Eva Trout (19 page)

“Yes,” said Eva.

“Trout, what about that bear?”

“It could smother him … How big are your children?”

“Big Boy’s the biggest; he’s going on four.—He’d be happy to own it.”

“Thank you then, Elsinore.”

“To think,” Elsinore observed, for the last time. In a now rational manner, she shook her hair. “I need a cigarette,” she said, “and they’re up there—so I guess I’ll leave you.”

“I shall be back,” swore Eva. Not a gleam of belief lightened Elsinore’s lost but composed countenance. Distance, the floor of the lobby, widened between them. Elsinore, top-heavied by her mother’s equipment, totteringly balanced on spike heels, stood in the elevator as in a show case: its tarnish framed her. She waved, playing up to the daydream. “See you!” The door slid to.

Eva forged her way up the avenue, a mild gradient—fur cap and gauntlets flattened under an elbow, hands thrust down into greatcoat pockets. Her stride was resolute, yet the turmoil that was everywhere was within her. Between bouts of the wind came an ululation such as used to be heard in the castle chimneys. Tomorrow was a banged-about Bethlehem star, yesterday a writhing unravelled pattern. She rebelled; she did not know against what. Stopped at an intersection, she lost her armour, mindless speed—a waiting thought leaped on her. “I don’t know her married name, don’t know where she lives: so now gone she
is
.
Or
do I go back?” She looked behind her. “No: I could miss him, I could lose him. I could fail him, by never knowing so never coming … I could be late by a minute, they’d snatch him back. I
could
lose him, lose him forever: the old man said … You came back too late, Elsinore. I cannot. You came at the wrong time.”

Lights changed: she headed on, scowling with haste. A flying wisp of tinsel caught in her hair and would have clung there had she not plucked it out.

Entering her hotel, she veered near the desk. The alert clerk reacted: “Hi, Mrs. Trout!” “Anything?” asked Eva. “A call came in for you, five minutes ago. No message. Caller will call again.” He gave her her room key. “Goodnight, Mrs. Trout.” “Goodnight.”

Up in her dumb, lit, sealed room, Eva stared at the solid curtains. She started pacing the carpet. Going by, she shut the door of the bathroom, lest there be ears there. Three pictures hung on the walls; she analysed each. From the under-shelf of the bed table she took the Gideon Bible: she put her thumb in it. “
This is the law,
” she read, “
of the burnt offering, of the meat offering, and of the sin offering, and of the trespass offering, and of the consecrations, and of the sacrifice of the peace offerings
—” The telephone rang.

“Hi,” said the voice, “you back again? You there?”

“I’m here.”

“You there all by yourself?”

“All by myself.”

“Do I have your name?”

“Trout.—Eva.”

“That is correct.” A pause on the line, then—”Dog in the ditch,” the voice said.

“Cat on the wall,” replied Eva. “All set. Tomorrow.” “Where do I go?”

“You got a pencil?—you want to write it down?”

EIGHT YEARS later, Eva and her little boy, Jeremy, boarded a Pan-American Boeing 707 at O’Hare Airport, Chicago. Destination: London. This was to be Jeremy’s first trans-Atlantic flight, and, at the end of the journey, first view of England— both prospects filled him with elation. While they awaited the take off, he looked perfunctorily at the comics on his knee, but all the same, every now and then, with uncontrollable eloquence up at Eva. Each time he did so, she gave him a meditative smile, which he, having watched her lips for an instant, returned. Each of their interchanges was marked by this sort of gravity, which they had in common. He was a beautiful child, fair hair cut straight across a wide, forehead, eyes with a skylike power of varying between grey and blue. His skin, though unfreckled, delicate and fair, looked healthy. His features were to an extent in the Trout cast, having an openness which had been Willy’s and was Eva’s; yet his alikeness to her, at moments striking, had about it something more underlying, being of the kind which is brought about by close, almost ceaseless companionship and constant, pensive, mutual contemplation. Whether the boy would be tall, it was not yet possible to say; at present, he was average for his years. He was dressed in rather a British manner, cream silk shirt with a blue tie, short grey knickerbockers. Eva looked orderly in a Neiman-Marcus suit, also flannel grey. The two were traveling in comfort, indeed style. Others glanced at them favourably. There was no professor.

The lights trembled. The jet moved forward along the runway.

“Here we go—Jeremy! We’re off!”

He put his hand in hers.

