The Death of the Heart (28 page)

The time between Eddie’s Friday morning letter and 
his arrival seemed to contract to nothing. In so far as time did exist, it held some dismay. The suspense of the week, though unnerving, had had its own tune or pattern: now she knew he was coming the tune stopped. For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realisation is something of an ordeal. Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realise themselves it is in the waking world: the difference is subtly but often painfully felt. What she
should
have begun to enjoy, from Friday morning, was anticipation—but she found anticipation no longer that pure pleasure it once was. Even a year ago, the promised pleasure could not come soon enough: it was agony to consume intervening time.
Now
,
 
she found she could wish Saturday were not on her so soon—she unconsciously held it off with one hand. This lack of avidity and composure, this need to recover both in a vigil of proper length, showed her already less of a child, and she was shocked by this loss or change in her nature, as she might have been by a change in her own body.

On Saturday morning, she was awake for a minute before she dared open her eyes. Then she saw her curtains white with Saturday’s light—relentlessly, the too great day was poured out, on the sea, on her window sill. Then she thought there might be a second letter from Eddie, to say he was not coming after all. But there was no letter.

Later, the day became not dark but muted; haze bound the line of the coast; the sun did not quite shine. There had been no more talk, when it had come to the point, of Eddie’s catching the morning train: he would come by the train by which Portia had come. Mrs. Heccomb wanted to order the taxi to meet him, but Portia felt Eddie would be overpowered by this, besides not being glad to pay for the taxi—so it was arranged that the carrier should bring down his bag. Portia walked up the station hill to meet him. She heard the train whistle away back in the woods; then it whistled again, then slowly came round the curve. When Eddie had got out they walked to the parapet and looked over at the view. Then they started downhill together. This was not like the afternoon when she had arrived herself, for a week more of spring had already sweetened the air.

Eddie had been surprised by the view from the parapet: he had had no idea Seale was so far from the sea.

“Oh yes, it is quite a way,” she said happily.

“But I thought it was once a port.”

“It was, but the sea ran back.”

“Did it really, darling: just fancy!” Catching at Portia’s wrist, Eddie swung it twice in a gay methodical way, as, with the godlike step of people walking downhill, they went down the station incline. All at once he dropped her wrist and began to feel in his pockets. “Oh God,” he said, “I forgot to post that letter.”

“Oh—an important letter?”

“It
had
to get there tonight. It was to someone I put off by telegram.”

“I really do thank you for coming, Eddie!”

Eddie smiled in a brilliant but rather automatic and worried way. “I invented all sorts of things. It
had
to get there tonight. You don’t know how touchy people are.”

“Couldn’t we post it now?”

“The postmark… . However, everyone hates me already. Anyway, London seems beautifully far away. Where’s the next post box, darling?”

At the idea of this desperate simplification, Eddie’s face cleared. He no longer frowned at the letter but, crossing the road, plunged it cheerfully into the corner letter box. Portia, watching him from across the road, had a moment in which to realise he would be back beside her; in fact, they were together again. Eddie came back and said: “Oh, you’ve tied your hair ribbon in a bow at the top. And you are still wearing your woolly gloves.” Taking her hand in his, he scrunched the fingers inside her glove together. “Sweet,” he said. “Like a nest of little weak mice.”

They lagged along, all down the turning road. Eddie read aloud the names on the white gates of all the villas —these gates were streaked with green drips from trees; the houses behind them looked out through evergreens. The sea was, for the moment, out of view: a powerful inland silence, tinted grey by the hour, filled the station road. Seale was out of sight behind the line of the hill: its smoke went up behind garden conifers. Later, they heard a stream in a sort of gulch. All this combined to make Eddie exclaim: “Darling, I do call this an unreal place!”

“Wait till we get back to tea.”

“But where on earth is Waikiki?”

“Oh, Eddie, I told you—it’s by the sea.”

“Is Mrs. Heccomb really very excited?”

