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Authors: Elizabeth Bowen

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better than travesty, repeat in order to judge exactly how much it showed, his originally unconscious trick of the hands; he recalled this trick in his father, not before in himself--but it must have been waiting for him. Yes,'he had had recourse to it, fallen to it, this evening out of some unprecedented need for emphasis in the body. Yes, he had been forced to it by the course of what in the strict sense had not _been__ thought at all. The futility of the heated inner speed, the alternate racing to nowhere and coming to dead stops, made him guy himself. Never yet had he not got _somewhere__. By casting about--but then hitherto this had always been done calmly--he had never yet not come on a policy which both satisfied him and in the end worked. There never had yet not been a way through, a way round or, in default of all else, a way out. But in this case he was thinking about a woman. She had asked him to go away and to stay away: that was the best he could do--she said, last time. What did she expect him to do? She expected him to do whatever he did do: she had no idea what he did, but surely he did do something?--why not get on with that? She had finished up with: "I'm sorry, but it just is that you don't attract me. Why should we go on wasting each other's time?... There's something about you, or isn't something about you. I don't know what." He was not, however, through. He was once again, this evening, on his way to her flat. He proposed, in fact, to be back with her as the clocks struck eight. Up his sleeve he had something--only, the question was in exactly what manner to bring it out? He had hoped, by sitting down at the concert, to have arrived at the answer before they met. It seemed to Louie that there was overmuch music at this concert. There was nothing for her but to drop back again into the stupor in which she had been sitting before her notice lit on the thinking man. The quality of the stupor was not much altered--content at having forced him to notice her, she did not look back over their conversation or ask herself what it had come to or where she stood. Unlike him, she did not look at things in the light of their getting or failing to get her somewhere; her object was to feel that she, Louie, _was__, and in the main she did not look back too willingly at what might have been said or done by her in pursuit of that. She had her misgivings; though always, she hoped, no cause for them. She had never had any censor inside herself, and now Tom her husband was gone--he was in the Army--she had no way of knowing if she were queer or not. Possibly she addressed herself to unknown people in the hope of perceiving what _they__ thought--she had perceived just enough queerness in this last man to make her fancy he might not be a good judge. She often was disconcerted, but never for long enough to have to ask herself why this happened. Left to herself, thrown back on herself in London, she looked about her in vain for someone to imitate; she was ready, nay, eager to attach herself to anyone who could seem to be following any one course with certainty. Tom, by this time, had been drafted abroad; more or less she understood him to be in India. In his letters home he expressed the hope that she was getting on well and being a good girl: to this she never had any notion how to reply, so did not. She maintained what had been their married home, a double first-floor room in one of those little houses in Chilcombe Street, and worked every day at the factory in another, not too far distant part of London. In order to continue to meet the rent at Chilcombe Street, she drew, with Tom's consent, on the sum of money which had come to her from her parents, both of whom had been killed by a bomb. She had been the only child of their late marriage; they had been people who, having done well with their little business, or shop, at Ashford, found themselves in a position to sell it and retire; accordingly, when Louie was ten years old, there had been a removal to Seale-on-Sea, where the family had already spent happy holidays. It was at Scale, in the little villa they had so much enjoyed, that the elderly couple had been wiped out during the Battle of Britain. Louie, having been married by Tom early in 1939, was then in London. The marriage had been a surprise to everyone, most of all herself--actually, the~goodness of her home and the solidity in every sense of her people had been reassuring: she had been a far from bad match--as for her as a wife, it only could be supposed that Tom, himself solid, a serious and progressing young electrician, had a soft spot for comics. They had happened to meet when he was at Scale on holiday--_how__ it should have arrived that she caught his fancy he had not explained