The Death of the Heart (18 page)

I promised him I would not write down that. But Sundays make one have to think of the past.

Major Brutt will be disappointed if I don’t get on with that puzzle more than I do.

Monday.

When I got back from Miss Paullie’s this afternoon I found Anna in my room doing my puzzle. She said she was sorry but she could not stop, so she and I went on doing the puzzle. She said where did I get the table it’s on from, and I said it was a table Matchett had got from somewhere. She said, oh. She had got one whole corner done, a bit of sky with an aeroplane in it. She smiled away to herself and looked about for more pieces, and said well, how are all your beaux? She said she had better ask Major Brutt to dinner, and then we could make him do the plainer part of the sky. Then she said, who else shall we ask, Eddie? She said, you say, it is your party you know. We went on with the puzzle till past the time for Anna to get dressed.

Today we started Tuscan Art, and did Book Keeping and German Grammar.

Tuesday.

When I went down to breakfast past Anna’s door it was a crack open, she was talking to Thomas. She was saying, well it’s your something-or-other not mine. Thomas often sits on their bed while she drinks her morning coffee. Then she said, she’s Irene’s own child, you know.

Lilian has still heard nothing more from the actor.

Today we did First Aid and discussed our English Essays, and were taken to a lecture on Corneille.

Wednesday.

I had a letter from Eddie, he does not say what he did at the week-end. He says not to say to Anna about those imitations, because once or twice she has been to tea there herself. What does he think I tell Anna? He does sometimes puzzle me.

Today it rained a great deal. We did Hygiene, and had a discussion on Corneille, and were taken to the National Gallery.

This afternoon, Anna took me to a grand afternoon party with gold chairs, but there were several girls of my age there. I wore my black velvet. Some lady came up and said to Anna, I hear you’re just going abroad, too. Anna said, Oh, I don’t know, then gave me a sort of look.

Thursday.

Today we had a lecture on Events of the Week, and a special lecture on Savanarola, and Elocution (in German).

Thomas and I were alone for dinner tonight, as Anna was having dinner with somebody. He asked if I minded if we did not go out to anything, as he said he had had rather a day. He did not seem to want to talk about anything special. At the end of dinner he said I’m afraid this is rather dull, but it is family life. I said that when we lived in the South of France we often did not talk. He said, oh, talking of the South of France, I forget if I told you we are going to Capri. I said that that would be very nice. He coughed and said, I mean Anna and I are going. He went quickly on to say, we have been wondering what would be the nicest plan for you. I said I thought London was very nice.

Friday.

Last night, when I had just finished putting away this diary, Matchett came up to say good night. She clapped her hands at me for not being in bed yet. Then I told her I had been told that they were going abroad. She said, oh, you have? and sat down on my bed. She said, she’s been on at him to tell you. I said, well they can’t help it, I’m not their fault. She said no, but if they did right by you you wouldn’t be always out after that Eddie. I said, well after all, they are married, and I’m not married to either of them. She said, it’s one marriage and then another that’s done harm all along. I said to Matchett that at any rate I’d got her. Then she leaned right on my bed and said, that’s all very well, but are you a good girl? I said I didn’t know what she meant, and she said no, that is just the trouble. She said, if Mr. Thomas had been half of the man his father was, I’d have— I said, what, Matchett? and she said, never you mind.

She got up, stroking her apron, with her mouth tight shut. She said, he’s a little actor, he is. She said, he had a right to leave you alone. Her good-nights are never the same now.

Tomorrow will be Saturday.

Saturday.

This morning Anna came with a quite ordinary smile and said, Eddie’s wanting you on the telephone. It was quite a time since I’d heard the telephone ring, so Anna must have been having a talk first. He said, what about another walk in the park? He said, it’s all right, I know, they are going out to Richmond. He said to meet on the bridge at three.

Matchett took no notice when we met on the stairs.

We did meet on the bridge at three.

Sunday.

