Eva Trout (33 page)

“Eleven o’clock coffee, in the common-room. I’m afraid you are not in a Spanish cloister.”

“I hope I—?”

“No, you are not preventing me from having coffee; our coffee here prevents me from having coffee. When necessary, I percolate my own.—So far, you are giving me the impression that the boy existed for you, emotionally, largely in the context of other people. That was so, or was it not?”

“Not. Or, only initially. I came to conceive of him in his own right, to in some way desire for his own sake. I envisaged him. He was three-dimensional for me before I saw him; Before, even, the fact that he did exist was confirmed by Constantine.”

“Never thinking of him as anything but ‘him.’ Why? Never as a duplication of your pupil, as a girl?”

“No. For one thing, a second Eva would have been not only unthinkable but impossible. For another, she belonged in some other category. ‘Girl’ never fitted Eva. Her so-called sex bored and mortified her; she dragged it about after her like a ball-and-chain. Why should she wish to reproduce it when she chose a child? Also, remember, thanks to her father and Constantine she had grown up apart from women, other than hirelings. She did not need women. Their vulnerability antagonised her—as
I
found. She had had enough of her father’s vulnerability. She had watched him being destroyed—if I may say that to you? Eva could not or would not forget her father. There was something she fanatically wanted to redress. That Willy image, it became her object to repair, or reconstitute— whichever you like. The means, as she would have seen it, would be a boy. Acceptable?”

“Convincing. Leave it: go back to where you were.”

“Willingly. My wonder about the boy was nothing so internal as an obsession; it grew outward into a desire to see him I knew I would stop at nothing to satisfy, though for a long time I couldn’t see how I could hope to. Can you wonder I seized, without loss of time, at an opportunity handed me on a plate? Unfortunate Constantine blabbed.”

“Yes. He is artless—occasionally. He paid dear, as you know.”

“Yes; I was sorry.”

“You speak of your pupil’s invention of her pregnancy as having in it a wish to inflict pain—on you, I infer. You can’t have removed the boy without some idea of the inordinate terror that would cause her. You had a reciprocal wish?”

“Not that I knew, not at the time. I seemed to myself to be acting under necessity. Since, I have wondered whether the wish was latent. I still do not know, so I can’t tell you. This is where you come in—why I came to you. Would you say that it was?”

“Did I, what would you expect me to do? Impose a penance?”

“No; that would be superogatory. My existence as it has come to be has been in the nature of a penance for some years. I have paid up; I should say I owe very little. I’ve paid up retrospectively for what I have done or not done, done wrongly or done for the wrong reason, side-tracked, or botched. I’ve paid in advance for anything I may do still. I didn’t come here to ask you to absolve me; I have already begun to absolve myself. There are stages in that. Could a stage be final, I should incline to feel it had been reached. The afternoon I spent with the boy, I mean.”

“The ‘miracle’?”

“I retract that.”

“Do you know, I am sorry.”

“You should be. I dislike your sardonic tone. You are a priest.”

“I cannot get rid of my tone, it is like a stammer.—Will you go on?”

“Understand one thing: when I went to meet Jeremy in the studio, I still was to an extent in a state of shock. Only a few hours ago, you see, had I learned from Constantine that Eva’s American child, of unknown parentage, was a deaf mute. To do Constantine justice, he had no reason to know what a blow
that
was! Yet even if Constantine hadn’t told me, the terrible over-expressiveness of the child’s face would have, almost at the first glance. He had been counting on me. Here we were, confronted, both strangling with hopes, yet—hopeless? You imagine I am too sure of myself: a teacher? Don’t think I minimised the agony, the barrier. For him, it was an agony taking him by surprise; he had been protected from it, he had never felt it. Yet it was proper he
should
feel it: the time had come. As beings, we were delighted by one another. We went downhill from the studio and got on to a bus, sitting on the top.
Qua
ride, the ride was no pleasure to him—nothing he saw could tell him more than it had already told him a thousand times. I cannot tell you what satiated eyes he had, or how his weariness of seeing, seeing, seeing without knowing, without knowing, without knowing was borne in on me. Clay was caking on his fingers, and he watched it, gathering his forces. His mind was racing, making him shrug his shoulders and keeping twisting him about on the seat beside me. Questions were furiously, frantically framing themselves inside him, and the knowledge that they were and the answers to them and the impotence to answer were furiously in me. His being in his cage taught me how I am in mine. He may come to speak—when shall
I
do anything else?”