to her, and she had never asked. Child of Kent, she had been to London only a few times on a day-ticket before Tom brought her there as a bride. She now, that is to say within these last years, never left London, having been left with no place to go to. She was lucky, she understood by reason, in being left with Chilcombe Street: few wives of men called up remained placed as they were before. But the idea of Chilcombe Street's being home, which at the best of times had resided in Tom only, had been taken away by him to India. For her part, as things were now, she was glad to get out of it every morning: she neglected the rooms--front and back, opening on one another through an arch across which Tom had fixed a curtain--the Turkey-patterned lino lost its gloss and she went out leaving the big bed slatternly; in revenge, perhaps, for its being so cold all night. Her returns from the factory every evening had in one or another manner to be survived--all the fine evenings of this summer there had been the solution of a walk in the park; when it rained, she either sat in a movie or else lay on her bed in a series of heavy dozes alongside the hollow left by Tom's body. In this state, drugged by the rainy dusk, she almost always returned with sensual closeness to seaside childhood; once more she felt her heels in the pudding-softness of the hot tarred esplanade or her bare arm up to the elbow in rain-wet tamarisk. She smelt the shingle and heard it being sucked by the sea. Louie had, with regard to time, an infant lack of stereoscopic vision; she saw then and now on the same plane; they were the same. To her everything seemed to be going on at once; so that she deferred, when she did, in a trouble of half-belief to either the calendar or the clock. At present, though bodily seated on a chair on a darkening slope listening to music, she was in effect again in the park rose garden, where she had been walking that afternoon. Great globular roses, today at the height of their second blooming, burned more as the sun descended, dazzling the lake. Lagging along the turf between the beds, Louie repeatedly stooped to touch petals, her raspy fingertips being every time entered by their smoothness. She above all desired to snap two or three of the roses from their stems--had she been alone she would have taken the risk, but she dared not because of her Air Force friend. She had found all men to be one way funny like Tom--no sooner were their lips unstuck from your own than they began again to utter morality. To divert his attention she had once, even, tried staring up alarmedly at the sky. "_Look__--that balloon there's come all untied!" But his glance had been too brief. "They don't," he said to her, tolerant. "Oh, they do!" He only resettled his guiding thumb more firmly inside her elbow. "My husband saw one do," she improvised. "He told me." "I shouldn't wonder he told you a lot of things." The sneer at Tom turned her scarlet--she veered away from roses, rebelliously stiffening her muscles inside the airman's hold. He and she returned to the slope of mound under the ilex where they had already been lying most of the afternoon: here once more she spread her coat out, and he, somewhat absently, set to tickling her behind the ear with a blade of grass. Round them the lawns were dotted with other couples imploring with their extended bodies the yellow last of the sun. To this spot, to which Tom had been so much attached, a sort of piety made her bring any other man: she had thus the sense of living their Sundays for him. She stared up into the tree. "Not ticklish?" said the airman, dissatisfied. "What, aren't I?" "You ought to know," he said, throwing the grass away. "Don't you know anything?" He heaved over on to his back, dropping one hand over his eyes; and she, having for the moment forgotten what he looked like, turned round to wonder what was under the hand. Something more began to invade his manner--he began: "Where was it you said you lived?" "Why, I never did say." "Still, you must live somewhere. You ought to have a nice place, a nice girl like you." "Oh, I have," she said with enthusiasm. "You have?" He shifted his hand and rolled round his head in order to look at her with increasing interest. "Still, lonely, all on your own." With resentment she thought of the un-picked roses: _so__, why ever should he? "I'm not," she promptly said. "I live with my auntie. She lives with me." "Look," said the reddening airman, "what's this all of a sudden about you having an auntie?" "An invalid," threw in Louie even more rapidly. "Poor thing. Never goes out." The airman looked at her harder. "Come on," he said, "we'll drop in and meet the old cup o' tea.