Eva Trout (15 page)

“You may find it so,” answered the callous one. “Well, one must be tearing oneself away.
You”
—the incredulous Constantine turned to Eric— “are really doing so, also? Too bad, that seems. However, in that case we fare forth together; or do we not?”

“I don’t mind,” Eric said—gone dead to it all. He spat into a hand and smarmed a side of his hair back. He squeezed his eyes shut, to store them up for the journey, then reopened them to spare one hard look for Eva—who reacted by shifting her balance, discomposedly, from one to the other foot. All at once, he could play it. Bravado. Going over to Eva, he struck her, with titanic joviality, on the shoulder, a blow that could have felled an ox. “So long! Take care of yourself! It’s been nice seeing you!” He got himself from the room.

Constantine followed—having intoned: “Then, April?”

Both were gone—as unforeseeably, barbarously, as they’d both come. Not a trace left, but for damage to Eva’s frame, and, still there on its table, the wrappered bottle.
She
now yawned: so dismissive a yawn that it distended her ribcage to cracking-point, just not dislocating her jaw by the grace of Heaven. She checked on the silence, waiting another minute before going out to make fast the porch door. She then double-locked, grinding the key round twice. She waggled bolts into long-forgotten sockets, wheedled the ball end of the door-chain along its groove. Surveying her work as an absolute, she was not content yet—a barricade should have been added, had that been possible.

So far as she thought of anybody, she thought of Henry.

ISEULT stood by herself in the Dickens room in Bleak House, Broadstairs—by herself, that was, but for the inhabitant. This was a June afternoon, that June. She had reasons for coming. She was in course of translating a fresh French re-evaluation of Dickens,
Le Grand Histrionique
, which, she’d made known to Eva, had rather fired her. Less revolutionary than it had been said to be (who could be revolutionary, by this time?) the evaluation had sent her back to its subject: he did enflame her. She was now in a state of total immersion in his works, and letters. Great significance surrounded the Broadstairs period. “As I
shall
be there,” she had written, to Cathay, “and so, near you, could we not meet? Just as you like, of course.”

Eva’d raised no objection. She was to come for Iseult, here, and afterwards take her to North Foreland. This plan, entineered by the visitor, cut out what would have been the nerve-rackingness, all considered, of being met at the train, and, still better, ensured that the meeting, when it took place, did so in the presence of a third person (virtually). Iseult had brought in with her a jotting pad, some books, and a brochure acquired down in the hall; these she placed on a corner of the table and did not, after all, look at again. Nobody else, to her relief, entered the room or, so far as she could hear, the house —which, though posted up over the humming town and crowded sands, was filled by a disembodied, insipid silence.

This room was designated “the study.” It showed no more signs of studiousness than does any in which maniacal creativity has gone on. It was small: a semi-circle breaking out into a lantern window. No fireplace: heat generated itself? The window, seeming large out of all proportion, hung out into the air, straight over the sea but for a tiny apron of garden, and was filled inside by a platform on which table and chair stood —an arrangement, surely, very precarious, should the man, excited, suddenly shove his chair back? Surely the peril would be distracting?—sufferance of it did not seem workmanlike. As against that, the platform brought the top of the table level with the otherwise too high window sill. So it cut both ways —if, indeed, it
had
ever been here in his day? Practically nothing now in the room had, all having been assembled by later piety. The chair was as verifiable as anything, having found its way here (let’s hope, found its way
back
here) after an auction at Gad’s Hill or somewhere else. This chair, very lately vacated, existed in a picture hung on the wall near it:
The Empty Chair
—Gad’s Hill, 9th June, 1870. The day of the death. A wooden (pearwood?) armchair, with carved back, wicker seat (damaged) and castered feet. A white rope was now, very properly, tied across it.

Sir Luke Fildes, one of the sought-after reproductions of whose painting this on the wall was, also gave authenticity to the table—apparently? This on the platform here was identical with the one in his picture. Its massive woodwork was dulled by just less than a century. Its leathered top (which was to be touched) was worn, blotched, scabbed and eroded; doubtless by sea air. Though, by what else? This was a table which had been written at.