“Yes, very excited—though I must say, it does not take much to excite her. But even Dickie said this morning at breakfast that he supposed he would bump into you tonight.”

“And Daphne—is she excited?”

“I’m sure she really is. But she’s afraid you’re ritzy. You must show her you’re not.”

“I’m so glad I came,” said Eddie, quickening his step.

At Waikiki, Mrs. Heccomb’s deportment was not, for the first minute, equal to the occasion. She looked twice at Eddie and said: “Oh …” Then she rallied and said how pleased to see him she was. Holding her hand out, she nervously circumscribed the tea table,’ still fixing her eyes on the silhouette of Eddie as though trying to focus an apparition. When they all sat down to tea, her own back was to the light and she had Eddie in less deceptive view. Each time he spoke, her eyes went to his forehead, to the point where his hair sprang back in its fine spirited waves. In pauses that could but occur in the talk, Portia could almost hear Mrs. Heccomb’s ideas, like chairs before a party, being rolled about and rapidly rearranged. The tea was bountiful, but so completely distracted was Mrs. Heccomb that Portia had to circulate the cakes. It occurred to her to wonder who would pay for them, and whether she had done wrong, on account of Eddie, in tempting Waikiki to this extra expense.

She wondered, even, whether Mrs. Heccomb might not pause to wonder. Having lived in hotels where one’s bills wait weekly at the foot of the stairs, and no “extra” is ever overlooked, she had had it borne in on her that wherever anyone is they are costing somebody something, and that the cost must be met. She understood that by living at Windsor Terrace, eating what she ate, sleeping between sheets that had to be washed, by even so much as breathing the warmed air, she became a charge on Thomas and Anna.
Their
keeping on paying up, whatever they felt, had to be glossed over by family feeling— and she had learned to have, with regard to them, that callousness one has towards relatives. Now she could only hope they were paying largely enough for her own board at Waikiki to meet the cost of the cake Eddie might eat. But uncertainty made her limit her own tea.

Eddie had the advantage, throughout tea, of not being familiar with Mrs. Heccomb. All he thought was that she was exceedingly shy. He therefore set out to be frank, easy and simple, which were three things he could seem to be on his head. He could not be expected to know that his appearance, and that the something around him that might be called his aura, struck into her heart its first misgiving for years—a misgiving not about Portia but about Anna. He could not know that he started up in her mind a misgiving she had repressed about Anna and Pidgeon—a misgiving her own marriage had made her gladly forget. A conviction (dating from her last year at Richmond) that no man with
bounce
could be up to any good set up an unhappy twitch in one fold of her left cheek. Apprehensions that someone might be common were the worst she had had to combat since she ruled at Waikiki. No doubt it must be in order, this young man being Portia’s friend, since Portia said that he was a friend of Anna’s. But what was he doing
being
a friend of Anna’s? … Portia, watching the cheek twitch, wondered what could be up.

Eddie felt he was doing wonderfully well. He liked Mrs. Heccomb, and was anxious to please. Not a scrap of policy underlay his manner. Perfectly guilelessly, he understood Mrs. Heccomb to be just a little dazzled by him. Indeed, he looked well here—from the moment of coming in, he had dropped into a happy relationship with the things in the room: the blue chenille curtain to the left of his head, the dresser he tilted his chair against, the finished lamp shade that he had seen and praised. He seemed so natural here, so much in the heart of things, that Portia wondered how the Waikiki lounge could have fully existed before he came. There in the sun porch stayed the unfinished puzzle, into which, before he came, she had fitted her hopes and fears. After tea, she took a retrospective look at the puzzle, as though it were a thing left from another age. Eddie stood gaily talking, gaily balancing on the fire kerb. He attracted a look from Doris as she slithered in to clear away the tea.

“It’s nice to get back to a proper fire,” he said. “I have only gas in my flat.”