At the London end, they had reservations at Paley’s Hotel, Gloucester Road, S.W.7, recommended to Eva as a good family one. It was. The mahogany lift, massive ivory woodwork, Turkey-carpeted corridors had all the solidarity she hoped. They had a suite at the top; they came in late, so it was not till next morning that Jeremy saw out over the horizontal city, green-misted by its many, many trees—this was mid-April; spring, too, had arrived in London. They had lunch at the Zoo, then went to Madame Tussaud’s. The evening, they spent in their suite, looking at pictures of London in colourful books which had been bought. The following morning, at the hour ordained, round came the chauffeur-driven Daimler. They were off again—this time, into Worcestershire.

The boredom, for Eva, of being a passenger was mitigated by showing Jeremy England. Lambs, elms, cottages, colleges (they passed through Oxford). He missed nothing. From time to time, dread of the impending day overcame her; the aware child, at such moments, went supine against her, shoulder to shoulder. They stopped for lunch at Evesham, roast beef, apple tart, afterwards walking some way along the river looking at boats. “You’d like a boat of your own?” He certainly would. “A seagoing boat, with an outboard engine?” Still better! … Just after three o’clock, the Daimler drew up outside Larkins.

“You stay where you are, a minute. Then I’ll be back for you.” So saying, Eva got out—then, halted.

The short front garden was, as it never had been, tightly and brightly planted: wallflowers of every shade from lemon to wine blazed out their heady though velvet smell. The five sash windows facing the roadway wore, today, a look of feverish polish, and were crisply nylon-curtained within. The door in the middle, crimson since time began, was cobalt blue … From inside the car behind Eva, her little boy drank in this promised, promising house—so houselike, so red-as-a-plum, so square within its fairyland orchards. He watched Eva lag— why lag?—up the clean white cement path between the wallflowers. He saw her unable to find the doorbell, then at last discover a bell, and at last press it. Jeremy held his breath till the door opened—in it stood a stoutish put-about lady, in tight bright red. A colloquy followed, punctuated, on the part of the red lady, by stolid, irrefutable head-shaking. Throughout, Eva stood like a ramrod. She turned away only after the door had closed in her face. She then came slowly down the path to the Daimler. The chauffeur sprang to attention—she got in again. “Jeremy, they’re not there now.”

He looked unutterably reproachfully at Larkins.

“They’ve gone away,” she said. “She says, nobody knows where.”

The chauffeur remained at attention. “Where now, madam?”

She sat there stupefied, stony. “I don’t know.”

The expressionless man waited. “Yes, I do,” she admitted. “Go to the vicarage.”

“You know where that is, madam?”

“Yes, I do.”

So they went there.

The Gothic portal stood ajar, by about three inches, indicating, “Out, but back in a minute.” Eva gave it the traditional shove; it brushed heavily inward over the doormat. Indoor, the cramped-up dusk was deeper than ever—she gave her habitual stumble, crossing the threshold. She got her vicarage voice back— ”
Anyone there
?” From out of the drawing-room, a widening segment of sunshine entered the hall. Henry appeared, in the form of a young man.

“I thought,” he said, “that sounded rather like you.” He looked past Eva. “Who have you with you?”

She said to Jeremy: “This is Henry Dancey.”

The boy came forward, hand out. He and Henry shook hands.

Back again in the drawing-room, Eva settled into her former place, at her particular end of the long lean sofa, Jeremy seating himself beside her. Henry retrieved a book he had left face downward, making a note of the page before he closed it, and went on to tuck it under his elbow. He then stood, in balance, one foot on the seat of the sofa at his end. There was a different cover, pomegranates and birds, not roses and loops —the fruit had become, by this time, not less washed-out than the flowers had been. April absolved the fire from being lit.

“Well,” said Eva.

“Well—indeed!” replied Henry.

“This,” said she, with a touch of the ancient truculence, “was a surprise?”

“Nothing,” said he, with recourse to the ancient tactics, “surprises me absolutely.—Mother,” he added, “will be sorry to miss you; she’s away for two days. Where have you been?”

Eva drew a dangerously deep breath.

“I mean,” he interposed hastily, “more or less?” He could not have a full recital, he was not up to it. “Where, for instance, have you immediately come from?”

“Larkins.”

Jeremy made a diversion; slithering off the sofa he looked with excited desire out at the garden. “May he go out?” asked Eva. “He would enjoy that; we have been much in cities.” Henry unlocked a reluctant half-glass door, too ecclesiastical to be called a French window, and the child rushed out into the flowering currant bushes. “How nice he seems,” Henry said, coming back. “On the silent side; but we talked him down, I expect?”

Eva said nothing.

