The Heat of the Day (20 page)

these eyes with curiosity, wondering whether now, if ever at all, she was not to be overtaken by Robert's feeling. Also, this could have been the moment to establish exactly what _was__ queer, wrong, off, out of the straight in the cast of Harrison's eyes. But she failed to do so: from so close up she only saw the structure of the expression of urgency--the pupils' microcosms, black little condensations of a world too internal to know what expression was, each mapped round with red-brown lines on a green-brown iris run to rust at the rim. Veins feathered the whitish whites. Fatigue, perhaps, reddened the in-sides of the eyelids; and it was in examining the start and growth of the lashes--irregular, neither short nor long--that she experienced a kind of pathetic shock. It was nothing more, perhaps, than that the existence of these eyelashes was touching--or, was what was touching their generic delicacy? They were not, she saw, even thickened by singeing at the tips, in spite of constant slovenly close-up lighting of cigarettes. They were sparse on the lower lids; here and there one was missing--about the survival of all the rest something was nai've. The shock she felt had no more than an echo of intimacy about it, as though transmitted from someone else--it was enough, however, to set up resistance in her: she hardened. "But also," she said, "it is, that I simply do not care what I say to you. You're right: almost no one has heard this particular story--to be quite precise, no one I care for has. Not, if you want to know, most of all Robert--I should be ashamed, for one thing, to let him know that ever, however long ago, I could have cared so much for face. There may be other reasons; if so I do not know them. And not up to now, hence that scene this evening, Roderick. Between you and me, everything has been impossible from the first--so, the more unseemly the better, it seems to me. With you from the very beginning I've had no face: there's nothing to lose. There's an underside to me that I've hated, that you almost make me like: you and I never have had anything but impossible conversations; nothing else is possible. But, when I talk as I sometimes do to you, talk as I did tonight, you should _not__," she said, looking away from him round the room, "feel flattered." There was a short pause. "Right," said Harrison softly. He added: "You don't much like this lobster?" "Oh, yes," she with compunction said, "I do." She twisted ribbons of lettuce round her fork, ate, then went on, in a voice which carried a smile: "I suppose _now__ I've made it impossible for myself to say anything?" "Not necessarily." "You can see then, perhaps, why what Nettie Morris--and who could have thought of _her__?--told Roderick has made such a situation?--Do you go to the theatre?" "Well, I have been." "Then you know how in plays when a boy discovers his mother's guilt--" "--Ah, but then come, wait, stop!--in this case it's entirely vice versa: _your__ boy should now be right up in the air.... He might, of course," added Harrison, studying the short, clean nail of his right thumb, "fairly ask you what came over you, at that time, chucking away your good name." "Why should I care?" said she. "Both my brothers are dead." "Oh, _I'm__ not asking you, mind." "I hope not, because I thought I'd told you.--Oh, I should doubt," she exclaimed, "whether there's any such thing as an _innocent__ secret! Whatever has been buried, surely, corrupts? Nothing keeps innocence innocent but daylight. A truth's just a truth, to start with, with no particular nature, good or bad--but how can any truth not _go__ bad from being years underground? Dug up again after years and laid on the mat, it's inconvenient, shocking--apart from anything else there's no place left in life for it any more. To dig up somebody else's truth for them would seem to me sheer malignancy; to dig up one's own, madness--I never would." She looked up at one of the glaring globes, blinked, and said: "Roderick will not like me any better, either. He has grown up to swallowing what he's thought I did; somehow he's made the person he thought did that into the person he's loved. He has grown up defending me--possibly sometimes even against his own thoughts. _Now__, he'll hardly know me." "What he'll think _ought__ to be, what a bad deal you got. He'll be," said Harrison hopefully, "all the sorrier for you." "But good heavens--" cried Stella, then broke off, looking at Harrison with a restrained, musing despair. "Why else do you imagine I put off telling him? It's come to matter too little, having mattered too much. No, no, no: I arranged things to suit myself.