--Well?" Louie, sitting up, removed a twig from her hair. "You have no right to speak of my aunt like that," she said. (Nor of Tom, either, she added in her own mind.) "You've never got an aunt any more than I have," said the airman, stern with sexual anger. "How was I to know," she replied, "you had never got an aunt?" "You make me sick," he said, getting up. "Starting off by saying you were lonely. Wasting my afternoon." He stood up, pulled at his tunic, slapped at his pockets, finally stooped to brush shreds of moss from his trousers. "You ought to be ashamed, with your husband fighting." "Oh dear," said Louie, disheartened, "whatever is the matter?" "Time," he said aloofly, "I was getting along." "Still, it's been nice," she ventured, lying there sadly, receiving the last blast of disparagement from his back-view as he marched away. However, that was that, and she was now more than even with him about the roses and his mocking of Tom. When she was not disobliging, and she was not always, everything still somehow ended in her being told off--with a resignation no sigh could express she reached out for a new blade of grass and experimentally tickled her own ear, but was still not ticklish. Saddest of all, she found herself without any real desire to return to the roses; she stayed where she was, on the suddenly hard, chill and unloving breast of the lawn till she saw people moving towards the concert, whereupon she got up and moved after them. There is a freedom about an outdoor concert: you come or go at will--there is easy passage between the rows of chairs and your step muted by the grass disturbs no one. However, either the punctiliousness of a stranger or the superstition that rules any movement to do with love made the thinker wait where he was for the coming interval. Nothing more now than suffering the music, he sat on tensely, eye fixed on his watch. The music ceased: he shot up, stood, looked round at the thinned-out clapping, then, in the hurry of flight, made his way out past the Czech soldier, along the row of chairs, up the middle gangway. So far, so good. He paused for less than a second to get his bearings at the theatre gate--whereupon, up came Louie, breathless from her run. "I've had enough, too," she said. She swung into step with him like an old companion. "Looks quite ghosty," she said of the reach of lawns. "That must be mist off from the lake." "Goodnight, then," he said prematurely--for fifty yards more they had to share the path. "I'm going back home," she volunteered, "now, I think." "Much the best thing you can do." "You mean, the evenings are drawing in?" They were--the weeping trees, one by one, shivered slenderly in a tide of ground-mist; away on the mound each ilex stained with a little night of its own the after-death shining of the day. Ahead stood, still open, Queen Mary's gate, high gilded plaque and garlands having not yet forgotten their all-day glittering in the sun. "Are you?" said Louie suddenly. "What?" he said with a start. "Going home? No, I've got a date--thanks." She took this with unconcern; if anything, she sent him a puzzled look as though wondering how such a thing could be. He quickened his step, she hers. Paths parted, _they__ did not--she continued manfully at his side. Riled to a point, he turned on her, saying harshly: "What I meant was, I'd _go__ home, if I were you. You know, you'll land up in trouble one of these days. Tacking on like this. There are funny people about." "You mean, _you__ might be funny, for all I know?" "Which _is__ your way?" he demanded, stopping dead in his tracks. "Which?--either," she said in a struck, preoccupied tone. They were by this time outside the lovely gate; they went legging it down the short serpentine road that, with trees, railings and air of a private avenue, runs downhill from the Inner into the Outer Circle. Ahead one had still an illusion of wooded distance, out of whose blue and bronzy ethereality rose the tops of Regency terraces--these, in their semi-ruin, just less pale than the sky. They were shells: the indifference of their black vacant windows fell on the scene, the movement, the park, the evening they overlooked but did not seem to behold. Inconceivably, London was behind them. This moment of walking to meet the houses seemed to have its place in no given hour of time--though across it, in contradiction, St. Marylebone clock began striking eight. During the first stroke Louie and her companion, apart, and on his side hostile in thought, experienced a fusion of the nerves. He stepped off the kerb, crossing the road obliquely; she followed. "I don't know _your__ name," she said. "No. Why should you?" She seemed nonplussed. "Oh, I don't know. I only thought..." "Well, I can't help that. That's eight o'clock." "Oh," cried Louie reproachfully, "your date!" The end of the road was definitive: she for the last time turned, looked, with her big lips parted, then was with startling completeness gone. He stood in a sort of after-math of suspicion, not yet sure she might not have picked his pocket, then walked the other way.

