The Death of the Heart (31 page)

“Pardon? What
did you say?”

“I said, I didn’t know… . But I don’t see, Daphne, why you’re so shocked with Eddie. If what you and he were doing was
not
fun, why should I be jealous? And if you hadn’t liked it, you could always have struggled.”

Daphne gave up. “You’re completely bats,” she said. “You’d better go and lie down. You don’t even understand a single thing. Standing about there, not looking like anything. You know, really, if you’ll excuse my saying so, a person might almost take you for a natural. Have you got
no
ideas?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Portia in a dazed way. “For instance, my relations who are still alive have no idea why I was born. I mean, why my father and mother—”

Daphne bulged. She said: “You’d really
better
shut up.”

“All right. Would you like me to go upstairs? I’m very sorry, Daphne,” said Portia—from the far side of the puzzle, her downcast eyes meanwhile travelling from Daphne’s toe caps, up the plump firm calves stretched out on the
chaise longue
to the hem of the “snug” wool dress —”very sorry to have annoyed you, when you have always been so nice to me. I wouldn’t have said about you and Eddie, only I thought that was what you were talking about. Also, Eddie did say that if I didn’t understand about people feeling matey, I’d much better ask you.”

“Well, of all the
nerve!
 The thing is, you and your friend are both equally bats.”

“Please don’t tell him you think so. He is so happy here.”

“I’ve no doubt he is—Well, you’d better run on up. Here’s Doris just coming to lay.”

“Would you rather I stayed upstairs for some time?”

“No, stupid, what about dinner? But do try and not look as though you’d swallowed a mouse.”

Portia pushed round the chenille curtain and went up. Standing looking out of her bedroom window, she mechanically ran a comb through her hair. She felt something in the joints of her knees, which shook. The Sunday smell of the joint Doris was basting crept underneath the crack of her door. She watched Mrs. Heccomb, with umbrella and prayer book, come happily down the esplanade with a friend—a lunch hour breeze must have come up, for something fluttered the wisps of their grey hair; and at the same time the hems of her short curtains twitched on the window sill. The two ladies stopped at Waikiki gate to talk with emphasis. Then the friend went on; Mrs. Heccomb waved her red morocco prayer-book at the window, as she came up the path, jubilantly, even triumphantly as though she brought back with her an extra stock of grace. While Portia stood at the window there were still no signs of Eddie and Dickie, but later she heard their voices on the esplanade.

The set of temple bells had not yet been struck for dinner, so Portia sat down near her chest of drawers and looked hard at the pastel-portrait of Anna. She did not know what she looked for in the pastel—confirmation that the most unlikely people suffer, or that everybody who suffers is the same age?

But that little suffering Anna—so much out of drawing that she looked like a cripple between her cascades of hair—that urgent soul astray in the bad portrait, only came alive by electric light. Even by day, though, the unlike likeness disturbs one more than it should:
what
is it unlike? Or is it unlike at all—is it the face discovered? The portrait, however feeble, transfixes something passive that stays behind the knowing and living look. No drawing from life just fails: it establishes something more; it admits the unadmitted. All Mrs. Heccomb had brought to her loving task, besides pastels, had been feeling. She was, to put it politely, a negative artist. But such artists seem to receive a sort of cloudy guidance. Any face, house, landscape seen in a picture, however bad, remains subtly but strongly modified in so-called real life—and the worse the picture, the stronger this is. Mrs. Heccomb’s experiment in pastels had altered Anna for ever. By daylight, the thing was a human map, scored over with strawy marks of the chalks. But when electric light struck those shadeless triangles—the hair, the face, the kitten, those looking eyes—the thing took on a misguided authority. As this face had entered Portia’s first dreams here, it continued to enter her waking mind. She saw the kitten hugged to the breast in a contraction of unknowing sorrow.