--What a lot," she said, leaning back, scribbling a pattern of confusion on the air over the table with her finger, "what a lot I have, you know, put Roderick through for nothing." "You let him think his father was quite a chap." "I wonder.... I simply left it. But what was the good of that? Now he'll go, quite likely, to the other extreme of thinking Victor a skunk; which is not true either. One or the other way, Victor _was__ his father: as, indeed, Roderick said tonight. That's what matters; that's what can't be helped. I? I've done him, Roderick, out of everything ordinary--a slightly blown-upon mother, that's what he's had. Now, who can be ordinary?--it's too late. All the years to have been ordinary in are gone." Harrison looked at her sideways, calculating the possibilities of a remark. "Well?" she said. "He has never, er, cut up in any way about you and Robert?" She said: "No," snubbingly and remotely. "So it has not," he suggested, "on the whole, worked out for you too badly? If the boy had had more illusions, you might have had more trouble." "Yes, I see what you mean." She paused. "Roderick would not take my way of life now so calmly if he had not thought, from the first, that he had a mother _capable de tout__? That is certainly," she agreed, with the affability of extreme disdain, "rather a point." It was clear that he hated the way she said so. "You mean," she went on, "there's been a certain advantage in my son's feeling I had nothing left to lose?" "No, now look here--" "Really we cannot talk if you are so squeamish." "We shall have to talk," said Harrison, "all the same. As I did rather say, if you recollect, when you and I made this date for the evening over the phone. Then, of course, it so happened that this other thing came up. And I can't say, if I may say so, that I'm sorry it did--somehow it's brought us closer. You'd say I mustn't say that? Then let's leave it this way: it's established confidence." "I had almost forgotten we were not here for pleasure." "Knowing how _I__ feel, that again is too bad of you." He turned, however, with at least some equanimity to signal for more lager and the next course. The considerable remains of the lobster were taken away; crumbs of coral, dribbles of greenery, drops of transparent yellow assiduously were wiped from the dark-topped table; two double portions of a fruit flan appeared. "Though of course, also," Harrison said with second failure of confidence, "the Welsh rarebit here has been known to be far from bad.... On the whole, right as we are, you think?... In that case, O. K.," he told the white-coated boy, whose hands' red inexpert progress about the table he had not ceased to watch, as though timing work. "Yes," he went on when they were once more alone, "for me this is an occasion--if I _have__ got to scold you." "Oh," she said, going cold to the marrow. "Why?" "You have done what I told you not to." "I cannot think what you mean." "You can if you want, all right. Yes, you've been naughty." "Really?" "Yes, really. Also," he said, at his softest, "rash. One of these days you'll be getting some of us into trouble. Don't look blank--you know very well what you've done." She worried with her fork at the flan pastry. "As we know, we have a mutual friend." "If you mean Robert," she flashed out, "he doesn't know you." "So that's what he says?" said Harrison, looking at her twice. "Now we know where we are. So you thought you'd take a chance on it and tip Robert off?" "No," she said, steadying her voice, "not that. You expect me to have taken what you told me a good deal more seriously than I did--did ever, and certainly more seriously than I could now. Naturally I asked him whether he knew you--are we making any bones about that?" "Right," said Harrison imperturbably. "Let's by all means take things a bit slower. So _he__ said, no, he had never set eyes on me? (Which is not unlikely--how much good should I be if he knew he had!) Whereupon, _you__ took it that that was that?" "If you mean I thought no more of it, frankly, no: no, I didn't." "Frankly," retorted Harrison, "we're not, are we, _being__ particularly frank? Because, on the contrary, I should estimate you've thought of practically nothing else. Else, why not tell _me__ to go to the devil?" "Why, indeed?" she said boldly. "Perhaps you are growing on me, as you say." He took this without a flicker. Then he asked: "Do you know you're not as bright as I thought?" "Oh?" "No. When I told you, at the very beginning, that I should know if you tipped him off, you should have thought twice. Try thinking now. I not only know that you have, I could tell you when. I could tell you the very day, or rather the very night." "What makes you think you could tell