The Heat of the Day (11 page)

couldn't unlock our looks. I suppose I could draw you a map today of every vein in his iris. The jelly of an eye, not to speak of whatever else there may be in it, has been unseemly to me ever since--haven't you seen how seldom I look in your eyes?--_at__ them's an entirely different thing. Your mothy way of blinking and laziness about keeping your eyelids open didn't even so much attract me when we first met as reassure me--I felt we had the same sort of prudery without your knowing. In my father it was impossible not to see the broken spring; or at least impossible for me not to. Can you wonder I ask myself what did that to him.--What's the matter?" "Nothing." "The less you say, the more you think," he said, walking round the room, stopping to stare at the cases of moths and coins. "However, I think you'd have liked my father. There were his looks, and he could often take refuge from his humiliation in a sort of dignity. Yes; if you, anybody like you had loved him--but no, I cannot imagine any time when that could have been in time; at any time I remember it would have been too late--and I can't imagine from his point of view a more exposing thing to have happened: that would have been the pay-off. In all but one sense he was impotent; that was what came out in his relationship to me. What I think must have happened to him I cannot, while we're in this house, say. He let himself be buckled into his marriage like Ernie's labrador used to let itself be buckled into its collar. However..." "_Is__ Anne like him?" "Anne?" he said blankly, "why?" "Your mother seemed to suggest she had had the piano for Anne to practise on moved into the lounge because Anne was like your father." "Oh, yes, he was always trying to pick out tunes; whereas Anne is learning to play the piano properly but badly. My mother's _non sequiturs__ do of course establish connections one mightn't see. What else about him? He had business capacity, or we should not be where we are; yes, he could afford to retire comparatively young--in hopes of what? He gave me the start he owed me, and put good round sums into settlement for both the girls when they married. Later the slump hit him through some investments, but that not even badly. He left Mother enough to go on with as she always had." "How much did he leave you?" "Ten thousand down: what my mother has remains at her disposition, apart from this house, which if it should still be in the family at her death comes to Ernestine and me." "Why should it not still be in the family?" "Oh, it's for sale, you know. It practically always has been. He put it back again on the agents' books a year or two after we moved in. Not that he had anything against it, he merely foresaw that he would be wanting another change; in fact he had his heart set on a house called Fair Leigh outside Reigate; but nobody else bought this one, and meanwhile somebody else bought Fair Leigh. I was born in a house called Elmsfield, near Chiselhurst; and between that and this we lived in another house called Meadowcrest, outside Hemel Hempstead. To your eye I expect they would all look very much the same, including, I imagine, Fair Leigh--though I never saw that; it remained a dream." "One would have thought that somebody moving out of Fair Leigh would have been glad to acquire Holme Dene." "Something broke down somewhere; we got caught short. Either people no longer knew what was good for them or we were asking too much money for too few bathrooms. We would rather die than not sell for more than we gave. It's a slight, all the same, as you can imagine." "But Ernie made such a point, just now, of saying Holme Dene was not to let." "She was perfectly right; it's not to let, it's for sale. An infinite difference in prestige. We suffer no annoyance; people stopped coming to see it years before the war; at the same time, we never speak of the matter even among ourselves because we feel so sore; this has been simply one more of my father's mistakes. Or rather, that was how we used to feel: now, fortunately, the war has saved our faces. We always have lived uncomfortably in this house; _now__ it is possible for us to make a point of doing so." "All the same, how sad," she said, "how unsettling--surely?--I should have thought?" She looked out of the window, down at the betrayed garden, in which the gnomes, bird-bath and rustic seats now seemed to hover indeterminately. From this attic height you looked through the tops of trees; their illusion of forestlike density was lost; their thinning foliage stood out tattered against the sky. There were no rooks. Seen through transparent dusk the pattern of flowerbeds in the lawn looked impermanent, and those pallid roses seemed to have lingered on only because they were not only for this year but for _this place__, ever, the final ones. "How can _they__ live, anyone live," she asked, "in a place that has for years been asking to be brought to an end?" "Oh, but there will always be somewhere else," he said easily. "Everything can be shifted, lock, stock and barrel. After all, everything was brought here from someone else, with the intention of being moved again--like touring scenery from theatre to theatre. Reassemble it anywhere: you get the same illusion." "You'd say this was an illusion?" "What else but an illusion could have such power?" He made a movement of bitter carelessness--then, as though to narrow a breach between them, threw himself down by her on the window seat and picked her hand up. A movement under the window made Stella turn again and look down: the two children marched briskly into view on the lawn, looked up, then began to perform exercises. "Oh, there they are," she cried, "and you promised to look at them." Anne's and Peter's knowing the promise was being kept betrayed itself only by sterner effort, reddening foreheads, set jaws, a fixed-eyed refusal to so much as glance at their uncle's window again. From above they looked like galvanised starfish. Stella, holding Robert's hand below the level of the window sill as they watched the performance, passed from wishing he and she had children to wondering what such children would have been like.