Eva Trout (16 page)

The other wheedled her hair back from her forehead. “But such a sum. Such an enormous sum, you know!”

“I know,” the donor agreed, with a certain glumness.

“I’m glad you say that!” cried out Mrs. Arble, as exultingly, as impulsively, as Miss Smith might have. “If you’d said, ‘Not to me,’ I think I’d have wanted to send the cheque back—or wanted to want to. Not that I could, now; I’ve paid it in.”

“I saw,” said Eva. “So what now are you asking me all these things for?”

“You may well ask,” admitted Iseult.

“So …” said Eva conclusively.

“Eva,
Eva
, though: there were faults on both sides, which means I daren’t think how many there were on mine. That damage, can one assess in money? Out of the question! Which is fortunate,” laughed Iseult, “or where might
I
not be? Can’t we, you don’t think, ever begin again? I’d be happier if that money could be a present—do understand!—a present purely and simply. A considerate thought. A generous gesture—anything!” Iseult laughed again, extravagantly. “
A pourboire
!”

“A
pourboire
,” said Eva, “is a tip in a restaurant.”

“Yes, I see,” said Iseult, with no particular inflection. She bowed her head, acceptingly, then folded her arms, consoling the elbows. She slid a look under her eyelids from chair to table. “
Here’s
an authority, anyhow,” she gave out, to herself not Eva. “Who knew better what one can come to, or be brought to? Not one bad passion got through his net—not a sliver of grudge, not a minnow of resentment got by him! Well, well, well … Am I wrong to have come?” she still longed to know. She requested herself to smile, and quite soon did so. “I wanted to
see
you, wanted to see you, Eva. And so wanted to see Cathay, to see where you are—while I cannot imagine that, you seem more gone: that I mind, you know.”

“Let’s go there!” Enthusiasm all over, Eva could hardly wait to be off.

“One thing more: I feel bad about Mr. Denge.”

“You wish to call on him?” asked the girl socially.

“No,
no
! —Bad, I mean, about ringing him up that day. But I did want some word of you; I was at the end of my tether. Constantine said you felt I had been malicious.”

“Oho, did he?”

The Jaguar waited under the house, over the harbour; where, masterfully inserted into a park long placarded FULL, it was not flanked by the space due to it. Doors could barely open; one got in crabwise. Eva then masterfully reversed out. “Nice,” Iseult said, smiling along the dashboard, disposing her summer skirts, “to see this again. You are glad it’s back?”

“Oh, yes,” said the owner dismissingly.

The fact was, the relationship had been broken. The Jaguar, homing, had had the chagrin of finding itself superseded by the bicycle. There are absences which are fatal, this had been one of them. And the car had a stain on its character, having involved Henry in an ethical duel with his father, when all came out. “What possessed you?” Mr. Dancey had wanted to know, worried. And he’d been angry. “You’ve been unsuccessfully mercenary and extremely silly. As far as I can see you could be in jail.” “I’m a minor,” said Henry, though slightly shaken. He looked down his nose and added: “ ‘The woman tempted me.’ ” “Adam,” said Mr. Dancey hotly, “was a cad.” “I don’t think,” said Henry, “that comes well from a clergyman. And I’ll tell you who is a cad, Mr. Eric Arble, shoving his oar in: this was between me and Eva.” “Mr. Arble,” said Mr. Dancey, “was very nice, really. He merely rightly felt that I ought to know—he himself would have liked to, he said, in my place.” “Tastes differ,” said Henry. “And what signs does
he
show of becoming a father?” “I dislike you when you are heartless,” said Mr. Dancey. So it went… If Henry were out of temper, one could not blame him. Disillusionment settled down on the whole affair. He wrote it all off in a letter to Eva: “Your dreary motor car is being ferried back to you. It leaves tomorrow. Hope it will like North Foreland.”

Henry’s epithet stuck. This unfortunate Jaguar, though now for nearly three months on Thanet, had got to know little of the locality. Going well when given a chance, it remained dispirited. Eva, negotiating the thing through Broadstairs’ sometimes pretty and sometimes so-so though today radiant streets, threw out: “I shall be getting another.”