me the day, or night?" "Because, from the morning after, Robert altered his course. Pulled out of old haunts, dropped several old friends cold. Behaved, in fact, exactly and to the letter the way I'd told you he would behave from the instant he knew there was anyone on his tracks. Which was not," said Harrison, secretively fiddling with a cigarette but not lighting it, "unnoticed. What do you think I'm for?" Stella opened her bag, began to powder her face: not knowing whether her hand would shake she did not take the risk of applying lipstick. Before putting away the mirror she examined her eyebrows, shaping them with the tip of her little finger. "Well?..." she said, as though in abstraction--but there was a deadness, into which she failed to infuse expression, about her tone. "Well..." he replied. "So now what more do you want? If you ever wanted a proof, I suppose you have one? If you want to, think back. Months ago, when I first put this up to you, didn't I din in one thing--that if you did slip the word to him, I'd know? How? you said. I said, because he would show it. Tonight, that's what I'm telling you he's done. So now you know how I know you spoke. You know I know what you told him." "Told him when?" "That night you got back from Ireland." She looked round the room. More people had come in; no one had gone out yet; a new row of eaters' backs was along the counter; the dog, leash trailing, now sniffed about the floor. Space between the counter and the tables was by this time congested by standing groups, holding glasses, looking (it seemed-to her) with stunned calculation into each other's faces. She got the impression that news unheard by her had detonated dully among these people, without causing a blink to the lights or a shock to anyone. Perhaps the fact was that the seeing of everybody by everybody else with such awful nearness and clearness was already enough. They were neither smart nor shabby, drunk nor sober, saved nor damned--born extras, if anything too many. But nobody is hired to play for nothing however small a part: she wondered what tonight's inducement could be--here and there somebody looked around, uncertain, as though the inducement were breaking down. Was it possible that some major entrance could be overdue? How if Robert were to walk in? "I don't," she said, "see anyone I have ever seen. Who are all these people?" Surprised, he ran his eye over them. "Usual crowd." "You would know if any of them were unusual?" He, looking put out, said he might or might not: evidently he felt that the situation, at this point, demanded something more from her. Goncentratedly working towards this climax, he had not, as his tense fidgety blank-ness showed, envisaged it as it was to be. He had, as though to symbolise a sort of general coming-into-the-open, lighted the cigarette; but he smoked without satisfaction, knocking ash off faster than it could form--some fell on the sticky part of the flan. What an evening, she superficially thought, of, among everything else, waste! She returned to scrutinising the other people between half-closed lids. "One girl, I see," she said, "has got her stocking-seams crooked. Is that unusual?" Louie, at these words--or at what must have been their vibration, for they could not have reached her end of the room--pivoted round on the stool on which she sat. Holding on with one hand to the rail of the counter, she leaned backwards to stare at Harrison's table as though it might mean something--and, as soon became evident, it did. Her face lit up; her colour enthusiastically rose. She nodded, lost some of her countenance but went on staring. Harrison did not see her. "Oh, but the one I mean is a friend of yours!" exclaimed Stella in the light, rather high voice which had in the last few minutes become her own. She was at a desirable distance from her soul. "Do at least," she said to Harrison, "look at her!" He did so without pleasure. Very much gratified, Louie renewed the greeting: he not so much nodded as contracted his neck-muscles with a jerk--then at once looked elsewhere. "Oh, come," said Stella, "one can do better than that." "I haven't time," he said. "Nor have you. _You__--you've put us all on the spot, nicely. As things are, how long do you think I am going to carry this? What do you expect me to do now?" "I was wondering." "It's a question of what I _can__ do. Thanks to you, our friend has pretty well dished himself. I told you, the only case for leaving him loose was, the chance he might lead us to something bigger. Now he's put wise he's out. All this time he's been costing us quite a bit: _now__, the only possible case for leaving him loose falls down. No more reason why things shouldn't take their course. That is what it's up to me to report." "So you do?" "I've got myself to think of.