The Death of the Heart (40 page)

When Anna had written this, she glanced at the clock. If she were to send this to post now, it could only reach Eddie tomorrow morning. But if it went round by special messenger, he would find it when he came in, late. That is the hour when letters make most impression. So Anna rang up for a special messenger.

At half-past four, that same Monday afternoon, Lilian and Portia came up Miss Paullie’s area steps into Cavendish Square. Lilian had taken some time washing her wrists, for her new bangles, though showy, left marks on them. So these two were the last of a long straggle of girls. After the silence of the classroom, the square seemed to be drumming with hot sound; the high irregular buildings with their polished windows stood glaring in afternoon light. The trees in the middle tossed in a draught that went creeping round the square, turning the pale under-sides of their leaves up. Coming out from lessons, the girls stepped into an impermeable stone world that the melting season could not penetrate—though seeing the branches in metallic sunlight they felt some forgotten spring had once left its mark there.

Lilian cast a look at those voluptuous plaits that hung over her shoulders, down her bosom. Then she said: “Where are you going now?”

“I told you: I am meeting someone at six.”

“That’s what I mean—six is not now, you silly. I mean, are you going home for tea, or what?”

Very nervous, Portia said: “I’m not going home.”

“Then look, we might have tea in a shop. I think some tea might be good for your nerves.”

“You really are being very kind, Lilian.”

“Of course, I can see you are upset. I know myself 
what that is, only
too
well.”

“But I’ve only got sixpence.”

“Oh, I’ve got three shillings. After what I’ve been through myself,” said Lilian, guiding Portia down the side of the square, “I don’t think you ever ought to be shy of me. And you can keep my handkerchief till this evening, in case you need it again when you meet whoever it is, but please let me have it back tomorrow, don’t let them wash it, because it is one with associations.”

“You are being kind.”

“I go right off my food when I am upset; if I try to eat I simply vomit at once. I thought at lunch, you’re lucky not to be like that, because of course it attracts attention. It was a pity you had attracted attention by being caught using Miss Paullie’s telephone. I must say, I should never dare do that. She was perfectly beastly, I suppose?”

“She was scornful of me,” said Portia: her lip trembled again. “She has always thought I was awful since last term, when she found me reading that letter I once got. She makes me feel it’s the way I was brought up.”

“She is just at the age when women go queer, you know.
Where
did you say you had got to meet your friend?”

“Near the Strand.”

“Oh, quite near your brother’s office?” said Lilian, giving Portia a look from her large near-in gelatinous dark grey eyes. “I do think, Portia, you ought to be careful: an untrustworthy man can simply ruin one’s life.”

“If there wasn’t
something
one could trust a person about, surely one wouldn’t start to like them at all?”

“I don’t see the point of our being such bosom friends 
if you don’t confess to me that this is really Eddie.”

“Yes, but I’m not upset because of him; I’m upset about something that’s gone on.”

“Something at home?”

“Yes.”

“Do you mean your sister-in-law? I always did think she was a dangerous woman, though I did not like to tell you so at the time. Look, don’t tell me about this in Regent Street, because people are looking at us already. We will go to that A.B.C. opposite the Polytechnic; we are less likely to be recognised there. I think it’s safer than Fuller’s. Try and be calm, Portia.”

Actually, it was Lilian who commanded attention by looking sternly into every face. Beside her goddess-like friend, Portia walked with her head down, butting against the draughty air of the street. When they came to the crossing, Lilian gripped Portia’s bare arm in a gloved hand: through the kid glove a sedative animal feeling went up to Portia’s elbow and made the joint untense. She pulled back to notice a wedding carpet up the steps of All Souls’, Langham Place—like a girl who has finished the convulsions of drowning she floated, dead, to the sunny surface again. She bobbed in Lilian’s wake between the buses with the gaseous lightness of a little corpse.

“Though you are able to eat,” said Lilian, propping her elbows on the marble-topped table and pulling off her gloves by the finger tips (Lilian never uncovered any part of her person without a degree of consciousness: there was a little drama when she untied a scarf or took off her hat), “though you are able to eat, I should not try anything rich.” She caught a waitress’s eye and ordered what she thought right. “Look what a far-off table I got,” she said. “You need not be afraid of saying anything now. I say, why don’t you take off your hat, instead of keeping on pushing it back?”

“Oh Lilian, I haven’t really got much to tell you, you know.”

“Don’t be so humble, my dear; you told me there was a plot.”

“All I meant was, they have been laughing at me.”

“What made them laugh?”

“They have been telling each other.”

“Do you mean Eddie, too?”

Portia only gave Lilian an on-the-run look. Obedient slowly, she took off the ingenuous little hat that Anna thought suitable for her years, and put the hat placatingly down between them. “The other day,” she said, “that day we couldn’t walk home together, I ran into Mr. St. Quentin Miller—I don’t think I told you?— and he very nearly gave me tea in a shop.”

Lilian poured out, reproachful. “It does no good,” she said, “to keep on going off like that. You are only pleased you nearly had tea with St. Quentin because he is an author. But you don’t love him, do you?”

“Eddie
has
been an author, if it comes to that.”

“I don’t suppose St. Quentin’s half so mean as Eddie, laughing at you with your sister-in-law.”

“Oh,
I didn’t say that! I never did!”

“Then what’s the reason you’re so mad with her? You said you didn’t want to go home.”

“She’s read my diary.”

“But good gracious, Portia, I
never
knew you ever—”

“You see, I never did tell a soul.”

“You are a dark horse, I must say. But then, how did
she
know?”

“I never did tell a soul.”

“You swear you never did?”

“Well, I never did tell a single soul but Eddie …”

Lilian shrugged her shoulders, raised her eyebrows and poured more hot water into the teapot with an expression Portia dared not read.

