Eva Trout (32 page)

“Yes. We must not be late.”

They took the boat across to the other shore, where waited the Jaguar. He paddled, she regarded the castle. “Oh,
don’t
look sad, Eva!”

“This, I am seeing for the last time.”

“But that could be true of anything,” he argued. “We may both get killed on the way back, me driving.”

That evidently was not what she had in mind, so did not comfort her. The glasses, Eva’s camera (which for some reason had all today been out of the picture, so had not taken any), their two pullovers, which had not been needed, and the big box of excellent cigarettes of which Henry had smoked a few were transferred from the boat to the roomy boot. She unlocked the car; he investigated the dashboard, the gear and so on. “Which is reverse? You will have to show me.” She handed him the keys, on their jewelled ring. “Thanks,” he said, jingling them on his palm.

“Henry …”

“Hullo?”

“Why is my money ‘horrible’?”

“It isn’t; it’s part of your persona.”

“What is my persona?”

“Oh,
bother
, Eva! What it is is—outsize, larger-than-life in every way. That’s how you fascinate the imagination. Years ago when you first came cracking into the vicarage you’d already been pointed out as A Very Rich Girl. We had none of us ever seen one—it was like knowing a violinist, or something. There could be a trace of that still, I suppose; one so seldom completely outgrows things. But what harm?”

“You said my money was horrible.”

“Did I?—What could be horrible could be what it could do to me.”

“What would it do to you?”

“Too much.—I said ‘could’ not ‘would,’ Eva; but there
would
be danger. I’m such a split-up character. What I don’t think I ever have talked to you about, actually, are my ambitions. Perhaps I’m shy of them. It’s easier to peeve, and so I do, ad lib. But they do very much exist; I mean, my ambitions. They have great power with me. They are a mixed bag, though. Your money could swamp all but the ones I’m most nearly ashamed of.—Shall we get going?”

They got into the Jaguar, exchanging their places of that morning. Henry, with barely-controlled excitement, fitted in then turned the ignition key.

The castle flashed its series of last appearances through gaps in the woods the car began to move through—in vain. Eva, arms folded, leaned back with eyes shut; Henry, so far, drove with a concentration he was endeavouring to make light of. Clearing the last of the rides, they passed through a gateway into the outer world. Up hill, down dale, through the gauzes of midsummer as through the steel-engraving of that January day. After some miles, Henry eased into ease in driving: his triumph was to be felt. “You are happy, Henry?”

“Outwardly, very.”

A bridge bestrode a quicksilver valley—seen, gone! She sighed: “What was
that
river’s name, I wonder?”

“I wonder,” said Henry, accelerating.

To find out, she unfolded a map. It escaped from her fingers: within an instant the mottled, angular thing had billowed outward all over her body. She stayed passively underneath it. Henry slid the car to a stop abruptly. Slewing under the wheel, he slanted over Eva’s erotic counterpane.

“Now you’ve done it—you’ll never find that river!”

“Why not?”

“Because who cares whether you do?”

“
I
do.”

“
I
don’t!” He stripped the map off Eva, half-folded it wrongly, chucked it away. “Eva, I
could
make love to you; it’s not that I’m frightened of! The, the reverse. Would you ever like me enough, would you ever let me? I don’t think we’ve even as much as touched, have we ever—even in the past? So I do sometimes wonder … I do now wonder. Or would it all be too very extraordinary?”

“I suppose we shook hands?”

“No, I don’t think so.—Or only under compulsion.”

“Henry, this was a wrong place to stop the car, just round a corner; unfair to other traffic.”

“We ought to go on, ought we?” he said, troubled.

“We had better, I think.”

He drove all out. Eva said nothing till a church steeple resembling Mr. Dancey’s, admonitory reminder of what was coming, rose into view then dipped out again. Then: “Before we said goodbye, I wanted to ask you—”

“—This is
not
The Last Ride Together, is it?”

“Unless you kill me.” (The unforgivable driver had flicked an eye off the road.) “I wanted to ask you if you would act somebody.”

“In a play?” he said dazedly.

“Don’t be stupid!—for one occasion.”

“
Enact
somebody? Do an impersonation?—of what person?”

“My bridegroom.” She pressed her hands to her temples. “
Appear
to depart with me on a wedding journey, seen off by friends.”

