The Death of the Heart (44 page)

“I don’t see why. I thought when people were young that they were allowed to expect life to be ordinary. It did seem more like that at the seaside, but as soon as Eddie came it got all queer, and I saw even the Heccombs did not believe in it. If they did, why were they so frightened by Eddie? Eddie used to say it was he and I who were mad, but he used to seem to think we were right, too. But today he said we were wrong: he said I gave him the horrors and told me to go away.”

“That’s it, is it? You two have had a quarrel?”

“He’s shown me all my mistakes—but I have not known what to do. He says I’ve gone on taping him too much. I never could stop asking him why he did some things: you see, I thought we wanted to know each other.”

“We all take these knocks—this is your first, I daresay. Look here, my dear child, do you want a handkerchief?”

“I have one somewhere.” Automatic, compliant, she pulled a crushed one out of a buttoned pocket, held it up to please him, then, in a hand that went on sketching vague motions, held it crunched up tight. “How can you say ‘first’? she said. “This can’t happen again.”

“Oh, one forgets, you know. One can always patch oneself up.”

“No. Is this being grown up?”

“Nonsensel This is no time to say so, and you’ll bite my head off, but you’ll do better without that young man. Oh, I know I’ve got no business to chip bits off him, but—”

“But it isn’t just Eddie,” she said, looking amazed. “The thing was, he was the person I knew. Because of him, I felt safer with all the others. I did not think things could really be so bad. There was Matchett, but she got cold with me about Eddie; she liked me more when she and I were alone: now she and I are not the same as we were. I did not mean to be wrong, but she was always so angry; she wanted me to be angry. But Eddie and I weren’t angry: we soothed each other. But I find now, he was with them the whole time, and they knew. I can’t go back there now I know.”

“One’s feelings get hurt; one cannot avoid that. One really can’t make a war out of that, you know. A girl like you, Portia, a really good girl, ought not to get her back to the wall. When people seem to give you a bad deal, you’ve got to ask what sort of deal they may have once got themselves. But you are still young enough—”

“I don’t see what age has to do with it.”

He swivelled round on his chair, as wretchedly as a schoolboy, to look, in glum, dumb, nonplussed communication at his own rubbed ebony hairbrushes, his stud-box, his nail-scissors—as though these objects, which had travelled with him, witnessed to his power somehow to get through life, to reach a point when one says, It doesn’t really much matter. Unhappy on his bed, in this temporary little stale room, Portia seemed to belong nowhere, not even here. Stripped of that pleasant home that had seemed part of her figure, stripped, too, of his own wishes and hopes, she looked at once harsh and beaten, a refugee—frightening, rebuffing all pity that has fear at the root. He tried: “Or look at it this way—” then spoilt this by a pause. He saw what a fiction was common-sense.

However he had meant to finish, she would hardly have listened. She had turned to grasp his bed-end, to bend her forehead down on her tight knuckles. Her body tensely twisted in this position; her legs, like disjointed legs, hung down: her thin lines, her concavities, her unconsciousness made her a picture of premature grief. Happy that few of us are aware of the world until we are already in league with it. Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from the world but the world from the power of innocence. Major Brutt said: “Well, cheer up; we’re in the same boat.”

She said, to her knuckles: “When I thought I’d be older, I thought Eddie’d be the person I would marry.

I saw I’d have to be different when that happened, but not more different than I could be. But he says he knew I thought that; it is that that he does not like.”

“When one’s in love—”

“Was I? How do you know? Have you been?”

“In my time,” declared Major Brutt, with assertive cheerfulness. “Though it may seem funny to you, and for one or another reason I never cut much ice. For the time being, of course, that queers everything. But here I am, after all. Aren’t I?” he said, leaning forward, creaking the cane chair.

Portia almost gave him a look, then turned her head to lay the other cheek on her knuckles. “Yes,
you
are,” she said. “But today he said I must go. So what am I to do now, Major Brutt?”

