The Death of the Heart (26 page)

“Oh, I don’t think we could quite ask him, dear … It seemed to be a very successful party.”

Daphne, from behind the
Sunday Express,
said: “It was all right.” She raised her voice: “Though some people cut their own friends, then are stuffy to other people’s. Mr. Bursely was shoved against the bookcase by Wallace Parker shoving, that rude way. I’m only thankful he didn’t hurt himself. I didn’t like him to see us so rough-house.”

“If you ask me,” said Dickie, “I don’t suppose he noticed. He’d have stayed stuck in the bookcase if Charlie Hoster hadn’t pulled him out. He arrived here pretty lit, and I’m told he nipped down the front and had two or three quick ones at the Imperial Arms. I wonder what he’ll smash next time he comes blowing in. I cannot say that that is a fellow I like. But apparently I do not know what is what.”

“Well, Clara liked him all right. That is how she forgot her bag. She stopped on to give him a lift home in her car.”

“So you pointed out. Well, if that bag is Clara’s, I don’t like it: it seems to me to be covered with ants’ eggs.”

“Well, why don’t you tell her so?”

“I no doubt shall. I shall no doubt tell her this afternoon. Clara and I are going to play golf.”

“Oh you
are
a mean, Dickiel You never said! Evelyn’s expecting us all to badminton.”

“Well, she will simply have to expect me, I’m afraid. Clara’s picking me up at half-past two. We may buzz back here for tea, or we may go back to her place—By the way, Mumsie, can Doris be sharp with dinner?”

“She’s just going to lay, dear. May I move your paper? Daphne, what are you doing after lunch?”

“Well, a lot of us thought we might go for a short walk. Then we’re all going round to Evelyn’s to badminton. Do you mean you’d like me to take Portia along?”

“That might be nice, dear. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Portia? In that case I may just take a little rest. Last night was so successful that we were rather late.”

The walking party—Daphne, Portia, Evelyn (the fine girl who had worn orange last night), Cecil (who did not seem to have been asked) and two other young men called Charlie and Wallace—deployed slowly along the top of the sea wall in the direction of Southstone. The young men wore plus fours, pullovers, felt hats precisely dinted in at the top, and ribbed stockings that made their calves look massive. Daphne and Evelyn wore berets, scarves with dogs’ heads and natty check overcoats. Evelyn had brought her dog with her.

The road on top of the wall was as deserted as ever: at the foot of the wall the sea, this afternoon mackerel blue, swelled sleekly between the breakwaters. Here and there a gull on a far-out post would be floated off by the swell, looking rather silly. There was a breakwater smell —a smell of sea-pickled planks, of slimy green boards being sucked by the tides. The immense spring sky arched from the inland woods to the marine horizon. The wall made a high causeway on which the walkers walked between sea and land: here you smelled not only the sea but a land breath—from the market gardens, the woods in clefts of the chalk hills, the gorse budding in its spiney darkness up there on the links where Dickie and Clara were. The crests of two airy tides, the sea’s and the land’s, breaking against each other above the asphalt, made a nervous elation, so that you spun, inwardly, in the blue-whiteness of the quiet and thrilling day.

Daphne’s party walked in a Sundayish dogged manner, using without sensation their deep lungs. They knew every inch of the sea wall; they looked ahead to Southstone, where the dome of the Splendide was bright gold. The sense of exposure this airy bareness gave them made them, with one another, at once sidelong and bold. On the whole, they walked abreast, but as far apart as they could; at times they converged so close that they jogged elbows; if they split up into twos, the twos called across to each other—this was daylight: there were no
tête-à-têtes
.
At the end of a mile and a half they reached the old lifeboat station, where without a word they all wheeled round to return. The girls fell into a three; the three young men kept pace exactly behind them. They faced west.

With the first touch of evening, the first dazzle, a vague poeticness invaded them. Yawnfuls of ozone stopped the desultory talk. Evelyn took Daphne’s arm; Cecil veered out alone to the edge of the esplanade and began to kick a lonely pebble along. A lovely brigantine appeared on the Channel, pink with light.

