Eva Trout (12 page)

“That’s that, then.”

“How should I know, Eric, that you were coming?”

“Don’t ask
me
: I didn’t know myself! Thought of it once or twice, then thought ‘Better not’—and I’m not so sure I was not right.” He blinked at her out of a haze of fatigue and doubt. “But the trouble was—”

“Yes?” asked Eva attentively. To concentrate, she had brought herself face-to-face; and she stood there, searching his eyes red-rimmed by want of sleep, the bouts in the pubs, the havoc wrought in him by the journey, with that mooselike fidelity known to Henry. “Yes?—what was the trouble?”

“Don’t keep on,” he said restively.

“But please, Eric!”

“
You
were; if you must know!”

“But that,” she declared with a sweeping superiority, “was silly!”

Eric got hold of Eva by the pouchy front of her anorak and shook her. The easy articulation of her joints made this rewarding—her head rolled on her shoulders, her arms swung from them. Her teeth did not rattle, being firm in her gums, but coins and keys all over her clinked and jingled. Her hair flumped all ways like a fiddled-about-with mop. The crisis became an experiment: he ended by keeping her rocking, at slowing tempo, left-right, right-left, off one heel on to the other, meanwhile pursing his lips, as though whistling, and frowning speculatively. The experiment interested Eva also. Did it gratify her too much?—he let go abruptly. “That’s all,” he told her. “But mind your own business, next time.”

“Yes.—What shall we do now?”

“Get the car and go for a blow. Why not?”

They sought the Anglia. Round the corner, it was run up on a grass verge. “Neighbours?” asked Eric, quizzing the hedges. She had no idea. “If you have,” he reasoned, “they’re dead.” The Anglia, having gone through this enigmatic maze at an awed crawl, quickened on entering open air—passing the lighthouse, they swooped down the loops of the road to Kingsgate Bay. At the level one above sea-level, two great white-painted lions outside a great white closed house looked across, watching the tide go out. Not a ship in sight—and the road, in the bright boundless chill of the salty evening, was vacant also. Even the wind had gone. The outgoing w&ter sucked and dragged at the wetted edge of the beach, but you could not hear.—”This where you found those shells, Eva?”

Some way ahead, to the east, like a kind of beacon, the Captain Digby crowned the sawn-off headland terminating the bay. Now, building and cliff were one in an hallucinatory afterglow: B—A—R was able to be deciphered. (
Half
an hour to go.) Eva, not aware of the Captain Digby, was trailing a look through the back window at what they were leaving behind them: Kingsgate Castle. The crenellated mock fortress, flint-hard in silhouette, rode forward over the waters towards France. She could by no means behold it often enough.

“You did not say much,” she observed, “when we passed that castle.”

“In point of fact, I didn’t say anything.”

“Why, though?”

“I was not sure what to. Didn’t know how you felt about castles these days.”

“Oh, because of my honeymoon?”

“More or less, yes.”

“But Eric, I made that up.”

“Oh, you did?” he remarked, somewhat unconcernedly. “Try not do that again, though; you had us worried.”

He had been slowing the car down; he now stopped it, got out and crossed the road to the railing overhanging the beach at no great height. Looking over, he examined the beach. What he saw—what perhaps he had hoped to see?—then sent him rapidly down some steps. There was driftwood lying … Eva came hard after him, shouting: “
Wha-at
?” He shouted back: “This could make you a fire.” They started gathering. Once, straightening his back, Eric looked round him, getting the scene by heart. He and she were alone on the crescent beach but for gulls coming swinging in to see what went on. The eternal shingle skeined with eternal sand was strung and clotted with dunglike seaweed; bedrabbled seaweed slimed some exposed rocks proceeding outward like stepping-stones to nowhere. A last-summer’s child’s bottomless bucket, upturned, could have been jettisoned bv expeditionaries from some other planet. A colourless haze was gathering out at sea. “You know what?” he shouted, “I wonder you didn’t pick on the moon!” No answer from Eva’s foreshortened backview. By the end, they had not done too badly. Opening the boot of the Anglia to stack the stuff in, he calculated: “This should do for tonight.”

“For how long,” it struck her to wonder, “is your holiday?”

”‘Holiday’?—fancy your thinking that. No, one day is what I contracted out for, and that’s this one—or was,” he said, looking round at the dusk.

