Lewis Percy (10 page)

Across the table Mrs Harper watched him with the stillness of a lizard. She signified her detachment from the common business of eating and drinking by placing her chair at a slight angle and smoking a cigarette. The room was snug but joyless. Its walls were as red as those of the hallway, as were its curtains, but those curtains were half drawn against the tender blue of a late spring evening. The effect was of a consulting room where secrets were the currency. Small though it was the room contained a handsome though over-large dining-table and two equally sizeable armchairs placed beside a minuscule hearth. The unsuitable nature and appearance of the furniture, which looked as if it had come from a more commodious house, countermanded the intimacy of the red walls, and it began to be apparent to Lewis that a quite foreign existence, of a variety with which he was unfamiliar, might be lived here, that meals might be taken at that grandiose table and impenetrable comments exchanged between the occupiers of the two armchairs. Were it not for the half-drawn curtains, and Mrs Harper’s insistent gaze, Lewis would have felt alert to receive information, signals, codes to be decoded. As it was he felt shabby, far from home. This effect was enhanced by the fact that he had thought to wear his best suit.

Nor was he eating the innocent food, to which he had been accustomed in his mother’s house. Mrs Harper, like Marie
Antoinette, believed in luxury above necessity. He had been presented with a coffee gâteau crowned with whipped cream and a ginger cake with a melting base of pear and crushed walnut. Clearly he was expected to eat both. Tissy, whose appetite was remarkably steady, offered him further dishes of tiny macaroons and small but abundant iced biscuits. Even these revealed themselves to be dangerously emollient. Feeling slightly sick at the drenching sweetness of these offerings Lewis remembered to compliment his hostess: he thought, correctly as it turned out, that she was a woman to whom many compliments must be paid. And he was genuinely surprised at the sophistication of the table, and indeed its festiveness. These cakes, and Mrs Harper’s distant expression, made him feel as if he had been translated elsewhere. He could see no connection between this afternoon and his ordinary life, which seemed to him to be lived on a different plane of reality. He felt, and not quite agreeably, out of his depth.

‘Did you make all this yourself, Mrs Harper?’ he asked. ‘It’s very impressive.’ He felt he had struck the wrong note, particularly as no answering comment was forthcoming. He felt uneasy, eating this luxurious food, in this impenetrably strange setting. His heart grew heavier, and he registered the effect not only mentally but physically as well. Mrs Harper’s diet, though profuse, was also upsetting. ‘Delicious,’ he murmured again, although to his ears the word had a slightly desperate ring.

‘Mother makes everything herself,’ said Tissy. ‘She’s a wonderful cook.’

Throughout this exchange Mrs Harper continued to gaze at him indifferently and to smoke. Tissy did the honours of the tea-table, but under her mother’s supervision or protection. Conversation was sparse, owing to the almost palpable withdrawal of the mother, who had, Lewis noted, dressed herself up for the occasion in a rather tight black coat and skirt, with a silk blouse open to show the beginnings of an opulent bosom. The discrepancies between the appearance of
mother and daughter could not have been more pronounced. Yet Tissy, timid pale Tissy, seemed entirely at ease under her mother’s watchful yet abstracted eye, and the presence of Lewis, far from making her nervous, seemed to add to her sense of security. He was surprised to see her eating so freely of the rich food, which appeared to have no connection with the frailness of her body. He supposed that in this little household all sorts of cossetting and cherishing went on. He imagined days spent in just such a restricted setting, curtains drawn, beyond the sphere of male influence: ample shopping, self-indulgent meals, fires in bedrooms, routines that might have descended from a grander establishment altogether, as this afternoon’s delicate confectionery seemed to indicate. And Mrs Harper’s noble bust, swathed in a spotless butter coloured blouse, her tight black skirt, and her endless cigarettes, seemed better suited to an afternoon at the bridge table than to this nursery occasion. It occurred to Lewis that the half-drawn curtains were there to reassure Tissy, neither entirely open, to frighten her, nor entirely closed, to send her regressively back to where he sensed she was happiest: at home, in a very small room, with her mother.