You could edge round the table, at either corner, to see further out of the lantern window. Iseult did so. In his day, all along the top of the cliffs between here and Kingsgate there had been growing corn. Corn, then, in the under-the-window triangle now garden. “A ripple plays,” he wrote and she recollected, “among the ripening corn upon the cliff, as if it were faintly trying from recollection to imitate the sea; and the world of butterflies hovering over the crop of radisheed are as restless in their little way as th gulls are in their larger manner when the wind blows. But the ocean lies winking in the sunlight like a drowsy lion—its glassy waters scarcely curve upon the shore—” And another letter: “It is the brightest day you ever saw. The sun is sparkling on the water so that I can hardly bear to look at it.” And another, June letter—in here, framed on a wall: “I am in a favourite house of mine, perched by itself on the top of a cliff with the green corn growing all about it and the larks singing invisibly all day long.” He liked corn young, he liked green corn.

So today was, but for the corn gone and the butterflies with it. Butterfly-like sails, however, danced out over the dazzling water. Scarlet, yellow—blue most of all prettily, in that they were a blue other than the sea’s. Sun made them quiver like little flames. Were larks singing?—impossible to hear them. Iseult turned, at that point, and went away into the next-door bedroom. She wanted to see what the waking eyes saw. These windows looked west, along Viking Bay. The sands, not quite obliterated by people who ran about them or lodged upon them like coloured beads, were tawny, deeper than coagulated honey. (Who wishes silver sands?) Donkeys did business, nimbling along jogging solemn riders. Topping the crescent of low cliffs, “this pretty little semi-coloured sweep of houses tapering off from a wooden pier into a point in the sea . . In the early mornings, light would have lightly lain on them, making them pearls.

Yet
this
was in itself a forbidding house—in contrariety to what was all round it. Out of his own contrariety, he sought it. “Tall, solitary,” it was to be later admitted by a biographer, “the house in question is a square, sullen structure—hard and bleak.” One thought of it as beheld from; beheld, it was truly a Dark Tower. Fort House was, rightly, its name in his time— under that name it saw him out. The addition which blandified it into a mansion, trimmed round the skyline with crenelations, was yet to be—so, for many years, was the whimsey which then re-christened it. He knew himself to be living in a bleak house, for all the family fun and the summer gambols. “Bleak house” escaped, disloyally, from his consciousness. It struck him then as excellent for a book title.
Bleak House
, with its genial Hertfordshire landscape, was gestated here. That was what got him out—not the German bands (as complained of) or meandering fiddles. Having done with
Copperfield
, “I sit down between whiles to think of a new story, and, as it begins to grow, such a torment of desire to be anywhere else but where I am; and to be going I don’t know where, I don’t know why, takes hold of me that it is like being driven away.” So he was. So that was the end of this.

Horrible sea storms used to beat about. Seven miles out lay the Goodwin Sands. (Yes, the Goodwin Sands.) Weeks after a cattle ship came to grief, bloated animal carcases, many of them burst open by putrefaction, “tumbled and beaten out of shape, and yet with a horrible sort of humanity about them,” continued to be washed up on to Viking Bay. Flaubert, reflected Iseult, would have been interested. Henry James, less so. What, now one came to think of it,
had
James, that Dickens really had not? Or if he had, what did it amount to?

She returned to the study. Still empty, still not so much as a footfall. It now affected her like an all but bursting bubble of afternoon: radiant. She paused on its floor with a sense of being in beauty—and she was right. Her new dress was lovely: pinkish, diaphanous as the day demanded, becoming to the young woman she still was. Incongruous for a train outing?— for all its fragility, it was uncrushable (this science had done). Voluminous, it had the good sense to fall down severely round her in classic folds. The garb of a votaress, with a touch of the ball gown … On the wall near
The Empty Chair
hung a small (rare) photograph of Miss Ternan, the inevitable eighteen-year-old, “the young friend.” Iseult investigated the porcine smile, with its refined look of dreamy gluttedness. “
I
should have been old for him,” she thought. “At any age, always—but what a pity.” She turned and looked into one of the show cases.

