The Death of the Heart (3 page)

“Just before poor Thomas went back to Oxford, the bomb went off. Mr. Quayne woke Thomas’s mother up at two in the morning and told her the whole thing. What had happened I’m quite sure you can guess—Irene had started Portia. She had done nothing more about this, beyond letting him know; she had gone on sitting in Notting Hill Gate, wondering what was going to happen next. Mrs. Quayne was quite as splendid as ever: she stopped Mr. Quayne crying, then went straight down to the kitchen and made tea. Thomas, who slept on the same landing, woke to feel something abnormal—he opened his door, found the landing lights on, then saw his mother go past with a tray of tea, in her dressing-gown, looking, he says, just like a hospital nurse. She gave Thomas a smile and did not say anything: it occurred to him that his father might be sick, but not that he had been committing adultery. Mr. Quayne, apparently, made a night of it: he stood knocking his knuckles on the end of the big bed, repeating: ‘She is such a staunch little thing!’ Then he routed out Irene’s letters and three photographs of her, and passed Mrs. Quayne the lot. When she had done with the letters and been nice about the photos, she told him that now he would have to marry Irene. When he took that in, and realised that it meant the sack, he burst into tears again.

“From the first, he did not like the idea at all. To get anywhere near the root of the matter, one has got to see just how dumb Mr. Quayne was. He had not got a mind that joins one thing and another up. He had got knit up with Irene in a sort of a dream wood, but the last thing he wanted was to stay in that wood for ever. In his waking life he liked to be plain and solid; to be plain and solid was to be married to Mrs. Quayne. I don’t suppose he knew, in his own feeling, where sentimentality stopped and want began—and who could tell, with an old buffer like that? In any event, he had not foreseen ever having to put his shirt on either. He loved his home like a child. That night, he sat on the edge of the big bed, wrapped up in the eiderdown, and cried till he had no breath left to denounce himself. But Mrs. Quayne was, of course, implacable: in fact, by next day she had got quite ecstatic. She might have been saving up for this^moment for years—in fact, I daresay she had been, without knowing. Mr. Quayne’s last hope was that if he curled up and went to sleep now, in the morning he might find that nothing had really happened. So at last he curled up and went to sleep. She probably didn’t—Does this bore you, St. Quentin?”

“Anything but, Anna; in fact, it curdles my blood.”

“Mrs. Quayne came down to breakfast worn but shining, and Mr. Quayne making every effort to please. Thomas, of course, saw that something awful had happened, and his one idea was to stave everything off. After breakfast, his mother said that he was a man now, walked him round the garden and told him the whole story in the most idealistic way. Thomas saw his father watching them round the smokingroom curtain. She made Thomas agree that he and she must do everything possible to help his father, Irene and the poor little coming child. The idea of the baby embarrassed Thomas intensely on his father’s behalf. Words still fail him for how discreditably ridiculous the whole thing appeared. But he was sorry about his father having to go, and asked Mrs. Quayne if this was
really
necessary: she said it was. She had got the whole thing sorted out in the night, even down to the train he was to catch. She seemed to be quite taken with her idea of Irene: Irene’s letters had gone down better with her than with Mr. Quayne, who did not like things in writing. In fact, I’m afraid Mrs. Quayne always liked Irene a good deal better than, later, she liked me. Mr. Quayne’s faint hope that the whole thing might be dropped, or that his wife might find some way to make it all right, must have been dispelled as he watched them walk round the garden.
He
was not allowed a say for one single minute—to begin with, he strongly disapproved of divorce.

“During the two days before his departure (during which he stayed in the smokingroom and had his meals sent in to him on a tray) Mrs. Quayne’s idealism spread round the house like ‘flu. It very strongly affected poor Mr. Quayne. All the kick having gone from the affair with Irene, he fell
morally
in love with his wife all over again. She had got him that way when he was twenty-two, and she got him again like that at fifty-seven. He blubbered and told Thomas that his mother was a living saint. At the end of the two days, Mrs. Quayne had him packed for and sent him up to Irene by the afternoon train. Thomas was told off to drive him to the station: all the way, and while they waited on the platform, Mr. Quayne said not a word. Just before the train started, he leaned out and beckoned as though he had something to say. But all he said was: ‘Bad luck to watch a train out.’ After that he bumped back into his seat. Thomas did watch the train out, and he said its blank end looked quite wretchedly futureless.