--"Don't hold your breath!" shouted Robert suddenly; at which Anne's mouth flew open--she deflated, staggered, collapsed on the lawn gasping. Peter, however, went on and on till Robert said: "That will do." Stella, feeling something to be owing, clapped hysterically, till it became evident from everybody's manner, including Robert's, that this was uncalled for. "Oh, dear," she said. Robert said: "Never mind." "Hot, hot!" puffed Anne, lying plucking her jersey away from her heaving chest. "We were afraid you might have started out for your walk." "But we would have done this anyhow," added Peter. "We'd said we would." "We'd have done this before, only Grannie wanted us." "Nobody can find the half-ounce weight off the weighing machine." "She wanted to weigh the parcel for you to post in London." "You'll have now to have it weighed _in__ London, she says." "She can't weigh it, now she can't find that weight." At the beginning, both children had been hampered by lack of breath; but by now, Anne having picked herself up, both had somehow got back to form and were standing bellowing under Robert's window, lusty as carol-singers. They seemed better fitted for this than for merely speaking: both had been glum at tea. There seemed so little reason why this should ever stop that Robert and Stella found themselves constrained to imitate the smilingly gradual disappearance of royalty from a balcony; or, better still, perhaps, that of Cheshire cats, leaving grins behind them on the air in the window. Intent on bringing this off, Stella was badly startled by Ernestine's bursting into the room behind them, exclaiming: "Yes, here you are!" "Yes, indeed, Ernie," said Robert. "Why?" "I thought you must have started out for your walk, till I heard the children shouting, so put two and two together. I must say I'm very glad to have caught you--Muttikins has a parcel for you to post in London." "What on earth's the matter with the post office here?" "Nothing," said Ernestine loyally. "But of course it's never open on Sunday, whereas in London they are." "That is the first I've heard of that." "Well, Muttikins knows _some__ are. And as you know, these days every moment counts. I'm sure Mrs. Rodney won't mind." "I'd love to post it," said Stella. "But can all this not wait," said Robert, "till we're actually starting?" "A.," explained Ernestine, "there is almost always a rush at the last moment, in which one has no time to explain, and, B., I always may have to dash off myself. So I thought I had better tell you there's been a small complication--we have been hunting high and low, but alas in vain, for that little half-ounce weight of Muttikins's little weighing machine; and owing to that she is far from sure that she may not have understamped the parcel: it is always so difficult to know. As you know how she hates to be in anyone's debt she is arranging to leave three pennies _with__ the parcel, just in case, on the oak chest at the foot of the stairs. If you find when the post office weighs the parcel that she has not, after all, under-stamped it, you can always give her back the pennies next time. That is quite clear, isn't it?--everything will be on the oak chest at the foot of the stairs; in fact, I am just going down to arrange about that now. Now, Robert, can I be certain you won't forget, or how would it be if I told the children to remind you?" She sped to the window and looked out. "No, that settles that," she said, "they seem to have gone--however, they are probably somewhere else: _you__ can always tell them to remind you. If you do so, be sure and let Muttikins know, on your way out, that you _have__ told the children to remind you, or else she may be wondering. She is in the lounge. She will of course in any case be there to see you off, but one does not want her to have anything further on her mind.--I don't know of course _where__ you're planning to walk to, Robert, but if you want to get anywhere you should have started sooner; as it is you ought to start at once, or you will have brought poor Mrs. Rodney down here on quite false pretences. Stella said: "It's my fault; I've been looking at all these photographs." "Yes, quite a galaxy, aren't they?" said Ernestine. "Robert has always photographed well; whereas my own boy Christopher Robin, unlike his uncle, flees from a camera at sight. However, these in their own way recall the past.--Crooked again!" she cried, dashing to straighten several. "Whatever have you been doing to them, Robert?--Did Robert tell you," she added, turning to Stella, "that this is my sister Amabelle, the children's mother, just off to golf with Robert before her marriage? She has lost a good deal of weight since she's been in India.... And that is our father shortly before his illness: he used to radiate energy and fun, although in some ways Robert takes after him.... And that, poor fellow, was my dog." "Yes, so Robert said." "He had wonderful faith in human nature," said Ernestine, for the first time colouring with emotion. "Of course, he came to us as a pup, and I am glad to think none of us ever let him down. I often think that if Hitler could have looked into that dog's eyes, the story might have been very different.--Hark, though: there goes the telephone! Someone else after me!" Robert and Stella, having allowed Ernestine a considerable start, went downstairs: Mrs. Kelway looked up from her knitting in the middle of the lounge. "You will not have time to go very far," she said. Stella, picking up her scarf and gloves from the oak chest, saw the parcel with the pennies on it and held her breath: however, nothing further was said. As she and Robert stepped out of the porch, the children came zigzagging round the corner of the house, trying to look nonchalant. "Can we come with you?" they asked. "No," said Robert. "Oh.--Are you meaning to walk through the wood?" "We might." "The thing is, we are pretending that we have mined that." "Then you can pretend we've been blown up." "Oh," they said doubtfully. The grown-up couple made off across the garden, Stella feeling guilty about the children, at whose faces she had not the heart to look back, and Robert limping.

