The Death of the Heart (13 page)

Matchett sat with the captured letter in the trough of her lap. Meanwhile, her spatulate fingers bent and injured, with unknowing sensuous cruelty, like a child’s, the corners of the blue envelope. She pinched at the letter inside’s fullness, but did not take it out. “You’d be wrong to trust him,” she said.

Safe for the minute, sealed down under her eyelids, Portia lay and saw herself with Eddie. She saw a continent in the late sunset, in rolls and ridges of shadow like the sea. Light that was dark yellow lay on trees, and penetrated their dark hearts. Like a struck glass, the continent rang with silence. The country, with its slow tense dusk-drowned ripple, rose to their feet where they sat: she and Eddie sat in the door of a hut. She felt the hut, with its content of dark, behind them. The unearthly level light streamed in their faces; she saw it touch his cheekbones, the tips of his eyelashes, while he turned her way his eyeballs blind with gold. She saw his hands hanging down between his knees, and her hands hanging down peacefully beside him as they sat together on the step of the hut. She felt the touch of calmness and similarity: he and she were one without any touch but this. What was in the hut behind she did not know: this light was eternal; they would be here for ever.

Then she heard Matchett open the envelope. Her eyes sprang open; she cried: “Don’t touch that!” “I’d not have thought this of you.” “My father would understand.” Matchett shook. “You don’t care what you say.” “You’re not fair, Matchett. You don’t know.” “I know that Eddie’s never not up to something. And he makes free.
You
don’t know.”

“I do know when I’m happy. I know that.”

MAJOR BRUTT
found it simple to pay the call: everything seemed to point to his doing that. To begin with, he found that an excellent bus, a 74, took him from Cromwell Road the whole way to Regent’s Park. He was not a man to ring up; he simply rang a door bell. To telephone first would have seemed to him self-important, but he knew how to enter a house unassumingly. He had lived in parts of the world where you drop in: there seemed to him nothing complex about that. His impression of Windsor Terrace had been a warm and bright one; he looked forward today to seeing the drawingroom floor. Almost unremitting solitude in his hotel had, since his last visit, made 2 Windsor Terrace the clearinghouse for his dreams: these reverted to kind Anna and to that dear little kid with fervent, tender, quite sexless desire. A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different faces. Today, he came to recover that visionary place, round which all the rest of London was a desert. That last night, the Quaynes, seeing him out, had smiled and said heartily: “Come again.” He took it that people meant what they said—so here he was, coming again. Thomas’s having added “Ring up first” had made no impression on him whatever. They have given him
carte blanche
, so here 
he was, dropping in. He judged that Saturday should be a good day.

This Saturday afternoon Thomas, home from the office, sat at his study table, drawing cats on the blotter, waiting for Anna to come back from a lunch. He was disappointed with her for lunching out on a Saturday and for staying so late. When he heard the bell ring he looked up forbiddingly (though there was just a chance Anna might have forgotten her key), listened, frowned, put whiskers on to a cat, then looked up again. If it had been her, she would ring two or three times. The ring, however, did not repeat itself—though it lingered on uneasily in the air. Saturday made it unlikely that this could be a parcel. Telegrams were almost always telephoned through. That it could be a caller did not, at his worst moment, enter Thomas’s head. Callers were unheard of at Windsor Terrace. They had been eliminated; they simply did not occur. The Quaynes’ home life was as much their private life as though their marriage had been illicit. Their privacy was surrounded by an electric fence—friends who did not first telephone did not come.

This being so, even Phyllis, with all her aplomb, her ever-consciousness of a pretty cap, had forgotten how to cope with a plain call. She well knew the cut of “expected” people, people who all but admitted themselves, who marched in past her without the interrogatory pause. Some smiled at her, some did not—but well did she know the look of someone who knew the house. And, except for a lunch party or a dinner, nobody ever came who did not.

So, directly she opened the door and saw Major Brutt, she knew it was in her power to oppress. She raised her eyebrows and simply looked at him. For him, that promising door had opened on something on which he had not reckoned. He knew, of course, that people have parlourmaids—but that last time the hall had been so full of light, of goodbye smiles, of heaps of women’s fur coats. He faltered slightly at once: Phyllis saw the drop in his masculine confidence. Her contempt for humility made her put him down as an ex-officer travelling in vacuum cleaners, or those stockings that are too shiny to wear.