Chapter 2

STELLA RODNEY stood at a window of her flat, playing with the blind-cord. She made a loop, through which she looked at the street, or coiled the cord round a ringer, then swung the finger, making the acorn tap on the pane. The harsh black-out blind, its roller hidden under the pretty pelmet, was pulled some way down, throwing a nightlike shadow across this end of the ceiling; the blind of the other window was, on the other hand, right up. She did not correct the irregularity, perhaps because the effect of it, _méchant__, slipshod, was in some way part of her mood. Nothing is more demoralising than waiting about for someone one does not want to see. She mimed by this idiotic play at the window the disarray into which the prospect of Harrison had thrown her--she was too uneasy, felt too much reduced by the whole affair, was too angry to wish to collect herself. From the first he had shown her his imperviousness to everything she felt--would she be able to show him the indignity, if for himself only, of this impervious return? He was forcing his way back. It was some minutes since she had heard eight strike: she wondered why, since he had got to come, he had not come--she did not yet dare to hope he might not be coming. He was as a rule punctual, wheeling in on the quiver of the appointed hour as though attached to the very works of the clock. Eight had been his choice, and seemed a stupid one unless he intended to take her out to dinner--his not having said so gave her no chance of saying she would on no account dine with him. But it had seemed pointless to quibble as to the hour when he had gained his main point, _was__ coming, and on his own terms. Indeed, she determined not to quarrel again till she had found out, as she should at once this evening, _why__ he was taking this new tone of the person in power. On the telephone, the exaggerated quietness of his voice hinted at some undefined threat--she was at a disadvantage through having avoided knowing him; she had no way of knowing, now it had come to this, how valid a threat of his could be, or what its nature. _Having__ gained his point, he was already--which made her ponder--being a little lax in being a little late. As one does when thinking about an enemy, she endowed him with subtleties which in his case, on second thoughts, were unlikely. Up to the last half hour she had at least felt defiant. In so far as she had set the scene at all, everything had been arranged to show that she did not care--either for him, which he should know already, or as to anything more he might have to say. To show the careless negligence of her way of living, she had left the street door unlatched and the door of her flat, at the head of the stairs, ajar: thus it was left to him to make his own way in, unmet halfway, without even that little taste of imperious-ness to be got from the ringing of a bell, and with the best face he could. This fairly old house in Weymouth Street, of which her flat took up the top floor, was otherwise in doctors' and dentists' occupation and was accordingly empty at week-ends: below her now were nothing but empty rooms; the caretakers living in the basement almost always went out on Sunday evenings. Silence mounted the stairs, to enter her flat through the door ajar; silence came through the windows from the deserted street. In fact, the scene at this day and hour could not have been more perfectly set for violence--but that was not on the cards. She had recognised in him, from the first, the quietness of a person perpetually held back from some extreme: it had not, however, been till this morning, on the telephone, that the quietness became an extreme itself. Now the clock had struck, no step could not be his. She did hear a step, and unwound the cord from her finger, on which it left a red spiral weal. Stella Rodney had taken this flat furnished, having given up the last of her own houses and stored her furniture when the war began. There had been an interlude, up to the late autumn of 1940, in which she had lived in London lodgings. Here in Weymouth Street she had the irritation of being surrounded by somebody else's irreproachable taste: the flat, redecorated in the last year of peace, still marked the point at which fashion in the matter had stood still--to those who were not to know this room was not her own it expressed her unexceptionably but wrongly. Sensitive whitish walls registered every change in the mood of the London weather; a complete and no doubt valuable set of dark glass pictures of Regency goddesses hung round them. The feather-etched chintz encasing armchairs and sofa advertised its original delicacy by being these days always a little soiled: about on the low tables stood high alabaster lamps with pale veined shades. Between the windows, a fragile escritoire had been topped by her, earlier in this week, with a bowl of roses--today, the petals began to fall. Some books of her own were wedged among those not hers in the shelves in