, she vibrated with energy, seeming to be almost audibly ticking over. Her being clad in the uniform of the W. V. S. added to her air of having been torn, or having on their account torn herself, from some vital wartime activity; but Stella guessed she would look like that at any time. That she should have ever loved, married and borne a child seemed fantastic; she certainly gave the impression of being far from sorry to have got all that over. In the look Ernestine turned from Stella to Robert the absence of human awareness was quite startling; she might have been scanning a public notice to see if anything further ought to be done. "Well, Robert," she said, "you'll find Muttikins in the lounge; though of course she's been expecting to hear the taxi." Picking her laugh up where she had left it off, she took it a few more notes up the scale; then, to Stella, remarked: "We were only saying this morning, it took being shot in the leg to make Robert walk!--Well, I have got to rush. See you both at tea." Disengaging herself from their company with unnecessary force, Ernestine shot onwards towards the gate, leaving them to pursue their way to the house. Stella said: "What was Ernestine laughing at?" "Oh, she was just laughing." "But she seemed to be laughing before we met her." "Then I suppose she must have seen us first." Stella reflected, then asked: " 'Muttikins'?" "My mother: we call her that." The lounge of Holme Dene could be seen into from the entrance porch, through an arch. It had three sizeable windows; but was so blackly furnished with antique oak, papered art brown and curtained with copper chenille as to consume, with little to show, their light. Some mahogany pieces, such as a dining-table, a dumb waiter and an upright piano, could be marked as evacuees out of other rooms; the grandfather clock, on the other hand, must have stood here always--time had clogged its ticking. The concentrated indoorness of the lounge was made somehow greater rather than less by the number of exits, archways and outdoor views; the staircase, lit from the top and built with as many complications as space allowed, descended into the middle of everything with a plump. In the evident hope of preventing draughts, screens of varying heights had been placed about. Stella, keyed up to meet Robert's mother, did not know in which direction to look first: a small bowl of large orange dahlias drew her attention, like an arranged decoy. A silence, more than a sound, made her turn round quickly--Mrs. Kelway, in one hand holding her knitting, had already risen out of her chair. Small, sizes smaller than Ernestine, the mother reached up her free hand to her tall son's shoulder; Robert bowed his head, and her lips just paused on his cheek, as though to endorse the kiss placed there many times already. She said, "Robert..." "Muttikins..." he a shade more lightly returned. Then added: "Muttikins, this is Mrs. Rodney." "Mrs. Rodney?" said Mrs. Kelway, turning to look sceptically at Stella, after which they shook hands. "But what became of the taxi?" she said to Robert. "We sent it back from the gate." "Ernestine had been listening for the taxi; I hope she did not miss you on her way down the drive?" "No; we ran into Ernestine---just a little _détraquée__," he said--as though struck by this for the first time. "It is Saturday afternoon," Mrs. Kelway said. She sat down again, in the armchair Stella should not have failed to see, for it was posted midway across the floor. Was this position strategic?--from it she commanded all three windows, also the leaded squints in the inglenook. Her crystal knitting needles went on flying along--smoothly, lightly, apparently under their own volition. "If I had not seen you come up the drive," she said, "I should have begun to wonder if you had missed the train." "Mrs. Rodney," said Robert, "likes to walk in the country." Mrs. Kelway glanced for a moment at Stella's feet. "It is so nice to be out of London," said Stella. "And I am so fond of autumn." Seeing no reason not to, she sat down. "Yes, today it is quite autumnal. I seldom go to London during the war, as I hear we are asked not to travel for no reason. Though I do not care for walking; I have always been a knitter. And now, in addition, my grandson is in the Army." "Oh, and so is my son!" "I sometimes ask myself how long it will last." "Oh, come," exclaimed Robert, "the Army may not be much, but it should surely take more than Roderick and Christopher Robin to do it in!" Mrs. Kelway, without change of expression, said: "I did not mean the Army: I meant the war." Having watched her needles fly along half a row, she added: "What do you mean by 'Roderick'?" "Mrs. Rodney's son." "Oh," said Mrs. Kelway, if anything less genially than before. Comedy, Stella understood, was to have no place in any kind of relation with Robert's mother. She was now confronting, with a submerged tremor, with a momentary break in her sense of her own existence, the miniature daunting beauty of that face. Mrs. Kelway's dark hair, no more than touched with grey, was of a softness throwing into relief the diamond-cut of her features. The brows, the nose, the lips could not have been more relentlessly delicate, more shadowlessly distinct. If Ernie's regard had held unawareness, her mother's showed the mute presence of an obsession. For, why _should__ she speak?