“Mrs. Quayne went up to London the following day, and put the divorce proceedings on foot at once. It is even said that she called and had a kind word with Irene. She sailed back to Dorset all heroic reserve, kept the house on, and stayed there through it all. Mr. Quayne, who detested being abroad, went straight to the south of France, which seemed to him the right place, and months later Irene joined him, just in time for the wedding. Portia was then born, in Mentone. Well, they stayed round about there, and almost never came home. Thomas was sent by his mother to visit them three or four times, but I think they all found it terribly lowering. Mr. Quayne and Irene and Portia always had the back rooms in hotels, or dark flats in villas with no view. Mr. Quayne never got used to the chill at sunset: Thomas saw he would die of this, and he did. A few years before he did die, he and Irene came back for a four months’ visit to Bournemouth—I suppose Bournemouth because he knew no one there. Thomas and I went to see them two or three times, but as they had left Portia behind in France, I never met
her
till she came to live with us here.”

“Live? I thought she was only staying.”

“Whatever it’s called, it comes to the same thing.”

“But why was she called Portia?”

Anna, surprised, said: “I don’t think we ever asked.”

Mr. Quayne’s love life had taken them round the lake. Already, the All Out whistles were blowing: an inch of park gate was kept open for them alone, and a keeper waited by it with such impatience that St. Quentin broke into a stately trot. Cars slid lights all round the Outer Circle; lamps blurred the frosty mist from here to the Quaynes’ door. Anna swung her muff more light-heartedly: she was less unwilling to go in to tea now.

THE
front door of 2 Windsor Terrace brushed heavily over the mat and clicked shut. The breath of raw air that had come in with Portia perished on the steady warmth of the hall. Warmth stood up the shaft of staircase, behind the twin white arches. She slid books from under her elbow on to the console table, dropped her latchkey back into her pocket, and went to the radiator, tugging off her gloves. She just saw her reflection cross the mirror, but the hall was a well of dusk—not a light on yet, either upstairs or down. Everywhere, she heard an unliving echo: she had entered one of those pauses in the life of a house that before tea time seem to go on and on. This was a house without any life above-stairs, a house to which nobody had returned yet, which, through the big windows, darkness and silence had naturally stolen in on and begun to inhabit. Reassured, she stood warming her hands.

Down there in the basement a door opened: there was an intent pause, then steps began to come up. They were cautious—the steps of a servant pleasing herself. Whitish, Matchett’s long face and tablet of apron soared steadily up the dark of an arch. She said: “Ah, so you’re in?”

“This minute.”

“I heard you all right. You were very quick with that 
door. Likely you left that key outside in the lock again?”

“No, it’s here, truly.” Portia scooped the key from her pocket.

“You didn’t ought to carry that key in your pocket. Not loose like that—and with your money too. One of these days you’ll go losing the lot. She gave you a bag, didn’t she?”

“I feel such a goat with a bag. I feel so silly.”

Matchett said sharply: “All girls your age carry bags.”

Vexed ambition for Portia made Matchett click her teeth; her belt creaked as she gave an irate sigh. The dusk seemed to baulk her; they could barely see each other—her hand went up decidedly to the switch between the arches. Immediately, Anna’s cut-glass lamp sprang alight over their heads, dropping its complex shadow on the white stone floor. Portia, her hat pushed back from her forehead, stood askance under the light; she and Matchett blinked; there followed one of those pauses in which animals, face to face, appear to communicate.

Matchett stayed with her hand propped on the pillar. She had an austere, ironical straight face, flesh padded smoothly over the strong structure of bone. Her strong springy lustreless hair was centre parted and drawn severely back; she wore no cap. Habitually, she walked with her eyes down, and her vein-marbled eyelids were unconciliating. Her mouth, at this moment stubbornly inexpressive, still had a crease at each end from her last unwilling smile. Her expression, her attitude were held-in and watchful. The monklike impassivity of her features made her big bust curious, out of place; it seemed some sort of structure for the bib of her apron to be fastened up to with gold pins. To her unconscious sense of inner drama, only her hands gave play: one hand seemed to support the fragile Regency pillar, the other was spread fanwise, like a hand in a portrait, over her aproned hip. While she thought, or rather, calculated, her eyes would move slowly under her dropped lids.