“Yes, of course,” Henry agreed. “Larkins.” A slight reluctance began to invade his manner, as though he felt himself somewhat under a handicap—as one is when constrained, by civility, to discuss a novel or play which has not impressed one, bored one in so far as it did do anything, and in any event stays related to years ago. He was resigned, however. He did his best. “I hear it’s tremendously chic, now?”

She cried out: “Henry, where
have
they gone?”

“They’re not ‘they’ any more, for one thing. They broke up.” He stopped and looked speculatively at Eva. “You broke them up, it was thought?”

“I did not,” she declared, staring him out.

“You cut and ran, so how would you know?”

“How should J do a thing like that?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Henry, more than detached.

“When,” she asked, more uneasily, “did this happen?”

“Ages ago.” He made an extra effort of recollection. “We weren’t supposed to know anything about it. About the time —I should say?—that you took off. After all, they could do as they liked; they were in the money. He probably bought a business somewhere else. (The man he was working for here was his cousin, wasn’t he?—
he
might tell you?) Mrs. Arble made a beeline for France, and as far as anyone knows may be there still. Past that, I can’t help you, Eva. France is quite large, in its own way, and I barely knew her. She never took to me. You got rather a dusty answer at Larkins, did you? Mrs. Thing takes a low view of her predecessors. She’s got it into her head that they kept a brothel.”

“Was Jeremy,” she asked angrily, “blamed for this?”

“You mean, was Mr. Arble blamed for Jeremy? I believe so, in some quarters.—I don’t know, really.”

“Then that was wicked,” she said. “There was nothing,
nothing
.”

“Oh, good!” exclaimed Henry—relief was manifest. He could not, though, restrain himself from saying: “Then how did you come by Jeremy?”

“That is
my
business.”

“Not by the usual means?” he proceeded rashly.

“That is my business,” said Eva, never more quellingly.

“ ‘You stupid boy’—eh?” said he, with the best of grace— seldom more engagingly. “What’s Jeremy doing, I wonder?” He strolled to see. “He has found the ash-heap; now there is a rich dig, layers of civilisation—it’s been a dump since we came.” With a kingfisher-like flash of the personality, back he came, to cast himself on to the sofa in his corner. “You find us where we were,” he reminded her, “at any rate. Why we still are and whether we always shall be, I can’t tell you. One sop, though: Father’s a rural dean.—Do you find me changed?”

“No.”

“Oh.—You’re looking handsome, Eva; age suits you.”

“I am not so old as that.”

“You are twice my age.”

“No I am
not
, Henry.”

“You may not be now, but you were; and so that’s indelible. The day of the gallivant to the castle I was twelve, and you were twenty-four. What a crew we were.”

“You remember that day?”

“Now I come to think of it.—Of course, though here in one sense we’re gone in another: we children, I mean. Fledged and scattered. Catrina’s just qualified as a p.t. instructress, which exactly suits her: bossier than ever. (Mother’s now with her, settling her into digs. Unwantedly, I’m certain, but there you are.) Andrew got himself into Haileybury. If all shapes well, he’ll be a chartered accountant. He has a tremendous effect on girls; he’s away now with several of them, sailing. I am at Cambridge.”

“What is Louise doing?”

“Louise died.”

His face, for an instant towards Eva, showed a curious whitened hardening round the eyes. He watched her make a cumbrous, resisting movement, twisting her head about.— “How
could
she?”

“I know,” he said. “Not exactly the type, was she? Bright as a button. And she need not have. There was incompetence. I shall always mind very much. She was my familiar.”

“That, Henry,” said Eva, not only humbly but with a timidity lost for years, “I never knew.”

“You never noticed. She was, always.”

She was left to blurt out: “I’m sorry I asked.”

“Not at all. I made you, I led you on to.—You see, I hate telling people.”

Jeremy’s shining head appeared in the window. He indicated, he wanted now to come in again. “No,” Eva said, “he must open the door himself.” Henry went to investigate. “No, he can’t,” he reported, “his hands are full.” He admitted Jeremy. The boy straightway tipped his handfuls of treasure on to the rug at Eva’s feet, then crouched down, absorbedly starting to sort things out—half of a mangled teaspoon, a minute wheel off some minute toy, the crushed empty shell of some wild bird’s speckled egg, three or four slivers of splintered mirror, particles of Woolworth willow-pattern, flower-pots, Crown Derby and, not least, one orange wooden button. Could his hands have held more, more would have been deployed. What there was, he was making into a pattern. From above, the comparative adults looked on. “You’ve not done so badly, Jeremy,” remarked Henry.