This morning they got up late, so I got on with mj puzzle. When they were up they said they would do whatever I liked. I could not think what, so one of them said Epping. So we drove there to a place called The Robin Hood and had sausages for our lunch. Then Thomas and I went for a walk in the forest, Anna stayed in the car and read a detective story. The forest is full of blackish air like London, the trees do not look the same in it. He told me they had arranged for me to stay at the seaside at the time when Anna and he would be in Capri. I said oh, yes, that that would be fun. Thomas gave me a sort of look and said yes he thought it would.

When we got back to the car Thomas said, I’ve been talking plans with Portia. Anna said, oh, have you, I’m so glad. She was so interested in her detective story, she went on with it all the way home.

I told them how much I had enjoyed my day.

Anna said, it will be spring before we know where we are.

EARLY
in March the crocuses crept alight, then blazed yellow and purple in the park. The whistle was blown later: it was possible to walk there after tea. In fact, it is about five o’clock in an evening that the first hour of spring strikes—autumn arrives in the early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day. The air, about to darken, quickens and is run through with mysterious white light; the curtain of darkness is suspended, as though for some unprecedented event. There is perhaps no sunset, the trees are not yet budding—but the senses receive an intimation, an intimation so fine, yet striking in so directly, that this appears a movement in one’s own spirit. This exalts whatever feeling is in the heart.

No moment in human experience approaches in its intensity this experience of the solitary earth’s. The later phases of spring, when her foot is in at the door, are met with a conventional gaiety. But her first unavowed presence is disconcerting; silences fall in company—the wish to be either alone or with a lover is avowed by some look or some spontaneous movement—the window being thrown open, the glance away up the street. In cities the traffic lightens and quickens; even buildings take such feeling of depth that the streets might be rides cut through a wood. What is happening is only acknowledged between strangers, by looks, or between lovers. Unwritten poetry twists the hearts of people in their thirties. To the person out walking that first evening of spring, nothing appears inanimate, nothing not sentient: darkening chimneys, viaducts, villas, glass-and-steel factories, chain stores seem to strike as deep as natural rocks, seem not only to exist but to dream. Atoms of light quiver between the branches of stretching-up black trees. It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth’s almost agonised livingness is most felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors and turn on the lights—they are pursued by the scent of violets sold on the kerb.

On that early March evening, Anna and Portia both, though not together, happened to be walking in Regent’s Park. This was Portia’s first spring in England: very young people are true but not resounding instruments. Their senses are tuned to the earth, like the senses of animals; they feel, but without conflict or pain. Portia was not like Anna, already half-way through a woman’s checked, puzzled life, a life to which the intelligence only gives a further distorted pattern. With Anna, feeling was by now unwilling, but she had more resonance. Memory enlarged and enlarged inside her an echoing, not often visited cave. Anna could remember being a child more easily and with more pleasure than she could remember being Portia’s age: with her middle ‘teens a cloudy phase had begun. She did not know half she remembered tili a sensation touched her; she forgot to look back till these first evenings of spring.

At different moments, they both crossed different bridges over the lake, and saw swans folded, dark-white cyphers on the white water, in an immortal dream. They both viewed the Cytherean twisting reaches at the ends of the lake, both looked up and saw pigeons cluttering the transparent trees. They saw crocuses staining the dusk purple or yellow, flames with no power. They heard silence, then horns, cries, an oar on the lake, silence striking again, the thrush fluting so beautifully. Anna kept pausing, then walking quickly past the couples against the railings: walking alone in her elegant black she drew glances; she went to watch the dogs coursing in the empty heart of the park. But Portia almost ran, with her joy in her own charge, like a child bowling a hoop.