--And, of course, the country." "I see. So far, who besides you knows this?" This must have been the question he had been waiting for. "Up to date--as a whole, as a hang-together--only / know. It has still to go on up to the...--" "Still..." She suddenly looked him in the eye. "I see. You wouldn't be telling me this if it _had__ gone?" "_Scram__!" said Harrison violently to the dog. Patiently knocking itself against a leg of their table, the dog had distracted Stella's attention: it pushed its muzzle up at her, pleading to be allowed to be under obligation to _someone__--there was something umbilical about its trailing leash. Harrison, reaching round, pushed at the dog with his foot: a masochistic quiver ran down its spine but it stood
firm, having now lodged its head upon Stella's knee. She put her hand on its collar, counting over the studs with her fingertips as though reading braille: "It's not doing any harm," she said. "It's bothering you." "No, only boring me. Won't bite; I wish it would.... We were saying?" "You know what we were saying. You know quite well." "I know what you are going to say, yes. That through my blunder this is your moment to foreclose? That at last, now, it really _is__ up to me? That I either buy out Robert, for a bit longer?--or?" She broke off--for, with a lightning movement, Harrison had clapped down his hand on hers. She envisaged for a split second that, past a point insulted, he could be striking her. Then she saw what had happened, what was happening--Louie was advancing on their table. "Excuse me," Louie panted, "I'm just after my dog." She stooped and clicked a finger and thumb. "Come on, come along with you, Spot, you bad boy! Bothering people!" Stella, retaining a very clear impression of the dog sitting scratching long before Louie entered, looked at her with surprise. Everything ungirt, artless, ardent, urgent about Louie was to the fore: all over herself she gave the impression of twisted stockings. For this evening she had abandoned her comrade get-up and was looking smart, if not as smart as she hoped, in a claret two-piece; a handbag slithered under her elbow and in one bare hand she was mauling a pair of fancy gloves. A bow clip rode its way down her pony-rough hair. Her big lips, apart, were pale inside their crusted cosmetic rim; distended by enterprise, askance at what she found herself doing, her eyes looked oyster-pale in her ruddy face in the glare. "I've not seen _you__ in our park," she said to Harrison with galvanised boldness, "for ever so long!" "You don't surprise me," he said, picking up the end of the dog's leash and handing it to her. "I'm never there." "Still, you must have been when I saw you.--Fancy seeing you _here__! Excuse me interrupting; it's on account of the dog--Spot," she said to it faltering, "you bad boy, you. Won't leave people alone." "You're not interrupting us," Stella said, looking gratefully up at Louie--who, standing looming over the table, naïvely shifted her weight from foot to foot. "Why do you call your dog Spot? He hasn't got any." Louie could be seen to take rapid thought. "He's my friend's dog, more, that I am keeping an eye on," she said, yanking half-heartedly at the leash. "It's nice here, really, isn't it?" she went on, looking round the room and then back at Stella: she studied Stella and her bravado ebbed. "I hardly wonder at _anyone's__ coming here." "Anyhow, you come. Often?" "No, I never do. What makes it funny this evening my getting here is, I don't think it's the place I meant to. I mean, I have got a date, but I think now it must really be somewhere else. They said to keep down the street, and then it was just down some steps and I couldn't miss it; but it's surprising the way you can. If it isn't here I have no idea where they did mean: everywhere has got names, but all you can read written up is, 'Open.' So I thought in case it was the others' mistake I'd better give them an hour. Meanwhile I had a bite. But for my girl friend saying I always look so silly, I'd just as soon." "That's right," interposed Harrison, who throughout the speech had been drumming thumbs on the table-rim, "you'd better beat it home. You'll only be landing yourself in more trouble. And mind, put that dog back where it came from." "Why, look, it's taking quite a fancy _\\. oyou__, now, poor thing, isn't it? They always say a dog knows. However, I _should__ be getting along." "No, don't go!" cried Stella, checking a movement to catch at Louie's arm. "For a minute--why won't you sit down?" "Oh, I don't think I ought to," Louie decided, after a glance at