Read The Heat of the Day Online

Authors: Elizabeth Bowen

Tags: #Fiction - General, #Classic fiction

The Heat of the Day (4 page)

BOOK: The Heat of the Day
3.66Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Who is to know--still more, how would anyone know?" "I should have thought _that__ stuck out a mile. You expect him to laugh this off, or, should we say," he said with an almost delicate air, "kiss it off, when and if you bring the matter up. To make your mind nice and easy and as you were. And so, no doubt, if he's half the chap we both think he is, he would. But don't forget he'd have more than you on his mind. Having got the gist, been given the gist by you, of your and my little talk this evening, would you really expect him not to alter his course a bit--if it were only in one or two small particulars? His time-table would alter, and his beat--that could not not happen; it would be bound to. One or two of his haunts would miss his familiar face; he'd start cooling off one or two of his buddies, and so on. Not to veer a bit, it might be ever so slightly, would take more nerve than a man humanly has. I've never yet known a man not change his behaviour once he's known he's watched: it's exactly changes like that that are being watched for. No, _he'd__ let us know in an instant that he'd been tipped the wink: in which case, what? He'd be pulled in before anyone could say knife, before _he__ could tip the wink any further.... I should not say anything to him, if I were you." "Well, thank you. But what would there be to stop me saying to him, 'Go on just as you're going, but be careful. Be most careful to go on just as you've been going on'?" "Nothing, nothing at all," said Harrison promptly. He shrugged his shoulders. "In that case, you're taking a chance on how well you know him .7 speak, of course, merely as an outsider. It's clear to me he's got quite his share of nerve--but this would take more; it would take tiptop acting. How much of an actor would you, now, take him to be?" She flinched, oddly. "Actor? How should I of all people know? He has never had any reason to act with me." "No," he said thoughtfully. "No, I suppose not." "No." "I should say, if a chap _were__ able to act in love, he'd be enough of an actor to get away with anything." "I--I suppose so," she said, turning away her head. Harrison, having waited, all the more quickly said: "We can leave it, he's no sort of an actor." It was just not a question. Nothing could be more telling than this show of his of compunction, muffled compunction, at having touched her on what could conceivably be the raw. By, next, renewing an awkward silence he made apparent to her what she had made apparent to him--that, out of the whole of a conversation abhorrent and shocking to her from the very start, it took one remark to get her under the skin. Lips compressed, as though he had taken refuge in silent humming, Harrison meanwhile looked round the room which should so well know the person under discussion. He looked, in fact, everywhere but at Stella. Finally he said: "As to all that, though, I'm naturally off" my ground. All I mean is, I should feel bad if I let you ruin the chap. A chap is quite often ruined, I shouldn't wonder, by someone's expecting too much of him. Of course, I can't make you take my advice--I quite see that my position in the whole matter may seem a bit funny? I more or less come and say to you, 'Better liquidate Robert.' But that means just as a friend, be it understood. Otherwise, I haven't a thing against him. You say, no, he can't act up. Ought you, then, to take such a cracking risk?" "Risk of telling him what you've told me? Perhaps not," she said, so amenably that he looked at her with suspicion. He was right, she had not been listening--or not completely. Thinking off at a tangent, she had arrived at a point which, it really seemed, made it unnecessary to listen to Harrison any longer or ever again. Her eyes now sought and insisted on meeting his with a quite new dark and embattled glitter. "Your position funny? But you've been so kind--you've thought of me, Robert, everyone but yourself: surely now it's time we thought about you. Are you not the one who's taking rather a risk,--if you _are__ really what you imply you are? For all I know, you may be--indeed, why not? You're not to be accounted for in any other way: I cannot believe you spend your whole day sitting in the park; you never have volunteered any information as to what you do do; these days it is inevitable that everybody should be doing something, and that in most cases one doesn't ask what. Let's certainly take it, then, that you _are__ a counterspy, which I understand to be some sort of spy twice over, and that you're officially employed. In that case, if I may ask, what _are__ you doing? Employed and accredited as you are, you go out of your way to tell me--remember, I never asked--that you are on to, or working around the edge of, something exceedingly dangerous to this country and our conduct of war. You've traced, or are tracing, a leakage of information in which X number of people may be involved? If that _is__ true, it's vital--and if it's vital surely the preessential should be absolute secrecy, silence? But, oh no. You brag--no, let's put it calmly and say you talk--to me about your power to tip scales. Assuming you have that power, you wouldn't, I take it, have it without having been given immense responsibility. You may even, as you hint, be a key man. Very well, then--what? Your behaviour staggers me. _Is__ this country really so badly served? What do you do?