The Heat of the Day (21 page)

Chapter 13

"I MIGHT have known," said Connie. "And after the lengths my friend went to providing his friend for you. So there we had him on top of us all the evening." "Anyhow, you're back early." "What else would you suppose? No, this is the last time I take you under my wing, let me tell you. Go on: resume your usual habits." "I didn't, Connie," said Louie, flopping like a flatfish across her bed, shoeless. "Oh, my feet!" Connie scolded: "Round in those silly shoes!" "All right then, I'm silly all over--go on, say it. Still, it was a pity you didn't come where I was, even if it wasn't just where you said. They had ever such a variety of snacks. And another thing--" "Well, so they had a variety of snacks where we were.--What other thing?" "I got right in a drama." "Oh, I've had quite enough of that for tonight, thank you," Connie declared, yawning. Standing in cami-knickers in front of Louie's front-room gas fire, she balanced herself as she peeled off one stocking, then the other. "And listen: if you wish me to sleep down here in your bed with you, you go on and pop in ahead and warm it. I don't see why I should be the one to get the gooseflesh." "You are kind, Connie." "Well, rather that than up two flights in the nude. It's all one to me--though, mind you, I'm never sure this is healthy. Got your clock set?" "It never went off this morning." "Then I shouldn't be surprised if you never set it. Let me look--give it here." Connie gave the alarm clock a good shake. "Anyhow, what do you mean," she went on, "drama? If you're going to tell me you got in a fight, don't--I have had enough of all that monotony. Or if not, then whatever kept you so long?" Louie, halfway through pulling her nightgown over her head, explained in a muffled voice, "Walked home." "Whatever made you do that with the trains running! No wonder you felt your feet." "I got asked to accompany someone back." "There's nothing I can see wrong with _clock__," said Connie, coming to put it back on the bedside chair, "but that's the most I can say.--Got that nightie for me?" A spare one of Louie's for Connie's use was nowadays kept under Tom's pillow. "Well, shove over," she ordered in a minute or two. "And mind," she added, bouncing critically once or twice on the springs on Tom's side, "whatever you do or don't dream during the night, don't you start kicking me with your toe-nails like you did last time: that's one of the things I don't get married for. Or maybe it was as a precaution your husband seems to have hollowed himself this deep trough? You ought to get this mattress seen to, once conditions show any sign of becoming normal--though, of course, again, one sign of conditions becoming normal should with luck be you having your husband coming nipping back; in which case far be it from me to dictate. I'd as soon lie level, but men are more nervous.--You creamed your face?" "I don't think I'll bother, Connie.--You like to use my cream, though?" "Nn-nn, I'll let it ride. Where has the fatal gift of beauty been getting Connie lately, I should like to know?--I'll tell you what, however: _you__ ought to watch your pores. It could be your not having a London skin." So Louie turned out the light. But, "Oh, _there__," she complained, "Connie, you went and left on the fire!"--"Well, I haven't yet known you seven years, have I? While you're at it, you'd better undo the window, just in case that clock of yours should _not__ go off." Upon Louie's getting out with a resigned flop, Connie took the chance of appropriating the extra amount of blanket wanted for her cocoon. Louie, for her part, dawdled rather on the return journey, taking some time to feel her way round the furniture. "Buck up," grumbled Connie, "Lady Macbeth! So it was the drama you accompanied home, or what?" But this evening for Louie had rung the knell of Harrison, man of mystery, as a subject: she found, with a shock, that what she now most wanted was never to speak of him again. A fog of abhorrence was already settling over his features, blotting out what he said, blanketing the cuttingly quiet edge of his tone of voice. It seemed unseemly, even, that his companion should have claimed for him the prerogative of pain: Louie simultaneously felt he could never suffer and wished he might. It was not so much that she could not forgive him as that he seemed to her born to repulse forgiveness, with indeed all things else: tonight's most strong impression had been that in all Harrison there was no place in which to receive anything. Oh, what had come over her, in talking to Connie, thus to have baited her talk? The truth was, she very much wanted to speak of Stella--but as to that, also, probably better not. Very many nights it was Connie's way to drop into sleep bang, like a devil down through a trapdoor--much was it to be hoped this might happen now. But of course, not. "Mm-mm?" persisted Connie, yanking one arm out over the bedclothes to spank at her own hip-bone, making sure in the dark it was always there, "so what?" Louie tried a yawn like a lion's. "Oh Con--I--am--so--tired!" "What do you imagine I am, always upon the watch? Not to speak of this evening, dragging around that spare. What's the matter with you is, you're getting stealthy!" "Oh no, truly. No, all that happened was, me starting by taking a fancy to a dog. It seemed so sad. Which led me into getting into conversation with its owners." "What were they doing, then--ill-treating it?" "Oh no. No, they were sitting at a table. 