--she had all she needed: the self-contained mystery of herself. Her lack of wish for communication showed in her contemptuous use of words. The lounge became what it was from being the repository of her nature; it was the indoors she selected, she consecrated--indeed, she had no reason to go out. By sitting here where she sat, and by sometimes looking, by sometimes even not looking, across the furnished lawn, she projected Holme Dene: this was a bewitched wood. If her power came to an end at the white gate, so did the world. She wore a grey woven two-piece, pre-war in quality as in style, softened off at the throat by a fold of net. Robert remained standing between his mother and Stella--who, looking up, saw his fair head against the glossy dark of a picture. From his attitude, back to the fireless fireplace, and the easy turns of his interest between woman and woman, you could have taken this meeting to be of the most everyday. Height, nonchalance, fairness he must have got from his father--how much, that was saving, else? He said: "Well, should we be going out?" Mrs. Kelway said: "Tea will be coming in." "Then perhaps a stroll before tea and a walk later?" When they were out of sight, or of all but psychic sight, of the windows, he said: "She's not really rude, more unconscious." Stella wondered. "Or don't you agree?" he asked. "Well, principally, darling, she struck me as being wicked. But you might not see that." "Oh, I see it constantly." "In London, you said she would make a fuss. I do not see any signs of that so far." "No, what I said was that _they__ would make a fuss: so far, you've been seeing them one by one, and neither my mother nor Ernestine can make a fuss singly. As a matter of fact, my mother did make a demonstration; she told you a good deal about herself." "Is that not usual?" "How can I say, really? Almost no strangers come here, and Ernie and I and the children have already been told." "So chiefly I was a stranger?" "Yes, you were largely that." Stella, glancing across to the paddock occupied by a pony which took no notice of her, said: "But where are the children?" "Saturday afternoon--but we ought to see them at tea." The children, Mrs. Kelway, Robert and Stella were seated round the mahogany table--whose bareness had been relieved by some mats, some plates, a japanned tray of tea things opposite Mrs. Kelway, buns, a cut loaf, an uncut cake which had the look of being of long standing, and an inviting pot of damson jam--when Ernestine dashed in and began to saw at the loaf. She then sent round the slices on the flat of the knife. "Dear me," said Robert, having received his, "Mrs. Rodney and I forgot about bringing our own butter." This served to draw Stella's attention to the butter arrangements: each one of the family had his or her own ration placed before his or her plate in a differently coloured china shell. Today was the delusive opening of the rationing week; the results of intemperance, as the week drew on, would be to be judged. Stella's solitary Londoner's footloose habits of living, in and out of restaurants, had kept from her many of the realities of the home front: for some reason, the sight of the coloured shells did more than anything so far to make her feel seedy, shady; though she could not but admire the arrangement as being at once
fanciful, frank and fair. She said hurriedly that she did not eat tea. "I would offer you some of my butter," said Ernestine, "but that would only make you feel uncomfy." Robert helped himself to a bun, which he split open in order to spread thickly with damson jam. "Oh, I _say__!" expostulated his nephew, Peter, speaking for the first time. The girl, Anne, remarked: "Do you do that in London? You must use a lot of jam, a most awful lot." "Black market," said Robert, out of the side of his mouth. Ernestine's laughing off of this held a warning note: "Remember," she said, "that we swallow everything whole. I'm afraid we are rather a case of hero-worship." Anne, with her eyes down, angrily suffered a slow red blush. The Joliffe children, aged about nine and seven, wore jerseys knitted when they were smaller; both looked downright and self-sufficient. A pink plastic broach representing a dog was pinned to Anne's chest; Peter sported an armlet with cryptic letters. Anne said: "Uncle Robert, suppose you end up in prison!" "In that case, you'll have to come and see me." This was going too far; Anne's excruciating reaction strained the mesh of her jersey. "We shall be having tears in a minute," said Ernestine. Mrs. Kelway looked reflectively at the child, but did not find anything to say other than: "If it's not too much trouble, Grannie would like some bread."