Portia drew a breath, then suddenly said to Daphne:
“A
friend of mine—could he ever come and stay here?”

Brought out with a bang like this, it sounded quite all right.

Daphne veered thoughtfully round, hands in her pockets, chin deep in the folds of her doggy scarf, and Evelyn peered across Daphne, holding on to her arm.
“What
say?” Daphne said. “A boy friend, do you mean?”

Evelyn said: “That’s what she’s been in such a study about.”

“Could he how much?” said Daphne.

“Ever come and stay here?”

“Come and stay here when?”

“For a week-end.”

“Well, if you
have
a boy friend. I don’t see why not. Do you see why not, Evelyn?”

“I should have thought it depended.”

“Yes, it depends, naturally. Have you really got a friend, though?”

“Just fancy, her,” added Evelyn. “Still,
I
don’t see why not.”

Daphne said swiftly: “Friend of your sister-in-law?”

“Oh yes. She, he, they—”

“He’ll be a bit ritzy for us, then, won’t he? However,” said Daphne looking at Portia derisively, but with a touch of respect, “if he’s really as keen as all that it won’t hurt him to lump it. Well, you certainly don’t lose any time, do you? Of course, you’ll have to square it with Mumsie, of course… . Go
on
: don’t be such a little silly. She won’t think anything of it; she’s used to boys.”

But boys were not Eddie. Portia paused, then said: “I thought I would ask you, then I thought you might ask her.”

“What’s your friend in?” put in Evelyn. “The Diplomatic?”

“Who’s
in the Diplomatic?” said Charlie, coming alongside.

“Portia’s friend who’s coming.”

“Well, he is not really: he’s in my brother’s office.”

“Well, after all,” said Evelyn, adjusting to this. She was the receptionist in Southstone’s biggest beauty parlour: her face, whatever Dickie might think of it, continued to bloom in luscious and artificial apricot tones. Her father was Mr. Bunstable, the important house agent who not only negotiated the Waikiki summer let but had clients throughout the county. Evelyn was thus not only a social light but had a stable position—consequently, she could not be hoped to enter into Daphne’s feeling against the Quaynes. Business people were business people. She said kindly: “Then it’s been nice for him, picking up with you.”

“Your sister-in-law,” said Daphne with some relish, “would probably have a fit.”

Evelyn said: “I don’t see why.”

“Say, Cecil,” cried Daphne, whisking round sharply at him, “must you keep on kicking that old stone?”

“So sorry: I was thinking something out.”

“Well, if you want to think, why come for a walk? Anyone might think this was a funeral—I say, Wallace, I say do listen, Charlie: Portia doesn’t think much of any of you boys! She’s having her own friend down.”

“Local talent,” said Wallace, “not represented. Well, these ladies from London—what can you expect?”

“Yes, you’d think,” said Daphne, “it should be enough for anyone, watching Cecil kicking that old stone.”

“Oh, it isn’t that,” said Portia, looking at them anxiously. “It’s not that, really, I mean.”

“Well, I don’t see why she shouldn’t,” said Evelyn, closing the matter. She went to the head of some steps to whistle to her dog, which had got down on to the beach and was rolling in something horrid.

The others waited for Evelyn. The act of stopping sent a slight shock through the party, like the shock felt through a train that has pulled up. They were really more like a goods than a passenger train—content as a row of trucks, they stood solidly facing the way they would soon walk. Over still distant Seale, crowned by the church, smoke dissolved in the immature spring sun. This veil etherealised hillside villas with their gardens of trees; behind the balconies and the gables the hill took a tinge of hyacinth blue and looked like the outpost of a region of fantasy. Portia, glancing along the others’ faces, was satisfied that Eddie had been forgotten. They did more than not think of Eddie, they thought of nothing.

