The Heat of the Day (7 page)

most other children: her unformed worry began when he failed to grow out of this. Having once seemed old he now seemed young for his age. Her anxiety mingled with self-reproach--how if he came to set too much store by a world of which she, both as herself and as an instrument of her century, had deprived him? He would have esteemed, for instance, organic family life: she had not only lost his father for him but estranged herself (and him with her) from all his father's relations. She could perceive, too, that Roderick was ready to entertain a high, if abstract, idea of society--when he had been a baby she had amused him by opening and shutting a painted fan, and of that _beau monde__ of figures, grouped and placed and linked by gestures or garlands, he never had, she suspected, lost interior sight. The fan on its fragile ivory spokes now remained closed: she felt him most happy when they could recreate its illusion in their talk. Yes, what he liked about people was the order in which they could be arranged. Such idealisation of pattern, these days, also alarmed his mother. She had supposed for some time that adolescence might make him more difficult but less odd--it had not yet done so when he went into the Army. Before that, she had watched him being confronted by people not only patternlessly doing what they liked but, still more preposterous from his point of view, expecting to be liked for their own sakes.... Since she felt, or believed she felt, that Roderick ought to change, how foolish to dread lest the Army change him! "Well, it's your leave, darling," she said. "Do as you like." Roderick was loth to remind his mother that she had so far done nothing about the blankets--however, nature spoke for him: he sneezed twice. At this she started up. He unfolded his arms in order to delve about, underneath himself in the cushions, then down the cracks of the sofa, for a handkerchief. Nothing, however, came of this.--"Wait," he said, "or possibly in this pocket?" He dived his hand into the slippery pocket of the dressing-gown; in which, audibly, it came upon at least _something__. Stella and he both heard the tired crackle of paper--paper long ago folded, pulped by age in its folds, limp from being in silk near a body's warmth. The sound from that pocket of Robert's made Stella start: her eyes, with an uncontrollable vehemence, interrogated her son's. "Correspondence?" Roderick vaguely said: he fished out the paper, lay holding and staring at it, noncommittally twiddled it round and round. "It's not yours," she sharply said. "Put it back." "Or had you better take charge of it? It might fall out again." "It didn't _fall__ out this time," she could not help remarking. "However, it always might; and you never know." She said: "What on earth do you mean?" "Well, you never know, you know, who might pick up what. And isn't what Robert's at quite important?" She over-easily smiled, took the paper from him, made ready to tear it up. "Hi!" he expostulated, "It isn't yours, either." "It can't be anything much." "Still," he said gravely, "it was found worth keeping." "So are old bus tickets and empty match-books and receipts for things at two-and-eleven-three, and en-velopes telegrams have arrived in." "I am sure, though, you ought to have a look at it." "Are you?" she said derisively, holding the twice-folded paper, dingy along its edges, pincer-nipped between her fingers and thumbs. She was aware of Roderick's eyes upon her in a suspended, dispassionate curiosity. Up to now, with that evasiveness a division between any two loves makes natural, she never had come to the point of asking herself what Roderick thought, or did not think, of herself and Robert. It could be possible that Roderick had succeeded in thinking nothing. If so, here was a crisis for them both. Like an ignorant looker-on at some famous game, trying to grasp the score and get the hang of the rules, he was watching to see what she would now do--expecting, evidently, to learn how far the prerogative of love went. He was waiting to see if this paper from Robert's pocket did count, was to be counted, as also hers. What a blunder, this bringing things to a head by this insane show of tearing the paper up! All the proprieties, everything sweet and lasting between herself and Roderick seemed to be caught up into this moment--in which she could hardly spare _them__ a thought. This was dynamite, between her fingers and thumbs. That she was terrified of the paper--she wondered, could Roderick see that, too? This secretively-folded grey-blue half-sheet became the corpus of suspicion--of guilt, hers, baseness, hers. What did she feel to be possible?