The Death of the Heart (43 page)

At the end of Monday (for this was the end of the day unless you were gay or busy) dinner was being served. The guests could now dine in daylight—or rather, by its unearthly reflections on the facades of houses across the road. In the diningroom, each table had been embellished, some days ago, with three sprays of mauve sweet peas. Quite a number of tables, tonight, were empty, and the few couples and trios dotted about did not say much —weighed down, perhaps, by the height of the echoing gloom, or by the sense of eating in an exposed place. Only Major Brutt’s silence seemed not uneasy, for he, as usual, dined alone. The one or two families he had found congenial had, as usual, just gone: these tonight were nearly all newcomers. Once or twice he glanced at some other table, wondering whom he might get to know next. He was learning, in his humble way, to be conscious of his faint interestingness as a solitary man. On the whole, however, he looked at his plate, or at the air just above it; he tried hard not to let recollections of lunch at Anna’s make him discontented with dinner here—for, really, they did one wonderfully well. He had just finished his plate of rhubarb and custard when the head waitress came and mumbled over his ear.

He said: “But I don’t understand— ‘Young lady’?”

“Asking for you, sir. She is in the lounge.”

“But I am not expecting a young lady.”

“In the lounge, sir. She said she would wait.”

“Then you mean she’s there now?”

The waitress gave him a nod and a sort of slighting look. Her good opinion of him was being undone in a moment: she thought him at once ungallant and sly. Major Brutt, unaware, sat and turned the position over—this
might
be a joke, but who would play a joke on him? He was not sprightly enough to have sprightly friends. Shyness or obstinacy made him pour himself out another glass of water and drink it before he left the table—rhubarb leaves an acid taste in the teeth. He wiped his mouth, folded his table napkin and left the diningroom with a heavy, cautious tread—conscious of people pausing in what they were hardly saying, of diners’ glum eyes following him.

One’s view into the lounge, coming through from the other house, is cut across by the row of shabby pillars that separate the lounge from the entrance hall. At first, in those dregs of daylight, he saw nobody there. Glad there was no one to see him standing and looking, he challenged the unmeaning crowd of armchairs. Then he saw Portia behind a chair in the distance, prepared to retreat further if the wrong person came. He said: “Hullo, hul-
lo
—what are
you
doing here?”

She only looked at him like a wild creature, just old enough to know it must dread humans—as though he had cornered her in this place. Yes, she was terrified here, like a bird astray in a room, a bird already stunned by dashing itself against mirrors and panes.

He pushed on quickly her way through the armchairs, saying, more urgently, less easily, lower— “My dear child, are you lost? Have you lost your way?”

“No. I came.”

“Well, I’m delighted. But this is a long way from where
you
live. At this time of night—”

“Oh—is it night?”

“Well, no: I’ve just finished my dinner. But isn’t this just the time when you ought to be having yours?”

“I don’t know what time it is.”

Her voice rang round the lounge which, whatever despair it may have muffled, cannot have ever rung with such a homeless note. Major Brutt threw a look round instinctively: the porter was off duty; nobody was arriving; they had not begun to come out from dinner yet— there would be the cheese, then the coffee, always served at table. He went round the chair that barricaded her from him and kept them in their two different worlds of uncertainty: he felt Portia measuring his coming nearer with the deliberation of a desperate thing—then, like a bird at still another window, she flung herself at him. Her hands pressed, flattened, on the fronts of his coat; he felt her fingers digging into the stuff. She said something inaudible. Grasping her cold elbows he gently, strongly held her a little back. “Steady, steady, steady—Now, what did you say?”

“I’ve got nowhere to be.”

“Come, that’s nonsense, you know… . Just stay steady and try and tell me what’s the matter. Have you had a fright, or what?”

“Yes.”

“That’s too bad. Look here, don’t tell me if you would rather not. Just stay still here for a bit and have some 
coffee or something, then I’ll take you home.”

“I’m not going back.”

“Oh, come …”

“No, I’m not going back there.”

“Look, try sitting down.”

“No, no. They all make me do that. I don’t want to just sit down: I want to stay.”

“Well,
I
shall sit down. Look, I’m sitting down now. I always do sit down.” Having let go of her elbows he reached, when he had sat down, across the arm of his chair, caught her wrist and pulled her round to stand like a pupil by him. “Look here,” he said, “Portia, I think the world of you. I don’t know when I’ve met someone I thought so much of. So don’t be like a hysterical little kid, because you are not, and it lets me down, you see. Just put whatever’s the matter out of your head for a moment and think of me for a minute—I’m sure you will, because you’ve always been as sweet as anything to me, and I can’t tell you what a difference it’s made. When you come here and tell me you’re running off, you put me in a pretty awful position with your people, who are my very good friends. When a man’s a bit on his own, like I’ve been lately, and is marking time, and feels a bit out of touch, a place like their place, where one can drop in any time and always get a warm welcome, means quite a lot, you know. Seeing you there, so part of it all and happy, has been half the best of it. But I think the world of them, too. You wouldn’t mess that up for me, Portia, would you?”

“There’s nothing to mess,” she said in a very small voice that was implacable. “You are the other person that Anna laughs at,” she went on, raising her eyes. “I don’t think you understand: Anna’s always laughing at you. She says you are quite pathetic. She laughed at your carnations being the wrong colour, then gave them to me. And Thomas always thinks you must be after something. Whatever you do, even send me a puzzle, he thinks that more, and she laughs more. They groan at each other when you have gone away. You and I are the same.”