“Well, it may seem tough, but I still don’t see why you can’t go home, after all. We’ve all got to live somewhere, whatever happens. There’s breakfast, dinner, so on. After all, they’re your people. Blood’s thicker—”

“No, it isn’t; not mine and Anna’s. It, it isn’t all right there any more: we feel ashamed with each other. You see, she has read my diary and found something out. She does not like that, but she laughs about it with Eddie: they laugh about him and me.”

This made Major Brutt pause, redden and once more turn his head to look out of the window behind his chair. He said, to the parapet and the darkening sky: “You mean, they’re quite hand in glove?”

“Oh, he’s not just her lover; it’s something worse than that… . Are you still Anna’s friend?”

“I can’t get over the fact that she’s been very good to me. I don’t think I want to discuss that… . But look, if you feel, if you
did
feel there was anything wrong at 
home, you should surely stick by your brother?”

“He’s ashamed with me, too: he’s ashamed because of our father. And he’s afraid the whole time that I shall be sorry for him. Whenever I speak he gives me a sort of look as much as to say, ‘Don’t say that!’ Oh, he doesn’t want me to stick. You don’t know him at all… . You think I exaggerate.”

“At the moment—”

“Well, this sort of moment never really stops… . I’m not
going
home, Major Brutt.”

He said, very reasonably: “Then what do you want to do?”

“Stay here—” She stopped short, as though she felt she had said, too soon, something enough important to need care. Deliberately, with her lips tight shut, she got off the bed to come and stand by him—so that, she standing, he sitting, she could tower up a least a little way. She looked him all over, as though she meant to tug at him, to jerk him awake, and was only not certain where to catch hold of him. Her arms stayed at her sides, but looked rigid, at every moment, with their intention to move in unfeeling desperation. She was not able, or else did not wish, to inform herself with pleading grace; her sexlessness made her deliver a stern summons: he felt her knocking through him like another heart outside his own ribs. “Stay here with you,” she said. “You do like me,” she added. “You write to me; you send me puzzles; you say you think about me. Anna says you are sentimental, but that is what she says when people don’t feel nothing. I could do things for you: we could have a home; we would not have to live in a hotel. Tell Thomas you want to keep me and he could send you my money. I could cook; my mother cooked when she lived in Not-tinghill Gate. Why could you not marry me? I could cheer you up. I would not get in your way, and we should not be half so lonely. Why should you be dumbfounded, Major Brutt?”

“Because I suppose I am,” was all he could say.

“I told Eddie you were a person I made happy.”

“Good God, yes. But don’t you see—”

“Do think it over, please,” she said calmly. “I’ll wait.”

“It’s no good beginning to think, my dear.”

“I’d like to wait, all the same.”

“You’re shivering,” he said vaguely.

“Yes, I am cold.” With a quite new, matter-of-fact air of possessing his room, she made small arrangements for comfort—peeled off his eiderdown, kicked her shoes off, lay down with her head into his pillow and pulled the eiderdown snugly up to her chin. By this series of acts she seemed at once to shelter, to plant here and to obliterate herself—most of all that last. Like a sick person, or someone who has decided by not getting up to take no part in a day, she at once seemed to inhabit a different world. Noncommittal, she sometimes shut her eyes, sometimes looked at the ceiling that took the slope of the roof. “I suppose,” she said, after some minutes, “you don’t know what to do.”

Major Brutt said nothing. Portia moved her head on the pillow; her eyes roved placidly round the room, examined things on the washstand. “All sorts of pads and polishes,” she said. “Do you clean your own shoes?”

“Yes. I’ve always been rather fussy. They can’t do everything here.”

She looked at the row of shoes, all on their trees. “No wonder they look so nice: they look like chestnuts… . That’s another thing I could do.”

“For some reason, women are never so good at it.”

