Eva Trout (23 page)

“That afternoon at your friends the Danceys’. He, my host, I’m sorry to say was out; but
she
disentangled herself from some deep dream and was most understanding. It hardly needs to be said that we spoke of you: veiled but one could feel rather intense anxiety—might you not have sent them one postcard, Eva?—and helpless, rather meandering speculalations. Everything very natural, tea in the kitchen. The undergraduate son seemed a trifle sticky; but there was a delightful child …”

“You talked about snow.”

“Then she still remembers?”

“I don’t know,” said Eva. “She’s dead.”

Constantine looked away, down a length of corridor. A twitch ran over his forehead. He said: “A pity.”

“I was there last week. Otherwise they were well.”

“The wall’s very thin.”

“What do you mean?”

“Between dead and living. One has begun to feel that.— You might not, yet.”

“I’m sorry I said you were unkind.”

“Did you?—in that case, perhaps I was. When, in particular?”

“Saying I had no purpose.”

“I don’t think I
said
so, did I?” he temporised, with exemplary mildness. “I think I asked whether you did not possibly feel a lack of that. In your life, that is; that is, as you’re living it. Er, social purpose. Spiritual content.”

It was beyond Eva to remark—as Henry might have?— “That comes well from you.” She did not, at least, do so aloud. Her astoundedness, and her totally nonplussed stare, which had in it just a hint of the cryptic, the nearest she ever came to the sardonic, did, however, to an extent convey that. Constantine, for his part, did not merely note her reaction; he seemed to bathe in it. It was as desired; she had not disappointed him. He was in humour for it. “I surprise you, do I?” he mused. “The fact is, Eva, my, er, angle on many things has been a good deal altered. My, er, values have been reorganised, since I last saw you. The result of a friendship.” “Oh.”

The Orange Crush came, Jeremy sank his nose in it.

“Yes. Tony,” expatiated Constantine, with evident inner pleasure in the sound of the syllables, “is Tony Clavering-Haight, a young East-End priest. Anglican, naturally.” Puting his glass down, emphatically, on the glass-topped table, he veered full round, unblinkingly, upon Eva before going on: “Of the highest principles.”

“I am so glad to hear that.”

He blinked once. “What do you mean?”

“So glad you have a friend.”

“Yes.” He drew a breath, leaned back, picked up the glass again. “So am I, Eva.”

“Then that is nice, Constantine.”

“Tony,” he sighed up at the embossed ceiling, “will miss the castle. He and I have fallen into the custom of taking summer parties of lads there, camping—his youth club lads. To that he devotes his holidays: absolutely selfless. But last summer turned out to be really rather too much; the rain streamed through. Really it’s just as well you don’t want it, Eva. A pretty penny that roof is going to cost. Even Willy’d have jibbed, I think. This year I must negotiate for a barn somewhere—less of a setting, but there one is.”

“Where does Mr. Clavering-Haight live?”

“Where he works, in a clergy-house. Absolutely austere. Not that it’s too bad there; it rather grows on one. Should you like to come there, one afternoon? By the way, he is Father Clavering-Haight. ‘Father Tony,’” Constantine fondly reported, “is what he’s known as. Which makes one smile; he seems hardly more than a boy. Yet his influence …”

“Yes,” said Eva, elsewhere. Gone was the Orange Crush, not a drop left, and Jeremy was now on the go again: there were danger-signals. “Go up,” she bade him, entrusting to him the key to their suite, “and see how the budgerigars are.” He hopped off, vanished into the lift. “Oh,” she found, too late, “he’s forgotten his walking-stick:
he’ll
be miserable!”

“No,” said Constantine, “he’ll fall on those apricots. In a way, this agonises me. Eva, there is one thing I should like to know: did you knowingly take on a handicapped child?”

“Why,” she touchily asked, “do you say ‘take on’?”

“One assumes that was so,” he returned dismissingly.

“When you took him on, did you know him to be as he is?” “How should I? He was a little baby.” “I see.—In a way, I am rather sorry.” “Sorry for who?”

“Rather sorry that that was the way it was. Not an undertaking, embarked upon. Not, er, a self-dedication …”

“Oh
really
, Constantine!”

“All the more, I should like you to talk to Tony. I’d like him to have a chance to study the boy. I can think of no one more fit to grapple with this. There’s such a thing as exorcism, you know.”

Eva rolled her eyes at Constantine, but said nothing.