“Larger or only newer?”

“Mm-mm,” Eva replied, or rather did not.

“How unfaithful you are!” said the other, very lightly indeed.

“This is our way,” said the girl, turning out of town.

… So this was Cathay? Stepping about the asphalt, from the cracks in which flowering weeds now sprang, in her shapely white shoes, Iseult looked from various angles up at the pile. “A millionaire residence—I had never seen one. May I look at the garden?”

Roses run to briar had spread so far, they even engaged themselves with the evergreen. Roses conventional years ago, it was wonderful they had kept their power to bloom, even so fitfully as they did: pink, crimson, ivory with gold centres. Some, finished, were stamens only, their petals scattered like the petals at Lumleigh—but those were cherry ones. The grass they flecked had grown into seeded hay, sheeny pinkish bronze—evergreen stood about in it like dark islands. There were moon daisies and, here and there, scarlet flickers, forerunners of what would be hosts of poppies. No flowers otherwise. In colour the garden was outdone by the Channel beyond it blazing its peacock blue. Heat made interposing houses send up a quiver. Eva, casting an eye over her domain, was just so far aware of imperfect order as to say: “I have been busy indoors.”

“You housekeep?”

“No. Electricians.”

“Still, this is quite a garden, as Eric told me.”

“How is Eric?”

“He sends his love, of course!”

“Come into the house.”

“Just a minute, where are the Goodwin Sands?”

Eva did not know. So indoors they went.

Extensive re-wiring was in progress, though at a halt. Drums of copper casing obstructed the hall, also stacked with cartons of every size. Panelling having had to be taken down, dislodged antlers and art ironwork mingled on and under the refectory table; and portions of the staircase were cut away, leaving oubliettes, over which cables flowed upward towards the gallery. lery. Nothing was at its best. “It’s a pity,” said Eva, “you came today.”

“I’m sure,” said the visitor manfully, “you are right in tackling this. Old, defective wiring can be dangerous.”

“Nor was it only that. It was inadequate.”

Once into the drawing-room, one saw why. In here had been activity; there was much to show for it. Outstanding examples of everything auro-visual on the market this year, 1959, were ranged round the surprised walls: large-screen television set, sonorous-looking radio, radio-gramophone in a teak coffin, other gramophone with attendant stereo cabinets, 16-millimetre projector with screen ready, a recording instrument of B.B.C. proportions, not to be written off as a tape recorder. Other importations: a superb typewriter shared a metal-legged table with a cash register worthy to be its mate; and an intercom, whose purposes seemed uncertain, had been installed. What looked like miles of flex matted the parquet. Electronics had driven the old guard, the Circe armchairs, into a huddle in the middle of the floor: some were covered in dustsheets and some not. Glaring in upon all this, the June sun took on the heightened voltage of studio lighting. All windows were shut.

“Well, I must say, Eva!”

“Yes,” said Eva contentedly.

“You understand all these?”

“I am learning to.—Will you have tea, Iseult?”

“I don’t think so, thank you. A drink, later?”

“My computer will be going into the dining-room.”

“Oh really, Eva, how
can
you need a computer!”

“It thinks,” said the girl, looking aggrieved. “That is what you used to tell me to do.”

“When,” asked Iseult, mastering herself, “will it be arriving?”

“Not yet. Afterwards.” As she spoke that decree, a look of infatuated preoccupation passed over Eva’s face. Something or other, still more tremendous, must be afoot. Had it occurred to her, even she could not at once have everything?— what other project, rival and/or incompatible, now got in the way of the computer? On looking at Eva, Iseult received again that puzzling impression of gained weight—exactly physical, or exactly not? The always ample and giant movements, slowed down (or could that be simply the heat?) gave signs of having prestige for the girl who made them: she rated herself, all she did and was, decidedly higher than she had done. She was in possession; in possession of what? Astronomic wealth, and its so far products in here, rationally should have supplied the answer: they not only failed to, they somehow did not begin to … Iseult Arble inwardly shrugged her shoulders. She seated herself (there was nowhere else) on the love seat —to discover she had as neighbour Eva’s well-known ivory and now mute transistor. “The nose of this,” she said, “must be out of joint?”