So it was with snappy triumph that she was able to say Mrs. Quayne was not at home. Modifying his expectant manner, he then asked for Mr. Quayne—which made Phyllis quite sure that this person must be wanting something. She was quite right: he was—he had come all this way to see a holy family.

“Mr. Quayne? I couldn’t say,” Phyllis replied pursily. She let her eye run down him and added “sir”. She said: “I could enquire if you liked to wait.” She looked again —he did not carry a bag, so she let him in to a certain point in the hall. Too sharp to give Thomas away by looking into the study, she started downstairs to ring through on the room-to-room telephone. As she unhooked the receiver at the foot of the basement stairs, intending to say, “Please, sir, I think there is someone —” she heard Thomas burst open his door, come out and make some remark. Now Mrs. Quayne would not have allowed that.

In the seconds before Thomas came to his door, Major Brutt may have realised this was a better house to be brought back to in triumph than to make one’s way into under one’s own steam. While he looked up the draught-less stairs behind the white arches, some aspirations faded out of his mind. He glanced at the console table, but did not like to put down his hat yet: he stood sturdily, doubtfully. Then a step just inside that known door made him re-animate like a dog: his moustache broadened a little, ready for a smile.

“Oh,
you:
splendidl” said Thomas—he held his hand out, flat open, with galvanised heartiness. “I thought I heard someone’s voice. Look here, I’m so sorry you—”

“Look here, I do hope I’m not—”

“Oh, good God, no! I was simply waiting for Anna. She’s out at some sort of lunch—you know how long those things take.”

Major Brutt had no idea—it had seemed to him rather more near teatime. He said: “They must be great places for talk,” as Thomas, incompletely resigned, got him into the study, with rather too much fuss. The room now held fumy heavy afternoon dusk—Thomas had been asleep in here for an hour before unscrewing his pen, opening the blotter and sitting down with some of his papers out. “Everyone talks,” said Thomas. “I can’t think, can you, how they keep it up.” He looked at his cats with nostalgia, shut the blotter, swept some papers into a drawer and shut the drawer with a click. That was that, he seemed to say, I
was
busy, but never mind. Meanwhile, Major Brutt pulled his trousers up at the knees and lowered himself into an armchair.

Thomas, trying to concentrate, said: “Brandy?”

“Thanks, no: not just now.”

Thomas took this with a just touch of rancour—it made the position less easy than ever. Major Brutt was clearly counting on tea, and the Quaynes would be likely to cut tea out. Anna, with whom large lunches did not agree, would be likely to come home claustrophobic and cross. She and Thomas had planned to walk once right round the park, after that, at perhaps about five, to so to a French film. At the cinema they felt loverlike; they often returned in a taxi arm in arm. Thomas had a notion that, for Major Brutt, the little kid Portia might do just as well—in fact, she might really be his object. But, annoyingly, Portia was not to be found either. Saturday was her free day, when she might have been expected to be about. But having come for her lunch, Thomas was told, she had gone out immediately—nobody knew where. Matchett was said to say that she might not be in for tea. Thomas found he had formed, with regard to Portia, just enough habit of mind to be cross that she was not about on Saturday afternoon.

This accumulating worry made Thomas ask himself what on earth had made him go to the door when he might have stayed playing possum. Had the sense of siege in here oppressed him, or had he, in fact, felt lonelier than he thought? The
worry
of sitting facing this patient manl Then he gave Major Brutt a quick, undecided mean look. One had clearly got the idea this Brutt was out of a job: had he not said something about irons in the fire? That meant he was after something. That was why he had come.
Now,
no doubt, he had something soft in Quayne and Merrett’s in view—he would not be the first old buffer who had.

Then, Thomas had a crisis of self-repugnance. Twitching his head away, with a shamefaced movement, from that block of integrity in the armchair, he saw how business had built him, Thomas, into a false position, a state of fortification odious, when he noticed it, to himself. He could only look out through slits at grotesque slits of faces, slits of the view. His vision became, from habit, narrow and falsified. Seeing anything move, even an animal, he thought: What is this meant to lead to?

