The Death of the Heart (23 page)

Very sincerely yours,

               Eric E. J. Brutt.

Portia had never had such a morning’s post as this: it seemed to be one advantage of having left London. These three letters came on Saturday morning; she reread them at a green-tiled table at the Corona Café, waiting for Mrs. Heccomb. By this, her second morning, she was already into the Waikiki routine. Mrs. Heccomb always shopped from ten-thirty to midday, with a break for coffee at the Corona Café. If she was not “in town” by ten-thirty, she fretted. With her hive-shaped basket under her elbow, Portia in her wake, she punted happily, slowly up and down the High Street, crossing at random, quite often going back on her tracks. Women who shop by telephone do not know what the pleasures of buying are. Rich women live at such a distance from life that very often they never see their money—the Queen, they say, for instance, never carries a purse. But Mrs. Heccomb’s unstitched morocco purse, with the tarnished silver corners, was always in evidence. She paid cash almost everywhere, partly because she had found that something, happens to bills, making them always larger than you think, partly because her roving disposition made her hate to be tied to one set of shops. She liked to be
known
in as many shops as possible, to receive a personal smile when she came in. And she had by this time managed things so well that she was known in every Seale shop of standing. Where she had not actually bought things, she had repeatedly priced them. She did admit herself tied to one butcher, one dairy because they sent: Mrs. Heccomb did not care for carrying meat, and the milk supply for a household must be automatic. Even to these two shops she was not wholly faithful: she had been known to pick up a kidney here and there, some new shade of butter, a crock of cream.

To Portia, who had never seen a purse open so often (when you live in hotels there is almost nothing to buy), Mrs. Heccomb’s expenditure seemed princely—though there was often change out of a florin. When Mrs. Heccomb had too many pennies, she would build them up, at the next counter she came to, into pillars of twelve or six, and push them across cautiously. Where she paid in coppers only, she felt she had got a bargain: money goes further when you do not break into silver, and any provident person baulks at changing a note. Everything was bought in small quantities, exactly as it was wanted day by day. Today, for instance, she made the following purchases:

One cake of Vinolia for the bathroom,

Half a dozen Relief nibs,

One pot of salmon and shrimp paste (small size),

One pan scrubber of crumpled metal gauze,

One bottle of Bisurated Magnesia tablets (small size),

One bottle of gravy browning,

One skein of “natural” darning wool (for Dickie’s vests),

One electric light bulb, One lettuce,

One length of striped canvas to re-seat a deck chair,

One set of whalebones to repair corsets,

Two pair of lamb’s kidneys,

Half a dozen small screws,

A copy of The Church Times.

She also made, from a list of Daphne’s, and out of a special ten shilling note, a separate set of purchases for the party tonight. Portia bought a compendium—lightly ruled violet paper, purple lined envelopes—and nine pennyworth of three-halfpenny stamps. Infected by the sea air with extravagance, she also bought a jade green box to keep a toothbrush in, and a length of red ribbon for a snood for tonight.

Now Mrs. Heccomb had gone to the house agent’s for her annual consultation about the summer let. Probably no other householder in Seale began to discuss the summer let so early. The fact was that Daphne and Dickie objected each year more strongly to turning out of Waikiki for the three best months. But their father had built the house for summer letting, and his widow adhered to this with a touch of piety. In July, August, September she took her painting things with her and moved on a round of visits to relatives: meanwhile, Daphne and Dickie were put out to board with friends In view of the objections they always raised, she liked to get the let clinched well in advance, then to let them know of it as a
fait accompli
. But she was made sad, when she went to the house agent’s, by the sense of conspiring against Daphne and Dickie.

So she did not take Portia with her to witness this dark act, but sent her to the Corona to book a table. The Corona was very full at this hour; the fashionable part Was upstairs, looking down on the High Street. Only outsiders drank their coffee downstairs. And how bright it Was up here, with the smell of hot roasting coffee, the whicker of wicker chairs. A stove threw out roaring heat: sun streamed through the windows, curdling the smoke of a few bold cigarettes. Ladies waiting for ladies looked through back numbers of the
Tatler
and
Sketch
. Dogs on leads wound themselves round the table legs. Paper tulips in vases, biscuits in coloured paper on the tile-topped tables struck bright notes. The waitresses knew everyone. It was so much gayer than London—also, there was abandonment about this morning feast: to be abandoned you must be respectable.