“That sounds loopy. What would be the idea?”

“Getting with me on to a train, seen off at a station. Victoria station, probably. You would not need to
stay
on the train; you could get off, once nobody was about.”

“Rather poor fun you’re master-minding me into, aren’t you? Why should I get off the train? And why a train, of all things?—they are so beastly.”

“They are the most formal. And this would be a
train de luxe
, bound for the Continent.”

“Then how should I ever get off, if I did want to?—those never stop. Seriously, Eva, I hate to say so but really you are quite dotty; you’re raving dotty. Also, you shake me, rather. The whole thing’s too near the bone—
don’t
talk like that!”

“Are you shocked, then?” she asked, searching for the answer in his profile. “I see nothing shocking.”

“It would be completely spooky. Why do you want what’s untrue?”

“One is made a liar. You have refused to marry me, this is the one satisfaction you could give. For all my longing in vain for you, and pain.
Is
this much to ask? For once, one day only, part of one day only, you would at least be mine in the eyes of the world. I’d ask no more, afterwards—I would abide by that.”

“But I might not want you to!” Henry swizzed past a lorry, dangerously near a corner. “What made you think this up?”

“Our circumstances.”

“
When
did you think this up?”

“I have been doing so. What worse would this be for you than a charade—a game in a railway station? Why should you deny me this thing you
can
do? You don’t know whether you love me, you tell me, Henry—therefore, you do not. Love there is no mistaking. I have lived with it, I have felt it, and I can tell you.”

“ ‘Felt it’? You talk as if it was in the past.”

“I shall compel it to be.”

“That’s handsome of you!” Henry shot past two Minis, three W.D. lorries, a Pickford van, a cement-mixer in transit which, in travail, had been slowing the line down. Pleased to have got away with this, he whistled. That fatal old fascination of cooking a plot with Eva began to work. “Your fertile brain,” he commented, “seems to have jumped two or three snags. For instance, I should have to turn up again. I’d be left to live with this thing—live it down, I mean. For the rest of my days. Miss Trout’s reject. That would not suit me; I am a mass of vanity. Also, to stage an all-out bridal departure wouldn’t you first have to fake up some kind of wedding?—or that
had
you thought of? We’d go through some bogus ceremony with some villainous unfrocked priest, as in Gothic fiction, would we?”

“No; that would not be necessary. Simply, we should be known to be setting forth to be married in Rome, or perhaps Paris—”

“—Or Helsinki or Bucharest or Karachi. Well, that clears that. Seen off with all the works: sobs of emotion, lashions of flowers, digs in the ribs… Really, you
have
a nerve, Eva!”

“But you say you won’t do this.”

“You have a nerve to think of it.—Now for the seeing-off party: whom would you be proposing to line up? No, you don’t need to tell me; I can see it. The entire cast: Uncle Tom Constantine and All. Jeremy, to watch himself acquiring a father?—It would be roaringly funny,” said Henry temptedly. “A side-splitting
comèdie noire
.” He whistled again.

She gave an unbearable sob.

“
Eva
, what’s up?”

“My feelings: you go too far, you hurt them—and endanger my car.”

He reduced speed. “And what are you doing to my feelings, do you imagine?—with this burlesque.”

“Making mock of each other? And yet, Henry—”

“—I’m funny because I’m miserable. Sorry about my driving; not so good, is it? I’m slipping—I always begin well.” He drew into the roadside. “Will you take over?”

“If you would rather.”

He got out, to let her into his place. On his way round the back of the Jaguar to hers, he opened the boot and took out the box of cigarettes. He displayed the box, and had a cigarette already between his lips, though not yet lit, when he cast himself in beside her. “Helping myself, again—you don’t mind?” He reached for the dashboard lighter. “Or do you?”

“When have I ever?”

“I’m never certain.”

“All I have’s yours.”

“In your feeling, sometimes. Not in reality.”

“It could be. You know I would rather die than have hurt you—Henry.”

He slid a hand about in the air over her knee, then withdrew the hand. The remaining miles to the vicarage began to be demolished silently, evenly; and as evenly, time demolished itself. The landscape insidiously melted into a known one; names on signposts, inn signs, sayings on notice-boards began to talk a familiar language. A green pond, a rustily-locked smithy, the bus stop at the mouth of the turn to Larkins, a coppice of sycamore and a mound with no history and away back over the fields the stump of a building were less landmarks than re-tellers of an obsessive story. Back again one was coming, into the web. The innocent theatricality of evening made all this at once more tender and more menacing. “You’re not coming in?” asked Henry, meaning, into the vicarage.