Harrison. "For a minute..." "No, I don't think I should." She reached an empty chair from the next-door table, turned it around and sat on it. She looked from Stella to Harrison. "For one thing, you were talking." "Only deciding something," said Stella, going dead white at the sound of the words. "Still, even that takes time." The anonymous crisis at this table seemed to Louie no queerer than any other. She crossed her legs, draped her skirt on her knee, pasting it into position with the palm of a hand. Here she was, sitting like an image--up to whom was it to pass the next remark? She looked at the dog and, cricking her head sideways, re-read the address of the owner on its collar: she then reflected she should have thought of that, making her look silly. However, you had to do something or nothing happened; and, in spite of Harrison's nasty manner, neither of them had looked again at the dog. "How I wish I knew where this was where we are," she said at last. "Because they have ever such a variety of snacks." "I have no idea where we are!" cried Stella, starting alive. "_Where__ are we?" she threw at Harrison, who did not answer. "Do at any rate," she went on, rapidly and light-headedly, to Louie, "tell me who you are. You see," she laughed, indifferently, as though Harrison were nothing more than a stuffed figure, "there's no chance of our being introduced, so you tell me your name and I'll tell you mine. I'm Mrs. Rodney." Louie only was glib when she improvised: now it was after a pause in which she seemed to quell a doubt that she at last declared "I'm Mrs. Lewis." "_Are__ you?" Stella, again surprised--so much so that she found herself glancing for confirmation at Louie's wedding-ring finger. "Yes," Louie said, with a now more confident nod. "But you know how it is--my husband rightly should be an electrician, but now they've got him in India. Or at least," she amended, shying away from Harrison, "that's what it appears like, but you have to be careful what you say. Wherever he is, I'm quite lonely sometimes, really. Still, as it says, we women are all in the same boat." "Oh, I'm not: it's just that my husband's dead." Louie was shaken. "You don't mean, already killed?" "No, he died. And that was years ago." "All the same..." Louie, having turned this over, brought her gaze to bear upon Harrison, re-assessing him, from the finger-nails up to the crown of the head, in a new and it could be important light. It appeared to her that Stella should do better. Unnerved by a look from him, she again attempted to please. "To think of you re-membering me," she said. "After only once. But I know you did remark how you seldom forgot a face. Considering what a number there are, it ought to be quite funny inside your head by this time." "You're right," said Stella, "It is quite funny inside his head." On hearing which words Harrison fixed his eyes on her with an either equivocal or tormented expression. But she was saying to Louie: "You're not old friends, then?" "Why, I don't know his name! Just, we fell into conversation at a park concert. They're informal on account of the open air. You notice how they seem to attract all sorts. Such classical music, in spite of which you get the band fiddling away as gaily as anything in that nice glen. Though oh the gnats, however; and then night quite falls before you know where you are. Of course by this time of year everything's discontinued, which is just the pity--there's nothing left but London once it's winter.... How he was thinking away to himself, though!" she said, her face retrospectedly broadening. "I shall never forget." She waited for Harrison to enter into the story: he did not, so she went on unaided: "I nearly had to laugh--boxing at his hand with his other hand. You never saw such brainwork. There was I on one chair, next that an empty, then him there on the next. I need not say, it was Sunday." "That," said Stella to Harrison, "was the day you were listening to the band?" "_You__ were never his date?" said Louie, illumined. "Doesn't that go to show." "Why?" "Why, it does show. Because I did just wonder if he might not be artful--so now I ought to beg his pardon." Her pause was proffered to Harrison: no reply. "Though it's not," something constrained her to tell Stella, "that in a regular way _I__ should take note of a person: you meet so many. No, what led me to take account of him was a thing he said which you don't hear often. He gave me an old-fashioned look and said, '_I might be funny__, for all you know.' " As ever pleased by the words, she drank in their effect on Stella. But Stella was not enough--exaltedly hauling on the dog's leash, Louie faced round on Harrison. "Oh yes you