It was five to four. The cook, whose night out it was, lay in her afternoon bath: in front of the pantry mirror the parlourmaid, Phyllis, was trying on a new cap. These two girls in their twenties had been engaged by Anna, and formed, as it were, Anna’s party below stairs. Matchett, on the other hand, had been not a matter of choice: she had been years in service in Dorset with Thomas Quayne’s mother, and after Mrs. Quayne’s death had come on to 2 Windsor Terrace with the furniture that had always been her charge. A charwoman, Mrs. Wayes, now came in to clean and polish, ostensibly leaving Matchett freer to maid Anna and Portia and valet Thomas. But Mrs. Wayes’ area was, in fact, jealously limited by Matchett—accordingly, Matchett kept longer hours than anyone in the house. She slept alone, next the boxroom: across the same top landing the cook and Phyllis shared an airy attic with a view of Park Road.

By day, she exacted an equal privacy. The front of the basement had been divided into Phyllis’s pantry and a slit of a sittingroom, which, by an arrangement Anna did not question, Matchett occupied in her spare time. Boiling her own kettles on her gas ring, she joined the kitchen party only for dinner: if the basement door happened to be left open, you could hear the fun break out when she had withdrawn again. Her superior status was further underlined by the fact of her not wearing a cap: the two girls took orders from Anna, Matchett suggestions only. The two young servants did not resent Matchett—she might be repressive, but kept herself to herself—they had learnt that no situation is ever perfect, and Anna was as a mistress amiable, even lax. No one knew where Matchett went on her afternoons off: she was a countrywoman, with few friends here. She never showed fatigue, except fatigue of the eyes: in her sittingroom, she would sometimes take off the glasses she wore for reading or sewing, and sit with one hand shading her forehead stiffly, like someone looking into the distance—but with her eyes shut. Also, as though wishing to remain conscious of nothing, she would at the same time often unbutton the tight shoe-straps that cut into the arches of her feet. But mostly she sat bolt upright, sewing, under the pulled-down electric light.

On the middle floors of the house, where she worked and the Quaynes lived, her step on the parquet or on the staircase was at the same time ominous and discreet.

It was five to four, not quite teatime yet. Portia, turning away inconsequently and seriously, faced round once more to the radiator and spread her fingers a few inches above it, so that the hot vibration travelled up between. Her hands were still mottled from the outdoor cold; her fingers had bloodless tips. Matchett looked on in silence, then said: “That’s the way to give yourself chilblains. Those want rubbing—here, give me!” She came over, took Portia’s hands and chafed them, her big bones grinding on Portia’s painfully. “Quiet,” she said. “Don’t keep pulling away like that. I never saw a girl so tender to cold.”

Portia stopped wincing and said: “Where’s Anna?”

“That Mr. Miller called, and they went out.”

“Then can I have tea with you?”

“She left word they’d be in at half-past four.”

“O-oh,” said Portia, “That’s no good, then. Do you think she’ll
ever
be out?”

Matchett, impassively not replying, stooped to pick up one of Portia’s woolly gloves. “Mind and take these up,” she said. “And those books too. Mrs. Thomas spoke about those exercise books. Nothing does down here that isn’t here for the look.”

“Has anything else been wrong?”

“She’s been on about your bedroom.”

“Oh golly! Has she been in there?”

“Yes, she seemed quite put out,” said Matchett monotonously. “She said to me this morning, did I not find dusting difficult with all that mess about. Your bears’ party, she meant, and one and another thing. ‘Difficult, madam?’ I said. ‘If I made difficulties, I should not be where I am.’ Then I asked if she had any complaint. She was putting her hat on—up in her room, it was. ‘Oh dear no,’ she said, ‘I was thinking of you, Matchett. If Miss Portia would put some of those things away—’ I made no remark, so she asked for her gloves. She went half out of the door, then she gave me a sort of look. ‘Those arrangements are Miss Portia’s hobbies, madam,’ I said. She said: ‘Oh, of course,’ and went out of the house. No more was said at the time. It isn’t that she’s so tidy, but she thinks how things look.”