the arched recesses. There were two or three _gros point__ stools: and against the end wall, just inside the door, was a second, more formal sofa--brocade-covered, heaped at each end with cushions, and long enough for a person, even of some stature, to be able to lie on it full length. Propped on the chimneypiece above the built-in electric fire were two photographs, not framed yet--the younger of the two men was Roderick, Stella's twenty-year-old son. Over the photographs hung a mirror--into which, on hearing Harrison's footstep actually upon the stairs, she looked; not at herself but with the idea of studying, at just one more remove from reality, the door of this room opening behind her, as it must. But no, not yet: he was still knocking into something, putting down his hat, out there in the tiny hall. This gave her a moment in which to reconsider--she swung round again, after all, to face him--stood stock still, arms folded, fingers spread over the sleeves of her dark dress. There came to be something dynamic, as he entered, about her refusal to move at all. She had one of those charming faces which, according to the angle from which you see them, look either melancholy or impertinent. Her eyes were grey; her trick of narrowing them made her seem to reflect, the greater part of the time, in the dusk of her second thoughts. With that mood, that touch of _arrière pensée__, went an uncertain, speaking set of the lips. Her complexion, naturally pale, fine, soft, appeared through a pale, fine, soft bloom of make-up. She was young-looking--most because of the impression she gave of still being on happy sensuous terms with life. Nature had kindly given her one white dash, lock or wing in otherwise tawny hair; and that white wing, springing back from her forehead, looked in the desired sense artificial--other women asked her where she had had it done; she had become accustomed to being glanced at. That, but only that, about her was striking: her looks, after the initial glance, could grow on you; if you continued to know her, could seem even more to be growing _for__ you. Her clothes fitted her body, her body her self, with a general air of attractiveness and ease. Younger by a year or two than the century, she had grown up just after the first world war with the generation which, _as__ a generation, was to come to be made to feel it had muffed the catch. The times, she had in her youth been told on all sides, were without precedent--but then, so was her own experience: she had not lived before. The early failure of her early marriage had not encouraged her; still she sought equanimity; she wore a sort of hardiness as a poor resource. Her parents were dead; her two brothers had been killed fighting in Flanders while she was still at school. Since her divorce, ironically rendered almost at once unnecessary by her husband's death, she had been left with her son and a life to make for them both: left as they both were, money had been a difficulty, if not a pressing one. Roderick, at school when this war began, was now in the Army--to her, the opportunity to make a break, to free herself of her house, to come to London to work had been not ungrateful. In the years between the wars she had travelled, had for intervals lived abroad: she now qualified by knowing two or three languages, two or three countries, well--having had some idea what she might most usefully do she had, still better, known whom to ask to support her application to do it. She had in her background relations, connections and at least former friends. She was now therefore employed, in an organisation better called Y.X.D., in secret, exacting, not unimportant work, to which the European position since 1940 gave ever-increasing point. The habit of guardedness was growing on her, as on many other people, reinforcing what was in her an existing bent: she never had asked much, from dislike of being in turn asked. Or, could that have been circumstance?--for by temperament she was communicative and fluctuating. Generous and spirited, to a fault not unfeeling, she was not wholly admirable; but who is? She now stood watching Harrison make his entrance. "Good evening?" he said. "Good evening." "I'm a few minutes late. I was listening to that band in the park." This was, for some reason, startling. She said: "Oh, were you?" Harrison turned back to close the door behind him, but paused to ask: "Not expecting anyone else?" "No." "Good. By the way, I found your downstairs door on the latch. That in order?" "Quite: I left it open for you." "Thanks," he said, as though touched. "So I shut it--that was in order, too?" She waited for him to come to the end of this in a silence which could not have been more unhelpful. He, having settled with the door, looked at the carpet, at the distances of carpet between them, as though thinking out a succession of moves in chess. Under a slight, if anything humble, frown, his downcast eyes zigzagged from chair to table, from table to stool; step by step he came forward behind his look. He paused by a cigarette box, and, reminded by this, brought his own cigarettes out. "Mind if I smoke?" "Do." "You won't?" "No.