“What help she did not find in the picture she found in its oak frame and the mantelpiece underneath. After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable
things.
Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee. Pictures would not be hung plumb over the centres of fireplaces or wallpapers pasted on with such precision that their seams make no break in the pattern if life were really not possible to adjudicate for. These things are what we mean when we speak of civilisation: they remind us how exceedingly seldom the unseemly or unforeseeable rears its head. In this sense, the destruction of buildings and furniture is more palpably dreadful to the spirit than the destruction of human life. Appalling as the talk with Daphne had been, it had not been so finally fatal, when you looked back at it, as an earthquake or a dropped bomb. Had the gas stove blown up when Portia lit it, blowing this nice room into smithereens, it would have been worse than Portia’s being called spying common. Though what she had said had apparently been dreadful, it had done less harm than a bombardment from the sea. Only outside disaster is irreparable. At least, there would be dinner at any minute; at least she could wash her hands in Vinolia soap.

Before the last chime of the temple bells, Mrs. Hec—

Comb had raised the cover and was carving the joint. She did not know that the boys had been to a pub; she understood that they had been for a turn. When Portia slipped into her place between Daphne and Dickie, she was at once requested to pass the broccoli. Upon Waikiki Sunday dinner, the curtain always went up with a rush: they ate as though taking part in an eating marathon. Eddie seemed to be concentrating on Dickie—evidently the drinks had gone off well. Now and then he threw Daphne a jolly look. As he passed up his plate for a second helping of mutton, he said to Portia, “You look very clean.”

“Portia always looks clean,” said Mrs. Heccomb proudly.

“She looks
so
clean. She must just have been washing. She’s still no lady; she uses soap on her face.”

Dickie said: “No girl’s face is the worse for soap.”

“They all think so. They clean with grease out of pots.”

“No doubt. But the question is,
do
they clean?”

“Oh, have you got enlarged pores on your mind? Those are one of the worries I leave behind in the office. They are one of our greatest assets; in fact I have just been doing a piece about them. I began: ‘Why do so many Englishmen kiss with their eyes shut?’ but somebody else made me take that out.”

“I must say, I don’t wonder.”

“Still, I’m told Englishmen do. Of course I take that on hearsay: I’ve got no way to check up.”

There were signs, all round the table, of Eddie’s having once more gone too far, and Portia wished he would take more care. However, by the time the plum tart came in, the talk had begun to take a happier turn.

They examined night starvation, imperfectly white washing, obesity, self distrust and lustreless hair. Eddie had the good taste not to bring up his two great professional topics—halitosis and flabby busts. Doris had found the nine-pennyworth of cream too stiff to turn out of the carton, so brought it in as it was, which made Mrs. Heccomb flush. Daphne said: “Goodness, it’s like butter,” and Eddie spooned a chunk of it out for her. By this time, she looked at him with a piglike but not unfriendly eye. When they had had cream crackers and gorgonzola they rose to settle heavily on the settee. Eddie said: “Another gambit of ours is fullness after meals.”

Evelyn Bunstable was said to be dropping in, to give Portia’s boy friend the once over. However, at about a quarter to three, just when Daphne had asked if they all meant to stick about, something better and far more important happened: Mr. Bursely reappeared. Dickie heard him first, looked out of the window and said: “Why, who
have
we here!” Mrs. Heccomb, coming back from the stairs on her way up to lie down, went quite a long way out into the sun porch, then said: “It’s that Mr. Bursely, I think.”

Wearing a hat like Ronald Colman’s, Mr. Bursely came up the path with the rather knock-kneed walk of extreme social consciousness, and Eddie, who had heard all about him, said: “You can’t beat the military swagger.” Daphne squinted hard at her knitting; Eddie leant over Portia and pinched her gaily in the nape of her neck. He whispered: “Darling, how excited I am!” Mr. Bursely was let into the lounge. “I’m afraid I’ve given you rather a miss,” he said. “But it’s been a thickish week, and I got all dated up.” Having hitched his trousers up at the knee, he plumped down on the settee beside Eddie. Portia looked from one to the other face.

Mr. Bursely said to Portia: “How’s the child of the house?”

