Eva Trout (27 page)

“—Thank you,” said Eva.

Anger restored her senses. Rising to go, she now saw what she was leaving—a room, no more. If anything, less: it was largely vacant, uncompleted forever, as was its owner. Its scant furnishings were memorial pieces. In a corner, a tangle of soiled sheeting, perhaps some abandoned aesthetic purpose, caught what daylight there was; the room being darkened by bile-green walls, to which were pinned flopping sketches, and houses opposite. In the fireplace were (which recalled something?) the white, deadened ashes of a wood fire. Not habitable, this was proper to be the scene of an enormity—as it had been. “You are right,” Eva said, “it is time I went.” The woman poured the cat out of her arms, on to its chair, in order to go with her to the street door.

Panic waited till Eva was alone in the Jaguar. Then, as the car moved off, desolation came up with a rush and kept pace alongside. The way downhill, into the bottomless incredulity which is despair, was incandescent with flowering chesnut trees. The Outer Circle swept Eva round Regent’s Park, awash in the gold of early evening, running with children. “Tomorrow, I take you to …” Jeremy’s seat was not empty, wholly; on its waxen leather something slithered about—one of his puzzles, the favourite lately. The silver bullet in it darted like quicksilver, which it may have been: it bid vainly for Eva’s notice, for, unshakable driver, she kept eyes ahead, fixed on nothing but nothingness. After the park gateway, she could, she found, not contemplate any familiar route between here and Paley’s. Neither could she expect to endure Paley’s—so, instead, swung the other way. But there was to be nothing anaesthetising about Central London: on the contrary, the car, trapped in tightening networks it did not recognise, began to convey to Eva its own first exasperation and then terror. So,
she
became trapped, in them and in it. She ran it into an alley that said NO ENTRY, stopped, snatched the keys out and made her escape. Though there was, actually, none.

“Nothing has happened, I hope, madam?” asked the porter at Paley’s, an hour later.

“I don’t know yet.”

Though Jeremy returned, Eva felt it no longer safe to remain in London. He wandered back into Paley’s, that same evening, cool as a cucumber and in good spirits, round about eight o’clock—he did not want anything to eat (one might suppose, anything more to eat) and went straight to bed. Overnight, she made reservations on a plane to Paris; well before noon next day they were in the air. They each had with them a suitcase only; she ordered that everything left in the suite at Paley’s go down to the baggage room for storage. Anything edible, to be eaten. Budgerigars, to remain with the porter’s wife. Jaguar, not sure where it had been put: let it be traced and restored to garage. From Le Bourget she wired to Constantine: “Gone away again owing to conspiracy you probably know of.” (His behaviour yesterday had been more than suspicious, incriminating: from lunch time onward to midnight he had still been nowhere available on the telephone.) Eva sent no more telegrams till she and the boy arrived at the Ritz, Paris—she then communicated with Henry: “Are in Paris so pretty wish you could join us.” She had no intention of remaining in this conspicuous hotel, but it was friendly to her on account of Willy; yes, the place swarmed with memories of him. She considered it part of Jeremy’s heritage. Eva did not think Paris pretty (she did not know what she thought it, if anything; it had been there always). The adjective had been chosen to needle Henry. She had last been here when, eight years ago, she took off to New York from Orly (the better to mystify pursuers). This time, she was not sure where to go next.

It was now May. Everywhere was full, she was warned, owing to the Americans—who are always blamed. Miss Trout obtained a table for lunch at the Ritz, but once again Jeremy was not hungry. In the afternoon, they took a taxi over a bridge, then walked from small hotel to small hotel on the Left Bank, till finally she extracted a room from one. Sitting on the edge of this new bed, Eva wrote a compensatory cheque for the sculptress—she then had to go downstairs to procure an envelope. Nothing here went so smoothly as at the Ritz, or Paley’s, but she pressured the pessimist at the desk into despatching for her an addendum to the original Henry telegram—this supplied what was now her address, ending: “Do come.” Being at this distance put Eva in a stronger position. Jeremy, at her elbow, watched her indite the telegram with impartial interest; he could not of course read, but could write, being a wonderful copyist; line after line of her copper-plate had he reproduced… . The hotel, grumbling, came across with a stamp for the envelope, but then signified it had shot its bolt: no way of getting the suitcases from the Ritz other than fetching them oneself. Zigzagging across the river continued, therefore, into late afternoon.

