The Heat of the Day (6 page)

was nothing to eat. In that case, what are these three biscuits for?" "Oh, you, naturally. But I'm afraid they're musty." Roderick tried, ate them, then picked crumbs from his chest. "Who was it who was here whom I didn't know?" "When?" "Just now, this evening, when I rang up. You answered in your company voice; I could hear that. Have you made any interesting new friends?" "No; it was only a man called Harrison." "The man who was at the funeral.--What had he come about?" "He just came to see me." "But I thought you said he was a commercial traveller?" "I only said I rather got that impression." "Anyway, as it's Sunday, probably he'd be taking the day off. If he's not a commercial traveller, what does he do?" "Roderick, what about your commission?" Roderick rearranged the cushions under his elbow. "What do you mean?" he said. "You haven't heard anything?" "I should be very much surprised if I ever did: why should I? I should be surprised enough if I ever got my stripes--Fred, you know, got his a month ago. I see how you feel; I am very, very sorry I'm not more like your brothers, Mother, but there it is. I'll really try and exert myself if you'd rather, but I don't think the Army's quite what it was in your day--everything now depends on so much else. I must say, I should like to be known as 'the Captain' when I settle at Mount Morris; but I suppose quite a lot of water will have to flow under the bridges before then." "I wonder about your commission. I was saying to Robert--" "Oh yes, how _is__ Robert? I hope, well?" "Very. This week-end he's at his mother's." "Like I am," said Roderick genially. However, the idea of the elder man made him look anxiously down the length of his own person in Robert's dressing-gown--he had a notion he might have spilled some coffee, but was relieved to find it had no more than left a runnel on his bare chest. He wondered what had made his mother ask, and ask so abruptly, about his commission--a subject she as a rule approached in only the most roundabout way, or hinted at. It had been clear from her manner that she did feel strongly, but about something else: the commission, this time, had been made to act either as a diversion or an unconscious revenge--the saying of something to irk or nettle him because he had, somehow, irked or nettled her. In which case, what? Raising eyes which held, where she was concerned, the brooding intuitiveness of a young animal rather than intelligent speculation, Roderick gazed at Stella--who slightly changed her position at the end of the sofa he had called their boat. The reality of the fancy was better than the unreality of the room. In a boat you were happy to be suspended in nothing but light, air, water, opposite another face. On a sofa you could be surrounded by what was lacking. Though this particular sofa backed on a wall and stood on a carpet, it was without environment; it might have been some derelict piece of furniture exposed on a pavement after an air raid or washed up by a flood on some unknown shore. His return to his mother cried out for something better--as a meeting, this had to struggle for nature, the nature it should have had; no benevolence came to it from surrounding things. It is the music of the familiar that is awaited, on such an occasion, with most hope; love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void--at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak. Even lovers can feel this--how many passions have not been daunted by the hotel room?--and between son and mother the absence of every inanimate thing they had had in common set up an undue strain. Perhaps his fidgeting with the cushions was an attempt to acclimatise at least those. Stella and Roderick both, in their different ways, felt this evening to be beyond the powers of living they now had. They could have wished to live it as it could have been lived. Both felt the greatness inherent in being human and in their being mother and son. His homecoming should have been one more chapter added to an august book, a book on a subject greater than themselves: nothing failed, to make it so, but their vision. It may still have been such a chapter in the vision of God. Where they were concerned, the ban, the check, the caution as to all spending and most of all the expenditure of feeling restricted them. Wariness had driven away poetry: from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could. Was this war's doing? By every day, every night, existence was being further drained--you, yourself, made conscious of what was happening only by some moment, some meeting such as tonight's. Stella and Roderick were too intimate not each to extend to the other that sense of instinctive loss, and their intimacy made them too honest to play a scene. Their trouble, had it been theirs only, could have been written off as minor--the romantic dismay of two natures romantically akin. But it was more than that; it was a sign, in them, of an