--"Oh, _Muttikins__, but didn't I _give__ you any?--"Not this time, Ernestine: first I was pouring out; afterwards you were talking about the butter." Stella turned to Peter. "Do tell me what those letters on your armlet stand for?" "Nothing you would have heard of," said Peter shortly, not giving up his attempt to catch Robert's eye. "Uncle Robert, you didn't save your taxi much petrol by getting out of it at the gate; it had to go on more than a mile down the road before it could turn; when it drives up here it can quite easily turn in front of the door." "I've already decided," said Robert, "to never do that again." "We have eyes like gimlets," said Ernestine. "--Peter, old man, you weren't wearing your armlet _outside__ the gate?" "We remained under cover." "Under cover or not, you know what I've always said. A game is a game, but this war's really rather serious." "Yes, Aunt Ernie." "And ask Mrs. Rodney if she would like some more tea. If she says 'Yes,' pass her cup, and don't drop the spoon." "Mrs. Rodney," observed Mrs. Kelway, "does not care about afternoon tea." "Oh, but I _drink__ a great deal--of tea, I mean: it's a bad office habit." Mrs. Kelway stared, in evident wonder whether bad office habits could be confined to this. She then said: "We now drink tea only once a day; otherwise we might not have enough for guests. During the week it frequently happens that my daughter has hers at the W. V. S., in which case, if it were not for the children, I should be tempted to do without mine. Afternoon tea at this table does not seem the same to me, but the gate-leg at which we used to have afternoon tea had to be taken away into the drawingroom to make place for the piano out of the drawingroom when it was moved in here: we could not have Anne practising in the cold; she is like her grandfather. Since we were told of the fuel shortage we have made a point of keeping to this room, as the most central. My daughter does not feel the cold, from moving about so much that she seldom takes off her hat. My son tells me that in London you would not notice the war; I am afraid it is far from the same here. Previously, of course, he went through so much. More than we care to speak of," she added, looking at Robert. Not looking at Robert, Stella said: "I suppose so." "Mum is the word here," added Ernestine, "Isn't that so, children?" Anne said: "Uncle Robert is never so very particularly mum." Robert, trying to knife the cake, said: "No, no one can say I don't come across. The thing with you, Ernie, is that you never listen. There's nothing I would not tell you about the great retreats.--You wouldn't think it was time we bought a new cake?" "But that one has not been eaten," objected Ernestine. "I'm sure Mrs. Rodney will take us as she finds us." "Happily for Mrs. Rodney, she does not eat cake." "Goodness, why?" exclaimed Anne, turning to study Stella. "Or are you always afraid it would make you fat?" "Don't say 'goodness' to someone older than you, dear. Mrs. Rodney is free not to eat cake if she doesn't want to: that is just what I mean by the difference between England and Germany." Peter, wriggling inside his jersey, said: "The Nazis would _force__ her to eat cake." Mrs. Kelway, whose distant ice-clear gaze had not left her son's face since his last remark, said: "But retreats are now a thing of the past." The sun had been going down while tea had been going on, its chemically yellowing light intensifying the boundary trees. Reflections, cast across the lawn into the lounge, gave the glossy thinness of celluloid to indoor shadow. Stella pressed her thumb against the edge of the table to assure herself this was a moment _she__ was living through--as in the moment before a faint she seemed to be looking at everything down a darkening telescope. Having brought the scene back again into focus by staring at window-reflections in the glaze of the teapot, she dared look again at Robert, seated across the table, opposite her, between his nephew and niece. Late afternoon striking into the blue of his eyes made him look like a young man in Technicolour. That the