By six o’clock they were far from the Captain Digby, careering inland over the darkening Thanet flats. Continuous nameless soil and vast lost sky engendered in Eric a wish for the bright lights: at their first stop, he accordingly sketched out their coming evening. He should like soon, he said, to eat somewhere posh—why not? Because, said Eva, that would be very expensive. And so what?—that was for him to say, he was taking her. (“And drink
that
up; or don’t you know what it’s for?” She’d been given a shandy; he stuck to beer—so far.) She said, there were two nice places down by the harbour: both gave large helpings, she went to them turnabouts. He dared say she did; but had he come all this way to eat fish and chips, did she think? He didn’t mind telling her, he had not. This once, what was wrong with beating it up? What
had
she against the classier part of Broadstairs? She was not got up for it? Not exactly, perhaps …

“I by no means am,” said Eva, seizing on this.

“Still, what of it? They’ll never see us again.” Eric, leaning sideways against the bar, prospected Eva from top to toe. “Anyway, you’ll do. You’re a handsome girl—got a comb, though?”

He at last got to the bottom of her objection. All scenes of classier Broadstairs night life, noted for international cuisine, must be shunned by Eva.
There
might be Mr. Denge.

“Well, that is silly.”

But could he shake her? No. So the harbour it had to be—after more stops.

They pushed their way, eventually, into the steamy café. Of the few tables, none was now quite empty: Eric and Eva got themselves on to bentwood chairs, facing each other, alongside another couple doing the same. She looked about, amicably. He picked up a bottle of sauce and stared hard at it. “Well …” he said, noncommittally. The adjacent couple were eating, so said nothing. There was a hissing of urns, a sizzle of pans, a banging about of crockery, with, as additional background, background music. “Still—for the best, who knows?” he reflected aloud.

“What did you say, Eric?”

“I said: ‘Least said, soonest mended.’”

“
What
?”

“What I’d been otherwise going to say to you—”

No good. Overheated in here, Eva was peeling down to one jersey. She flung discards behind her over the back of the chair.

ISEULT flexed her fingers over the keyboard. She angled the lamp lower over the typewriter, to see more clearly what it was about to tell her, then set to:—

“So he’s gone. An hour ago? More, less? I didn’t look at the clock. What does he tell himself he is going to do, argue her back? So he told me. He dissimulates all the time, most of all to himself. At all events, another page is turned over. I never believed for an instant this would not happen—yes, I
did
, I believed it would not happen. How inconceivable oneself is. One would say mad, but that I knew what I was doing. But to know what one is doing without caring, is that to know what one is doing? I murdered my life, and I defy anybody to defend me. I should hang for it.

“But at least I am living as no one else does, an existence without
fundamental
tedium. Money or not, we need not have had Eva here. I am glad we did. The antagonism she’s sparked alive between him and me, for one thing. The passion I had for Eric was becoming less than a memory, now it’s more than one. That kind of passion at its height can wipe out anything that’s an obstacle. In this case, the obstacle was my life, as it was—and was to have been, and the T I had been. So …1 did not implicate him in the crime; he was not aware of it, he would not have approved it. What he has had to do is, live with its outcome. I now see, he had wanted me as I was. He wanted me because I was not his kind. I was beautiful, the death of me dulled that out. I’d excited him because I seemed set apart. My bookishness and my being a teacher fascinated him like a pythic mystery. Therefore, I murdered for nothing. Not so good.

“Eva then came along. Eva reappeared. From the moment of moving in she made herself felt—yet how? Under this roof she’s gone steadily back, back, back till of even the Eva there was there is not a trace. Was that vengeance on her part? But what for? I am not loving by nature, she knew that—did she not? What I thought could be possible in her, I can’t remember. What was I like at Lumleigh? I can only imagine, I wanted to see what I could do. Or wanted to see whether there could be anything I could not do? What I did do was reckon without Eva: her will, the patient, abiding, encircling will of a monster. I should have been warned. There were danger-signals. Her stepping out of my path, when the sun came out, that subservient way. My breaking out into that sweat when we had to follow our joined-up shadows. Blind I was, not to see. She was as stuck in a groove on the subject of love as probably that other victim her father. I suspect victims; they win in the long run. She went on wanting to move in; in she moved. She took Larkins over. Those consuming eyes and that shoving Jaguar. Yet she has had her use. If Eric has now gone after her, I sent him. 11.40. Twenty minutes to midnight. How far will he have got to? A long trail. “Only take care,’ I said, ‘not to fall asleep at the wheel.’

