Eva Trout (7 page)

To mark her status, the donor’s daughter had been awarded an octagonal vaulted chamber with a balconied window and lake outlook, holding two beds only—the second was that of a fairy-like little near-albino who had for some reason been christened Elsinore. This child’s washed-out beauty gave her an air of age: she was eleven. Elsinore wrote and re-wrote the same long letter, which she read aloud, then tore up, then began again: fury made her still whiter as she worked away, denouncing her mother, deriding her step-father, and praising love—she had been reft from the Japanese butler’s son. Elsinor wept at nights, sometimes stormily, out of thwartedness, sometimes piteously, out of sensuous desolation. Her sobbing orchestrated her room-mate’s dreams; and perhaps caused them? But towards dawn the Juliet ran out of tears and slumbered grimly. Her silence would—then—wake Eva, who asked no better.

For, this was the hour. Through the curtainless window day stole in, fingering its way slowly, as though blindly, from thing to thing. Redness, though still like a watered ink, began to return to the top blanket, under which lay outlined her body. This redemption from darkness was for Eva, who had witnessed it nowhere else, a miracle inseparable from the castle. Her bed had its back to the window, but a looking-glass faced it—in that, she could see existence begin again. Seeing is believing: again, after the night of loss and estrangement, after the malicious lying of her misleading dreams in which she was no one, nowhere, she knew herself to be
here
. Here again was the castle, and she in it … At the beginning, when the sun still rose early, striking the lake, the lake had telegraphed brightness up to the ceiling—when a swan furrowed the water, a golden dance had gone on over the ribbings of the vaulting. Now, winter made the sun late for breakfast. But to unhasp the window and step out for so much as a minute on to the balcony launched into waking earthy air was enough to tell one that, behind the scene still dark as the darkest celluloid, day was about the place.

As would be the daffodils—”You wait!” The many-ness and splendour of the forlorn castle’s daffodils was a legend. Few looked upon them, but those few carried the tale. “Round and round the pond, up the woods, down where there used to be that garden—everywhere! Year after year I think, ‘Well, I never!’ and so will you do.” Mrs. Stote, the prophetess, spearhead of the party of local women induced by Kenneth to come in, when they could manage to, and clean up a bit, let go of her polisher-mop to extend her arms, graphically, for Eva’s benefit. “Yellow as technicolour! They’ll surprise you—miss,” she added, as an afterthought. Mrs. Stote spoke of Kenneth’s little community as “the school” to Kenneth only, and only out of civility. School, my eye! This was a Home, if ever she saw one, and moreover a Home for afflicted children. Nothing said or done by the inmates, consequently, caused her to turn a hair. There you were, you took the rough with the smooth. This big Eva seemed no worse than a little dull—now, why had she had to be put away? Anything you told her she took an interest in. Mrs. Stote had related to Eva the tense story of the herons being driven out by the swans, which meant bad luck, and of how the rooks had deserted, which meant worse. To which the girl had replied: “There are still the owls.”

“
Ah
.”

Eva now asked: “When are the daffodils: in April?”

“March, they come.”

“April,” said Eva, longing for a concession, “is my birthday. April 21 st.”

“They’ll be dying down then.” Mrs. Stote stooped to retrieve the mop.

“I wish I could imagine them,” said Eva.

“How can you expect to?—you’ve never seen them.”

“I’ve seen daffodils.”

“I daresay you may have.” Leaning her weight on the frail mop, Mrs. Stote looked about, before going back into action, at the spaces of unpromising floor. “But
these
you’d never believe in unless you saw them.”

“But,” Eva discovered, “I
do
believe in them!”

Which was as well, for she never saw them.

Nor, by that March, was there anyone left to see them, other than Mrs. Stote coming in to caretake the emptied premises. Long before daffodils came, the school was no more— gone, leaving no trace of itself but some wear-and-tear, sunbursts of colourwash and a shot or two at a mural, various installations, some not yet paid for, and one proof more (were that needed) of the unconquerable unluckiness of the castle. To start with, Elsinore walked into the lake—she did not drown, but on being pulled out went into convulsions. That sparked off other mishaps: waves of food-poisoning thought to be due to verdigris in the
f
(copper, taken on with the castle); an attempt on the virtue of Jones the Milk by one of the girls; outbreaks of arson—nothing went very far —and two escapes (or, wayward departures). What was most distressing was, boredom began to set in—crises failed to amuse the children; they had plenty at home. They had relied on this castle to be respectable, and told Kenneth so—several spoke to him sharply. His rocket-like aesthetic evenings became damp squibs. In this humid, sunless, listless, rotty-smelling December, a further nightmare was the approach of Christmas—for which almost everybody was to remain here. Kenneth had thought of striking a pagan note, but under the circumstances would that do? … The police came; though only (so far) to check on bicycles. One had been stolen, or something.