Several times Portia had looked up from her letters to watch one more lady’s hat come up past the banisters. But for a long time no hat was Mrs. Heccomb’s. When Mrs. Heccomb did finally come, she shot out of nowhere like a jack-in-the-box. The three envelopes were still all over the table. Mrs. Heccomb threw them a glance whose keenness was automatic, though the keenness was quickly veiled by tact. Not for nothing had she been for years a duenna. Eddie’s writing was, to the simple eye, disarming, but Major Brutt’s was unflinchingly masculine. Matchett’s letter could be put down at once as a letter that was likely to be from Matchett. Mrs. Heccomb had not yet seen these hand-writings: it was Daphne who galloped out to meet the morning post.

“Well, dear, I’m glad you have not been lonely. Mr. Bunstable kept me. Now I shall order coffee. Look, eat a chocolate biscuit while we wait.”

Still slightly flustered by her own arrival, Mrs. Heccomb balanced her basket on an empty chair and signalled to a waitress. She looked pink. On top of this she wore, like an extra hat, a distinct air of caution and indecision. “It is so nice to get letters,” she said.

“Oh yes. This morning I had three.”

“I expect, travelling so much, you and your mother made many nice friends?”

“No, you see we travelled rather
too
much.”

“And now you have made friends with Anna’s friends, I expect?”

“Some of them. Not all.”

Mrs. Heccomb looked less anxious by several degrees. “Anna,” she said, “is a wonderful judge of people. Even as a young girl she was always particular, and now such distinguished people come to her house, don’t they? One would always be right in liking anyone Anna liked. She has a wonderful way of gathering people round her: it’s so nice for you, dear, to have come to a happy house like that. I am sure it must be a great pleasure to her to see you get on so nicely with the people she knows. She would be so wonderfully sympathetic. I expect you love to show her the letters you get, don’t you?”

“I only get many letters when I am at the sea.”

Momentarily, Mrs. Heccomb looked nonplussed. Then her shoulder was given a sharp tap by a lady leaning across from one of the other tables. A playful, reproachful conversation ensued between them. Portia, herself considerably puzzled, poured cream on to her coffee out of a doll’s jug. Soon she was made known to Mrs. Heccomb’s lady, and stood up politely to shake hands. She stuck the letters back in the pocket of her tweed coat.

When they had left the caf£ and were in the High Street, Mrs. Heccomb, pausing outside Smoots’, showed with a rather rueful upward gesture where Daphne worked. Portia pictured Daphne behind that window like a furious Lady of Shalott. “Is she fond of reading?” she said.

“Well, no, but that’s not so much what they want. They want a girl who is someone, if you know what I mean. A girl who—well, I don’t quite know how to express it—a girl who did not come from a nice home would not do at
all
, here. You know, choosing books is such a personal thing; Seale is a small place and the people are so nice. Personality counts for so much here. The Corona 
Café is run by ladies, you know.”

“Oh.”

“And of course everyone knows Daphne. It is wonderful how she has settled down to the work. I’m afraid her father would not have thought it ideal. But one cannot always foresee the future, can one?”

“No.”

“Almost everyone changes their books there. You must go and see her one morning: she would be delighted. Oh, dear, look; it’s twelve! We shall have to hurry home.”

They dashed back to the sea down the asphalt walk, then waited about an hour in the lounge at Waikiki while Doris dealt with lunch. Mrs. Heccomb turned her lamp shade round and round and said the varnish on it was drying. After lunch she said she’d be quiet just for a minute, then took a nap on the sofa with her back to the sea.