did--remember? You said how you might be funny. You see, you saw I was not a London girl." "What I saw you were, _and__ are," replied Harrison, "is a pest. And mind--are you trying to choke that dog?" He looked at Stella and said: "As for you, are you off your head? Do you think we have got all night?" She said: "Yes, I thought we had?" The quietness of all this made its repercussion on Louie slow: she played the leash out again to its full length, meanwhile gazing down at the dog with commiseration. But then suddenly she gave the dog a warning push with her foot, as though it would be safest as far away as possible. "No," she cried out, "how he can have the heart!" The two others, surprised, watched Louie sliding her chair back in a panic over the rubber floor. They waited with something like deference for her to go on: she did. "Oh, I wonder you go with him! I don't wonder you don't care to stay alone just with him if you can help it. People to be friendly, that's what the war's for, isn't it? _I__ never had any more motive than that poor dog!" "I am so sorry," said Stella, stooping to pick up Louie's flimsy gloves, which had fallen hopelessly to the ground: straightening their crumpled fingers she paused to look with remorse at the pattern pinked on their backs. She returned them to Louie, saying: "You mustn't mind his manner." "Don't you mind his manner?" "One cannot always choose." "I should have thought you should have had other chances," said Louie lifelessly, having let go the leash, while she was attempting to tug a glove on. "Though you ought not to mind me either," she had to add, "because I always do get upset: they say so. You see my home was wiped out, so that if anyone goes for me I suddenly don't know which way to turn. So you must excuse my saying anything I did: all it was, that up to the very last I had understood us all to be friendly--apart, that is, from his rathering me not there. How was I to know he would flash out so wicked?" "You must not blame him," said Stella, "it has been my fault. He's in trouble, too--I am telling her that you are in trouble," she said to Harrison, then went back to Louie. "Nothing ever works out the way one hoped, and to know how bitter that is one must be a worker-out--you and I are not. This evening was to have been a celebration, the first of many more evenings. It may still be the first of many more evenings, but what will they be worth? This is the truth," she said, looking round her at all the other people apprehensively staring into each other's faces. "He cannot bear it; let's hope he will forget it--let's hope that; it is the least we can do; we're all three human. At any time it may be your hour or mine--you or I may be learning some terrible human lesson which is to undo everything we had thought we had. It's that, not death, that we ought to live prepared for.--What shall we do?" she said to Harrison. "What would be least impossible, do you think? Where shall we go next?" The overpowered Louie glanced from man to woman, heaved about on her chair as though bound by ropes to it, got herself free, stood up. "I ought to be getting home." "But you said your home--?" "I ought to be getting back where I am. Tell him it's as you were," she said. "People must fly off sometimes." "Say goodnight to him." "Me? I don't know his name." "Harrison.--You must congratulate me before you go," said Stella, her hand still on Louie's arm. "I've good news, I think." "You have?" Stella nodded. "A friend is out of danger." Harrison's unfolding of his arms, on which he had been leaning heavily, let the table restore itself to equilibrium with a bump and a flash of cutlery. He was changing his attitude, apparently, only in order to minister to a smarting eye, which a fume from his heap of stubs must at last have caught. He scrubbed at this eye, the left, with a fingertip, raising and lowering his eyebrows. "Why not you two both go along together?" he said, looking at the finger when it had done. "Don't you hear what I say?" he asked in a louder, less absent voice. "You two had better both be getting along." Stella, pale again with stupidity, touched a spoon in a saucer. At last she brought out: "But..." "Well, what?" Stella looked at Louie, as though _she__ might take a turn. "But--she and I have no idea where we are." "Turn right, at the top of the steps; keep on; first left, keep on again. One of you ought to know when you're in Regent Street." "And then, I don't know where _she__ lives." "She may." He rose and pulled back the table; Stella under compulsion got slowly up. "I don't understand," she said. "What has been decided? What are you going to do now?" "Get the bill. Do you think a bill pays itself?"