“No.
It
can be carried from place to place.”

“I so well remember … I wish I could see this room as it was before. It’s not easy to picture it that evening—for instance, where did Constantine sit?”

“What evening?”

“When you had so many callers. You and Eric got a wonderful fire going.”

“Who told you it was so wonderful—Constantine?”

“Eric, I should think?—This could have been quite a romantic room, ‘When day is done and the shadows fall,’ as the song says.—You don’t think you could re-decorate, once you’ve got things settled?—And as quiet, Constantine said, as a desert island. Eric’s not, as we know, very observant, but Constantine spoke, when he wrote, of the friendly atmosphere.” (What he exactly
had
said was, ‘They seemed relaxed, and on the best of terms.’) “That’s the same hearthrug? Yes, I should think it must be. Are those burns where wood fell out of the fire?”

“No. Those are ancient burns.”

“One does not,” said Iseult, with a kind of gasp, “need a fire today.”

Eva walked away, along the long line of instruments. She set one going. “Shall I record us?”

“Not on any account!”

“It has recorded, ‘Not on any account.’ And it now records me saying, ‘It has recorded, “Not on any account.’ “

“Then stop it,” said Iseult dryly. She ostentatiously waited till that was done. “How curious, yes, how very curious, Eva, if you’d had that thing years ago, when I knew yon. What should we think of the playbacks, I do wonder?” Leaving the love seat to the transistor,
she
walked away (two could play that game) ending by vanishing into the dining-room. She could be heard unhasping a French window. “What’s this beautiful dark cool green cave out here?”

“The sun lounge.” Eva followed her into it.

“Couldn’t we sit here?” The brightly light-riddled darkness was almost tropical. Eva brought two
manoir
style chairs out of the dining-room and placed them facing. “What a voracious, powerful plant,” Iseult said, looking out through the glass into the depths of the evergreen pressed against it. “Can I have something to drink?—is there any ice?”

“No.”

“Then I don’t think I will.—How short time is; so soon there’ll be my train. Still, I’ve seen Cathay.—’See Cathay and die!’ ” went on Iseult with a wild smile.

“You have not seen all,” said her regretful hostess.

“No. I have not seen the upstairs rooms. But it didn’t seem as if one could
go
upstairs, today. I shall have to imagine them. How shall you go to bed, when the time comes? Somewhere downstairs one can wash, I expect?”

“Yes. When you have caught this train, shall you be going straight back to Larkins?”

“I am spending the night in London.”

“With Constantine?”

“Really, my dear good
Eva
.—I am going to a Lumleigh reunion.”

“You used not to.”

“This year I thought I would. I have new clothes.—Eva, I’m glad I came; I hate to be going. Do you believe me? Dickens is our witness, I did ask you, ‘Can’t we begin again?’ Can’t we? You have no notion how Eric misses you. For instance—couldn’t you possibly come to us for Christmas? Like you once used to do; I think very happily. And even Christmas seems very far ahead, far too far ahead for Eric. Why, if you do come then, it will have been seven—no, eight, nine?—months since he’s seen you. A long time.”

“Nine,” said Eva, looking up at the evergreen.

“Then at least, Christmas?”

“Christmas is in December?”

“It is usually.—Why? Is there anything else you think of doing?”

“In December I shall be having a little child.”

Department of Philosophy

University of Wyana

Wilson

Wyana

30th October 1959

My dear Mrs. Trout,

Your vanishing in the customs was a dislocation; after our hours in the air it left me twice over brought down to earth. What happened? I continue to wonder whether it was mischance, or could be intention. There at my side one minute, gone the next. Other planes with their quota of baggage having come in, the hall overflowed; chaos engulfed you—am I to fear you were not sorry it should? Must I conceive it possible I became a person you considered it better to shake off? I assure you, I had thought no further than that we share a taxi into the city, and during the ride consolidate as to some particulars before saying goodbye. That we should part under such conditions as rendered it likely we met again was not surely an inordinate wish. Our conversation had seemed not more than suspended by the touch down. Is it never to be resumed?