Portia looked several times at Mrs. Heccomb napping, then took her shoes off and crept up to explore the bedroom floor of Waikiki, to see which Eddie’s room could be. Mrs. Heccomb’s room, in which she dared not linger, contained a large double bed with a hollow in the middle, and a number of young girls’ photographs. Daphne’s room smelled of Coty powder (Chypre), an army of evening shoes was drawn up under the bureau and a Dismal Desmond dog sat on the bed. Snapshots of confident people of both sexes were stuck round the mirror. Dickie’s room looked north towards the town, and had that physical smell north rooms so soon acquire. It contained boot jacks, boxing gloves, a stack of copies of
Esquire
, three small silver trophies on ebony stands gleaming underneath framed groups. Doris’s room was so palpably Doris’s that Portia quickly shut the door again. But she did also discover another room—it was wedge-shaped, like the end of a piece of cheese. Its dormer window looked north. In here were stacks of old cardboard boxes and a dressmaker’s bust of quite royal arrogance: the walls were hung with photographs of such tropics as Dr. Heccomb had visited. Here also, promisingly, were a stretcher bed, a square of mirror and a bamboo table. Portia took one more look round, then crept downstairs again. By the time Mrs. Heccomb woke, she was half-way through a letter.

She was writing: “There is a room, and I think you would like everything. There are two directions for us to walk in. I will not broach about this till tomorrow, which will be Sunday—”

Mrs. Heccomb woke with a little snatch at her hair, as though she heard something in it. “Busy, dear?” she said. “We shall have to go out in about an hour. We are going out to tea up the hill—there are two daughters, though both a little older than you.” She tucked in her blouse at the back of her belt again, and for some time moved contentedly round the lounge, altering the position of one or two objects, as though she had had some new idea while asleep. A draught creeping through the sun porch rattled the curtain rings: Waikiki gave one of its shiplike creaks, and waves began to thump with greater force on the beach.

As Mrs. Heccomb and Portia, both in chamois gloves, walked sedately up the hill out to tea, the daffodil buds in gardens knocked to and fro. Seale gave one of its spring afternoon dramas of wind and sun, and clouds bowled over the marsh that one saw from here. Down there, the curve of the bay crepitated in changing silver light.

“I expect you often go out to tea with Anna?”

“Well, Anna doesn’t often go out to tea.”

On the way home, Mrs. Heccomb took Portia to Evensong, which was intoned in the Lady Chapel. Then they went round to the vestry for some surplices, which Mrs. Heccomb took home to mend. She could not aspire to do the altar flowers, as she could not afford beautiful flowers, so this was her labour of love for the church. “The little boys are very rough,” she said, “the gathers nearly always go at the neck.” It took some time to go through the surplices, and longer still to pin them up in brown paper—Mrs. Heccomb, with other ladies with access to the vestry, kept a hoard of brown paper, for their own uses, behind a semi-sacred cupboard of pitched pine. The Vicar did not know of the existence of this. Whenever Mrs. Heccomb opened a parcel, she saved the paper to take up to the church, so there was never brown paper at Waikiki… . When they did get back to Waikiki with the surplices, Daphne was punting chairs about in the lounge.

Daphne’s hair had been re-set, and looked like gilded iron. The door through to the diningroom stood open, so that the heat of the lounge fire might take some of the chill off the diningroom: the breath that came out from there was rather cold, certainly. They all went in there to have a look round, and Daphne blew the dust off a center-piece of Cape gooseberries with an exasperatedly calm air.

“The bell rings beautifully now, dear.”

“Yes, the bell’s all right, but when I tried ringing it Doris shot out and had a sort of fit.”

“Perhaps it’s still rather loud.”

“But what I mean is, she must learn not to do that. She can’t find the potted meat, either.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, dear; it’s hanging up in my basket.”

“Well, really, Mumsie … As it is, you see, she hasn’t even started the sandwiches. I suppose you’ve been at that church?” said Daphne, pouncing.

“Well, we just—”

“Well, I do think church might keep. It’s Saturday, after all.”

Supper was cold that night, and was eaten early in order to give Doris plenty of time to clear. So they were to dress afterwards. Dickie was rather cold about this evening party, as he had wished to watch an ice hockey match. He had spent his Saturday afternoon in Southstone playing ordinary hockey in the mud. “I don’t see why they want to come,” he said.