--You ask yourself to this flat and turn in, attempt to trade in, this information with a view to getting a woman you think you want. You attempt to use what you know to implement blackmail. You propose that by becoming your mistress I buy out a man, in whom I have an interest, who is by your showing dangerous to the country. That is what you are proposing?--stop me if I am wrong.... Very well. You've bludgeoned me with your perpetual 'we'--your 'we' is my 'they': what view would '_they__' take of that? Is there any reason why I should not report you--your attempts to make use, for amorous reasons, of official secrets at a most crucial time? I cannot say I am pleased to be the woman you want--but what's a good deal more the point is, I am not the right woman to try this on with. If I should in my turn decide to turn something in, I shouldn't fail to see that it went to the right quarter. I am not a woman who does not know where to go. You would be sorry, you say, if I sunk Robert. How would it be if I sank you?" Harrison, throughout this, had not shifted from Stella's face a look of patience and admiration. When she stopped, he returned to himself with a slight start. "Absolutely," he agreed. "You would certainly have me there." She sat more upright than ever, pressing together in her lap hands which, she found, trembled. "Or, I should say, could have me. (You've got a first-rate head: that's one thing I like.) But for _one__ thing, that is." "Oh. What?" He said warmly: "All you said sounded fine--you'd do right, as you say, to go straight ahead. But there's this.--Do you imagine I am the only one who's got your friend taped? In that case, I should have made myself plainer: I must say I thought I had. No, to put me out wouldn't close the case against him: in point of fact it would have the reverse effect. You're not only the most charming woman, if I may say so; you're also officially known to have quite a heart. That is--how should I put it?--where our friend's concerned. Your interest in Robert has, with everything else concerning him, been of some interest elsewhere for quite a time now--yes, I may say I was pretty well up to date with that particular story before I met you. You say you'd know where to go, and I've no doubt you would--but do you imagine that by the time you got there anyone there would imagine you'd gone _straight__ there? If you hadn't gone round by Robert's to drop the word to him, it would none the less be assumed you had--a woman's always a woman, and so on. The gaff would be taken as blown; the game would be taken as up. Oh yes, you'd be seen to the door with handshakings and many sincere thanks--but I'm prepared to say, practically before you were into your taxi, the word would go out and your friend Robert would be where a number of people (I don't say I) are of the opinion we rightly ought to have popped him a good long time ago. Phut, you must surely see, would have gone the only possible argument for leaving him any longer on the loose. I go--he goes. However, of course that is up to you." "I should have done my duty." "Ah--to the country?" said he, jumping to the point with surprising ease. "Exactly--how right you are. And it seems," he added, "so right _for__ you to be right that I almost wonder we haven't got round to that before. Naturally, if you're thinking about the country we shall have to go back and run through this whole matter over again; I mean to say, it puts everything in a somewhat different light. So if that's what is on your mind--" "--Well, it's not. If it were," she said, "do you suppose I'd submit my conscience to you?" As to this, he seemed to have no opinion; or, at any rate, showed no great concern. Having looked suspiciously at her clock, he confirmed what it said by reference to his wrist watch. "I'd no idea, do you know, it was getting so late!" "Hadn't you?" It might have been midnight--might have even been the most extinct and hallucinatory of the small hours. She had by now passed through every zone of fatigue into its inner vacuum, and had forgotten hunger. She wanted nothing, nothing but that he should not be any longer there. Her fingers, having exhausted any capacity to tremble, any further to feel the touch of each other, lay in an inanimate tangle in her lap. Her spine by now ached from her having sat so long on the backless stool; her head was empty. "Anything else?" he said. "Because, if not--" "--How am I to know you are not bluffing?