The Death of the Heart (32 page)

“Bitch,” Eddie said. “They all try and pervert you, but no one but me could really do it, darling. I suppose one day you will have ideas of your own, but I really do dread your having any. Being just as you are now makes you the only person I love. But I can see that makes me a cheat. Never be potty about me: I can’t do anything for you. Or, at least, I won’t: I don’t want you to change. We don’t want to eat each other.”

“Oh no, Eddie—But what do you mean?”

“Well, like Anna and Thomas. And it can be much worse.”

“What do you mean?” she said apprehensively, raising her hand an inch over her eyes.

“What happens the whole time. And that’s what they call love.”

“You say you never love anyone.”

“How would I be such a fool? I see through all that hanky-panky. But you always make me happy—except, you didn’t this morning. You must never show any sign of change.”

“Yes, that’s all very well, but I feel everyone waiting; everyone gets impatient; I cannot stay as I am. They will all expect something in a year or two more. At present people like Matchett and Mrs. Heccomb are kind to me, and Major Brutt goes on sending me puzzles, but that can’t keep on happening—suppose they’re not always there? I can see there is something about me Daphne despises. And I was frightened by what you said this morning—is there something unnatural about us? Do you feel safe with me because I am bats? What did Daphne mean about ideas I hadn’t got?”

“Her own, I should think. But—”

“But what ideas do you never want me to have?”

“Oh, those are still worse.”

“You fill me with such despair,” she said, lying without moving.

Eddie reached across and idly pulled her hand away from her eyes. Keeping her hand down in the grass between them, he gently bent open her fingers one by one, then felt over her palm with his finger-tip, as though he found something in Braille on it. Portia looked at the sky through the branches over their heads, then sighed impalpably, shutting her eyes again. Eddie said: “You don’t know how much I love you.”

“Then, you threaten you won’t—that you won’t if I grow up. Suppose I was twenty-six?”

“A dreary old thing like that?”

“Oh, don’t laugh; you make me despair more.”

“I have to laugh—I don’t like the things you say. Don’t you know how dreadful the things you say are?”

“I don’t understand,” she said, very much frightened. “Why?”

“You accuse me of being a vicious person,” said Eddie, lying racked by her on the grass.

“Oh, I do
not"

“I should have known this would happen. It always does happen; it’s happening now.”

Terrified by his voice and face of iron, Portia cried
“Oh no!”
Annihilating the space of grass between them she flung an arm across him, her weight on his body, and despairingly kissed his cheek, his mouth, his chin. “You are perfect,” she said, sobbing. “You are my perfect Eddie. Open your eyes. I can’t bear you to look like that!”

Eddie opened his eyes, from which her own shadow completely cut the light from the sky. At the same time frantic and impervious, his eyes looked terribly up at her. To stop her looking at him he pulled her head down, so that their two faces blotted each other out, and returned on her mouth what seemed so much her own kiss that she even tasted the salt of her own tears. Then he began to push her away gently. “Go away,” he said, “for God’s sake go away and be quiet.”

“Then don’t think. I can’t bear it when you do that.”

Rolling away from her, Eddie huntedly got to his feet and began to go round the thicket: she heard the tips of the hazels whipping against his coat. He paused at the mouth of every tunnel, as though each were a shut door, to stand grinding his heels into the soundless moss. Portia, lying in her form in the grass, looked at the crushed place where he had lain by her—then, turning her head the other way, detected two or three violets, which, reaching out, she picked. She held them over her head and looked at the light through them. Watching her from his distance, spying upon the movement, he said: “Why do you pick those? To comfort yourself?”

“I don’t know… .”

“One cannot leave things alone.”

She could do nothing but look up at the violets, which now shook in her raised hand. In every pause of Eddie’s movements a sealike rustling could be heard all through the woody distance, a tidal movement under the earth. “Wretched violets,” said Eddie. “Why pick them for nothing? You’d better put them in my buttonhole.” He came and knelt impatiently down beside her; she knelt up, fumbling with the stalks of the flowers, her face a little below his. She drew the stalks through till the violets looked at her from against the tweed of his coat. She looked no higher till he caught both her wrists.