impoverishment of the world. There was _not__ much left for either of them to say, and in this room in which they sat nothing spoke, either--a mysterious flutter, like that of _a__ fire burning, which used to emanate from the minutes seemed to be at a stop. The actual fire's electric units, like vertical hot set lips, grinned away at the empty end of the room. At half-shadow level, some way above the lamplight, the photographs were two dark unliving squares. Outside the curtain-masked windows, down there in the street running into streets, the silence was black-out registered by the hearing. It was imperfect silence, mere resistance to sound--as though the inner tension of London were being struck and struck on without breaking. Heard or unheard, the city at war ticked over--if from this quarter, from these immediate streets, the suction of cars in private movement was gone, there was all the time a jarring at the periphery, an unintermittent pumping of vital traffic through arterial streets into arterial roads. Nor was that quite all: once or twice across the foreground of hearing a taxi careered as though under fire. The room lacked one more thing: apprehension of time. Inside it the senses were cut off from hour and season; nothing spoke but the clock. The day had gone from the moment Stella had drawn down the fitted blinds and drawn across them the deadening curtains: now nothing took its place. Every crack was stopped; not a mote of darkness could enter--the room, sealed up in its artificial light, remained exaggerated and cerebral. In spite of this, something happened--petals detached themselves from a rose in the bowl on the escritoire, to fall, one by one, on to Stella's letters on the pulled-out flap. Roderick watched them; she turned her head to see what he was looking at and watched also. Then she said: "That reminds me--three more letters from Cousin Frankie's lawyers came this week; I must show them to you. I answered them all in one." "It is awful for you me being a minor," said Roderick. "However, time will cure that. Have we come yet," he inquired, rearing up on the sofa, "to anything crucial that can be really signed? I suppose so far there's been no way of knowing when I _do__ enter into possession?" "At this rate, one would imagine when you're about eighty." "Fred's sure the whole thing ought to be simpler.--You haven't been in _all__ day writing letters on my account?" "No, no; I wrote several others--I wrote a long one to you. The only annoying thing is, not knowing you would be coming up I took today as my day off; I shall have to work tomorrow. What shall you do?" "Oh, well, it can't be helped. And it does seem more natural your being at home on Sunday.--So you were writing away when poor Mr. Harrison came?" "Why 'poor'?" "Well, for one thing you don't seem to have given him much to drink; or at any rate I don't see any glasses. Don't you like him, or is he a teetotaller?" "No." "And yet," said Roderick, glancing thoughtfully in the direction of the ashtray on the chimneypiece, "he stayed on and on. He must be fascinated by you, Mother." Stella put down her coffee cup, left the sofa and, saying something about the Mount Morris letters, went to the escritoire. It was imperative that she should overcome, with the unconscious aid of Roderick's presence, her aversion from that part of the room where, forced to listen to Harrison, she had been forced to sit. Even the papers, letters, among which she had rested her elbow, listening to him, seemed to be contaminated; she shrank, even, from phrases in purple type on which, in the course of the listening, her eyes had from time to time lit. She could, further, fancy the papers were disarranged, not quite as she had left them that afternoon--Harrison _had__, no doubt, glanced through them quickly while she was at the telephone. She wanted to burn the lot--sorry for the petals of the roses for having fallen _here__ at the end of their lovely life, she brushed the petals from the flap of the desk with a violence which was enough to make others fall. "Still, I may see you some time tomorrow evening?" she heard Roderick say. Roderick's being for one more night in London would, of course, mean her putting off Robert. She perceived, if there had not been Roderick she might have been casting about her for some other excuse. Before they did meet again she would have to think--and to think seemed of all things beyond her power. She was not, therefore, then, in effect, again to see Robert until she _had__ thought? In that case, she might never see him again. "Came all the way across London, I shouldn't wonder?" pursued Roderick, recrossing his feet in the place where Stella had sat. "I should have said he'd have had a thirst." "Who, Harrison? No, he'd been listening to the band in the park." "Oh, is that what people here still do on Sunday evening?" asked Roderick, willing to document himself as to civilian life. "But I suppose there'll be a stop to that: winter'll be coming on." "Yes, winter will be," she said, vaguely thumbing the letter she ought to show him. "It will be coming on." "Those in fact must be nearly the last roses," he pointed out, looking, with the elegiac pleasure possible at twenty, at the desk. "Mother, I don't think you ought to knock them about like that." "It's nothing more than September," she sharply said.