Or a gesture would set him off: Oh, so
that’s
what he’s after… . Oh, then what
does
he want? Society was self-interest given a pretty gloss. You felt the relentless pressure behind small-talk. Friendships were dotted with null pauses, when one eye in calculation sought the clock. Love seemed the one reprieve from the watchfulness: it annihilated this uneasy knowledge. He could love with regard to nothing else. Therefore he loved without any of that discretion known to more natural natures—which is why astute men are so often betrayed.

Whatever he’s after, or not after, he thought, we certainly can’t use him. Quayne and Merrett’s only wanted flair, and one sort of distilled nervosity. They could use any number of Eddies, but not one Brutt. He felt Brutt ought to try for some sort of area travel in something or other—perhaps, however, he was trying for that already. All he seemed to have to put on the market was (query) experience, that stolid alertness, that pebble-grey direct look that Thomas was finding morally hypnotic. There was, of course, his courage—something now with no context, no function, no outlet, fumbled over, rejected, likely to fetch nothing. Makes of men date, like makes of cars; Major Brutt was a 1914-18 model: there was now no market for that make. In fact, only his steadfast persistence in living made it a pity that he could not be scrapped… . No, we cannot use him. Thomas once more twitched his head.—Major Brutt’s being (frankly) a discard put the final blot on a world Thomas did not like.

Major Brutt, offered Thomas’s cigarette case with rather hostile abruptness, hesitated, then decided to smoke. This ought to steady him. (That he wanted steadying, Thomas had no idea.) The fact was, the fact of Thomas, Thomas as Anna’s husband, was a lasting shock. Major Brutt remembered Anna as Pidgeon’s lover only. The picture of that great evening together—Anna, himself, Pidgeon—was framed in his mind, and could not be taken down—it was the dear possession of someone with few possessions, carried from place to place. When he had come on Anna in the Empire foyer, it could be no one but Pidgeon that she was waiting for: his heart had gone up because he would soon see Pidgeon. Then Thomas had come through the foyer, spoken about the taxi, put his hand under Anna’s elbow with a possessing smile. That was the shock (though she had first said she was married), and it was a shock still. That one great evening—hers, Pidgeon’s, his own—had made one continuous thread through his own uncertain days. He would recall it at times when he felt low. Anna’s marriage to Pidgeon had been one great thing he had to look forward to. When Pidgeon kept saying nothing, and still said nothing, Major Brutt only thought they were waiting a long time. There is no fidelity like the fidelity of the vicarious lover who has once seen a kiss. By being married to Thomas, for having been married to Thomas for eight London years, Anna annihilated a great part of Major Brutt. He thought, from her unhappily calm smile in the Empire foyer, that she must see what she had done to him; he had taken some of her kindness for penitence. When later, back in her home, she with her woman’s good manners had led him to talk of Pidgeon, their sole mutual friend, she had laid waste still more. He had not known how to bear it when she spoke of Pidgeon and the plate and the orange. Only Portia’s presence made him bear it at all.

But a man must live. Not for nothing do we invest so 
much of ourselves in other people’s lives—or even in momentary pictures of people we do not know. It cuts both ways: the happy group inside the lighted window, the figure in long grass in the orchard seen from the train stay and support us in our dark hours. Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do. It is the emotion to which we remain faithful, after all: we are taught to recover it in some other place. Major Brutt, brought that first night to Windsor Terrace at the height of his inner anguish on Pidgeon’s account, already began to attach himself to that warm room. For hospitality, and that little girl on the rug, he began to abandon Pidgeon already. Even he had a ruthlessness in his sentiments—and he had been living alone in a Cromwell Road hotel. The glow on the rug, Anna on the sofa with her pretty feet up, Thomas nosing so kindly round for cigars, Portia nursing her elbows as though they had been a couple of loved cats—here was the focus of the necessary dream. All the same it was Thomas he, still, could not quite away with. He hoped, by taking Thomas’s cigarette, by being a little further in debt to him, to feel more naturally to him, as man to man.