'Well,' they said, 'it always is something to meet a fellow dog-lover.' I said, 'Funny you calling your dog Spot when it hasn't got any,' so they took that well and asked me to join them, making a third." "Then married, were they?" "Oh no. No, her husband was dead. No, they weren't married." "Then in that case how could they both have the same dog?... No, you've mucked up two evenings, it seems to me. So along you came, you mean, with your fatal charm, and broke that up, then saw him home?" "On the contrary, Connie. He got indisposed so remained behind with the dog, and I saw her home. I went as far as her door. She and I became friendly. She was refined." "She was what?" "Refined." "No wonder her friend passed out." "That I did _not__ say! No, now you are too bad--keeping on taking me up like that! If that is all you are going to do, just you leave me quiet!" Louie heaved round to facing the other way, taking with her all she could in the way of bedclothes, thereby creating tautness with draught beneath it between her form and the unyielding Connie's. She drew her knees up and drove her profile forward, blunted, into her pillow. All this having been registered by the bed-springs, Connie muttered: "There you go--take on, do!" Tensity, silence. Connie acted as one thinking no more of it. But then a spring uncoiled--she brought out her arm again and dealt a wallop at the behind of Louie. "You don't have to mind me," she said, "you great sissy!" "It isn't you only. It's the taking and taking up of me on the part of everyone when I have no words. Often you say the advantage I should be at if I could speak grammar; but it's not only that. Look the trouble there is when I have to only say what I _can__ say, and so cannot ever say what it is really. Inside me it's like being crowded to death--more and more of it all getting into me. I could more bear it if I could only say. Now she tonight, she spoke beautifully: I needn't pity her--there it was, off her chest. If I could put it like she does I might not be stealthy: when you know you only can say what's a bit off, what does it matter how much more off it is? He was fit to strike her, but then she passed it off--if the way she did pass it off made him fit to strike her--so there was _I__ left with him ugly, which I cannot forget.... At home where I used always to be there never used to be any necessity _to__ say; neither was there with Tom, as long as they let him stop here. But look now--whatever _am__ I to, now there's the necessity? From on and on like this not being able to say, I seem to get to be nothing, now there's no one. I would more understand if I was able to make myself understood; so you know how it is, how I try everything. Excuse me, Connie, after your kindness, but you keeping asking only makes me take on. I'd sooner you some ways than a strange person; and I see you're right--to have been so happy-go-lucky like I've been does not appear true to Tom. All it is is, there's always this with a man--it need not have to come up what you cannot say. I would far sooner you there if you'd only _be__ there, just." Connie did not reply. "What's the matter, Connie?" "Can't I think?" "Oh, if that's all it is." "All I can say is, if I was you I shouldn't worry my head. You are not so much more peculiar than many others. I cannot say what anyone ought to do, really.... It's late, you know." "Why, yes, I suppose it is." "You can tell it is, from the quiet." They lay listening to what, under analysis, was only sound at further remove: nocturnal train-sounds, shunting, clanking and hissing, from the network of Marylebone lines. "Hark at those marshalling-yards," grumbled Connie, "you might as well be in Germany." Then a moment later, something faltered over the ceiling: searchlights out. "Funny it would be," Louie remarked, "to see light like we used to see on that ceiling, standing still. We did used to have a lamp just outside there in the street, therefore you have no idea how different this room used to be all through the middle of the night. It could have kept us awake. And that tree behind the yard, for instance; when there was a window lighted behind that the pattern of that tree used to come right on this very same bed. It used to be so lifelike you saw it move; Tom remarked you could know it was a plane tree.