--and, how could she? Smiling, as though Roderick were some atrocious contemporary, she remarked: "It always could be a letter from a woman." He said naïvely: "Oh, I shouldn't think so, should you?--No, more likely notes on some conversation." "But why should anybody make notes on a conversation?" "Why, but really, Mother," he exclaimed, heaving himself up on the sofa for greater emphasis, "conversations are the leading thing in this war! Even I know that. Everything you and I have to do is the result of something that's been said. How far do you think we'd get without conversations? And can you really suppose that someone where Robert is doesn't have conversations _about__ conversations, even if he doesn't have conversations himself?" "Very well, very well, very well; I daresay he does." "And in that case," said Roderick, lying back mollified, "he might be expected to jot down points." She, however, went on staring at nothing, till she suddenly asked: "Do _you__ believe what you're told?" "Depends on what I'm told, and who tells me." "Naturally. But, in general?" "Well, I am not told much. In fact, Fred says, it comes to seem fishy when one _is__ told anything. Go by what you find out for yourself, he says. If a thing's true, you find it sticks out a mile once you come to look. Whereas if anybody goes out his way to tell you something, Fred says you can take it he's got an axe to grind." "If what you were told were about someone you knew?" "In that case, how could I be told anything? If I properly knew the person I'd already know the thing--I should imagine. If I knew what I was told was true, it would not be news to me. If it both was news to me and then did turn out to be true, I suppose I should take it that after all I never had properly known the person." "It all sounds so simple." "Well, so it should; it is." He qualified this, however, by uncertainly, broodingly, looking at Stella's face. "It would be no good," he warned her, "coming to me for answers about anything complicated--I don't know anyone well except you and Fred." "Perhaps Fred might know what to do with a piece of paper?" "Might it not just be best if I simply put it back again where it came from?" Roderick, having cleared his nose by an exhaustive, racking, prolonged sniff, added: "All I was doing was looking for a handkerchief. No luck, however.--Could I have one of yours? Not one of those better ones with the monograms." She nodded. Rapidly she had unfolded the sheet of paper: now she was glancing through what was written on it in a semi-abstracted, calm, quite business-like way. "Nothing at all," she said, "as we might have known." Idly, she tore it across once, still more idly tore it across again, then stood up to brush the pieces from her dress to the floor. "We shall need the waste-paper basket," Roderick said. But she had walked away, humming, to come back with blankets and a handkerchief: she rugged up Roderick for the night while he blew his nose. By the time St. Marylebone clock struck twelve the sofa had become a solitary bed. Through the dividing door between this and the other room he, still just on the surface, still just afloat, heard his mother moving dilatorily about, heard her pearl necklace being trickled on to the glass-topped table, on to which tops dropped from little bottles and pots. She kicked off her shoes, hung up her dress with a clatter of hangers along a rod. Soon he did not distinguish between what he heard and what he dreamed he heard: she might or might not have said quietly, "Roderick?"--something, however, made him open his eyes. She had left a lamp alight on the stool beside him: the watery circle on the ceiling seemed for the moment to swell or tremble--so earthquake stories begin; but this could be only London giving one of her sleepy galvanic shudders, of which an echo ran through his relaxed limbs. The lamp's dazzling shade was on a level with his eyes: beyond it the tide of his own sleep submerged and blurred what was in the room. He had only to put out a hand to put out the lamp, but for some time he continued to lie and stare at it with the beatific helplessness of a drugged person--till at last, with a sigh like an exclamation, he heaved himself over, face inwards to the back of the sofa. He fell asleep with his forehead butted into the tense brocade. In the other room, the telephone was given time to ring only one note. Stella answered it in a hurried low voice. "Back?" she said.... "Listen, I can't talk now. Roderick's here, asleep--I think.... I did not know myself: he came up this evening.... Forty-eight hours."