“I don’t know how you feel,” he said, “I daren’t ask myself; I’ve never wanted to know.
Don’t
look at me like that! And don’t tremble like that—it’s more than I can bear. Something awful will happen. I cannot feel what you feel: I’m shut up in myself. All I know is, you’ve been so sweet. It’s no use holding on to me, I shall only drown you. Portia, you don’t know what you are doing.”

“I do know.”

“Darling, I don’t want you; I’ve got no place for you; I only want what you give. I don’t want the whole of anyone. I haven’t wanted to hurt you; I haven’t wanted to touch you in any way. When I try and show you the truth I fill you with such despair. Life is so much more impossible than you think. Don’t you see we’re all full of horrible power, working against each other however much we may love? You agonise me by being so agonised. Oh cry out loud, if you must: cry, cry—don’t just let those terrible meek tears roll down your face like that. What you want is the whole of me—isn’t it,
isn’t
it?—and the whole of me isn’t there for anybody. In that full sense you want me I don’t exist. What’s started this terrible trouble in you, that you can’t be happy with the truth of me that you had—however small it was, whatever might be beyond it? Ever since that evening when you gave me my hat, I’ve been as true to you as I’ve got it in me to be. Don’t force me to where untruth starts. You say nothing would make you hate me. But once make me hate myself and you’d make me hate you.”

“But you do hate yourself. I wanted to comfort you.”

“But you have. Ever since you gave me my hat.”

“Why may we not kiss?”

“It’s so desolating.”

“But you and me—” she began. She stopped, then pressing her face into his coat, under the violets, twisting her wrists in his unsure grip, she said some inaudible things, and at last moaned: “I can’t bear it when you talk.” When she got her wrists free, she once more locked her arms round him, she started rocking her body with such passionless violence that, as they both knelt, he rocked in her arms. “You stay alone in yourself, you stay alone in yourself!”

Eddie, white as a stone, said:
“You must let go of me.”

Sitting back on her heels, Portia instinctively looked up at the oak, to see whether it were still vertical. She pressed together her hands, which, torn roughly from Eddie, had been chafed in the palms by the rough tweed of his coat. Her last tears blistered her face; beginning to lose momentum they stuck in smarting patches: she felt in her coat pockets and said: “I have got no handkerchief.”

Eddie drew from his own pocket a yard of silk handkerchief: while he still held one corner she blew her nose on another, then diligently blotted her tears up. Like a solicitous ghost whose touch cannot be felt, Eddie, with his two forefingers, tucked her damp hair back further behind her ears. Then he gave her one sad kiss, relevant to their two eternities, not to a word that had been said now. But her fear of having assailed, injured, betrayed him was so strong that she drew back from the kiss. Her knees received from the earth a sort of chilly trembling; the walls of the thicket, shot with those light leaves, flickered beyond her eyes like woods passed in a train.

When they settled back on the grass, with about a yard between them, Eddie pulled out his twenty packet of Players. The cigarettes looked battered. “Look what you’ve done, tool” he said. But he lit one: threads of smoke began to swim from his nostrils; the match he blew out sputtered cold in the moss. When he had finished the cigarette he made a grave in the moss and buried the stump alive—but before this, several healing minutes had passed. “Well, darling,” he said, in his natural light intonation, “you must have had Anna tell you Eddie is so neurotic.”

“Is
that a thing she says?”

“You ought to know: you’ve been with her half a year.”

“I don’t always listen.”

“You ought to: sometimes she’s so right… .Look, let’s see ourselves in the distance, then we shall think, how happy they are! We’re young; this is spring; this is a wood. In some sort of way or other we love each other, and our lives are before us—God pity usl Do you hear the birds?”

“I don’t hear very many.”

“No, there are not very many. But you must hear them

—play the game my way. What do you smell?”

“Burnt moss, and all the rest of the woods.”

“And what burnt the moss?”