“There are dumb devils—a frequent case of ‘possession.’ Apart from that, it would do the child no harm to see something of the East End: its realities. You keep him in cellophane. You make a plaything of him; at best, a playmate. He may well go on hugging his disability, it’s a form of immunity. He does well with it—you make life too charming for him: an Eden. High time he was cast forth from it; as things are, that could only be done across your dead body. Nonetheless, he has a Black Monday Morning coming to him, I shouldn’t wonder. —For instance, what’s to become of him when you’re gone?”

“
You
tell me Jeremy has a devil?”

“No, no, no: don’t be so flatfooted! Another shandy? No? Well, I do intend to take you to tea there. Afoot there are various burning projects which might fire you—have you ever begun to consider how much you
could
do?”

“Subscribe, you mean?”

Constantine waved and said: “It’s not merely money (though, do you propose to keep yours under your mattress?). You have, or could have, very great ‘drive,’ Eva. You have unusual, many would say phenomenal, force of character. Er, dynamic energy, seeking an outlet. In fact, you—” “—Yes. Once you said I was mad.”

Constantine pressed a bell embedded in the mahogany for, again, bar service. “You wore me down, I can only imagine,” he said, returning. “Willy wore me down also, often … What are your plans, for instance, for next week?”

“One day we are going to Cambridge, to visit Henry.”

“You have reason to think so?”

“Yes. I received a postcard.”

“OR,” Henry said, “you could cut a dash. Why not?”

The Cambridge day was nearing its end. Up here in Henry’s college, on this side overlooking a lane, he and Eva were keeping watch for the taxi which was to carry her to the station. Visit by Jaguar had been banned by Henry, with no explanation, so far, other than: “No, I don’t think that would do.” The taxi was not, actually, due for some ten or twelve minutes more. This ancient room which he shared with another man, Parker, by now looked exhausted by hospitality. From a beam crossing the low ceiling depended a mobile, the property of Parker—of its owner nothing had been seen; possibly Henry thought he would not do, either. Stacks of records, of which some had been played from time to time during the day, were understood to be Parker’s; his taste was catholic. Books of Henry’s, overflowing from his share of the shelves and not to be contaminated by Parker’s, had for this afternoon been deposed from chairs and littered the floor. Jeremy was somewhere out on the staircase.

Like so many conversations which might make history, this, on the really rather momentous subject of Eva’s future, had waited to get itself going till the last minute. “You not only could but ought to,” Henry pursued. “What is to stop you? And you know, Eva, in a peculiar way that’s what you’re rather cut out to do. As you’re conspicuous anyhow, why not be conspicuous on purpose?”

“Oh,” she said emptily. “Well, go on.”

He intended to. “Be,” he told her, “sensational. Get hold of a house, and I
mean
a house. A spectacular London one. If you can’t find one that’s spectacular, have it made so. Launch out. Fill it with people.”

“What people?”

“Those known as ‘people.’”

“Where are those got from?”

“You’d need promotion. I could promote you, up to a point.”

“Then, what?”

“You could promote me.”

Eva looked torn, dubious. “Yes, but more serious courses have been suggested. I should not like to be lacking in social purpose.”

“I’m pointing one out to you, you silly!”

“Yes, Henry; but as I have just been telling you, my attention has been drawn to the good of the world. I could, for instance, foundate a research institution on deaf-and-dumbness, in memory of Jeremy.”

”‘Foundate’ isn’t a verb, and he’s not dead yet. Yes, I should think you
have
just been telling me! My blood boiled,” declared Henry—who had, throughout, not appeared to be other than at his coolest. “Do-gooding sharks! Wasps round a jam pot! Headed by your infatuated guardian. And if he imagines he’s going thereby to better himself with Tony Clavering-Haight, he’s gravely mistaken, let me tell you.”

“Constantine isn’t trying to.”

“Oh, isn’t he.” A pause. The promoter-to-be contemplated his subject—who, against this backdrop, mullions, embrasures, so on, profile sharply over a shoulder and arms folded, had a heraldic handsomeness. “I wonder,” he speculated, “who ought to dress you. I could find out.”

“You are worldly, Henry.”

“Only out of impatience,” he said impatiently.

“Would you like me better …” she began, then did not know how to finish.

“That’s beside the point!” he cried, snapping thumb on finger. “The main thing is, I’m projecting a role for you. Can’t you see? Don’t you want one? You ought to—I want one for you.”

That was all, then? Eva, left heavy-hearted, looked about at the books dispersed on the floor with something of the hopeless, regretful reverence which had been hers in the Lumleigh library. Stooping, here and then there, she retrieved some, which she built up into a cairn. It wobbled and fell.

“Leave those
alone
!” ordered Henry, peremptorily. “No— I’m sorry, Eva.”