Jeremy watched Paris, this further movie. At this hour, it exhausted the resources of technicolour, and exceeded them. Creamy buildings transmuted to honey yellow as the sun came languidly down the sky, dazzling half of the city out of existence. Viridian shadow clothed such trees as were not in the sun’s path. Rainbows of traffic frayed into splintering whirlpools. Flowers spumey like sherbets though more brilliantly chemical in colour effervesced from their artificial settings. Lancing its way through Paris, the steel-bright Seine magnetised leaners over its parapets. It was the wide-open extravagance of the Right Bank perspectives and spaces which most nearly astounded the little boy—who had never seen so much of anything, at once, as he saw of Paris—and, at the same time, their urbanity, their cerebralism, their look of having been calculated to the last centimetre, which most nearly subdued and in the end tired him: too much to grapple with? He was glad to be back
their
side of the river. In the sunken-shadowy hall of the small hotel he looked rather white, pinched. Eva, having watched the suitcases being bumped upstairs (there was no lift) asked: “Like to rest, Jeremy? Want to sleep, for a bit?” No, he did not. So out they went again, and, arriving on to the Boulevard St. Germain, some way up, squeezed through and managed to get possession of two chairs and a segment of table outside the Deux Magots.

It was a wonder Jeremy was not more
blasé
, considering how many Paris cafés there are on screens. This one, however, was no less lifelike—lie had the courtesy to look round him interestedly. How implacably good, how conciliating his behaviour had been since, first thing this morning, he had been torn from sleep, helpless as a princeling about to be assassinated, to witness the demolition, around his ears, of what had at least equivocated to “home.” Their continuing on at Paley’s, although it charged Eva, day after day, with an unkept promise, had spelled
some
domesticity for Jeremy. He had clutched at the token, later to be exchanged for the real thing. They had in a way kept house, established themselves—their surrounding accumulation of heaps of objects, and still more, imponderables, had quieted, assuaged him and reassured him. And now? All of it swept away!

Nor was it in his power to ask why.

Why, though, was he propitiating
her
? All today, this acquiescent if dazed brightness, and sliding smiles. Paris a spree? No, he knew better. Now, it was true, he was weary—he could no more.

Above all, he must not know she was afraid. “It’s been a long day, Jeremy—hasn’t it?” said Eva. But the child did not notice her. Shoals of people were going by, in the violet air. Phalanxes of people were sitting round—the café, springing alight inside, shone out on to their few silences, costive or tenuous, and their accesses of conversation. One knew nobody: Paris was one’s own. Was the boy glad they again were alone together: they two only? They were not alone together: an unbridgeable ignorance of each other, or each other’s motives, was cleft between them, and out of the gulf rose a breath of ice. A waiter came by. No Orange Crush to be hoped for in Paris, probably? She ordered a cassis syrup; for herself, cognac. Eva’s habits had changed, in twenty-four hours—this time yesterday, some
ignoto
at Paley’s had steered her into the bar and administered cognac: on the house, she was told. It had stopped her thinking. This evening, she needed that … Where
had
been Jeremy, this time yesterday? … “Paris is fun, Jeremy?” asked Eva. She still could not get his attention, she touched his wrist. He turned towards her, irradiated by some secret.

Next morning, on her way out to exchange wads of dollar bills flown in from Chicago, last month, on her person, Eva was handed a telegram. “Have sense,” it said, “middle of term how could I. Henry.” This stimulated her, if anything. Henry’s known thrift in matters of postage doubled the value of this reaction: anything so costly must be violent—and where
had
he got the money from, eh? Parker? … The streets were sweet, as though after a fall of dew. She bought
oeillets
, with picotee edges, dripping from the bucket, from the vendor at a corner. She had locked behind her the room in which lay Jeremy, still asleep—the metal-tabbed key rattled in her pocket, knocking against a miniature alloy revolver which had fallen from Jeremy’s when she shook out his jacket. (How had he come by it?) Enticing with coffee, the morning was pearly with promise of noon heat. A day for an outing—for instance, Fontainebleau? From thence, a bright-coloured postcard to Cambridge.

Next morning, in London, Constantine got this letter:

Thanks for your affability on the telephone. I made myself known to you, I may now tell you, with a trepidation which I suppose was extraordinary after all these years’ uninhibited letterwriting. One can only say, to talk is another thing. The great pleasure my letters to you gave me was bound up with the impossibility of your answering. They could have no come-back, any more than they could be fended off. To be telling you everything about where I was except where I was added a fascination to my surroundings (wherever I was) just as telling you all I did except what I was doing gave an extra edge to my line of action. That a day of reckoning could come did not occur to me. It did when I faced up to the telephone. Then, to be let know, and so immediately, that nothing had mounted up, that you held nothing against me, that our non-relationship was as ever, unimpaired, static, stable, was a relief. All had been nothing. Life is an anti-novel.