“What you can do, don’t denigrate; that is sacrilege.”

“Yes.—What I did do was, come at the right time. The rest, he did—the much more, he must do. I made him see
why
… What he did to me was illimitable. Genius we had in common, that was the solvent. Yes, I roused his, but he resurrected mine.
Resurrected
mine. Yes, for all I speak of our two cages, between us there was eternal life. He was my salvation—do you see?—I’m not of course going to tell you categorically where we went, what we did. I am not daring to tell you how we communicated, or what about, or to what effect. What I do want and mean you to understand is, he and I were in anything but a dream, all those hours: everything was razor-edged actuality, layers deep. While we were in Westminster Abbey, he traced the lettering of the inscriptions on monuments he could reach with the point of a finger as though responsible for incising them for the first time. While we were around Leicester Square into Soho where the evening arcades and bazaars were open he chose himself a present from me, then a present for me. He is aggressive, by the way—for himself he made straight for a pocket-size toy revolver, made of lead or something. He pointed it, consideringly, at me: ‘Don’t do that,’ I said, ‘even with a toy.’ Which reminds me, if he and Eva ever should open up house again at Paley’s, I must remove one that’s among her things.”

“That gun you wanted to plant on Constantine. I suppose not loaded; or else is it?”

“I don’t know; I shouldn’t think so.—It reminded me of Eric.”

“Are you going back to your husband?”

“I don’t know.—For me, he chose a red cotton flower: a poinsettia. He wanted me to put it in my hair; but how could I?—already I’d been accosted. When I didn’t, he lost interest. Don’t imagine he for a moment cared for me, but for that one flash—I was a walking strong-box he wanted to rifle. Would he know me again?—that might cease to matter. We had supper in an Italian caf£; he ate voraciously, as though getting his teeth into the world … How little this sounds.”

“Evidently you are dynamic.”

“I was.—Yes, I am able to be. You cannot think that wrong?”

“An inane question … You’ve told me as much as can be told; what did operate, chiefly, you can’t tell me. On the strength of what you have, you’ve made quite a case. You may have done what you think you have—it is not impossible.”

“Father Clavering-Haight—?”

“Well, yes?”

“You can find nothing more comfortable to say to me?”

“In my own way I am conscientious, Mrs. Arble.”

“Thank you for hearing me, at any rate. What I wanted to know was, if it sounded credible. I have never spoken this aloud.”

“It sounded incredible enough. Stranger things have happened, I mean to say. The person to watch will be the boy— when he turns up again. Why do you exile yourself in Newcastle? Does or doesn’t your husband want you back?”

“There are complications. In a good many ways, I should like to talk to you—but my time’s up, I see. Someone else coming?”

“He may not be punctual. A Black Muslim.”

“May I stay till he comes?—For one thing, my husband has two children …”

Hay-making was at its height; a mechanised whirring sounded over the country six days a week—when distant enough, it was in a contemporary way poetic. Restricted by the positions of orchards, the operation had about it something not only seasonal but tactical, military: summer manoeuvres. The cessation at evening brought with it a humid silence scented by exacerbated grass-roots and mangled wild-flowers. How sweet, how haunting new-fallen hay smells. Its mauve-bronze living shimmer is but a memory. There is something sacrificial in every rite, and in this case the victim was Mr. Dancey. His martyrdom now reached its annual peak. By consent, the vicarage windows were made fast; doors to the street and garden were opened sparingly, shut quickly. But the enemy infiltrated.

Henry did little to cheer the besieged household. Sympathetically, his nerves were in a state equivalent to their having been traversed repeatedly by a large tractor. He went nowhere. From the upstairs table on which were heaped his books he saw down, daily, into the well of garden, leaned about in by scraggy, unstaked delphiniums, their faint blue drained off by thirsting greenery. The foreshortened pergola sagged each year lower over the moss-grown path. This week-end, the garrison was added to by Catrina, who arrived on her motor bicycle to rally round, also to take part in what Henry designated a bi-sexual cricket match. “ ‘Mixed,’ ” she corrected, “sex does not enter into cricket.” “That is painfully evident.” “If you’re so cross, why don’t you go to Italy?” “Why should I?” “I thought you said some lunatic asked you?” “I still might …” “What are you hanging about waiting for?” “I am working, slightly.” “You are simply giving Father the heeby-jeebies, and at
this
time I think it is most unfair of you.” “Oh, do you,” said Henry, “really? He’s been sneezing so much, one hardly took him to be conscious at all.”