“Eva’s good at conspiracy, who’d have thought it? Living around with those two, she learned their ways. What an ambience to grow up in, a hated love. What isolation round them. Yet I think highly of Constantine, he’s without false sympathies. Only now and then a crocodile tear. I doubt whether any cruelty is gratuitous, and certainly it’s not expended for nothing—it constructs something. Evidently C. is a satisfied man. Evidently he was attached to that wretched Willy, evidently he understood him as no one else did. Attachment to prey I imagine must have about it some sort of equivalent of tenderness. I imagine, Willy’s capacity to suffer was inexhaustible: such a being probably can attach a tormenter to him more lastingly than most of us could attach a lover. Willy had that spectacular business acumen; is it possible that Constantine admired him? That could account also for C.’s fidelity, even though a fidelity in cruelty. Willy from all they say had a large-sized temperament. A continent for a great part given over to marsh and jungle but with sources of wealth. Interesting, having the whole exposed to one. Rewarding. How do I know this?—because I know it. Blast Constantine for his insolence in that restaurant! Yet he saw me and used me as a confederate. He was not wrong to. I am
capable de tout
. I am soiled by living more than a thousand lives; I have lived through books. I have lived internally.

“Conspiracy, the air natural to her. At Lumleigh, she could make an encounter seem like an assignation. That simpleton Eric. Anyone could have told him. He is not indifferent to her, who says he is? I’m not indifferent to her, which is what is galling. For, for her I’m over, I’m a thing of the past, and what’s that to Eva? Her dramatic orbs are turning another way. Or were. Now off she flies like a wee bird out of a window, and he goes after her.—I forgot, I sent him.

“Eva, Constantine. She behaves as though he petrified her, but I wonder. Exactly what did go on? No doubt she connects him with her father’s suicide, and no doubt rightly. Yet I doubt that C. either meant to bring that about or envisaged such a catastrophe as possible. Scandal apart, the thing was against his interest. I should think he never foresaw there could be a snapping-point. One infinitesimal cruelty too many? Willy revolted—that, after all those years, must have jolted C. as much as anything else. What Willy did left nothing more to be said. In a way, a master-stroke. C. left shackled to Eva, that walking monument. How much she knows, how incriminating what she knows is without her knowing, how is he to find out? Tenterhooks. His shuffling of her off on to us, lock, stock and as near the barrel as could be, his incessant anxiety not to see her, to have as little to do with her as possible consistently with that awful legal relationship are accounted for. Distaste, fretfulness, boredom are all he
manifests
. But—? She gets anything out of him that she wants, I’ve noticed. Jaguar, loan of the castle for that supposititious honeymoon, so on, so on. Now the end’s in sight, though. He’s about to be quit of her. April, the birthday girl takes over her all. Her fortune. Willy’s mountainous money —no, I don’t think, though I own that I once thought, that C. has been up to anything with
that
. C., it stands out a mile, was more than provided for. Yet no wonder one wondered— how uneasy he was! What would become of that money were Eva gone? She never will be, be certain. She is eternal.

”‘Frankly,’ he kept beginning. In more than half a mind, each time, to
be
frank. Each time, abhorrence of me stopped him. All the same, across that insulting table what was going on was a sort of inverse courtship. He was wooing me to return his intense dislike;
his
idea, perhaps, of coming to terms? Intimacy, of a kind? I was more his, actually, than he took account of. Read my mood he could not, but the fact was I’d have shrunk from no detail of his horrible life. There was nothing he could not have said to me or shown me. In effect I said so: a blunder, he is censorious. Yet that did not put the lid on it quite finally. He went on tantalising himself with that word ‘frankly,’ then turning away, sucking those lips in. What was he hankering to come out with? That complacence with which he gourmandised wasn’t genuine—very nearly, almost, but not quite.

“That was January, this is March. Not a word since, not a word thought necessary. I had my orders. That ghastly beauty of London. To what size do I go on blowing up that photograph? Imagining oneself to be remembering, more often than not one is imagining: Proust says so. (Or is it, imagining oneself to be imagining, one is remembering?) How I should like to play that scene over again: I should get a better grip on it next time. Now the situation’s taken this further turn. Will he act on my letter telling him where she’s gone to? Ought he not to? Ought I to egg him on to?