Chapter 4

RODERICK had rightly pigeonholed Harrison as the man at the funeral--Cousin Francis Morris's. It had been on that occasion, four months ago, that Stella had for the first time met him. None of the little family party of mourners knew him, or had any idea who he was or how he came to be there--the funeral was meant to be strictly private. Wearing a dark suit, the intruder had occupied a pew to himself, some way down the church, some way back from the last of the rows of relatives. Afterwards, as the party straggled away from the graveside, out through the lych-gate and down the village street, he was found to have attached himself to its tail end. Stella's first view of him, glancing back, had been of someone stepping cranelike over the graves. During the procession to the hotel, at which a buffet lunch was to be served in a private room, the idea sprang up, to be discussed in murmurs, that he must have taken the funeral to be that of someone other than Francis Morris. The idea of his performing a pious duty under a wrong impression became embarrassing: no one cared to address him. Stella had on the whole been grateful for the diversion Harrison's presence caused. For her, the day had not been an easy one; it involved, as well as the train journey to this old-world nucleus of a new dormitory town, the presenting of some sort of face to her once relations-in-law. She had not seen any of them, they had not seen her, since the disastrous end of her short marriage; they had every reason to feel coolly towards her, and today, in the main, gave evidence that they did. She had nearly not come to the funeral at all: for her, the goodbye she had spoken to Cousin Francis on the steps of his Irish house, at the end of her honeymoon, could be most happily left as the final one. The news of his death had done little more than stir up unwelcome memories--her melancholy, rather guilty regard for him had for a long time been of the kind one has for the dead. His actual death returned him to life again--his glass-grey eyes careering round their sockets, his kind wild smile and ragged pepper-and-salt moustache. His gestures, the intonations of his voice gained a renewed sharpness from the fact that they now would be made no more, heard no more. She had lost touch with the living Francis Morris completely: she had not even known him to be in England till she heard of his dying suddenly in this place. She had come to the funeral because the lawyer's letter, notifying her of the arrangements made, had been in its final paragraph so worded as to suggest that she _should__ be there with her son. She had been surprised, as things were, at the invitation. But she had also come because she recalled Cousin Francis as being, like other Irishmen, himself an unfailing, feeling funeral-goer: three times, during their stay with him, had he set out, top-hatted, black as a crow all over, to travel unnumbered miles. The unfairness, not of his dying but of his dying as and where he had, touched and wounded her. War made the return of his body to Ireland impracticable: at home, his funeral following would have been a mile long--he was a respected landlord. As it was, death had surprised him in this neighbourless place: he had, even, few relatives left living in any part of England. After his seizure and death in the span of minutes, his lawyer--or, rather, the London representative of his Dublin lawyers--had been telephoned for and had taken charge, making the few sombre, meagre arrangements for what should have been Cousin Francis's greatest sociable day. There was no chief mourner; no one figure stood out from the indefinite level of cousinship; an awkward lack of priority made itself felt more and more among those present. There was wanting not only a head but a core of grief. They let themselves be shepherded by the lawyer. Cousin Francis's death from a heart-attack at Wisteria Lodge could hardly have given more trouble; everything had had to be hushed up. It could have endangered the equilibrium of Dr. and Mrs. Tringsby's six tranquil uncertified mental patients, of whom Nettie Morris, the dead man's wife, was one. The whole frightful occurrence had confirmed the Tringsbys' prejudice against visitors: aided by the war, they had for some years succeeded in staving off Cousin Francis. They had felt he would prove upsetting--and so he had. Happily, the thing had been swiftly dealt with while the dear people were induced to keep to their rooms--the first to escape was fended off from the drawingroom by being told someone had gone to Heaven. Cousin Nettie, busy with arts and crafts, expected nothing, guessed nothing, was told nothing. She had not only forgotten Cousin Francis was coming, she happened to be enjoying one of those happy spells in which she was unaware that she had a husband at all. Cousin Nettie was very well where she was. Heaven had intervened on her behalf, for she could not have set eyes on her husband's face without