current between him and her should be cut off, she had expected; dullness, numbness, even grotesquery she had foreseen. But what could be this unexpected qualm as to the propriety of their having come to Holme Dene? The escapade, bad enough in its tastelessness and bravado, had a more deep impropriety with regard to themselves. Nothing more psychic than Mrs. Kelway's tea table, with its china and eatables, interposed between them: the tea table, however, was in itself enough. The English, she could only tell herself, were extraordinary--for if this were not England she did not know what it was. You could not account for this family headed by Mrs. Kelway by simply saying that it was middle-class, because that left you asking, middle of what? She saw the Kelways suspended in the middle of nothing. She could envisage them so suspended when there _was__ nothing more. Always without a quiver as to their state. Their economy could not be plumbed: their effect was moral. Apart from the ambiguities of her tie with Robert, Stella at Holme Dene felt every one of the anxieties, the uncertainties of the hybrid. She, like he, had come loose from her moorings; but while what she had left behind her dissolved behind her, what he had left behind him was not to be denied. Life had supplied to her so far nothing so positive as the abandoned past. Her own extraction was from a class that has taken an unexpected number of generations to die out--gentry till lately owning, still recollecting, land. A handsome derelict gateway opening on to grass and repeated memorials round the walls of a church still gave some sort of locale, however distant, to what had been her unmarried name. Having been born to some idea of position, she seldom asked herself what her own was now--still less, what position was in itself. Mrs. Kelway and Ernestine, on the other hand, occupied a self-evident position of their own. Further reflections were cut short by Ernestine's uttering one of her louder laughs. This was her reaction to Robert's having said that he knew Stella wanted to see the house. But ought they not to be starting out immediately on their walk? No doubt, he replied, but why not the house first? But by later, Ernestine pointed out, the sun might have set, or at least gone in. The sun was in no such hurry, maintained Robert. But _did__ Mrs. Rodney understand--at this point Ernestine turned to Stella--that the house, though antique in appearance, was not actually old? The oak beams, to be perfectly honest, were imitations. And moreover--in case this hope should be running through Stella's mind--Holme Dene was not, and never would be, to let. Stella replied, she had not dared hope that it was. In that case, continued Ernestine--not, of course, that _she__ minded--why waste a fine afternoon? Robert, apparently made mad, said Stella was interested in interior decoration. Upon which Mrs. Kelway at once said: "I am afraid there is nothing of that sort here. Your father always liked everything plain but good. In addition, due to the war the better rooms are shut up." "Then I shall show her my cricket groups." "Dear me," tittered Ernie, "won't Mrs. Rodney think you are very vain?" "Can we come too?" cried the children. "No," said their uncle. "Why don't you operate on the lawn?" "But you might not see us." "I might look out of the window." On the stairs on their way up to Robert's top-floor room, Stella said: "You have made them think me frightfully nosey." "Aren't you? However, do stop thinking you're making a bad impression; I assure you you're making no impression at all." Robert's room decidedly gained by being an attic: its windows occupied ample gables; the slants of the ceiling reared round one's head romantic tentlike half-lights. Against such walls as offered vertical space, imposing mahogany furniture had been planted; the unblemished veneer of all these pieces showed them to be testimonials to his maturity. His reluctance to move downstairs from his boyhood's den had evidently been seen indulgently: first-floor manly comforts had moved upstairs to him. They interspersed fictions of boyishness. A "varsity" chair was padded in fadeless butcher blue; a swivel lamp stood attentively at the chair's elbow; a hot-looking, new-looking square of turkey carpet garnished the linoed floor. Glass cases of coins, birds' eggs, fossils and butterflies that he must once have fancied or been supposed to fancy stayed riveted where they must meet the eye; silver and other trophies, on hooks or brackets, rose in a pyramid over the chimneypiece. And something was yet more striking--sixty or seventy photographs, upward from snapshots to crowded groups, had been passe-partouted or framed, according to size and weight, and hung in close formations on two walls. All the photographs featured Robert. By himself or with friends, acquaintances or relations he was depicted at every age. "My dear Robert..." said Stella, after a minute's silence. "I know...." "You never told me.