Elsinore got no better. She withdrew into coma. Sickness not having been envisaged, there was no sickroom; she continued, therefore, to lie in her sad bed distant only from Eva’s by the width of the window. Elsinore, destitute now of tears, had in her fragility and her piteous stillness the look of a thrown-out fledgling salvaged too late—eyes turned up under the purplish membrane of their faint lids, hair moistly wisped over the only just whiter pillow. Could she be dying?—the doctor finally sent for said so little. “Such an unhealthy little thing, poor thing,” complained the Hungarian lady, angered. “And as for you, Eva, where am I to put you? No other place at all, in this small castle.”

“Thank you, I’d rather stay with her.”

“It may be, she goes to hospital—but to hospital where? Oh, that stupid doctor!”

“Don’t,” pleaded Eva, “take her away!”

“Not that she is sick
badly
,” said the Hungarian lady. “But all the same …” She sized up Eva, disparagingly. “You are not nervous?”

“I am accustomed to her,” the dolt said.

“You must not touch her, Eva: you understand?”

Eva locked her hands together behind her back, in token of abstinence. She nodded.

“You call me—yes?—should there ever be anything. Though I am very busy. All this is terrible for Kenneth!” lamented the Hungarian lady (who
did
adore him). She rolled her lustrous, emotional, heartless eyes. “He has this beautiful nature, so is imposed on. Never should he have been sent this unhealthy child, who also was trying to go to bed with a Japanese boy, I am sorry to say.”

“She wants her mother, I think.”

But nobody heard. The spike heels of the matron or house mother went clickety-click away down the sounding stairs.

So the watch began. No longer did mornings transform the room, a perpetual makeshift curtain having been thumb-tacked over the window, to hide the lake—now, only a lightening of the fabric on which stood out a cabalistic pattern spoke of the duration of the short spaces, too like one another to be days, between night and night: whatever the hour by the clock, nothing made the ceiling less of an umbrella-shaped canopy of shadows, which multiplied within it, as do cobwebs, as time went on—though,
did
time go on? The octagonal chamber, outlook gone from its window, seemed more locked-up round its consenting prisoners than if a key had been turned in the door, and, made mediaeval by the untimely dark, began in a cardboard way to belong to history. Though set in the middle of the castle, whose unreal noises could be heard, the place was as though levitated to a topmost turret. What made Eva visualise this as a marriage chamber? As its climate intensified, all grew tender. To repose a hand on the blanket covering Elsinore was to know in the palm of the hand a primitive tremor—imagining the beating of that other heart, she had a passionately solicitous sense of this other presence. Nothing forbad love. This deathly yet living stillness, together, of two beings, this unapartness, came to be the requital of all longing. An endless feeling of destiny filled the room.

There were few intruders. Back came the doctor, on guard, mistrustful, knowing more than he said. At irregular intervals the house mother, silently turbulent, “saw to” Elsinore, or, hauling the child’s head up, tried to pour
consommé
between the inert lips. Eva went downstairs only when, chancing to be remembered, she was sent for to go to a lesson or a meal. Sometimes, on such occasions, her place was taken by the boy who had pulled Elsinore out of the lake and been riddled by self-analysis ever since—”She knew what she was doing, but did I? A reflex. It was disgusting. What fundamentally am I, a Boy Scout?”

“Oh, no,” Eva grew used to saying.

He then would gnaw at a thumbnail. “Look what I’ve possibly done to her—she
may
live, you know! Look what she’s done to me, though; jumping me into this.
Her
decision was rational, tiresome little thing. Look at her—Ophelia’s illegit!”

“Oh, no.”

Often, however, leaning over the bed he not unkindly blew at a downy wisp of Elsinore’s hair; whereat the child’s head rolled, as though facelessly, his way. Then the afternoon came when he said to Eva: “Her corrupt mother’s been sent for; didn’t you know?”