She had learned to be less alarmed by Daphne’s set since she had learned to plumb their abeyances. People are made alarming by one’s dread of their unremitting, purposeful continuity. But in Seale, continuity dwelt in action only—interrupt what anybody was doing, and you interrupted what notions they had had. When these young people stopped doing what they were doing, they stopped all through, like clocks. Thus nothing, completely nothing, filled this halt on their way to Sunday tea. Conceivably, astral smells of tea cakes with hot currants, of chocolate biscuits and warmed leather chairs vibrated towards them from Evelyn’s home. They had walked; they would soon be back; they must have done themselves good.

Evelyn’s dog came up the steps with a foul smear on its back, was scolded and wagged its rump in a merrily servile way. The dog was ordered to heel, where it did not stay, and the party, still with no word spoken, dropped forward into steady motion again.

At Evelyn’s, Portia had time to think about next Sunday (or the Sunday after, was it to be?) for no one said much and she did not play badminton. The Bunstables’ large villa had been built in the early ‘twenties in the Old Normandy manner—inside and out it was dark and nubbly with oak. It was a complex of nooks, inside which leaded windows of thick greenish glass diluted the spring sky. The stairs were manorial, the livingrooms sumptuously quaint. Brass or copper discs distorted your face everywhere; there were faience tiles. This Norman influence had blown so obliquely across the Channel that few Seale people knew it as not British, though of some merrier period. The diningroom was so impressively dark that the antiqued lights soon had to be switched on. Evelyn’s manner to her mother was disdainful but kindly: her father was out. Cecil, on showing a wish to sit by Portia, was sent to sit next the tea-pot, to talk to Mrs. Bunstable. He almost at once dropped a quarter of buttered teacake on to one thigh of his plus fours, and spent most of teatime trying to look
dégagé
, while, with a tea serviette dipped in hot water, he secretly failed to get the butter off.

Tea over, they moved to the glass-roofed badminton court: here the rubber shoes of the whole party hung by their laces from a row of hooks. While the rest put their shoes on, Portia climbed on a high stool close to the radiator. To hitch her heels on an upper rung of the stool made her feel like a bird. She began to imagine Eddie, next Sunday, taking part in all this. Or, when it came to the moment, would they find they would rather stay by the sea—not on the sea wall but out there near the martello towers, watching waves rush up the flat sands in the dusk? No, not for too long—for she and Eddie must on no account miss the Sunday fun. He and she had not yet been together into society. Even his name said on the sea front had made Daphne’s friends show several shades more regard for her—though since then they had forgotten why—she felt more kindly embraced by these people already. Supposing she had a wish to be put across, who could do this for her better than Eddie could? How much ice he would cut; how proud she would be of him. The wish to lead out one’s lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one’s self-respect. And, they would be in each other’s secret; she would see him just not winking across the room. Alone, one has a rather incomplete outlook— one is not sure what is funny, what is not. One solid pleasure of love is to check up together on what has happened. Since they were together last, she did not think she had laughed—she had smiled, of course, but chiefly to please people. No, it would be wrong to stay down by the sea.

Cecil, left out of the first sett, edged round the court and came to stand by Portia: he propped one foot on the lower rung of the stool and sent through it the vibration of a sigh. She put her thoughts away quickly. Away in the lounge, at the far end of the passage, Evelyn’s mother switched the Luxembourg music on: this fitted the game —the pouncing, slithering players, the ping of the shots —into a sprightly rhythm, that pleased Portia but further depressed Cecil. “I don’t care for spring, somehow,” he said. “It makes me feel a bit seedy.”

“You don’t look seedy, Cecil.”

“I do with all this butter,” said Cecil, plucking unhappily at his plus fours. He went on: “What were you thinking about?”

“I’m not thinking any more.”

“But you were, weren’t you? I saw you. If I were a more oncoming sort of fellow I should offer you a penny, and so on.”

“I was wondering what next Sunday would be like.”

“Much the same, I expect. At this time of year, one begins to want a change.”

“But this is a change for me.”

“Of course it’s nice to think it’s a change for someone. It will be a change for your friend too, I expect. Funny, when I first saw you at Daphne’s party, you didn’t look as though you had a friend in the world. That was what drew me to you, I daresay. I seem to have got you wrong, though. Are you really an orphan?”