The Heat of the Day (5 page)

black out her bedroom. And in the series of rushes with which she made the curtains run on the rail could be heard release, a lightening, a larklike soaring up of her mood. She lit up the dressing-table, hummed a tune, tranquilly touched her hair. Harrison could not but be drawn to the doorway, in which he remained standing--he searched, with his eyes, the room, the built-in cupboards, the satin low bed, her face reflected in the dazzling mirror. He said: "Well, that was that. You always sound so surprised?" "Only when I am," she replied, turning. "That was my son, on leave." "Oho." "He's just got to London. He's at the station. He's on his way round here."

Chapter 3

RODERICK never came to the flat without giving warning. When, at a quarter to ten that night, Stella heard the bell of the street door, she was in the act of pulling blankets out of a cupboard. Had her parting with Harrison been of a different kind she would have called after him, as he went downstairs: "Please leave that door on the latch again, for Roderick." As things were, she had had the irritation of hearing Harrison pause outside, to make sure the door _was__ shut, before making off down Weymouth Street. He had gone--but he had brought life to one of those passes when nothing is simple, not even opening a door. She dropped the armful of blankets, intended for her son's night on the sofa, when Roderick rang. In any case, she would have gone to meet him on the stairs. It was a time of opening street doors conspiratorially: light must not escape on to steps. Roderick, considerably broadened by his equipment--"Everything," he had once said, "but a mousetrap, and not impossibly that,"--inched in round the door his mother held. They embraced; with, on her part, an exclamation, for the happiness of reunion is surprising. Halfway up the stairs he said: "You are out of breath!" "I must be getting fat." "I hope not," Roderick said gravely. "Go ahead," she said at the top, stopping to turn off the landing light--through the door she watched Roderick, in the square yard of vestibule, bend his cropped head as he unslung his equipment. Clumsily he unyoked himself from what was to her an anonymous tangle of webbing and knocking things, and in so doing showed an animal patience. He stacked up some of the stuff, kicked the rest out of view, and plonked down his tin hat on the small marble table. There was now so little space left that he had to move on before she could enter the flat. So in the front room he waited, vaguely staring around him at lit white lamps and their reflections in dark glass pictures. This did not look like home; but it looked like something--possibly a story. She came in and said: "Roderick, you did get something to eat? I began to worry after you'd telephoned, because lately almost all places are shut on Sunday." "Fred knew of a pub that has pork pies." "Fred came up with you?" "Yes. He's gone to his married sister's at Wood Lane." "I thought if I made some coffee?" "Or you wouldn't," Roderick ventured, "have any cake?" "Absolutely none. If only, darling, you'd tell the day before!" "Everything depends on so much else.--Can I have a bath?" "Yes, go on; while I make the coffee." Roderick left the bathroom door ajar; steam came curling into the kitchen where Stella was: meanwhile, the percolator began to bubble. Later he called out, "Would there be a dressing-gown?" so she unhooked Robert's dressing-gown from her hanging-place and tossed it to Roderick through the walls of steam. As a family she and he liked their coffee strong; she was therefore still standing over the percolator when her son came out of the bath and propped himself in the door. This kitchen was, by agents' definition, a kitchenette; between the electric stove, the sink, the refrigerator, there was room for one slender person to stand and turn; all other fitments had been constructed to hang above or fit underneath each other. Roderick admired the scene in which he could play no part--this glazed, surgical-looking cabinet was the first kitchen in which he had seen his mother at work. Reaching up for the cups she said: "Are you really dry?" "I am drying off." "You are looking more like yourself." "More like myself, am I looking?" asked Roderick, with interest and curiosity. He attempted to remember what she must mean. He looked reflectively down at Robert's mottled silk dressing-gown with the froggings, even tweaked, with a frown, at one end of the cord he had knotted tightly about his middle. Not unnaturally, the dressing-gown gave no clue: it hung in Byzantine folds about the concavities of his frame, except where it stuck in patches to the damp of his skin--for his mother's suspicion was right; he _was__ imperfectly dry. "Would there be a pair of my pyjamas anywhere round?" he said. "If not, it naturally doesn't matter." "Why, yes; there should be--surely you left some here?" Stella's work at any time in her kitchen was not badly done, but erratic, punctuated by thoughts. Tonight she accomplished things rapidly in the wrong order--she had reached round for the china, raided about for spoons, chipped at last week's sugar crusted around the bowl before she remembered