“No …”

“That’s the buzz today. You never hear anything up here.”

With the coming-into-the-room of Elsinore’s mother, all here ended. From that instant, down came oblivion—asbestos curtain. Whether Elsinore died or lived, no one told Eva. Not told, she became unable to ask. Nor did she ask what ended the school in the castle so suddenly, so silently and so totally.

Several likely scandals Kenneth had kept at bay, but an unexpected one was the wrecker. “One cannot,” he sobbed to Constantine over the telephone, “think of everything!”

“One had better be able to, next time,” replied his sponsor.

“Such a stab-in-the-back!”

“Nobody’s pinning anything on you, so far, are they?”

“Not so far as one knows; but one never does, does one? Everything’s frightfully threatening. That filthy doctor—”

“Listen: post Eva home—first thing.”

“What’s poor Willy going to think of us?”

“I’ll square Willy. Then get the others out, while the going’s good—it
is
still good, for a day or two?—Then you blow.”

“Mayn’t that look rather fishy?”

“This is fishy.”

Eva, Willy considered, had had enough schooling for the time being. He took her to Mexico, where they were joined by Constantine; then, business calling him to the Far East, dropped her off with a Baptist missionary family in Hong Kong, reclaimed her, left her in San Francisco with some relations of his chiropodist’s, caused her to be flown to him in New York, flew her from thence to Hamburg, where he picked her up later and asked her if she would like to become a kennel-maid, decided it might be better for her to go to Paris and was about to arrange things on those lines when she said she would like to go to an English boarding-school: one for girls. Two years having elapsed, his daughter was on the eve of being sixteen.

“What d’you want to do that for?” he asked, though absently.

“I
should
like to learn.”

“Why didn’t you think of that before?”

“I did, Father.”

“Then why didn’t you say so? You’re a bit old for that, now, I should have thought.”

“I should like to.”

“Then just as you like, dear girl,” sighed Willy, fondly and indeed more than that—with a sort of wistful, spectral imitation of the far more he would have liked to feel for her (and perhaps might have?). The best he seemed able to do for her was, begrudge her nothing. “I’ll find out. That’s to say, that shall be arranged.”

So it was; in face of strong opposition. Willy had understood that girls’ schools would be looking about for girls, but far from it. They fought like wildcats to keep his girl out. Lumleigh was the first to weaken, so in he got her … Eva awoke one morning to find herself in a white, airy dormitory.

This was a rainy, blowy, bright-green late spring. The girls wore their regulation oilskins, yellow, going from class to class, for much of the school went on in huts in the garden— enlightened huts, consisting so largely of glass that in them you still felt outdoors, in the gusts of petals from the new-planted cherry trees, cream, pink, crimson. Eva’s attention did not wander once a lesson began: steadily, earnestly, emphatically, and so searchingly as to appear reproachful, it remained focussed on whichever of the teachers held the floor. Some of them found it mesmeric. Miss Smith did not.

Supremacy set apart this wonderful teacher. She could have taught anything. Her dark suit might have been the habit of an Order. Erect against a window of tossing branches she stood moveless, but for the occasional gesture of hand to forehead—then, the bringing of the fingertips to the brain seemed to complete an electric circuit. Throughout a lesson, her voice held a reined-in excitement—imparting knowledge, she conveyed its elatingness. The intellectual beauty of her sentences was informed by a glow; words she spoke sounded new-minted, unheard before. With her patient, sometimes ironic insistence upon fact, as fact, went what could be called her opposite capacity—that of releasing ideas, or speculation, into unbounded flight.

Fearless of coming to an end, she allowed pauses, during which she thought, or picked up a book and turned over a page abstractedly, almost idly. Meantime, there was suspense in the glassed-in classroom; nobody stirred.

One afternoon—before, even, the rain had had time to cease—the sun burst out, taking advantage of the recreational half-hour following school tea. It (the sun) caught Eva halfway along one of the brick paths intersecting the lawn. Then Miss Smith was beheld, coming straight towards her in one of the school oilskins—which, too capacious, enveloped her semi-transparently like a tent of yellow lit from within. The vision advanced on a shaft of light blinding to Eva. Instinctively making way, the girl side-stepped off the not narrow path. Her foot sank into the lawn with a deep squelch.