“Well, I’m certain I could cook. Mother told me about the things she used to make. As I say, there’d be no reason for you and me to always live in hotels.”

The preposterous happy mirage of something one does not even for one moment desire must not be allowed to last. Had nothing in Major Brutt responded to it he would have gone on being gentle, purely sorry for her— As it was, he got up briskly, and not only got up but put back his chair where it came from, flat with some inches of wall, to show that this conversation was closed for good. And the effect this cost him, the final end of something, made his firm action seem more callous than sad. To stop any weakening pause, he kept on moving—picked up his two brushes, absently but competently started to brush his hair. So that Portia, watching him, had all in that moment a view of his untouched masculine privacy, of that grave abstractedness with which each part of his toilet would go on being performed. Unconscious, he could not have made plainer his determination always to live alone. Clapping the brushes together, he put them down with a clatter that made them both start. “I’m sure you will cook,” he said, “I’m all in favour of it. But not for some years yet, and not, I’m afraid, for me.”

“I suppose I should not have asked you,” Portia said— not confusedly but in a considering tone.

“I feel pleased,” he admitted. “In fact, it set me up no end. But you think too much of me, and not enough of what I’m trying to say. And, at the finish of this, what I still ask you to do, is: forget this and go home.” He dared hardly look at the eiderdown, under which he still heard no stir. “It’s not a question of doing the best you can do, it’s a question of doing the only thing possible.”

Portia, by folding her arms over it tightly, locked the eiderdown, her last shelter, to her chest. “That will do no good, Major Brutt. They will not know what to say.”

“Well, let’s hear what they do say. Why not give them a chance?” He paused, bit his upper lip under his moustache, and added: “I’ll come with you, of course.”

“I can see you don’t really want to. Why?”

“I don’t like to spring this on them—your just turning up with me, I mean, when they’ve had hours to worry. I’ve got to telephone—Why, you know,” he added, “they’ll be calling out the police, the fire brigade.”

“Well, if you so much want to, you may tell them I’m with you. But, please, you are not to tell them I’m going back. That will all have to depend.”

“Oh, it will, will it? On what?”

“On what they do then.”

“Well, let me tell them you’re safe.”

Without any further comment, she turned over and put her hand under her cheek. Her detachment made her seem to abandon being a woman—she was like one of those children in an Elizabethan play who are led on, led off, hardly speak and are known to be bound for some tragic fate which will be told in a line; they do not appear again; their existence, their point of view has had, throughout, an unreality. At the same time, her body looked like some drifting object that has been lodged for a moment, by some trick of the current, under a bank, but must be dislodged again and go on twirling down the implacable stream. He picked up her hat and hung it on the end of the bed: as he did this, she said: “You’ll come back when you’ve telephoned?”

“You will wait, like a good girl?”

“If you’ll come back, I will wait.”

“And I’ll tell them that you are here.”

“And you’ll tell me what they do then.”

He took one more look round the darkening room with her in it, then went out, shut the door, started down to go to the telephone—his somnambulist’s walk a little bit speeded up, as though by some bad dream from which he still must not wake. As he went down flight after flight he saw her face on the pillow, and saw in a sleep-bound way how specious wisdom was. One’s sentiments—call them that—one’s fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or, worse still, when one betrays them does one realise their power. That betrayal is the end of an inner life, without which the everyday becomes threatening or meaningless. At the back of the spirit a mysterious landscape, whose perspective used to be infinite, suddenly perishes: this is like being cut off from the country for ever, not even meeting its breath down the city street.

Major Brutt had a mind that did not articulate: he felt, simply, things had changed for the worse. His home had come down; he must no longer envisage Windsor Terrace, or go there again. He made himself think of the moment—he hoped that the Quaynes would have some suggestion ready, that something could be arranged about Portia crossing London, that he would not have to go with her to their door. But as he went into the upright telephone coffin, he did not doubt for a moment that he was right to telephone, though they might laugh, they would certainly laugh, again.