dreading that he had come to take her away. This would have returned to its full force her dread of having to cross the sea. Having been left undisturbed at Wisteria Lodge for years, she was now, the Tringsbys were certain, much more herself. She had possibly never been as happy as she now was; in the prospect of Cousin Francis's visit her good friends foresaw the undoing of their work. The elderly man's pigheadedness in the whole matter was more inexplicable--now that they thought it over--than, even, his collapse: the post mortem had revealed cause for the first; nothing rationalised the second. Up to a month or two ago he had been the ideal patient's husband--elsewhere, quiescent, steadily (through his solicitors) paying up. _No__ visit, in the Tringsbys' opinion, could be expected to go off completely well: Cousin Francis' missed by a hairs-breadth being a total fiasco for Wisteria Lodge. Death came on him, however, in the drawingroom, before he set foot on the stairs to poor Nettie's room. The taxi bespoken by Cousin Francis to drive him back again to the station had arrived on the tail of the ambulance coming for his body: both were greeted by music from gramophones wafted out of the windows of the patients' rooms. This month, the flower which gave the house its name bloomed in mauve trickles down the cream stucco front. Late afternoon sun struck on the blue curtains drawn hastily across the drawingroom windows. It irritated Dr. Tringsby, who in these days had difficulty in arranging motor-car outings for his patients, to see the taxi going to waste. When Cousin Francis had at last been removed, the Tringsbys sat down and looked at each other; and this signalised the dawn of a mood in which they saw no reason to do anything more. They had already telephoned to the dead man's lawyer, with whom they had always been in touch--it being he who made all arrangements for Cousin Nettie, and paid, as meticulously as he scrutinised, their account. He thought highly of them and they thought highly of him. The lawyer could be relied on to see their point, which was that the funeral could not, under any conditions, be expected to take place "from" Wisteria Lodge. Next day, Mrs. Tringsby so far rallied herself as to telephone to the florist's, for a beautiful wreath--which Cousin Nettie must send but not be allowed to see. Mrs. Tringsby inscribed the card with: "_From his loving wife. Till the day break and the shadows flee away__." It was she who suggested that the Station Hotel might be persuaded to run a light buffet lunch. Unexpectedly--and, it was felt, nicely--Mrs. Tringsby turned up at the funeral: more, she brought with her the two steadiest of the patients, to swell the mourners' mournfully thin ranks. These two were told nothing more than that this was the funeral of a gentleman who had died: they enjoyed themselves quietly and asked no questions. Cousin Francis's visit to Wisteria Lodge had been a matter of honour, not merely of obstination. His real object in making the journey to England had been, to offer that country his services in the war--his own country's abstention had been a severe blow, but he had never sat down under a blow yet. Bound to Mount Morris both by passion and duty, he had waited two and a half years for Eire to reverse her decision: hopes of German invasion had for part of that time sustained him--he had dug tank-traps in the Mount Morris avenues--but as those hopes petered out he resolved to act. It appeared that he might have waited just too long, for by now the regulations affecting an Eire subject's travel to England had been forbiddingly tightened up. Having tried everything, everyone, in an increasing frenzy, Cousin Francis found he could only obtain an exit permit on "compassionate" grounds--the pretext of a visit to his afflicted wife. The repugnance to him, and the pointless-ness, of the visit he must therefore endeavour to overlook. Though annoyed by the tone of the Tringsbys' letters, he could not at heart have agreed with them more profoundly that Nettie was better left alone. But not having, in the course of his sixty-five years, ever obtained anything under false pretences, he could not, as he saw things, omit Wisteria Lodge. An Irish gentleman's honour is a hard master--he decided to swallow the pill at once, polish Nettie off, then have his time his own. So--having spent one day in his London hotel, writing letters to influential people he thought he knew and people he knew who he thought might be influential, and having kept one appointment--he caught the train into the Home Counties next morning. To be out of town for some hours, at this juncture, should just give the letters time to mature. Of course, if anyone were to telephone it would be a pity: he charged the hotel to tell them he would be back by eight. The recipients of his letters learned from the _Times__ announcement that they had been spared the embarrassment of replying. The insertion of the word "suddenly" in