Early editions. Faint paperbacks set out in a grubby fan:
Bleak House
in shilling monthly parts. Others. All-in-all, what a literature—of what? Longing. The lyricism of forgetfulness. The nightmare of the frustrated passion. The jibbering self-mockery of the “comic.” The abasements of love. The unplumbable panic of the lost man, the incurable damnation of the foresworn one. Helplessness. Hair fetichism. The turning of persons into pillars of salt. A bunch of roses despairingly cast on to a river, to be carried away. A sickening scene with a schoolmaster in a City churchyard. This was the man they lived for, the man they died with. Commemorated in ashtrays, cream jugs. “He took our nature upon him”—no, that was Christ. What a blasphemy; or rather, how nearly! An agnostic, she sometimes felt, had the worst of both worlds. A bust of the man—the confused, pouched, violent, raddled-looking face in its hirsute bedding, artistically distraught—stood on the show case. Yes, histrionic certainly.

The glassy sea was soundless; but the sound from the sands was not altogether sealed off by the big window.

Still, nobody else visited the house—no one came in to look at the dead man’s table. Outdoors, everyone was too happy. Out there it was too glorious, too fine!

The step at last to be heard was Eva’s. Like many big-framed persons she trod other than heavily, though, like many disorganised ones, with deliberation. In this case, she either procrastinated or—thinking herself before time—dawdled, stopping to look in at other doors. Finally, she filled this door with herself in what was simply and plainly a cotton frock. Peonies were stamped over her, and a summer standin for the crocodile bag, plastic simulating white patent leather, was slung from a shoulder. All exposed parts of her were equally sunburned; her hair had bleached somewhat. Shod in red canvas beach shoes, she from toe to top was the local girl, enlarged—or could have been, but for being Eva. This was the first time Iseult had seen her since her accession: April 21st last. She looked well on it;
bien portante
, Constantine would have said.

It took Dickens to not be eclipsed by Eva. The girl had clearly come in with no such intent; on the contrary, deference gave her expression the glaze associated with school chapel, and she seemed uncertain whether, in these surroundings, to greet Iseult in a secular way or not. This nonplussed her—not too badly, perhaps.

“Well!” exclaimed Iseult, kissing her hastily.

“Did you have a good journey on that train?”

“Very. Then I found my way here.”

“I
would
have met you.”

“I know, Eva; but I liked this better. I wouldn’t have for anything missed this place; it is so … extraordinary. So gimcrack, so ghastlily cheery, so hand-to-mouth, so desperately inordinate, so unscrupulous, so tawdry—so formidable. Genius: only just not a cheat—isn’t it?”

“What a lot you have thought.”

“I had just time to.—
You
found your way here?”

“I come in here when it rains.” Eva turned to the wall and addressed herself to
The Empty Chair
. “
I
,” she said, “have sat in that.” She turned to check on the chair on the platform.

“You had no business to!”

“One can untie the cord, then tie it again.”

“Are you glad to see me?”

It appeared to Eva, everyone asked that. “Yes,” she said compliantly. “Why have you come, though?”

Iseult, for emphasis, disregardingly smote the top of the chair. “Eva, you can’t not know why I am here! To see you and thank you. Writing’s hopelessly distant. That letter I wrote—we both know?—was feeble; I don’t think I tried to make it anything else. To be so completely bouleversee made me half angry; that may have come out, perhaps? I can’t imagine anything more unforeseeable than what you’ve done, or—and this I hope you realise?—less
required
, in any possible way. As you must know, after you’d left Larkins and we’d had to face it you wouldn’t be coming back, Constantine wound up everything, more than fairly. ‘Compensation,’ he called it. We had nothing whatsoever to complain of. We thought no more—why should we? But then, this … this almost
blow
you’ve dealt us of generosity. Ought you to have? Should you have been allowed to?”

“That,” declared Eva, “was not, now, for anybody but me to say.”

“Are we wrong, I wonder, to take advantage of that?”

“
I
wished,” said the girl, “to make compensation.” Hands locked behind her, she leaned up against the show case, wobbling its ornament.

“But Eva: what Constantine paid us off with was your money—his last act on your behalf, before handing over. ‘Compensation’? What further kind can you mean? Or I mean, for
what
?”

“There was some damage,” the girl pronounced, after one of her ruminative pauses. “My cheque was to
you
, Iseult.”