--"Here, do you want to read this?" He reached across for the lawyer's letter, but only went on to say: "Then he's musical?" "For heaven's _sake__, Roderick--on and on about Harrison? What's the matter with you? Can't you see how he bores me?" "Then why do you have him in the flat?" "You know how people come in." "I know they keep coming into houses; I didn't think they kept coming into flats. That was the point of a flat, you once said." She sat down again on the sofa, angrily took a cushion back and, unconsciously holding it against her like a shield, said: "You're not growing up to be a bully, are you?" He seldom was, and was not this time, put out. "But I always have taken an interest in you, Mother. Once I knew most of your friends, or at least about them. I sometimes wonder where some of them are." "Then you would put them all in the past tense?" "Oh no," said Roderick, once again surprised, "I daresay it's I who am in the past tense." Forthwith he began to arrange himself for sleep, lay flat, arms folded loosely across his chest; his mouth hung slightly open after a yawn as he dropped his head back to stare up into the ceiling's inverted depths. "Did you say there were blankets?..." She stared at him, repeating: "I am so sorry about tomorrow." "I shall sleep, you see," said he, with his air of total detachment. "But not all tomorrow--how can you?" "You've no idea how I can." "But it seems such waste." "Waste of what?" She did not seem sure. "Waste..." she said again, for an instant closing her eyes. She bestirred herself and said: "What about your friends? David, for instance, came running across the street the other day to ask where you were; and I saw Hattie on the top of a bus looking so nice." "I have nothing against either David or Hattie," said Roderick tranquilly, "except that I haven't a word to say to them." "They might not expect that." "Why shouldn't they? They ought to. Fred does." "Oh, very well," said his mother.--"In case you do wake up, have you got any money?" "Well, that is a point," he conceded, knitting his brows. "I mean, it could be a point in case of--that is, I mean to say, if possibly--" He showed, for the first time this evening, signs of some inhibition. "But no," he went on, "I don't imagine, on second thoughts, that you would ever _be__ free for dinner tomorrow evening?... If you had been, you and I might have gone off somewhere and had a slight blow-out." "Roderick, there's nothing I'd like more." The answer, at any time natural, was in this instance intimi-datingly true. It was dreamlike--how long would it last, in fact?--this throwing of desire into reverse. "I can count," she said, "on your being awake by then?" "Yes.--Well," he said, sighing, "that will be very nice. In that case, I _should__ be glad if we could arrange a loan." It had been clear, since Roderick was a child, that friendship with him would have to be one-sided. Not minding if he saw a person or not had been as far, apparently, as he would ever go; though he showed a well-mannered pleasure, wrongly read as response, in efforts to entertain or attach him. Stella had seen, if never taken to heart, the folly of hopeful comment on interests he did seem inclined to form. If he was what Harrison claimed to be, without vanity, that only made him more passive in his relations with people. If his willingness to be told a quite new story wore the deceptive guise of a new friendship, the deceived one, rather than Roderick, was to blame. He coupled a liking for, a curiosity as to, what was going on with a reluctance that it should involve him--more, a positive disbelief that it ever could. In general, he was in favour of what was happening, but preferred what _had__ happened as being more complete: so far, his heart had never moved from its place, for it had felt no pull from a moving thing. His attention, as an entirety, was yet perhaps to be daunting, to be reckoned with: up to now it had never been wholly given. His motives were too direct to be called ulterior: he liked going out to tea with families who had a brook through their garden, hypothetical snakes in their uncut grass, collections of any kind in cabinets, a haunted room, a model railway, a funny uncle, a desk with a secret drawer. He attached himself to the children of such families in a flattering, obstinate, reserved way--you still could not, somehow, accuse him of cupboard love. Stella could not fairly reproach in Roderick anything that savoured of only-childishness: was it not she who had left him an only child? In, _as__ a child, preferring objects or myths to people he probably had resembled