That had not been the case. Hypersensitivity tautened the sealed-in atmosphere. Within the beleagured earthworks there went on a second, internal siege, though laid by whom to whom it was hard to say. Father and son, passing each other on the claustrophobic stairs or colliding in doorways, ominously and eloquently hesitated, then went their ways—Henry sheathed, thereafter, in a vindictive melancholy. He could say or do, it appeared, nothing not discordant. By now, the disfiguration of Mr. Dancey, his submergence, his enflamed and distorting streamingness, was complete, unsparing—unbearaable. Insistently turning his countenance full on his son’s, he showed that he saw reason to spare Henry. (When his children were children, they had thought this funny: he had not minded.) This was a minor suffering, with a chasm beneath.

At meals they conversed, though irregularly—or had done so: now, with the imminence of Sunday, Mr. Dancey was known to be “saving his voice.” He was to be left in peace to charge up his batteries, few domestic and almost no parish matters being, where possible, referred to him. The prayerful hush which embraced the family at least created a moratorium— Henry was therefore the more taken aback when, about two on Saturday afternoon, he was intercepted not far from the hall hat-stand. “Where are you off to, this time?” asked Mr. Dancey.

“I hadn’t thought. It’s still so soon after lunch. Why—is there anything I can do?”

“You can wait a minute.”

“Of course; I’d like to—Father.”

“There is not,” began Mr. Dancey, picking a circular out of the bowl on the hat-stand, glancing at it, tearing it slowly across, “there is not by any chance anything that had better be had
out
, is there?”

“I don’t think anything’s the better for being had out,” Henry said, though as though in a general way.

“You are as good as telling me,” said his father. “Not that you haven’t, virtually, for the past week or so—have you any conception how you’ve been going on? I don’t like this, whatever it is. What is it?”

“Am I being more difficult than usual?”

“Yes. You’ve become impossible. And I won’t have it.”

“I’m having an intrigue, as a matter of fact.—I suppose you saw that?”

“I wonder exactly how senseless you are being.”

“The possibilities are infinite,” said Henry, hysterically echoing round the hall, up the staircase.

“I should be sorry to be anybody concerned with you, at your age. In fact, I’m not sure that I should not be sorry to be anybody concerned with you at any age, as you are now shaping, or would seem to be.” Mr. Dancey, with passionless accuracy, re-tore the halves of the circular into smaller pieces.

“Now I come to think of it, ‘shaping’ is optimistic; you’re all over the place. Do you wish to say who it is?”

“No. I imagine you know.”

“I hope I am wrong. If I’m not, I am unutterably distressed.”

“Shocked,” added the boy—as though in parenthesis.

“Distressed is enough for the present,” said Henry’s father. He washed his hands of the papery fragments, casting them towards the bowl; several went fluttering down on to the tiles. “What were you saying?” he then asked sharply.

“I don’t think, anything.—I
am
saying, you don’t leave me much to stand on: do you?”

“Don’t I?” asked Mr. Dancey, looking about him. His son stood like St. Sebastian. The father resorted to tugging aimlessly, desultorily, at an ulster hanging from the hat-stand. “I —” he began. His voice went, with almost a click; there followed an overstrained whisper. “The fault is probably mine —where did I go wrong? What I meant to say to you was, why not get off to Italy? Catrina tells me you have that invitation.”

“I told you. It’s odd you never remember what I tell you.— And speak of angels!” added Catrina’s brother. For here she came, thundering downstairs, off to cricket, bashing a canvas bag about, exclaiming: “I say,
Father
, about tomorrow, how if I telephoned H.Q. for a lay reader?”

“What, some pious dentist?” jibed Mr. Dancey, hoarse and unholy. Braced against that idea, he turned his back on his children and, handsomely, began the climb to his study. Sermon, to finish. That done, he continued work on
The Faulty Scales
. A good session, this time; one of his best—he felt clarified, calmed. He wiped the knife of his mind, as though after a sacrifice. Reservations, qualifications no longer tramelled him. No qualm sent him back on his tracks; no arising misgiving compelled him to re-cast. Straight ahead went Mr. Dancey, this afternoon—taking no reckoning of such injustices as are possible in exorbitant love.