--In fact, I know you are." He stood, frowned, tatted at his moustache. "Yes, that's the devil, of course," he feelingly said. "I don't quite see how you _are__ to check up--on me, that is--without bringing down the roof. You can't be too careful." "Still, I still think there's someone who can confirm that you're a fake." "Trouble is, everyone's so damned cagey." "But I know a lot of people!" she said, with the first touch of hysteria. Harrison shrugged his shoulders. "That's, again, always up to you. Go ahead." To release any kind of feeling could be to release it all. Stella rose, went to the chimneypiece, and, impassively reaching across Harrison, turned round Robert's photograph once more to face the room. "And another time," she said, "leave my things alone!" She then turned full on him, from less than a yard away: they were eye to eye in the intimacy of her extreme anger. There is actually little difference as to colour in the moment before the blow and the moment before the kiss: the negligible space between her and him was now charged, full force, with the intensity of their two beings. Something speechless, tenacious, unlovable--himself--was during that instant-exposed in Harrison's eyes: it was a crisis--the first this evening, not the first she had known--of his emotional idiocy, and it was as unnerving as might be a brain-storm in someone without a brain. The moment broke: he did not attempt to touch her. Having shaken a loose sleeve back, she supported an elbow against the chimneypiece, a side of her face against the palm of a hand, and continued to study him, though vacantly. He, having come to one of those pauses in his fidgety smoking, slowly slid his hands down into his pockets. "And as far as we're concerned," he said, "think it over." "I'd never love you." "I never have been loved." "Do you wonder!" "The thing would be, we'd get to know each other." "You're not _still__ expecting me to do what you say?" He said softly: "That would be what I'd like." "Not again see Robert?" That took him aback. "Or--might not that seem a bit suspicious? I should have suggested, more, as things are, ease out." "Just like that. I see.--Do you know much about love?" "I've watched quite a lot of it." "How much time do you give me?" "Listen," he said, "I hate you to put it that way." "A month?" "Good enough. If it suited you, I might drop in from time to time?" "To see how everything's going?" "In case you _had__ made your mind up." "And meanwhile, nothing will happen?" "I think one may pretty safely say pretty likely not.--And now--" "Now what?" "You don't think, a spot of dinner?" "No, thank you," she said in a final tone. His face fell. "Oh but, I say, I say--I'd got a table for us. What's the matter? You're not upset? Can't you eat, aren't you hungry?" "Simply, I'm staying in." "Oh, that's it, is it--you're staying in? Staying in who for?" He heard the telephone before she did, being one of those people who receive that vibration just before the ring: he had jerked his head in the direction of the dividing door before she was aware of the telephone in there in her bedroom. The same possibility made them exchange a glance--as though already there were complicity. She stood where she was, head down, while the telephone continued its double-ringing--to which Harrison, for his part, listened closely as though trying to familiarise himself with a code. "Look, take it, why don't you?" he said at last. She made a sweeping turn and went through to the other room, contemptuously leaving the door open behind her. Behind the mirror the curtains were still undrawn; there was an ashy glimmer of window--she went round the foot of the bed to sit at the pillow end, her back to the scene she had left behind. In the dark she took up the receiver with the unfumbling sureness of one who habitually answers a telephone at any, even the deepest, hour of the night. Her hand would have reached its mark before her eyes opened; before her brain stirred, her ear would be ready, so that the first word she heard, even the first she spoke, would be misted over by some unfinished dream. This mechanical reflex of hers to a mechanical thing suggested to Harrison, standing there aware in the other room, the first idea he had had of poetry--her life. Enflamed by the picture he could not see, he could but think, "So _that's__ what it can be like!" Meanwhile, feet planted apart in the lamplit drawing-room, he looked about him like a German in Paris. "Hullo?" she said--to be checked: whoever it was had failed to press Button A. Then--"Oh, _you__--oh, darling!... You are, are you? For how long?... However, that's better than nothing. But why didn't you tell me? Have you had any dinner?... Yes, I'm afraid that might be best: I don't think I've got anything in the flat. How I wish you'd told me.... And directly after that you'll come straight here?... Of course; naturally; don't be so idiotic.... Yes, there is just at the moment, but there soon won't be.... No, no one you know.... Soon, then--as soon as ever you can!" She hung up, but remained to

BOOK: The Heat of the Day
3.66Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Tarnished Honor by J. Lee Coulter
SVH08-Heartbreaker by Francine Pascal
The Changeling by Jerry B. Jenkins, Chris Fabry
Forced Retirement by Robert T. Jeschonek
Last Summer by Rebecca A. Rogers
Swept Away by Kristina Mathews
The Gift by Wanda E. Brunstetter