Chapter 7

ROBERT was due back on duty at nine o'clock: they dined early in Soho on their way from the station, then said goodnight at a street corner. Stella walked back to her flat alone. The country seemed to have followed her back into London and to be on her tracks like a disaffecting ghost, undoing the reality of the city; around her the unsubstantial darkness was quickened by a not quite wind. Shreds of leaves from the woods deadened the impact of her heels on the pavement; up out of basements came an autumnal mould smell; a loose gutter high on a damaged building now and then creaked overhead like a bough. All this, with the amputation of their goodnight as lovers, keyed up her susceptibilities to a pitch. In the sky there was a slow, stealthy massing of clouds: she walked hatless, and once or twice a drop--single, sinister, warmish--splashed on her forehead. She was walking west, towards the torn pale late light--this troubled lingering of a day that had been troubling oppressed her, as did the long perspective of the extinct street that so few people frequented and none crossed. Never never would the peacetime lighted windows and lamps of city autumn late evening have been more comforting. Muteness was falling on London with the uneasy dark; here and there stood a figure watchfully in a doorway; or lovers, blotted together, drained up into their kisses all there was left of vitality in this Saturday's end. She began to feel it was not the country but occupied Europe that was occupying London--suspicious listening, surreptitious movement and leaden hearts. The weather-quarter tonight was the conquered lands. The physical nearness of the Enemy--how few were the miles between the capital and the coast, between coast and coast!--became palpable. Tonight, the safety-curtain between the here and the there had lifted; the breath of danger and sorrow travelled over freely from shore to shore. The very tension overhead of the clouds nervously connected London with Paris--even, as at this same moment might a woman in that other city, she found some sort of comfort in asking herself how one could have expected to be happy? Carrying the hat she had worn all day, she had a finger of the same hand crooked through and cut by the string of Mrs. Kelway's parcel. Her finger-joint dug into the tight-bound softness of what could only be knitted wool. She had charged herself with the parcel: it was addressed, as they had seen in the train, not once but three times over to Christopher Robin. "I may _just__ remember to post it, on my work tomorrow: you wouldn't, I know. Anyhow, the whole thing only came up at all because I'm a woman." "And a mother." "I don't think they noticed that." "Well, I warned you, didn't I?" "Yes, I really will try and post it--only do for heaven's sake keep those pennies." "How you do hate pennies," observed Robert, neutrally jingling them with his other change. "All the same, there would have been much less fuss if you hadn't tried to skid them. What a fuss, anyway--_do__ London post offices stay open on Sundays?" "I'm sure if your mother says so they must." She was by this time footsore. She crossed Langham Place into her own street: here her step picked up as her eye ran ahead, through the now less anonymous dark, to where her own door should be. That she should seem to perceive a figure posted, waiting, that she should instantaneously know herself to be on the return to a watched house, _could__ be only another deception of the nerves. She had so dissolved herself, during the walk home, into the thousands of beings of oppressed people that the idea of the Someone was, at its first flash, no more than frightful fulfilment of expectation. Now her approaching footsteps were being numbered; no instinctive check or pause in them went unmarked. _Her__ part--listening for the listener, watching for the watcher--must be the keeping on walking on, as though imperviously: the actual nerved-up briskness of her step, the tingle up from her heels as they struck the pavement, brought back what seemed to be common-sense. But her very decision that there could not be anyone synchronised with the evidence that there _was__--a match struck, sheltered, then thrown away. This--for how could it not be a watcher's object to stay obliterated up to the last moment?