Mrs. Heccomb took the cloth from Doris to fold: it had a crochet border eight inches deep. “I suppose you have central heating in Mr. Quayne’s office?”

“Oh yes,” Eddie said. “It is all completely slap up.”

“Yes, I have heard it is very fine.”

“Anna, of course, has the loveliest log fire in
her
drawingroom. You go and see her quite often, I expect?”

“Yes, I go to Windsor Terrace when I am in London,” said Mrs. Heccomb, though still not forthcomingly. “They are extremely hospitable,” she said—discounting a right to the house as any one person’s privilege. She turned on the light over her painting table, sat down and began to go through her brushes. Portia, watching dusk close round the porch, said: “I think perhaps I might show Eddie the sea.”

“Oh, you won’t see much of the sea, dear,
now,
I’m afraid.”

“Still, we might just look.”

So they went out. Portia went down the path pulling on her overcoat, but Eddie only wound his scarf round his neck. The tide was creeping in; the horizon was just visible in the dark grey air. The shallow curve of the bay held a shingly murmur that was just not silence and imperceptibly ended where silence was. There was no wind, just a sensation round one’s collar and at the roots of one’s hair. Eddie and Portia stood on the esplanade, watching the sky and water slowly blot themselves out. Eddie stood aloofly, like someone who after hours allows himself to be freely alone again. There was never much connection between his affability and his spirit—which now, in a sombre way, came out to stand at its own door. Only Portia had this forbidding intimacy with him— she was the only person to whom he need not pretend that she had not ceased existing when, for him, she had ceased to exist. The tender or bold play of half-love with grown-up people becomes very exacting: it tired Eddie. It was only Portia that he could pack off—like that, at the turn of a moment—with tired simplicity. She did, therefore, enjoy one kind of privilege: he allowed her at least to stay in body beside him when he was virtually not there, gone. No presence could be less insistent than hers. He treated her like an element (air, for instance) or a condition (darkness): these touch one with their equality and lightness where one could endure no human touch. He could look right through her, without a flicker of seeing, without being made shamefully conscious of the vacuum there must be in his eyes.

Portia, waiting for Eddie as she had often waited, turned her fists round slowly in her pockets, regretting that he should have been called away just now. The autumnal moment, such as occurs in all seasons, the darkening sea with its little commas of foam offered no limits to the loneliness she could feel, even when she was feeling quite resigned. All at once, a light from mid-Channel darted over the sea, picking out its troughs and its polished waves. The lighthouse had begun its all-night flashing. The tip of this finger of light was drawn across Eddie’s face—and a minute later, the lamps sprang alight all down the esplanade. She saw, when she turned round, tamarisk shadows cast on lodging-house walls.

“What a blaze!” said Eddie, starting alight also. “Now this really
is
like the seaside. Have they got a pier?”

“Well, no. But there’s one at Southstone.”

“Come down on the beach.”

As they scrunched along, Eddie said: “Then you’ve been happy here?”

“You see, it’s more like what I was accustomed to. At Anna’s, I never know what is going to happen next—and here, though I may not know, I do not mind so much. In a way, at Anna’s nothing does happen—though of course I might not know if it did. But here I do see how everyone feels.”

“I wonder if I like that,” said Eddie. “I suspect how people feel, and that seems to me bad enough—I wonder if the truth would be worse or better. The truth, of course I mean, about other people. I know only too well how
I
 
feel.”

“So do I.”

“Know how
I
feel?”

“Yes, Eddie.”

“You make me feel rather guilty.”

“Why?”

“Well, you haven’t the slightest notion how I behave
sometimes,
and it isn’t till I behave that I know quite how I feel. You see, my life depends entirely on what happens.”

“Then you don’t know how you may be going to feel?”

“No, I’ve no idea, darling. It’s perfectly unforeseeable. That is the worst of it. I’m a person you ought to be frightened of.” “But you are the only person who doesn’t frighten 
me.”