“We-ell,” she said, “well, good gracious, what
more
do you want? There you are—that’s just what I mean, you seel Of course I call that a plot.”

“I didn’t mean him. I don’t mean a plot like that.”

“Look, eat some of that plain cake; you ought to eat if you can. Besides, I’m afraid people will look at us. You know, I don’t think you’re fit to go all the way down the Strand. If you didn’t eat any cake, we could afford a taxi. I shall go with you, Portia: I don’t mind, really. I think he ought to see you have got a friend.”

“Oh, he
is
a friend. He is my friend all the time.”

“And I shall wait, too,” Lilian went on, “in case you should be too much upset.”

“You are being so kind—but I’d rather go alone.”

There is no doubt that sorrow brings one down in the world. The aristocratic privilege of silence belongs, you soon find out, to only the happy state—or, at least, to the state when pain keeps within bounds. With its accession to full power, feeling becomes subversive and violent: the proud part of the nature is battered down. Then, those people who flock to the scenes of accidents, who love most of all to dwell on deaths or childbirths or on the sickbed from which restraint has gone smell what is in the air and are on the spot at once, pressing close with a sort of charnel good will. You may first learn you are doomed by seeing those vultures in the sky. Yet perhaps they are not vultures; they are Elijah’s ravens. They bring with them the sense that the most individual sorrow has a stupefying universality. In them, human nature makes felt its clumsy wisdom, its efficacity, its infallible ready reckoning, its low level from which there is no further to drop. Accidents become human property: only a muffish dread of living, a dread of the universal in our natures, makes us make these claims for “the privacy of grief.” In naiver, humbler, nobler societies, the sufferer becomes public property; the scene of any disaster soon loses its isolated hush. The proper comment on grief, the comment that returns it to poetry, comes not in the right word, the faultless perceptive silence, but from the chorus of vulgar unsought friends—friends who are strangers to the taste and the mind.

In fact, there is no consoler, no confidant that half the instinct does not want to reject. The spilling over, the burst of tears and words, the ejaculation of the private personal grief accomplishes itself, like a convulsion, in circumstances that one would never choose. Confidants
in extremis
—with their genius for being present, their power to bring the clearing convulsion on—are, exceedingly often if not always, idle, morbid, trivial or adolescent people, or people who feel a vacuum they are eager to fill. Not to these would one show, in happier moments, some secret spring of one’s nature, the pride of love, the ambition, the sustaining hope; one could share with them no delicate pleasure in living: they are people who make discussion impossible. Their brutalities, their intrusions and ineptitudes are, at the same time, possible when one could not endure the tender touch. The finer the nature, and the higher the level at which it seeks to live, the lower, in grief, it not only sinks but dives: it goes to weep with beggars and mountebanks, for these make the shame of being unhappy less.

So
that, that unendurable Monday afternoon (two days after Portia had seen Eddie with Anna, nearly a week after St. Quentin’s revelation—long enough for the sense of two allied betrayals to push up to full growth, like a double tree) nobody could have come in better than Lilian. The telephone crisis, before lunch at Miss Paullie’s, had been the moment for Lilian to weigh in. To be discovered by Lilian weeping in the cloakroom had at once brought Portia inside that sub-tropical zone of feeling: nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms. To be consoled, to be understood by Lilian was like extending to weep in a ferny grot, whose muggy air and clammy frond-touches relax, demoralise and pervade you. The size of everything alters: when you look up with wet eyes trees look no more threatening than the ferns. Factitious feeling and true feeling come to about the same thing, when it comes to pain. Lilian’s arabesques of the heart, the unkindness of the actor, made her eye Portia with doomful benevolence—and though she at this moment withdrew the cake plate, she started to count her money and reckon up the cost of the taxi fare.

“Well, as you feel,” she said. “If you’re crazy to go alone. But don’t let the taxi stop where you’re really
going.
You know, you might be blackmailed, you never know.”

“I am only going to Covent Garden.”

“My dear—why ever not tell me that before?”

EDDIE
did not think Covent Garden a good place to meet, but he had had no time to think of anywhere else— his telephone talk with Portia had been cut off at her end while he was still saying they might surely do better. He had to be thankful that there had, at least, been time to put the lid on her first idea: she had proposed to meet him in the entrance foyer of Quayne and Merrett’s. And this—for she was such a good, discreet little girl, trained to awe of Thomas’s office—had been enough to show her desperate sense of emergency. She would arrive distraught. No, this would never have done.

Particularly, it would not have done this week. For Eddie’s relations with the firm of Quayne and Merrett were (apart from the telephone trouble, of which, still unconscious, he was to hear from Anna) at the present moment, uncertain enough. He had annoyed many people by flitting about the office as though he were some denizen of a brighter clime. There had been those long week-ends. More, the absence of Thomas, the apparent susceptibility of Merrett to one’s personal charm had beguiled Eddie into excesses of savage skittishness: he had bounced his weight about; he had been more nonchalant in the production of copy, at once more coy and insolent in his manners than (as it had been 
borne in on him lately) was acceptable here. He had lately got three chits of a damping nature, with Merrett’s initials, and the threat of an interview that did not promise to take the usual course. There had been an unseemly scene in a near-by bar, with a more than low young man recruited by Mr. Merrett, when Eddie had been warned, with a certain amount of gusto, that one could not go to all lengths as Mrs. Quayne’s fancy boy. This had been a time when a young man in the tradition should have knocked the speaker’s teeth down his throat: Eddie’s attempt to look at once disarming, touchy, tickled and not taken aback had just not come off, and his automatic giggle had done nothing to clear the air. Mr. Quayne’s kid sister sitting in the foyer would, without doubt, have been the finish of him.