--was bravado, gratuitous. This was a sheer advertisement of impunity; this could not but be Harrison--for who else, by his prodigality with matches, in these days when there were to all intents and purposes none, gave such ostentatious proof of "inside" power? Having come into inside range of the door and watcher, Stella shifted her bag to take out her key. Halfway up the steps she said over her shoulder, flatly: "Been waiting long?" "I fancied you should be about due back." "You want to see me?" "I should rather like a word." He was up the steps, respectfully at her elbow, before her key had turned in the latch; he had slipped round the door behind her into the hall with the unobtrusive celerity of a normally outdoor dog. Automatically she started up the familiar stairs in the dark; then turned round to wonder what he was doing. Of course he would have a torch--the spotlight butterflied over the doctors' letters on the table, fixed itself, admiring, on a mask in the plaster arch, then began to come after her, gain on her, up the stairs. "At least _one__ in the party ought to have one of these things, I must say I think," said Harrison. He played the beam on her fingers while she unlocked her flat. As they entered, he picked up, inside her door, the letters she always left lying when she returned with Robert. Nothing could have been worse than coming home alone; even this, with its grotesque series of variations on her returns not alone, was better. Whistling away to herself as she quickly blacked-out the windows, she thought--inconceivable, this being the same flat! Still feeling nothing whatever she switched on the lamps and fire. She turned to find that Harrison had meanwhile sat down. He said: "You know, this is very nice. I so often think of this place that, if you won't mind my saying so, now I feel quite at home." "In that case, I should like to change my shoes." As she came back again through the door from her bedroom, now wearing green mules, she resumed: "I've been in the country, as I expect you know," "Making the most of the last of the fine weather?" "What do you mean by that?" "I say, making the most of the last of the fine weather?" repeated Harrison with patience. "Oh. You think it will rain?" "While I was out there just now, there were two or three drops." "I felt one, as I was coming along." "Yes, tonight one feels some sort of change coming on. Well, the rain falls on the just and the unjust, as they say, doesn't it? Ha-ha." Stella leaning exhaustedly back hi her armchair, feet up on a gilt-legged stool, rolled round her head on the cushions, unable to help remarking: "That's been the first time you've laughed tonight." "I always rasp you a bit when I laugh, do I? Possibly I chiefly laugh when I'm nervous--this evening I can't help feeling we understand each other. You do, for one thing, somehow seem more relaxed." "What I _am__ is, extremely tired." "Must have been quite a day," he said, nicely. "How did it go?" "I have no idea. Why?" "Look, if you feel done in, you don't have to talk. I'd be always happy simply sitting around." "Do you often do that?" "I am so seldom here." "One thing--is this your evening off?" "I don't quite--" "Is this business or pleasure?" Harrison, with the extreme tip of his tongue, touched his upper lip under the short moustache. He sat planted well forward in his armchair--which, like so many third armchairs in a room in which normally only two intimate people sit, was a stranded outpost some way away down the carpet, and was turned towards hers (which faced towards Robert's, empty) at a tentative angle which he had not changed. So placed, he viewed nothing but Stella's profile, unless he could provoke her to turn her head. It had been while in profile, and even more negligently and parenthetically than usual, that she had put the question--however, a moment later she did look round at him, as though all the same waiting for some reply. He exposed to her nothing but his forehead: frowning down at the carpet between his knees he began pushing one fist, dubiously, at no very great pressure, into the palm of the other hand. By continuing never to raise his eyes he conveyed the impression of being as much embarrassed, on her behalf, as saddened by her awkwardness. It was regretfully that he at last said: "I should have thought, you know, that you ought to know." "Then I must be stupid this evening. You'd better talk to me. Tell me what else I have been doing." Harrison's grin at that was so unequivocal that she could only like him. Swiftly he ruined that--"One thing one can see you've been doing, Stella: you've thought things over." She put up a hand between a lamp and her eyes. He added: "Don't mind me calling you by your Christian name?" "Thought what over?" "Your and my talk." She flashed out: "When and if I ever do think of that, it's to be all the more certain I must have dreamed it!" "Still, there are dreams one checks up on, even so, don't you think? I mean, if I'd seemed to dream I saw a chap at the foot of my bed going through my pockets, I'd take a look through my pockets first thing next morning. Who would'nt? You would. The devil, of course, would be, what exactly _had__ I had in my pockets the night before? It's queer how a thing comes popping back and back to one's mind--_something__ gone, but one cannot be sure what." "I never have dreams like that." "No, exactly--you and I both know darn well there are no dreams like that. If a thing looks to have happened, twenty to one it did. It's sheer stalling to say a thing's 'unlikely'; it's either downright impossible or it's a fact, to prove. Alternatively, what