--Then you could have come earlier?" "Well, I could, as it happened, as things panned out; but I took it that, as we had said eight, before that might not be convenient to you." "It has not been convenient that you should come at all." Harrison, looking about him for somewhere to drop his match, said: "Ha-ha--you know, you're the frankest person I know!--_Should__ I have found you, say, at around seven?" "Yes. And I should have been glad to get this over." He looked straight at her; this time just failing to utter that maddening little self-contained concise laugh. "Well..." he began, then stopped--one might have thought, helplessly. She went on: "What else can you suppose? After what I said to you last time--detestable things I should not have been forced to say--only you could have insisted on coming back!" He said: "You talk as if there were rules. All I know is, there's something like nothing else between you and me, even if you don't know it. I'm seldom wrong--and anyhow," he wound up, "you told me this was O. K. You said eight o'clock." It was her turn to say: "Well..." Tightening her spread-out fingers above her elbows, she looked away from him at the windows across the street. Oblongs of mauve-brown dusk were by this time framed in the white curtains. To point out that he had forced this meeting by an implied threat would be to admit that in her life _any__ threat could have force or context at all. She said: "You had something to tell me?" "I said I wanted a talk.--Look, is that an ashtray there?" One hand held cautiously cupwise under his cigarette, he advanced, gained the hearthrug, knocked off the head of ash into a tray on the chimneypiece near her shoulder. "Pretty," he said softly. "All your things are so pretty." "What is?" she said sharply. "Even this ashtray." He was touching around the rim of it with the tip of a finger; it was an ordinary little enamel-flowered one, from any Chinese shop. "It's not mine," she flickered. "Nothing in this flat is." There were, naturally, any number of other ashtrays about the room: she put the stratagem in its place by ignoring it. He had brought himself face to face with the mirror and photographs; she went on looking out of the window--only, her stillness and heedlessness became more rigid and artificial. He did something quite unexpected--turned and switched on a lamp. "You don't mind?" Mind? On the contrary, this released her; this could make it imperative to black out the windows. Moving from one to the other, tugging cords, settling folds into place, she tried not to show how welcome the release was. She switched on another lamp, then looked round: he was fixedly staring at the photographs. "Splendid," he said. "I wanted to see these better." "You've seen them before." "They did always interest me. One of them's very like." "Roderick's?" "Can't say: never met the original.--No, I meant the other." Stella, turning to the desk, pulled a drawer open, took one of her own cigarettes: she remained with her back to him, slow over the business of lighting it--long enough to at last be able to say with enough indifference: "Oh, you know him?" "I know _of__ him--know him by sight. I don't say we ever have what you might call _met__--he might not know me. An attractive chap--at least, so I always think." "Do you?" She sat down on the stool by the escritoire, propping her elbow among the letters on the pulled-out flap. Glancing at the letters obliquely, idly, she went on, as idly: "Oh, you've seen him around?" "That's about it. On his own sometimes, sometimes around with you. To be frank, I'd seen you with him before you and I met." "Had you," she uninvitingly said. "Yes. So the first time you let me drop in to this delightful flat, I was not altogether surprised when I spotted this. I was on the point of saying, 'By Jove, yes; we both know him!' " "So why didn't you?" "You see, one never knows--you might have thought me a bit pushing. Also it's a habit of mine to keep my thoughts to myself." "I see. But did that amount to a thought? So many people do know each other." "Absolutely, yes. But depends who the people are." His uneven eyes met hers, across the hoops of lamplight, the more intently for showing no change of expression. "Anything is a thought when one person is you," he said. "Girl I met asked me only this afternoon if I ever forgot a face: I said, sometimes. I was about right, I think--never a face that interests me. _There__," he said, eyeing the photograph, "is one case in point." "Indeed? Robert Kelway ought to be flattered." Harrison uttered a deprecating laugh. He then said: "Ever mentioned my name?" "You mean, has he mentioned your name to me?" "No; have you mentioned my name to him?" "I've no idea; I may have; really I don't remember." She paused and

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