Lewis, whose appetite could not match that of Tissy, drank his tea and studied Mrs Harper. No attempt had been made to welcome him, and yet he had the feeling that he was already accepted as a suitor. This thought did not displease him, although part of him was a little disappointed at how dull he was finding the experience. Dull and intimidating. Surely a feeling of conquest should be more liberating than this! For it seemed to him impossible that he should now back down: Mrs Harper’s still beautiful eyes, set in deep shadowed sockets, informed him that he was on probation. Yet if he were not to be seamlessly drafted into this household, as appeared likely, he must reassert his own independence, his own claim to existence. The trouble was that he was uncertain how to proceed, and knew no one who could advise him. Their hospitality, though lacking in any sort of charm or grace, was nevertheless superior to what he
himself could offer. Such cakes as he might provide would not match these in splendour. Yet there was an oppression in the air which made him long for his own much larger house and the untouched memory of his austere mother about her tasks within those white walls. Here, a brazen electric fire, with simulated orange and black coals, added considerably to the heat and weight of the occasion. After a fairly long silence Mrs Harper’s hand reached out to pick up a macaroon. Her fingers, he noted, were stubby, her mouth, as it closed on the tiny cake, prim. Both mother and daughter had this in common, that they made eating look like an act of virtue, far removed from bodily appetites and the secretion of gastric juices, distasteful matters with which they did not appear to concern themselves. Mrs Harper drank cup after cup of watery milkless tea, and with each fresh cup she lit a new cigarette. She seemed entirely uninterested in Lewis, yet he knew that nothing escaped her.

‘Do you like to cook?’ he asked, again desperately. The cake theme was beginning to sicken him, as was the fire, as were the curtains, but he thought this was the limit of the kind of question he could legitimately ask.

‘I learnt to cook when I was at school,’ was the reply. ‘I was at school in Brussels, for two years, when I was seventeen, then eighteen. I liked the Belgian cooking, so I took lessons.’

Yes, he thought: despite her appearance there was something about her that spoke of a Belgian pension. Her high colour, her brutal appeal, seemed reined in, restricted by strong conventional beliefs. She was animated more by a righteous sense of obligation than by anarchic feelings and desires. Yet she seemed never to have enjoyed what was due to her. Someone, somewhere, had defaulted.

Tissy turned to him earnestly: obviously she was willing to be forthcoming on the subject of her mother.

‘Mother’s family comes from Jersey,’ she said. ‘We often talk of going back there one day. She’s never really been happy here.’

‘And your father?’ he ventured, powered by the need to know all that had happened to the deserter.

At this she dropped her gaze. ‘I don’t really remember him,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen him since I was very little.’

‘Tissy’s father is in Canada,’ said Mrs Harper. ‘We don’t expect to hear from him again.’

This utterance seemed to leave her undisturbed: its finality told Lewis that further questions would not be welcomed. He felt indignant on behalf of Tissy, that she should be deprived of a broader, more robust influence in her life, one that would fling back those half-drawn curtains and let in some much needed fresh air. And how did a woman like Mrs Harper manage without a man? She was well built, even voluptuous, to some tastes a handsome woman. Not exactly discontented with motherhood, but unfitted for the role, uninterested. Despite all this wealth of
pâtisserie
she seemed absent, distanced from the task of providing it. Sitting there, slightly at an angle to the table, to which she lent rather than gave her presence, she was dressed for another occasion, markedly different in this respect from her daughter, who appeared to belong in a more juvenile context. Tissy, in her pale blue sweater, was too much of a schoolgirl to be at home in this red room, whose half-drawn curtains revealed a thin white moon in a remote darkening sky. Yet Tissy herself seemed obedient, even docile in his presence. Tissy appeared to acknowledge, tacitly, his right, even his duty, to be there. And Lewis felt himself to be identified with her in a process which he had only inadvertently brought about. To extract Tissy from this room suddenly seemed beyond his powers. Tissy and her mother had not been drawn to him; rather, they had been unaltered by his presence. He could impute no unkind action or inference to the mother, although he sensed in her a detachment which affected him almost with embarrassment. Yet when Mrs Harper’s eyes rested on him, as they so frequently did, they were calm, thoughtful, appraising. It was their lack of curiosity that he found so disconcerting.