Thanks, also, for putting me in the picture (as you put it) as to old friends. I have contacted Eric, losing no time —I hope you’ll think well of me. Almost immediately after our conversation I came to London, found myself an hotel, then telegraphed to the address you gave me: Luton. We met yesterday. He was considerably embarrassed; I felt nothing. I told him, I will do anything he wants, to which he immediately said he’s not sure what he wants. (So, where are we?) In that case, I told him, he was seeing me on false pretences; not that I minded, but it was waste of time. Apart from what he wanted, I said also, what about those children one heard he had? At once he was on the defensive, as though baited—as one remembers so well. After some time, he seemed blindly angry, though exactly with whom one couldn’t make out. You? Me? You and me as a combination—for he can’t get it out of his head that we are or were one. Eva, after that fandango she led him? As you’ll gather, our meeting was inconclusive. He asked how I was, where I had been. What I most noticed, seeing him again, was, he is very sentimental.

Yes, and I had a word with Eva. She’d I’m sure been called to the telephone in the middle of luncheon, not I suppose actually with her mouth full, though it sounded so. By the time I rang off, she was still adjusting. Considering, she didn’t do too badly. I must see her; not to would be a pity.

Have there been any of those disastrous consequences you foresaw, once—of her getting away, I mean? There I did fail you. On the other hand, I worked more than half in the dark. If you’d ever been more than partially honest with me, if you’d ever given me anything like the whole picture, or whole story, I need not have—or so I think sometimes. But perhaps there is no whole picture, or story. Or, more likely, you are unwilling to recognise what it is. I
could
have done better, and that riles me.

I shall be in Reading (15, Roundabout Rd.) for not more than a week. When I have another address, you shall have it. Do not let Eric have it; I don’t want him coming round again. Any further dealings with him must be through a lawyer. Could you find one for me?—I should be grateful.

Iseult.

To which he replied:

Dear Iseult,

What should have been one more of your delightful letters arrived, I am sorry to say, on the wrong morning. I’m fit for nothing. Eva has bolted again—and not only that, accuses me of “conspiracy.” That at least was the gist of her wild telegram. She and I had seemed to be entering calmer waters. Her return was a genuine pleasure; since it, she’s been accommodating and rational—I would go so far as to say, affectionate. A halcyon period of mutual confidence and planning. A very dear friend of mine, who met her, encouraged my optimism or euphoria; he saw nothing in her that could not be put right, and found her in general amenable, he reported.—But now?

You can offer no light on this? If you cannot, I fear I possibly can. You contacted Eva (from what you tell me) with incontinent speed, allowing no time for me to warn her you are about again. The effect on her nervous system could be deplorable; so much so that to it, I must frankly tell you, I trace this renewed outbreak of crazed suspicions. What I am talking about, you should surely know. The notion that you and I are “in league” in some way gained an over-mastering hold on poor dear Eva, at one time, and may not (though one had hoped the contrary) have been quite got rid of. On and off, it has hampered us both in our dealings with her—
I
suffered under it, certainly. Your reappearance set old machinery going—unprepared for it as she (
not
unavoidably) was. We know her to be a mass of latent nervosity. Had no incident followed, the same day, all might have again subsided—or one may hope so. There was incident.

On getting her telegram, I went straight round to Paley’s. Yes, indeed she had left—with a suddenness puzzling, and, one could see, wounding to that faithful hotel. Had anything happened to upset her? I unearthed this: the little boy had been missing, for an hour or so, at which “Madam had been very greatly shaken.” He turned up again, fit as a fiddle—but that did it. As well it might. Given the Trout child’s probable weight in platinum, it would not have been fanciful to suspect “conspiracy.” The insane thing was, to incriminate me. My best hope of clearing this mare’s-nest up is to establish, for certain, who was concerned. I have in mind one character who could be more than fishy. I cannot remember whether or not I told you, during our brief though at that time delightful chat, that Eva’d been farming the boy out, daily, to an artistic person on Primrose Hill? If I did, I cannot, I’m sure, have mentioned the name, or I should remember your laughing—it is too truly-rural, it is “Applethwaite.”

To the eye, Applethwaite is a wash-out. I went to see her (oh, the itinerary of one nightmare evening!). She is the
manquée
who could be “cover” for anything: chinless women crop up in half those cases, operators pick well. I drew a blank, outright. She has had time to think, she sticks to her story. A Zola-type harlot came and removed Jeremy. This she told Eva, this (she says) Eva accepted. I could not shake her. Someone must try again.

Will you be the one? Should you wish, you could see it as a step towards redeeming your tiny blunder. But also, my reliance on your acumen has been one of the lasting links in our “non-relationship,” dear Iseult. Will you go to Primrose Hill and look swiftly round? Just, confront the lady, unnerve her a very little. See if it seems to you she could ever crack. Then come straight to me (I repeat,
straight
) and report? We could, even, have lunch?

Or am I asking too much? If you feel that, say so. But I do wilt under Eva’s misdirected hostility. Don’t, of course, run into danger—on any account.

Yours,

C.