that one must have the tray, still on its bracket over Roderick's head. Yet all her movements seemed to him charmed and deft as, shifting his weight from one bare foot to the other, he re-propped himself against the frame of the door. In repose at last he stood as she often stood. It was to be seen how, each time he came back like this, he was at the beginning physically at a loss; till, by an imitation of her attitudes, he supplied himself with some way to behave, look, stand--even, you might say, _be__. His body could at least copy, if not at once regain, unsoldierly looseness and spontaneity. And he traced his way back by these attitudes, one by one, as though each could act as a clue or signpost to the Roderick his mother remembered, the Roderick he could feel her hoping to see. He searched in Stella for some identity left by him in her keeping. It was a search undertaken principally for her sake: only she made him conscious of loss or change. It was his unconscious purpose to underline everything he and she had in common. And this worked each time: each time she was reassured. While she and Roderick stayed so closely alike, it seemed less likely that he would, after all, shift away to somewhere outside her ken--whatever happened, whatever was done to him. For what nagged at her, what flickered into her look each time she confronted the soldier in battle dress, was the fear that the Army was out to obliterate Roderick. In the course of a process, a being processed, she could do nothing to stop, her son might possibly disappear. There must still be so many months before he saw action: she did not envisage or dread his death. She dreaded dissolution inside his life, dissolution never to be repaired. Months in the Army had made Roderick notice what he had taken for granted when he was more at home--the particular climate in which his mother dwelled. Of this, the temperature and the pressure were gauged by no other person, unless Robert. To re-enter this climate, to be affected by it, could have been enervating if one had not loved her. He was prepared to suppose that to be a soldier in training made one's thoughts desultory, one's feeling torpid--but of what else, what more, what better was he capable really--left to himself? Since he was seventeen, war had laid a negative finger on alternatives; he had expected, neutrally, to become a soldier; he was a soldier now. To his year at Oxford there had been denied meaning--any meaning it could have been disastrous to have caught. Now, his ineptness to play any other part would have more distressed him had there been any other part to play. Everybody was undergoing the same thing. The alternatives shadowed in Stella's mind only troubled him in so far as they troubled her: he could see, not feel, war's cruelty to a world to which he had so far given no hostage; with which, warned, he had never engaged himself. What did more nearly trouble him, this evening, was the probable disappearance of his pyjamas--those only things of his own in his mother's flat. He had been thinking of them on the journey up, and had even spoken of them to Fred. Everything else of his had gone into store, to limbo, when Stella gave up their house. As against this, Roderick now owned property he had never seen. Last May, he had inherited from a cousin of his father's a house in the south of Ireland, Mount Morris, with which went about three hundred acres of land. Probate, likely to be retarded by the complication of Mount Morris's being where it was, had not yet been obtained: legally, the estate was still in the course of becoming his. Personally, he had entered into possession the day the effect of the will was made known to him--the bequest was as unexpected as the testator's death. Up to that date, all Roderick had known of the house was that his parents spent their honeymoon there: arguably, Mount Morris was inauspicious; for the marriage, of which he was the only child, had broken before he was three years old. His father's and mother's divorce and his father's death had come so close together that only by a process of reasoning (necessary to go through over again each time he bent his mind to the matter) could the son be clear which had happened first. Cousin Francis Morris, of Mount Morris, had played no subsequent part in the life that Roderick and his mother shared. Possessorship of Mount Morris affected Roderick strongly. It established for him, and was adding to day by day, what might be called an historic future. The house came out to meet his growing capacity for attachment; all the more, perhaps, in that by geographically standing outside war it appeared also to be standing outside the present. The house, nonhuman, became the hub of his imaginary life, of fancies, fantasies only so to be called because circumstance outlawed them from reality. Submerged, soporific and powerful, these fancies made for his acquiescence to the immediate day. Whether he sought them out or they him; whether they nourished him or he them, could not be said. They did not amount to desires, being without object; nor to hallucinations, for they neither deceived him nor set up tension. Now he was in the Army, they filled those