Perhaps she wanted to be free, he thought. Perhaps she
wanted to give her daughter into safe keeping so that she could be off to the world that suited her, a world of hotel rooms, steamer trunks, new friends. Perhaps she wanted to go back to Jersey and whatever life she had led there before the arrival of the unsatisfactory husband and the restricting daughter. Off to sunny afternoons and male companions and night clubs. There was something perfunctory about the furnishings of this room, with its bold walls and its haphazard and out-of-scale contents, as if no attempt had been made to integrate the two. As if she would sail out and leave it all behind before the disagreeable necessity of making it into a true home imposed itself. Yet she was devoted to her daughter, as that daughter’s shining appearance and healthy appetite averred. Lewis would have felt sorry for Mrs Harper, trapped as she was, had it not been for a reserve in the woman, a silence during which she so obviously entertained her own thoughts, indifferent to the thoughts of others.

And Tissy? Tissy now appeared to him to be composed of the same fondant yet friable material as the cake she was so dedicatedly eating. Tissy, in this setting, seemed to him to be composed entirely of cake. If he nibbled her ear it would break off and melt in his mouth like marzipan. Her pale delicacy almost invited assault; making love to her would be like violating a nun. The thought intrigued him but made him uncomfortable. To lay a hand on Tissy would be both necessary and forbidden. She already had the appearance of a victim, with all of a victim’s innocence, yet there was something about that innocence, that virtue, which invited thoughts of assault. An approach to her, on this level at least, presented itself as a question of taste. Her many fears would have to be allayed; he did not think she had it in her to be anything but trustingly passive. Part of him felt lonely at the idea. Love should be strong, if not necessarily decent. Love should be eager and unplanned, not an affair of exorcism or therapy. He had before him a vision of sunlight, of peace, of maturity, which seemed very far removed from this dark hot room. And Tissy was not included in this vision: that much
was clear to him. He could also see that she was blameless, unprotected, and part of him, the other, better, half, knew that he matched her in this, that they were both novices, and that no one else could teach them what they wanted to know. For to the inexperienced certain degrees of experience in others are almost unacceptable.

His male conscience still reserved and clung to a vision of innocence for himself, although he was well aware that he had passed the age at which innocence was appropriate. Yet here he was, a relatively honest man, or one who liked to think of himself as relatively honest, apparently accepted, apparently absorbed into the curious wordless dialogue of this strange couple, with its wealth of meaning not made clear. There was even a sort of peace in the knowledge that he did not have to present his credentials, that in being in this house for the first time he was regarded as part of the set-up, however alien that might appear to be. And he liked the idea of having a girlfriend. Surely with an accredited girlfriend he would have passed one of the many tests awaiting him, for he did not doubt that there were many tasks ahead, many stages to be passed through on his progress to true adulthood, and if possible heroic stature. Maybe he was being asked to undertake this task as an act of unselfishness, as his first trial on the way to a just reward. What that reward might be he had as yet no idea: he simply saw himself far from the final result, the right true end. He saw the future through a diminishing lens, a camera obscura that revealed little. He knew that he would always strive towards a final recognition of his place in the world. And yet he saw Tissy Harper as an ineluctable part of his quest. He thought of her again as the Sleeping Beauty, whom he would awaken with a kiss, and once more the thought commended itself to him. But could he reconcile himself to the massive preoccupations of her mother, from whom Tissy, either consciously or unconsciously, took her cue? Must he go through this entirely unaided, unsupported, without encouragement or enthusiasm on the part of what he could not help thinking of as the main beneficiaries?

Their house suddenly seemed intolerable to him and he wondered how soon he might leave. But he could not leave without some sort of a sign from them as to how he was to continue. He knew that he would come back, yet he also knew that he would want to be a welcome guest, not merely tolerated, but gladly, excitedly, anticipated. It seemed to him that he could rise to fulfil any expectation, if only that expectation were to be indicated. Without that he would turn away in disgust, yes, disgust. He had come so near to beggary that he was indignant on his own behalf. He thought how differently his mother would have behaved in a similar situation and longed to be at home again, away from these people with their enormous reticence, their absolute lack of desire, their basic powerful refusal of life. Their indifference alone made him want to insist that they pay more attention to him, yet at the same time he had a feeling of impatience, as if he were in two minds about the whole affair and might easily be persuaded to call it off. He lacked a champion, a spokesman, an advocate, someone who would tell him what he wanted to know, that he should opt for the wider, fuller life. Something called to him beyond his present circumstances, beyond anything he could logically see, yet here he was, entrapped in this small room as if it were his destiny, as if his course were already chosen for him. The effect of Mrs Harper – and of her daughter too – was to deprive him of initiative. He longed to be gone, but curiously doubted his ability to free himself from their spell.