“No, not this time; I have to be back,” she said, meaning, in London. “This is a night I telephone to the Bonnards. They’ll be disappointed?” she asked, meaning his parents.

“More, puzzled.—At least,” he added uncertainly, “I suppose so. Stop just for a minute, will you, Eva?”

The edge of the village: some pretty gardens. The car stopped, but there was nothing to say—or, only their faces spoke. “Keep the cigarettes, of course,” she finally told him.

“All right. When do you go back to France?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you know?”

“Because that depends.”

“On the Bonnards, on Jeremy?”

“Not altogether, Henry.”

“Oh.—Do I see you before you go?”

“That depends also. You want to see me, yet will not do what I want?”

“This is not a ‘confession,’ you understand?”

“That was understood.”

“I am an agnostic.”

“Guaranteed conscientious, then.—Sit down?”

“This is not like a room in a clergy-house usually is, is it?”

“I have no idea. I have these one or two rather nice things. —Begin, will you?”

“Strictly, I have no right to your time.”

“My good lady, nobody has any ‘right’ to anything. We subsist on mercy.—Constantine’s under the impression you’re in Newcastle.”

“I go back tonight. I came to you, specifically to you, because your already knowing the story can cut out various explanations. I don’t say that was my only reason—”

“We’ll take any other as read, shall we?”

“At four o’clock one afternoon a boy was taken from a studio where he was muddling about; around eight that evening he was pushed back into his hotel. It was I who did both; that has ceased to matter. What matters is the intervening time.”

“Go on.”

“He and I knew each other at sight. I appeared to be what he’d been waiting for. One hears of children who meet an unspeakable end being last seen hopping and skipping beside the stranger who is taking them to it. Witnesses, later, say there had seemed to be ‘recognition’—often, the witness’s reason for doing nothing. The sculptress did nothing. For the child’s willingness to go with the stranger a blend of guilelessness and adventurousness and liking for the sudden is held accountable. But there could also be this to it: fate magnetises all of us, it magnetises children particularly. Jeremy’s and my case differed from others: I was not (other than factually) a stranger, and what was ahead was not an enormity but a miracle.—Does my acceptance of ‘miracle’ surprise you?”

“No. Though as you know, it is rather a claim to make: I shall expect you to justify it.—What made you want the boy?”

“I had thought about him. Originally, as being my husband’s, the result of a galling infidelity. The partner to it would have been my former pupil. The infidelity never in fact occurred—at least, technically. Long after I came to realise it had not, I clung to the possibility that it had. Fundamentally, I had desired that it should. I had gone out of my way to bring it about.—You are accustomed to twisted motives?”

“I meet almost none that are not.”

“The reputed foetus never existed. Her pregnancy had been an invention of my pupil’s, designed to inflict pain.”

“Why should she have wished to inflict pain?”

“You met Eva. You could have asked
her
that.”

“I did, in effect.”

“It fulfilled its purpose. Our marriage gave way. The false charge, together with the shock and upheaval, injured my husband, who has deteriorated since. To return to myself: I never quite disengaged myself from the child who, by every showing, had never been. When I was alone, in France, I attempted to reason myself out of this. It eluded reason. That no child
had
been begotten by my husband upon my pupil did not in any way alter my conviction that there was a child in the case somewhere. She could have acquired one, either to give substance to her story or for a more characteristic reason: she has a passion for the fictitious for its own sake.—Did that appear to you?”

“It was in the offing.”

“By now, that that
was
the purpose of her disappearance into America is accepted, unquestioned, taken for granted. I, ironically, was the last to be quite certain. That was not till the morning I rang up Constantine from Reading. He ladled out news of friends (I had been away, too). To learn how right I had been was almost unnerving. I must tell you, my interest in the child, the for so long hypothetical child, had always had a particular undertow. It was inextricable from my feeling for Eva. I care for her: would that be possible to guess? Implanted in her there is something which surmounts any harm we have done each other. It is something in which I was instrumental. I am not a teacher for nothing. This survives any failure there was later.—What’s that bell, ringing?”