Steps in the hall behind him made Major Brutt crane round automatically: they
were
beginning to come out from dinner now. “You must sit down,” he said to Portia, unexpectedly sharply. “You don’t want all these people staring at you.” He pulled another chair close: she sat down, distantly shaken by the outside force of what she had just said. Major Brutt intently watched four other people take their own favourite seats. Portia watched him watch; his eyes clung to these people; their ignorance of what he had had to hear made his fellow hotel guests the picture of sanity. There are moments when one can comfort oneself by a look at the most callous faces—these have been innocent of at least one crime. When he could not look any more without having to meet their looks, he dropped his eyes and sat not looking at Portia. It was she, for the moment, who felt how striking their silence, their nearness here had become— anxiety, and the sense of being pursued by glances still more closely than she had been all day made her sit stone still, not even moving her hands.

There seemed no reason why Major Brutt should ever raise his eyes from the floor: he had begun, in fact, to stroke the back of his head. She interposed, in a low voice: “Is there no other place—?”

He frowned slightly.

“Haven’t you got a room here?”

“I’ve been a pretty blundering sort of fellow.”

“Oh,
can’t
we go upstairs? Can’t we go somewhere else?”

“I don’t know what made me think they would have time for me… . What’s that you’re saying?”

“Everyone’s listening to us.”

But that still did not matter. He watched, with an odd grim sort of acquiescence, three more people come between the pillars, sit down. Then older ladies in semi-evening dresses cruised through the hall and upstairs: they were the drawingroom contingent. Major Brutt’s grey eyes returned to Portia’s dark ones. “No, there’s nowhere else,” he said. He waited: a conversation broke out at the other end of the lounge. He pitched his voice underneath this. “You’ll just have to talk more quietly. And mind what you say—you’ve no business to talk like that.”

She whispered: “But you and I are the same.”

“Besides, anyhow,” he went on frowning at her, “
that
doesn’t alter—nothing alters—anything. You’ve got no right to upset them: can’t you see that’s a low game? I’m going to take you right back—now, pronto, at once.”

“Oh no,” she said, with startling authority. “You don’t know what has happened.”

They sat almost knee to knee, at right angles to each other, their two armchairs touching. Their peril, the urgent need to stop him from this mistake, made the lounge, the rest of the world not matter—ruthless as a goddess, she put a small sure hand on the arm of his chair. So he wavered more when he said: “My dear child, whatever’s happened, you’d so much better go home and have it out.”

“Major Brutt, even if you hated them you couldn’t possibly want me to do anything worse. It would never stop at all. Having things out would never stop, I mean. Besides, Thomas is my brother. I can’t tell you down here… . Do you like this hotel?”

He re-adjusted to this in two or three seconds, hummed slowly at her, said: “It suits me all right. Why?”

“If you left tomorrow, what they thought would not matter: you could tell them I was your niece who had got a pain and had got to lie down, then we could talk in your room.”

“That would still not do, I’m afraid.”

But she interposed: “Oh,
quickly!
I’m starting to cry.’ She was: her dilated dark eyes began dissolving; with her knuckles she pressed her chin up to keep her mouth steady; her other fist was pressed into her stomach, as though here were the seat of uncontrollable pain. She moved her knuckles, to mumble: “There’ve been people all day … I just want half an hour, just twenty minutes… . Then, if you say I must …”

He shot up, knocking a table, making an ash-bowl rattle, saying loudly: “Come, we’ll look for some coffee.” They went through the diningroom arch to the other stairs—there was no lift—then she darted up ahead of him like a rabbit. He followed, stepping heavily, ostentatiously, whistling nonchalantly a little flat, fumbling round all the time for his room key, passing palms on landings with that erect walk of the sleep-walker—his usual walk. Her day had been all stairs—all the same, her look became wilder, more unbelieving as, whenever she turned her head, he kept signalling: “Up, up.” This house seemed to have no top—till she came to the attic floor. At Windsor Terrace, that floor close to the skylight was mysterious with the servants’ bodily life—it was the scene of Matchett’s unmentioned sleep. Under this hotel skylight he came abreast with her: whistling louder, he unlocked his own door. Till now, she had not seen him approach anything with the authority that comes from possession. After that second, she was looking doubtfully over a lumpy olive sateen eiderdown at a dolls’ house window dark from a parapet.

“I fit pretty tight,” he said. “But, you see, they give me cut price terms.”

His anxious nonchalance, and his caution—for he went out again to knock on the other doors, to be certain there was nobody on this landing—made her not speak as she passed the end of the bed to sit, facing the window, on the edge of his eiderdown. He said: “Well, here we are,” with an air of solemn alarm—he had just fully realised their position. His chair back grated against the chest of drawers: on the mat there was just room for his feet. “Now,” he said, “go on. What made you cry just now?”

“All those people everywhere, the whole time.”

“I mean, what brought you here? What is this you say you are running from?”

“Them all. What they make happen—”

He interrupted, austerely: “I thought there was something special; I thought something had happened.”

“It has.”

“When?”

“It always has the whole time; I see it has never stopped. They were cruel to my father and mother, but the thing must have started even before that. Matchett says—”

“You ought not to listen to servants’ talk.”

“Why? When she’s the person who sees what really happens? They did not think my father and mother wicked; they simply despised them and used to laugh. That made all three of us funny, I see now. I see now that my father wanted me to belong somewhere, because he did not: that was why they have had to have me in London. I hope he does not know that it has turned out like this. I suppose he and my mother did not know they were funny: they went on feeling upset because they thought they had once done an extraordinary thing (their getting married had been extraordinary) but they still thought life was quite simple for people who did not do extraordinary things. My father often used to explain to me that people did not live the way we did: he said ours was not the right way—though we were all quite happy. He was quite certain ordinary life went on—yes, that was why I was sent to Thomas and Anna. But I see now that it does not: if he and I met again I should have to tell him that there is no ordinary life.”

“Aren’t you young to judge?”