--_You__ didn't hang all these up?" "No.--Though, as you see, I haven't taken them down." "Then your mother?--Ernie?" With compunction she added: "They must really be very fond of you." "Then you'd have thought," he said, "that they'd have wanted these downstairs. No, they expect me to be very fond of myself." "All the same..." She began to move round the exhibition which, whatever it meant to him, was a feast for her. Reflecting on his last remark, she said: "Yet I don't think you are." She came to a stop in front of an enlarged snapshot of Robert, in tennis flannels, arm-inarm with a tall pretty girl in a summer frock. "Is this Decima?" (It was to Decima that he had for a short time been engaged.) "Yes," said Robert, glancing over her shoulder. Stella, unhooking Decima, carried her nearer to the light. "I must say, I don't see anything wrong with _her__." "There wasn't; she simply came up against what was wrong with me." 'I'm surprised, in a way," she remarked, "that they never took this down." "There may be no other of me in flannels." She put the picture back on its nail, and again looked round--this time at the narrow glacial bed, which, ends and all, had been draped in a starched white cover: in the neo-Sheraton book trough beside the bed the books gave the impression of being gummed together in some sort of secretion from their disuse. On the high dressing-chest, monogrammed backs of brushes stood high on their parching bristles. Everything was dustless; new air with all its perils came in now--he had opened a window. She exclaimed: "Robert, this room feels empty!" "It could not feel emptier than it is. Each time I come back again into it I'm hit in the face by the feeling that I don't exist--that I not only am not but never have been. So much so that it's extraordinary coming in here with you." "But what were you doing _then__--and _then__--and _then__?" she asked, pointing from photograph to photograph. "Or at any rate, who was doing what you seem to have done?" "You may ask. I not only have no idea now but must have had even less idea at the time. Me clawing at that fur rug as a decently arranged naked baby seems no more senseless, now, than me smirking over that tournament cup, or in shorts on the top of a rock with Thompson, or outside the church as an usher at Amabelle's wedding, or collaring Ernie's labrador, or at Kitzbuhl, or with Decima or that picnic hamper or Desmond's horse...." "--Still, those must once have been moments." "Imitation ones. If to have gone through motions ever since one was born is, as I think now, criminal, here's my criminal record. Can you think of a better way of sending a person mad than nailing that pack of his own lies all round the room where he has to sleep?" "Nonsense," she said, "they are only on two walls." "What do you think they are up to, all the same?" Comfortably slipping her arm through his, she said: "No, they've only made this room as though you were dead." "Well, damn it, Stella, isn't that bad enough?" She disengaged herself to go to the dressing-chest and pull open, by its firm knobs, one drawer: she smelled mothballs and admired paper folded over the top. "Socks," she said, looking under the paper, "beautifully put away. Roderick could do with a little of Ernestine." She slid the drawer to, sighed, and sat down on the window seat, cushioned to match the chair. One elbow on the sill of the open window, she looked thoughtfully back down the room at Robert. "What are you really wondering?" he said. "Whether I made you go on like that at tea, or whether here you are always the _enfant terrible__; what Ernie did with her labrador; and particularly, what your father was like. In the photographs with you how nice he looks." "He was.--Ernie's labrador? It died halfway through Munich week. Those big dogs must be sensitive; what they don't know they feel--the same was true of my father; in fact so' much so that _his__ dying was a cracking relief. To me, that is. Yes, look at all those pictures of me and him! We were an attractive embarrassment to each other--and, of course, in this house we were thrown very much together. Something was expected: very often I did not know which way to look, and looking back I can see that he didn't either; in fact I think I realised that at the time." "So where did you look?" "No option: on his insistence we were perpetually looking each other in the eye. There used to be convulsions of awkwardness when we literally