“
I’m
sorry,” said Eva, straightening her back, wiping together her chidden hands. “Yet this was, this has been, such a happy day.”

“I don’t think it went too badly, do you? Pity it rained when we were on the river, nothing is wetter than a punt.— And don’t tell me Jeremy now wants a punt of his own; one could see that.—What did you think of Jocelyn?” (An undergraduate who had joined them for tea, then gone away gracefully, when indicated.) “Oh, I liked him.”

“Good. He was an experiment.”

“What’s Jeremy doing, I wonder.”

Henry did not pretend to. Taking up one of the more trickily balanced yet authoritative of his standing attitudes, he narrowed in her direction his lambent dark eyes. “You know, Eva, one thing about you is, you’re a trend-setter. I mean, your proclivities are infectious. You vanish; everyone does the same. Well, not everyone, but look at your friends the Arbles —gone like smoke, leaving not a rack. Even your guardian’s ducked down into that clergy-house; since when,” Henry said, with a shade of pique, “nothing more has been heard of him. —And there’s another thing about you, Miss Trout: you leave few lives unscathed. Or at least, unchanged. You don’t know a rather long poem called
Pippa Passes
? No, I expect not. We were reared on Browning, owing to Mother. This girl only had to pass by (though as a matter of fact, she did more than that, she sang away at some length under people’s windows) to leave behind the most dynamic results. In a way you’re a sort of Pippa—though in reverse.”

“I don’t sing,” said Eva mistrustfully.

“No; and you don’t have an improving effect. Pippa diverted people from lust and villainy, and exactly one or the other of those two things, or both sometimes, do rather seem to spring up where you set foot. Don’t feel I feel this reflects on you. Ethically perhaps you’re a Typhoid Mary. You also plunge people’s ideas into deep confusion; that is, so far as they ever had any. You have only to pass—”

“Yet you advocate my taking a house in London?”

“Oh, all the more so!—Pippa, of course, marked people down in advance; she designedly went and sang under
their
windows. She wasn’t nearly as artless as she was thought. You are artless; that is the awful thing. You roll round like some blind indeflectible planet.
Sauve qui peut
, those who are in your course. I shouldn’t think there’s anybody you’ve ever gone out for, is there? Other, of course, than Jeremy (and after all, when you did that you had yet to meet him).—Otherwise, no one?”

Eva turned away to examine the mobile. She seemed unconscious that a reply was sought.

“Unless me,” he said—as though in parenthesis.

Looking with fervour, with passion almost, into the geometry of the mobile, Eva uttered no word. But she nodded, once.

In a room below, someone opened a window and shouted down to somebody in the lane.

Henry, never rendered speechless by agitation, indeed very much the reverse, now burst out: “What I
cannot
get over is, your having gone through life never having heard ‘The lark’s on the wing; the snail’s on the thorn.’ Not on a calendar, even? It’s incredible.”

“Much is.”

Jeremy, losing his way on the dark staircase, battered and banged on the door—the third he had tried—before getting a grip on the handle. Having let himself in, he defiantly out-stared Henry (though so far, everything between them had gone swimmingly) before making possessively for Eva, whom he leaned up against. A residuum of panic was about him; his hair still was in ratstails, at every angle, after the towel-scrubbing given it on the return from the rainy river. He extracted from Eva’s pocket a black-currant jujube, which he went on to suck. “That should do him good,” she observed, “if he
has
caught cold.”

“Why should he? I don’t—and I’m far more highly organised!”

“I know, Henry.”

Appeased, he said: “I’m afraid that sounds like the taxi.”

It was the taxi.

“Goodbye?” said Eva.

“I’m seeing you off, naturally.”

On their way to the station, she sat locked in an anguish nobody could explain—across her, the other two played cat’s cradle with the cord off a cake box. She could not endure this day’s being over. Fixedly looking ahead, past the driver’s ears, she cast no backward glances; she could not bear to. Nor did she need to; the beautiful agonising mirage of the University was inescapable from. This was a forever she had no part in. The eternity was the more real to her for consisting of fiery particles of transience—bridges the punt slid under, rain drops spattering the Cam with vanishing circles, shivered reflections, echoes evaporating, shadows metamorphosising, distances shifting, glorification coming and going on buildings at a whim of the sun, grass flashing through arches, gasps of primitive breath coming from stone, dusk ebbing from waxen woodwork when doors opened. Holy pillars flowed upward and fountained out, round them there being a ceaseless confluence of fanatical colours burningly staining glass. Nothing was at an end, so nothing stood still. And of this living eternity, of its kind and one of its children, had been Henry, walking beside her.