pockets of vacuum underlying routine. They were at their most vivid, most satisfying, in the bodily coma before sleep; but through the day they diversified those long docile will-less waits for his turn for something further to happen, fatigues, inspections, or simply hanging about. He got known as one of the dreamy ones who get by somehow. He was most nearly bestirred when he had to regret his mother's regretting the Army for him. Each time, at the first glance, her eyes cried out: "What are they doing to you?" She saw how exposed, naïve and comically childishly slender his neck looked rearing out of the bulky battle dress collar; she saw the grain of his skin harshening over face-bones not much less fine than hers. Through his hair, now stiff to the roots from cropping, she perceived the' bony planes of his skull. His eyes, like hers, were set in their sockets in a striking rather than lifelike way; they looked--in the surround of what he now was and wore--anachronistic. These days he held himself almost pigeon-breastedly, as though aspiring to fill out the bulky concavities of the khaki. He did not succeed: so unamenable was his over-growing thinness, so straggling and light his frame that, once he shed the ballast of his equipment, only his great boots seemed to be weighting him to the ground. Had he looked more _like__ a soldier, any kind of a soldier, she might have taken it more calmly--she could have felt the authority of a real change. As it was, the anomaly of her son's looks made Stella no longer know where she was with him: she could not believe he knew where he was himself. She had, for instance, not once actually asked whether Roderick liked being in the Army.... He was therefore relieved to learn he was looking more like himself, even in another man's dressing-gown. In a minute she passed him the tray of cups and said: "Will you take this into the other room?" "Where shall I put it?" "Anywhere you like." "Yes, Mother, yes," said Roderick patiently, "but there must be some place where it always goes?" "Anywhere," she repeated, not understanding. He sighed. In this flat, rooms had no names; there being only two, whichever you were not in was "the other room." Proceeding into what _he__ saw as the drawing-room, Roderick, grasping the tray, stood looking round again. Somewhere between these chairs and tables must run the spoor of habit, could one but pick it up. He could not envisage his mother as so completely alone as one would be without any customs. Fred and his other friends were all for the authoritarianism of home life; the last thing they wished was Liberty Hall. Roderick, for the moment, was confounded by there being no one right place to put down a tray--he examined, like a detective, the armchairs, to see which showed signs of being most often sat in, the ashtrays to see which had been in most recent use. The stub-heaped little Chinese one on the chimneypiece was a puzzle--why should anyone _stand__ to smoke for so long? He gave up, placed the tray on the floor and himself on the edge of the sofa which was to be his bed. Picking up and nursing one bare foot, in the posture of the boy with the thorn, he examined one toe-joint closely. "I say," he shouted, "I've got a corn!" "Got what?" "Oh, nothing," he said, already bored. He swung his legs up on the sofa, tested it out for length, refolded the dressing-gown round his body, built himself up an elbow-rest of brocade cushions and tossed a couple more of them over his feet. "What are you doing?" he shouted. "I've more or less gone to bed." His mother came in with the coffee, looked about for the tray, exclaimed, "Really, darling!" and moved it on to a stool. She towed the stool into position beside the sofa. "I wish," she remarked, "I had something for you to eat." Sitting down beside his feet, at the foot of the sofa, she removed the cushions in order to tuck them into the small of her back. Her attention was caught--"Why, Roderick, that's not a _corn__?" she said, staring. "That's what I've been telling you." "If your feet are cold, I can get the blankets." "You're mixing up corns with frostbite--don't go away again." He added: "Now we're in the same boat." "What?--how?" she said, starting. "This is like being opposite one another in a boat on a river." "_Have__ we ever been in a boat on a river--have we?" "Is there a boat for the river at Mount Morris?" "I only remember the river: it was in autumn." "All the same, you think there might be a boat? By now it may need tarring or caulking--you don't think someone should see to that? Perhaps next time you're writing to the lawyers..." "No," she said firmly, "that really will have to wait. We are not even certain there is a boat.--Suppose this coffee keeps you awake?" "Nothing could," declared Roderick, blowing politely into his little cup. "I only hope I stay awake long enough. There is so much I want to know.--For instance, what has been happening?" She ran a finger swiftly along the streak in her hair. "Why should anything happen?" He looked at her in not unnatural surprise. "I only meant," heexplained, "since you lastwrote." He brokeoff, eyes fixed on the tray. "Mother, I thought you told me--" "What?--" "--Told me there