may look and smell like a fact still stands to be proved impossible: of course that could happen. That's the way you're determined this thing is to work out--or isn't it? For you, it's a case of my word against your--er, ideas. How about those ideas of yours, all the same? If you want to know how I know you've been thinking things over, all I say is, look at the way you've been checking up! It's funny, you know: in reverse you work just the way I would. If it bores you to go back over the last month, just take today, for instance. Today you did exactly what I should have done in your place." "You flatter me; but still I don't understand." "Went to look at the first place where rot could start. Mind, I wouldn't dream of asking you what you found." "You could see for yourself--or perhaps you already have? It's not a long run by train." "Oh, it's not the time," said Harrison simply. "Nor is it purely the fact that I've got all I want already; in general, I'm all for one final look round. No, it's more, to put the thing in a nutshell, that I'm not a woman. _You__ would naturally bark up that tree; I bark up others. One can assume in most cases, and most of all, of course, in a case like this, that there's something up more than one tree: the question is, which tree to bark up first? That depends on what type one is oneself. All trees being equal, my choice wouldn't be yours. No, all I say is, you've done what I'd have done in _your__ place." "Spied round a home?" "Your being a woman," said Harrison somewhat regretfully, "cuts both ways. I can't tell you anything you don't know already, and you don't like me to tell you what you don't like knowing. Whether you want to or not, you don't miss a thing--except, if I may say so, what's right under your nose. The other evening, that Sunday, last time I dropped in here, I put it up to you that such-and-such was the situation: you virtually told me to go to hell, but not absolutely. I rather took it you'd rather leave the thing in the air. Absolutely it's been the same to me to leave the thing in the air for the time being, though not of course indefinitely. If your idea was that the thing would cool off, that has not been the case." "I was not hoping not to see you again. I mean, I expected you would be coming round." "Quite so. And as you see, here I am." "Yes." "I however have made a point of not crashing in." "I have not said anything to Robert--apart from asking whether he knew you." "I'd have been very much surprised if he'd said he did: in point of actual fact I don't think he does.... No, I may tell you it's been evident nobody's put the wind up him so far--everything's gone on taking its normal course. Only, _you're__ not as natural on the telephone at nights as you used to be. Anybody would think you thought his line was tapped." "Would they? So that is what you do in the evenings?" "And how have you got along with that other check-up--on me?" "Not very far, as you may have guessed." "Quite an amount of people, as I did warn you, have genuinely no idea who I am.--What," he asked, following her with his eyes, "are you looking for? Can I get you anything?" "Yes: will you bring me a glass of milk? The bottle's in the refrigerator in the kitchen." As he sprang from the chair with an alacrity which sent it careering back on its castors, she threw in: "You don't drink milk, I expect?" "Well, I'm not keen. In fact, if you ever felt any kind of shortage I could drop you a bottle round every other day.--To the right, out here?" "Second door: the first is the bathroom." Left like this in the room with the empty chairs, she took the opportunity to breathe. Harrison became nothing more than a person she had for the moment succeeded in getting rid of. She looked from the armchair proper to Robert to the armchair commandeered by Harrison, but found herself thinking of neither of these--of, rather, Victor, her vanished husband. Why of Victor now? One could only suppose that the apparently forgotten beginning of any story was unforgettable; perpetually one was subject to the sense of there having had to be a beginning _somewhere__. Like the lost first sheet of a letter or missing first pages of a book, the beginning kept on suggesting what must have been its nature. One never was out of reach of the power of what had been written first. Call it what you liked, call it a miscarried love, it imparted, or was always ready and liable to impart, the nature of an alternative, attempted recovery or enforced second start to whatever followed. The beginning, in which was conceived the end, could not but continue to shape the middle part of the story, so that none of the realisations along that course were what had been expected, quite whole, quite final. That first path, taken to be a false start--who was to know, after all, where it might not have led? She saw, for an instant, Roderick's father's face, its look suspended and noncommittal. In this room, in which love in the person of