--Think the searchlights mean anything?" "Nn-nn: they're obliged to keep fidgeting them about." "We ought to go to sleep, then." "Yes, I said." Connie reared up for the last time to scratch inside an armpit, then settled down--so dead still that the feeling of her beside one was that of Lot's Wife horizontal. Indeed, this applying of her whole force of character to the will to sleep was disturbing, going on close beside one--Louie, back on her back again, clasped her hands under her head and stared up at nothing--it was oppressive, though, how much of nothing there was: she escaped from underneath that, in a minute more, into wondering how Stella had done her hair. But how were you to tell?--there had been the hat. Most of all, there had been the effect--the effect, it said, was what you ought all to go for. Black best of all, with accessories, if you were the type. The effect of this person?... Invisible powder, mutiny, shock, loss; sparkle-clip on black and clean rigid shoulders; terror somewhere knocking about inside her like a loose piece of ice; a not-young face of no other age; eyes, under blue-bloomed lids, turning on you an intent emptied look, youth somewhere away at the back of it like a shadow; lips shaped, but shaping what they ought not; hat of small type nothing if not put on right, put on right, exposingly; agony ironed out of the forehead; the start, where the hair ran back, of one white lock.--What had been done to her? Where had she got herself?--Fine wrist watch not to be recollected apart from the fine wrist-bone, on her reaching down to pick up the fallen gloves. Good of her--but, dwelling on them like that? You might have thought Mrs. Rodney had not seen gloves before.... Louie felt herself entered by what was foreign. She exclaimed in thought, "Oh no, I wouldn't be _her__!" at the moment when she most nearly was. Think, now, what the air was charged with night and day--ununder-standable languages, music you did not care for, sickness, germs! You did not know what you might not be tuning in to, you could not say what you might not be picking up--affected, infected you were at every turn. Receiver, conductor, carrier--which was Louie, what was she doomed to be? She asked herself, but without words. She felt what she had not felt before--_was__ it, even, she herself who was feeling? She wondered if she would ever find Stella's house, the steps at whose foot they had said goodnight in the dark, again; still more she wondered if she would want to. "But this is not goodbye, I hope," had been said--but what, how much, had she meant to mean? This fancy taken to Louie, this clinging on, were these some sick part of a mood? Here now was Louie sought out exactly as she had sought to be: it is in nature to want what you want so much too much that you must recoil when it comes. Lying in Chilcombe Street, grappling her fingers together under her head, Louie dwelled on Stella with mistrust and addiction, dread and desire. Out of all the communicativeness during the zigzag walk back to Weymouth Street, there had risen not one reference to Harrison: instead, the talker had been dashing patchily back through her own past--partly as though to know by the spoken sound of it if it _were__ true, partly as though she could not put too great a distance between herself and what had happened half an hour ago. She had come back and back to a son she had in the Army. Anxious?--why not; this was her only son. "He should be a comfort to you," Louie had interposed, "Oh, yes, _he__ is a comfort to _me__!" Having been walking fast, the talker had from that point on walked faster; Louie had been put to it to keep up with her even with her own famous big flat stride. Fast?--no, it had been something more than that: Mrs. Rodney walked like a soul astray. Those three words reached Louie imperatively, as though spoken--memory up to now had been surface pictures knocked apart and together by the heavings of a submerged trouble. Now her lips seemed bidden: "A soul astray," they repeated with awe, aloud. Then in alarm she listened: silence. She listened longer--unseen Connie might have been stone dead. "_Connie__?" There came a hiss of breath. "Well, what?" replied Connie in a sharp sleepless voice. "I couldn't hear you breathe." "Nor I was, till you go and make me." "What _were__ you doing, then?" "Trying what those Indians are said to do." "Which Indians?--You did give me a fright." "Fakers." "Whatever don't they do that for?" "To attain themselves to the seventh degree of consciousness." "Whoever told you? Tom never repeated anything like that about the Indians when he writes letters; and he is observant.--Anyway, what d'_you__ want to be conscious for like that?" "I'm peculiar," Connie said in a Delphic tone. "If I'm not to be one thing then I'd as soon be the other one hundred per cent. I've never been so wakeful--must be something I ate: nothing's pure these days. No, I'm not in pain, nor is it fullness or wind, only the universe fevering round inside my head.--Ever got a bicarbonate?--No, I suppose not." "We did have, but Tom took them in the Army.--However, I could always