You must be north of a line to feel the seasons so keenly. On the Riviera, Portia’s notions of spring had been the mimosa, and then Irene unpacking from storage trunks her crushed cotton frocks. Spring had brought with it no new particular pleasures—for little girls in England spring means the Easter holidays: bicycle rides in blazers, ginger nuts in the pockets, blue violets in bleached grass, paper-chases, secrets and mixed hockey. But Portia, thanks first to Irene, now to Anna, still knew nothing of this. She had come straight to London… One Saturday, she and Lilian were allowed to take a bus into the country: they walked about in a wood near the bus stop. Then it thundered and they wanted to go home.

The day before Thomas and Anna were to start for Capri, Portia was to go to a Mrs. Heccomb, living at Seale-on-Sea. Here Mrs. Heccomb’s late husband, a retired doctor, had been the secretary of the golf club. Mrs. Heccomb, before her rather late marriage, had been a Miss Yardes, once Anna’s governess. She had stayed on with Anna and her father at Richmond, keeping house and supporting the two of them gently, till Anna was nineteen. She had not been teaching Anna for several years before that: she had done no more than escort her to and from day school, see that she practised the piano and make her feel her position as a motherless girl. But she had been quite a feature of Anna’s home—that house uphill with a fine view of the river, an oval drawingroom, a terraced garden with almond trees. Anna used to call her Poor Miss Taylor: she had been as much pleased as surprised when Miss Yardes had followed Miss Taylor’s pattern and, at the end of her annual holiday, announced her engagement to a widower. Anna and Miss Yardes had just at that time reached an uncomfortable phase of semi-confidence—for one thing, Robert Pidgeon had just appeared, and Miss Yardes was being too conscious of him. Though this loss had made a sad tear in daily habit, it had been on the whole a relief to see Miss Yardes go. Anna took on the housekeeping; the bills went up but meals became more amusing. Anna’s father footed the bills without a quiver, and touched her by saying how much nicer this was. It turned out he had only kept Miss Yardes on all this time because he fancied a girl should have a woman about. During Miss Yardes’ reign, Anna’s father had felt free to form the habit of being self-pro-tectively unobservant: this he did not discontinue after Miss Yardes had gone. He continued, therefore, hardly to notice Robert or any of the less important young men.

Robert had celebrated Miss Yardes’ wedding by bringing out to Richmond a package of fireworks; he and Anna went down the garden together and let the fireworks off on the wedding night. On their way back to the house, he kissed Anna for the first time. After that, he had gone abroad for two years, and she began to go about by herself. His subsequent irresponsible behaviour had been, she since understood, just as much her fault as his. This began after he came back from abroad. Late at nights, in fact in the small hours, they would rush in his car up Richmond Hill, to the house in which Anna’s father slept soundly, where the thermos of milk no longer waited, where Miss Yardes no longer kept her door ajar. In the drawingroom, the embers of the fire would be coaxed alight again by the knowing Robert, then the Chinese cushion slipped under Anna’s head… . They did not marry because they refused to trust each other.

On her marriage, then, Mrs. Heccomb
née
Miss Yardes had gone to live at Seale, on the Kentish coast, about seventy miles from London. Here her husband had bought a strip of reclaimed beach, just inland from the esplanade. On this he built a house facing the Channel, with balconies, a sun porch and Venetian shutters to batten against storms. For in winter storms flung shingle on to the lawns, and even, if the windows were left open, on to the carpets and pianos of these exposed houses along the esplanade. This house of his Dr. Heccomb considered a good investment—and so it proved: in July, August, September he, his second wife and the children of his first marriage moved out of Seale and took rooms at a farm inland, while the house was let for six guineas a week. During these summer exiles, Dr. Heccomb drove himself daily to the Seale golf club in a small car. He was popular; all the members knew him well; he came in on every celebration there was. It was on the return from one of these parties that Dr. Heccomb, driving home too gaily into the sunset, drove himself head-on into a charabanc. After this shocking affair, the hat went round at the golf club for Mrs. Heccomb; and the widow received eighty-five pounds in token of sympathy. This did not seem worth investing, so she spent it on mourning for herself and the children, a secretarial training for Daphne Heccomb and a fine cross for Dr. Heccomb in Seale churchyard.