“Very well, thank you.”

Mr. Bursely gave her a sort of look, then discreetly passed Daphne his next remark. “I left my car just along. I thought you and I might go for a slight blow.” “Oh, I’m fixed up
now,
I’m afraid.” “Well, unfix yourself, why don’t you? Come on, be a good girl, or I shall think you’re ever so sick with me. Too bad I can’t take you all, but you know what small cars are. I call mine the Beetle; she buzzes along. She—”

“—Actually,” said Dickie, “I’m playing golf.” “Clara didn’t say so.” “Because I’m playing with Evelyn.” “Well, look here, why don’t we all forgather somewhere in Southstone? What about the E.C.P.? Why not all forgather there?” “Oh, all right.”

“Right-o. Well, make it sixish. Bring the whole gang along.”

“Portia and I,” Eddie said, “will just go for a walk.” “Well, bring young Portia along to the E.C.P.”

“Someone ought to tell Clara. . 

“Right-o, then sixish,” Mr. Bursely said.

THEY
walked inland, uphill, to the woods behind the station—the ridge of the woods she had seen from the top of the sea wall. That Sunday, when she had been looking forward to Eddie, woods had played no part in the landscape she saw in her heart.

But here they were this Sunday, getting into the woods over a wattle fence, between gaps in the vigilant notices that said
Private.
Thickets of hazel gauzed over the distances inside; boles of trees rose rounded out of the thickets into the spring air. Light, washing the stretching branches, sifted into the thickets, making a small green flame of every early leaf. Unfluting in the armpit warmth of the valley, leaves were still timid, humid: in the uphill woods spring still only touched the boughs in a green mist that ran into the sky. Scales from buds got caught on Portia’s hair. Small primroses, still buttoned into the earth, looked up from ruches of veiny leaves— and in sun-blond spaces at the foot of the oaks, dog violets burned their blue on air no one had breathed. The woods’ secretive vitality filled the crease of the valley and lapped through the trees up the bold hill.

There were tunnels but no paths: doubling under the hazels they every few minutes stood up to stretch,
“Shall
we be prosecuted, do you think?”

“Boards are only put up to make woods disagreeable.”

Portia, unlacing twigs in front of her face, said: “I only imagined us walking by the sea.”

“I’ve had
quite
enough seaside—one way and another.”

“But you are enjoying it, Eddie, I do hope?”

“Your hair’s full of flies—don’t touch; they look very sweet.”

Eddie stopped, sat, then lay down in a space at the foot of an oak. Slowly flapping one unhinged arm from the elbow, he knocked the place beside him with the back of his hand till she sat down too. Then, making a double chin, he slowly began to shred up leaves with his thumbnails, now and then stopping to glance up at the sky—as though Someone there had said something he ought to have heard. Portia, her hands clasped round her knees, stared straight down a tunnel of hazel twigs. After some time he said: “What an awful house that wasl Or rather, what awful things we said.”

“In that empty house?”

“Of course. How glad we were to get back to Waikiki. I’m frightened there, but it feels to me rather fine. The mutton bled, did you see?—No, I mean that house this morning. Did I hurt you, darling? Whatever I said, I swear I didn’t mean. What did I say?”

“You said you hadn’t meant some other things you had said.”

“Well, nor did I, I expect—Or were they things you set store by?”

“And you said there were things you didn’t like about us,” said Portia, keeping her face away.

“That’s not true, across my heart. I think we are per-feet, darling. But I’d much rather you
knew
when I didn’t mean what I said, then we shouldn’t have to go back and put that right.”

“But what can I go by?”

“Yourself.”

“But Daphne thinks I am bats. She told me not to be potty, before lunch.”

“Don’t sit right
up:
I can’t look at you properly.”

Portia lay down and turned her cheek on the grass till her eyes obediently met his at a level. His light, curious look glanced into hers—then she dropped one hand across her eyes and lay rigid, crisping her fingers up. “She says I’m potty about you. She says I haven’t got any ideas.”