I launch forth this letter to an address from which you already may have departed (short, you said, was to be your stay in New York) leaving no other behind. The Drake Hotel will no doubt redirect it back to me in due course. I foresee the day of finding it in my mail. Knowing for sure it has missed its mark, what shall I then feel? Chagrin? Relief? Resignation comes to me all too easily, I am addicted to it; hence incapacity in my non-mental life. Resignation is not experienced, it is undergone. Much is required to shock me out of it. Your vanishing may have administered that shock; how lasting are its effects to be, I have yet to know. Resignation tries to regain its hold on me even now, as I write. Do I already look on this letter as doomed to have as its reader myself only? More than half, I write for my own eye; yet what I write may by some remote fortuity reach yours. That is a possibility, and a possibility I should be wrong in leaving out of account. How what I write will strike me, should it return, I cannot compute. Weeks may have elapsed when it reappears, I may by then be a different man (though I do not think so). How it may strike you, that is, in a certain eventuality, is for me still more open a question.

I am resolved as to one thing, I shall preserve this letter when (or dare I say if) it makes its way back, as sole tangible proof of your existence.
You
occasioned it; could that have been so had you never been? (This is the address which will unfailingly find me, but may not reach you.)

That the primitive object of your journey might as the journey approached its end drive out every other consideration, I am able to see. Your coming reunion with your child—. That the time, the place, the circumstances remain unknown to me (for you touched on none of them) does not lessen my attempts to envisage it. Such attempts are perpetual, at the cost of disturbance to my otherwise method of mind and habits of work. I perceive the cause of this. Mrs. Trout, to learn that you are a mother affected me abruptly and very deeply. Do not misunderstand me when I say, my initial reaction was surprise. You divergated, you are not to know how widely, from the mother-image hitherto entertained by me. Your lengthy and unencumbered physique with its harboured energy more seemed to me, and not at the first glance only, that of the dedicated discus thrower. The then total reversal of my ideas could not be without some emotive effect. Now, still, viewing the fundamental you let me know of, I am the more in awe. I myself am debarred from knowing what it must be other than figuratively to have given birth, to have brought forth. There is, there can be, no intellectual analogy. Bring into being that which was not, one can. Bring into being that which of its own volition proceeds onward from what when brought into being it first was, one cannot. You have the better of me. Let me give the full weight it has for me to the statement:
You have offspring
. I see that no separation for you can ever have negatived that fact. Though how, by a motherhood so imperative as yours, separation was tolerated I do yet wonder. The duration and cause of it you did not reveal. Your child is a son, still infant; no more is known to me. Had we shared the taxi, it is not quite inconceivable I might know more.

Whether you are to be lost to me or not, I shall not, I so far find that I can not, cease to relive our passage across that oceanic sky. As a concept, “the hand of fate” is distasteful to me; I mislike the anthropomorphic. I do defer, however, to the mathematical probabilities of chance, to the point of holding those could determine. The sickness (virulent bowel infection, attendant fever) which, first interrupting my Descartes research in Paris then condemning me to hospitalisation, delayed by weeks my return to this University to the very great inconvenience of my Department, I now see as inevitably designed. Not otherwise would my flight have been late October. I have asked myself whether post-convalescence can have accounted for the state of, if not hyperesthesia, intensified sensory awareness I was in when, some minutes after myself, you boarded the plane. You did not altogether seem to me credible. In the seat allocated to you being immediately over the aisle from mine, I cannot but see design again. Thanks to the mid-fall low in passenger traffic other places in your row remained unclaimed, enabling you to spread your belongs round and me to continue to have uninterrupted view of you. Your nonchalance, that of the habituated air traveller, at the outset perceptibly was disturbed by difficulty in finding room for your feet in the space accorded by Economy. You looked to be in expectation of something other; I surmised this might be your first trip at the lesser rate. Having accommodated as best you might, you then turned to a bag at your side and took out an apple, which you then ate. No clue to you was offered by reading matter, there being none in evidence then or later; entire engagement with your thoughts, together with reliance on them to engage you up to New York, was to be presumed: would an onlooker have been human had he not speculated as to their nature? Your impressiveness, my impressionability about matched. The extent to which you riveted my notice I was at pains to conceal, lest it offend—I need not have troubled, nothing of your consciousness was to spare. We did not, you may remember, fall into talk till some forty-five minutes after the take off, when you lost an apple. Escaping from others in the bag it cleared the edge of the seat the bag was on and symbolically bounded towards me across the aisle.