“Oh, Eddie … your cigarette.”

“Yes, my cigarette I smoked in the woods beside you— you darling girl. No no, you mustn’t sigh. Look at us sitting under this old oak. Please strike me a match: I am going to smoke again, but you mustn’t, you are still too young to. I have ideals, like Dickie. We don’t take you into bars, and we love you to give us pious morbid thoughts. These violets ought to be in your hair—oh, Primavera, Primavera, why do they make you wear that beastly reefer coat? Give me your hand—”

“—No.”

“Then look at your own hand. You and I are enough to break anyone’s heart—how can we not break our own? We are as drowned in this wood as though we were in the sea. So of course we are happy: how can we not be happy? Remember this when I’ve caught my train tonight.”

“Tonight?
Oh, but I thought—”

“I’ve got to be in the office on time tomorrow. So what a good thing we are happy now.”

“But—”

“There’s not any but.”

“Mrs. Heccomb will be so disappointed.”

“Yes, I can’t sleep in her lovely boxroom again. We shan’t wake tomorrow under the same roof.”

“I can’t believe that you will have come and gone.”

“Check up with Daphne: she will tell you for certain.”

“Oh, please, Eddie, don’t—”

“Why must I not? We must keep up something, you know.”

“Don’t say we’re happy with that awful smile.”

“I never mean how I’m smiling.”

“Can we walk somewhere else?”

Following uphill dog paths, parting hazels, crossing thickets upright, they reached the ridge of the woods. From here, they could see out. The sun, striking down the slope of trees, glittered over the film of green-white buds: a gummy smell was drawn out in the warm afternoon haze. To the south, the chalk-blue sea, to the north, the bare smooth down: they saw, too, the gleam of the railway line. In spirit, the two of them rose to the top of life like bubbles. Eddie drew her arm through his; Portia leaned her head on his shoulder and stood in the sun by him with her eyes shut.

On the top of the bus, riding into Southstone, Eddie pulled shreds of moss and a few iridescent bud scales from Portia’s hair. He ran a comb through his hair, then passed her the comb. His collar was crumpled; their shoes were muddy; they were both of them hatless; Portia wore no gloves. For the Pavilion they would not be smart enough. But as the Southstone bus rolled along the sea front, they both felt very gay; they enjoyed this ride in the large light lurching glass box. Eddie chainsmoked; Portia put down the window near her and leaned out with her elbow over the top. Sea air blew on her forehead; she borrowed his comb again. As the bus changed gear at the foot of Southstone hill they looked at a clock and saw it was only five—but that gave them time for tea before the others should come.

“I tried to ask Daphne what made one feel matey.”

“Well, you
were
a fish: whatever made you do that?”

“Do you know, I once thought, at a party, that Mr. Bursely was rather like you?”

“Bursely?—Oh yes, the chappie. Well I really
must
say … I wonder where he and Daphne buzzed to, don’t you?”

“They might even go to Dover.”

They were still sitting over their tea at the Pavilion when Dickie, Evelyn, Clara and Cecil filed in. Evelyn wore a canary-coloured two piece, Clara a teddy bear coat tied in a bow at her chin. Dickie and Cecil were pinstriped all over—evidently everybody had changed. By this time, the Pavilion hung like an unlit lantern in the pinkish air; the orchestra was playing something from
Samson and Delilah
.
Evelyn took her first look at Eddie, and asked if he liked hiking. Cecil, showing incuriosity, looked rather low. Clara kept her eyes on Dickie and said nothing: now and then she looked anxiously into her suede bag. As this was believed to be Mr. Bursely’s party, nothing could start until he came. Dickie folded open a glass and chromium door and said the girls might like to look at the view.

From the balcony they looked down at the Lower Road, at the tops of the pines and the roof of the skating rink. Eddie leaned so far out over the railing that Portia feared he might be going to show them (as he had shown her) how far he could spit. All that happened, however, was that the violets fell through space from his buttonhole. “Now you’ve lost your flowers,” said Evelyn brightly.