the notice, and the suppression of the locale of the death, gave rise in some quarters to the notion that Cousin Francis had been killed by a bomb. This, in a month when enemy action was not severe, seemed particularly tough on the poor old chap who had so lately quitted his own safe shores. Otherwise, for the death, under any circumstances, of an obscure and elderly Irish landowner there could not be much emotion to spare. It was recollected, with a final breath of relief, that the widow was in no state to receive letters. Most grateful of all was the intimation that the funeral was to be strictly private. Stella had been among the few to be notified as to time and place. The lawyer's letter, redirected from her prewar address, only arrived on the eve of the day itself--she had made this her justification for not so much as trying to contact Roderick. She did not see how he could get leave at such short notice, for the funeral of a first cousin once-removed. It was difficult enough to get leave herself. All the same, she ought--as she recollected only when she was halfway there in the train--to have let Roderick know Cousin Francis _was__ dead: he was a name at least, and her son set store by names--though Roderick's only connection with Cousin Francis was that of having been conceived under his roof. To face the truth of the matter, she did not want Roderick with her on this occasion--did not want him to see her being cold-shouldered, even possibly cut; nor did she want him eyed, in a solicitous manner, as being a bad mother's fatherless son. The world in which one could still be seen as _declassée__ was on the whole ignored by her, but not yet quite. Alone, she could hope to keep cool and wear a face. As the train slowed down for the station, she hastily glanced at herself in her handbag mirror, trying on an expression of imperviousness--even, should it be necessary, of effrontery. The London black suit she wore, though severe and matt, somehow failed altogether to look like mourning. No other mourner seemed, after all, to have been in the train with her: all others must have allowed the margin necessary for being in good time. She lost her way between the station and the church, made her entrance only just _not__ late, and, as she clicked up the aisle on her high heels, felt treacherous colour flaming up her cheeks. Several heads half-turned, and at the half-turn paused. She carried a bunch of tulips and white lilac, but was too shy to place this on the exposed coffin, adorned only, so far, by Cousin Nettie's wreath. Delinquent in being known to be who she was, she could not fail to recognise Harrison as a fellow-delinquent in being not known to be anyone. How right she had been, she thought, to keep Roderick out of this. It was not till she learned what was in the will that she saw she had been, on the contrary, very wrong. It was Roderick who ought to have headed the wavering procession out of the church; it was Roderick who should have stationed himself at the raw lip of the lonely grave, coming as near as he could to the sonless man who by naming him heir had sought him out as a son. Cousin Francis left Mount Morris and the land to Roderick--"in the hope," it was written, "that he may care in his own way to carry on the old tradition." Such capital as had not been placed in trust to provide for the widow during her lifetime went direct to Roderick; the rest would come to him later. There was not very much. It was not, of course, till they had reached the hotel that she was taken aside to be told this. Up to then, the lawyer was occupied in moving sheepdog-like, in his shadowy role of host, up and down the little straggle of mourners, improvising a murmured remark for each. The gathering, one learned, was by no means over; for ever-severer cuts in the train service so worked out that nobody could depart, on the up _or__ down line, for something under two hours more. It was therefore necessary to acclimatise the sad visitors, and at least to coax them to linger over their buffet lunch. There was, frankly, not much here to view and admire, except the church--of which, by this time, they had had enough. So, at least, said the lawyer--Mrs. Tringsby, more locally proud, pointed out landmarks along the street. The main street was by now empty: today nothing more would happen. Before noon the housewives had swarmed, so completely, whitely, stripping the shops that one might ask oneself why these remained open. A scale or two adhered to the fishmonger's marble slab; the pastrycook's glass shelves showed a range of interesting crumbs; the fruiterer filled a longstanding void with fans of cardboard bananas and a "Dig for Victory" placard; the greengrocer's crates had been emptied of all but earth by those who had somehow failed to dig hard enough. The butcher flaunted unknown joints of purplish meat in the confidence that these could not be bought; the dairy restricted itself to a china cow; the grocer, with