Before returning it to you, I wiped it off. I expressed a hope it might not be bruised. You liked bruised apples, you told me, you liked the taste.

I think of myself as resistant to disclosures. I have had overmuch of them; they abound on the campus, beset the faculty club, are all but unavoidable in close work with students. At the best, I should say I suffer them. Never have I sought them, or sought to make them. Yet, in this case? Why should I not say, in yours and mine? Can I forget the manner in which you (literally) regarded me, when you did so at last? Your eyes—Mrs. Trout, it is true to say—
rested
upon me when I returned the apple. I felt contemplated. Your gaze gives size to what is contained within it: I was. The momentousness of our journey stemmed for me to a degree from that. Yet there was more. As I recollect, we talked. Did we not?—do not think me ironical. In my academic capacity I give forth constantly, when not to my students then to my colleagues; existence would be insuperable without that. What a gulf between that and our intercourse. To you I
spoke
, Mrs. Trout, to a comprehension latent within your silence. You in return granted me observations which to one not in key with you could have seemed enigmatic: each was, on the contrary,
you
revealed. The exactitude of your diction, its slow purity—. What you in words told me remains one in my memory with the far more you caused to appear. Our first phase terminated when drinks were served, a dividing going-and-coming adown the aisle. You selected a syrup you let me buy you.

Lunch trays descended, you reacting to yours less negatively than I to mine. Followed, the no-hour; the ever to me enormity of an airborne post-noon. An unreal torpor fills the pressurised air; bodies abandon themselves to daylit slumber in contorted attitudes of death. Awake or asleep, Mrs. Trout, who is not afraid? There is mistrust. Nerves register, exaggerate, at this hour the stealthy continuous tremor of the plane. Outside, the glare: inimical, contemptuous, landmarkless, unabated, unchanging. The nullity of speed, the nullity of height. We accept that we move; do we know?—what evidence have we? Enough, to remain sustained. Shall we, shall we not? The terrible onus is on the plane, elongated the longer one looks along it to all but hypothetical vanishing-point. One is within a directed pencil. Yet the onus is on the passenger, his vigil.

No longer the critical individual but one alert lest he cease to be. The wailing or sobbing of an infant in the silence or imitation of silence becomes intolerable: how if we all gave voice? This time, in addition and no doubt due to my late sickness, I was onset by a sinister physical volatility; foreseeing my coming tension I should maybe have eaten more of my lunch, or taken spirits before it or drunken wine, but to spirits and wine I in part attribute my disaster in France. I was right out at my lowest ebb, Mrs. Trout. It was then that I let myself look across. You, your repose was absolute. Need not to say unfeigned, for you feign nothing. It was basic. The sight of it moved me strongly (I did not yet know you to be a mother). Your head being back and lips widely parted, I judged you might be asleep. That, strangely (if so, forgive me) did not deter me from crossing the aisle, saying, “Mrs. Trout?” The one compulsive act of my life, to date. “What?” you said, rolling your head around. “I have the horrors,” I said. You put out a hand to the seat at your side and removed the apples. I took their place.

Your home by the sea. It seemed to me I visited its calm great rooms with their elemental outlook, “opening on the foam of perilous seas—.” Other though my subject is, my resort and irrational sustenance has been poetry; under its influence I perceived your echoing oaken gallery, your traditional kitchen, your garden leafy and green through every season. I would say I transmutedly entered them. I beheld your setting with such clarity, you in it, that it was saddening to picture it you gone—desolate it can only be. Yet, Mrs. Trout, that was not a valid sadness, due to the ambience in which it was felt by me. There is substantiality where
you are
, and, recollect, I was then beside you. I identified with your cycling trips, your work on your shell museum (do you project a catalogue?), your marketing in that ancient seaport. This home you lately quitted, with some conflict. You propose returning there with your little boy ultimately—how ultimately, I wonder? Your present stay in the States is likely to be for about how long? It may be you do not yourself know. I should be glad to.

You lost both parents. The I understood still recent end of your father was unexpected, I hope not shocking; the dolor you manifested forbad my asking. You had been all to each other, due to the early extinction of your mother. A plane wreck, total. I blenched, maybe? “Not
here
,” you assured me, pointing downward through the flooring at the Atlantic, “the Andes.” She was on a pleasure trip. She was young, lovely? You, what joyous memories you were robbed of. Left with a broken father` without heart to re-marry, seeking in friendship such poor cheer as he could. Too bad, Mrs. Trout, he was not to hold your child on his knee. You drew strength from sorrow. Little has come my way. Greatly, grievously even, I am your junior, but for the years. Bereavement has not yet touched me; coming so late as it will, shall I deeply feel it? (I have both parents, resident in Ohio near to my married sister and her family.) Have I been spared, or by-passed?—I fear the latter. Am I to atrophy, have I in part done so? Already do I enact what I fail to feel? Emotionally, am I parasitic? Could that have been otherwise, could it still? I have it in me to sorrow?—or have I not? Tell me.

Before marriage, what was your family name?

Putting that question, I touch the verge of an area I retreat from. Should I pursue this, this letter may do better never to reach you. Shall I speak plainly? I am unable to conceive who, or what in manner of being, or in some senses wherefore, can be Mr. Trout. I repeat, unable; reluctance I might have mastered. Yet he must be posited. On your marriage finger you have a signet ring, I should say a male one. You are a mother, that cannot be without cause. This I brood over. Whilst we were yet in the air, this did not concern me. It did not present itself. Sublimation occurred. The desolation facing me in the customs hall set going what I have been prey to since. This is not fit matter for thought, I find thought rejects it—I do not think; I revolve, I do not proceed. Mr. Trout assaults my sense of all possibility. The idea of such an association as your bearing his name has to comprehend is I do not say painful I do say foreign in connection with you. As a being you are autonomous. Absolutely, it was as that you struck me. Your being not or other or less than that is, I have to tell you, wholly out of accord with the image of you less formulated
by
me than formulated
for
me by its own forcefulness. Other than you appeared, you are not reality—I continue therefore to doubt you are other than you appear (or, were other than you appeared). Was Mr. Trout awaiting you at the Drake Hotel? If so, why did he not come to the airport? Or can he have been at the airport unbeknownst to me? Can it have been he who removed your child?— does he claim a share in its origin? One question more I feel free to put, as your friend: is Mr. Trout pursuing a course of conduct which would have been objectionable to your late father?

Of two courses open to me, on leaving the airport, I not only did not attempt to adopt but did not consider adopting either. A speedy taxi could have delivered me at your destination not only not long after, maybe before you. Or I could have called the Drake. I should like to tell you delicacy deterred me; what did was pessimism. Cui bono? And I was sore, Mrs. Trout. I could have had my card sent you attached to flowers. I do not know if you use them. Cordiality might not have been out of place. I should tell you, I was for twenty-four hours longer within New York reach of you, at Columbia, checking on Descartes detail in unedited sources privately made available by that University; but did nothing. I regretted knowing which your hotel was, lest the knowledge impinge upon me destructively. When, on the plane, you let fall your hotel’s name, I asked, was the Drake familiar from other visits? “No,” you said, adding, “That is why.” What then, I asked, had led you to opt for the Drake, out of many others? You were fond of birds, you said. What then sprang to my eye was a green-neck, doubtless masculine symbol, afloat on a pond on a farm of Ohio boyhood. For reasons open to be established (I have not undergone analysis) I more than once pelted stones at it. None hit it.