The Death of the Heart (34 page)

We had been so long that Clara said good gracious, she had to hurry, a judge was coming to dinner at her home. So Dickie said she had better buzz straight back, so she did, and he and I walked home. He said, was I sorry I was going away? I said I was (I am) and he turned round and gave a look at the top of my head and said, so were they all. He said I had become quite one of them. That made me ask, did he like Eddie too. He said, of course he’s an amusing chap. I said I was so glad he thought Eddie was funny. He said, he is something of a Lothario, isn’t he? I said Eddie was not really, and he said, well, he loses his head a bit, if you know what I mean. I said I did not quite, and he said, well to my mind it is largely a matter of character. He said he judged people by their characters. I said was that always a quite good way of judging, as people’s characters get so different at times, as it depends so much what happens to them. He said no, I was wrong, that what happened to people depended on their characters. I know Dickie sounds right, but I don’t feel he is. By that time we were out on the esplanade and there was a sunset right into our eyes. I said didn’t the sea look like glass, and he said yes he supposed it did. I said I did like Clara, and he said oh she’s all right but she loses her head. I said then did he mean Clara was like Eddie, and he said he did not. Then we got to Waikiki.

Sunday.

My last Sunday. It’s very very fine, hot. The leaves are out on the chestnuts, though not big leaves, and the other trees have a quite frilly look. After church Mrs. Heccomb and I were asked into someone’s garden to have a look at the hyacinths. They are just like all sorts of coloured china. In the garden Mrs. Heccomb said to the lady, Next Sunday, alas, we shall not have Portia with us. I thought, next Sunday, I might even see Eddie and yet I still thought, oh I do want to stay here. Now the summer is coming they will do all sorts of things I have not seen them doing yet. In London I do not know what anybody is doing, there are no things I can watch people do. Though things have hurt me since I was left behind here, I would rather stay with the things here than go back to where I do not know what will happen.

On the way back from the hyacinth garden, Mrs. Heccomb said what a great pity it was that I had not been for a row on the canal. She says that is where they row in summer. I said, but don’t they row in the sea, and she said no, that is so public, the canal is shadier. She said how would it be if she asked Cecil to row her and me there this afternoon. So we went round by Cecil’s house, he was out but his mother said she would certainly ask him to row us.

So this afternoon we did. Cecil rowed, and he showed me how to steer, and Mrs. Heccomb held up a parasol. It was mauve silk, and once or twice when I was not steering I caught weed in my hands. The weed is strong, and it also caught on the oars. So none of us said much while Cecil was rowing, Mrs. Heccomb thought and I looked down in the water or up at the trees. The sun shone almost loudly. A swan came along and Mrs. Heccomb said it would be nesting and might likely be cross, so she folded up her parasol to hit at it, and Cecil said, I had better ship my oars. But the swan did not take any notice of us. Later we passed its nest, with the other one sitting there.

All the others were playing tennis somewhere. When I first got here, Mrs. Heccomb was wearing her fur coat. Now though it is all pale green it is summer. Things change very fast at this time of year, something happens every day. All winter nothing happened at all.

Tonight Mrs. Heccomb is singing in an oratorio. Daphne and Dickie and Clara and Evelyn and Wallace and Charlie and Cecil are all downstairs playing rummy because she is out. But Mrs. Heccomb made me go to bed early, because I caught a headache on the canal.

Monday.

Mrs. Heccomb is tired after the oratorio, and Daphne and Dickie do not like fine Mondays. Now I shall go out and lie on the beach.

Tuesday.

I have not yet had the letter Eddie said he would write, but that must be because I am coming back. This is a new place this week, this is a place in summer. The esplanade smells all over of hot tar. But they all say that of course this will not last.

Wednesday.

Tomorrow I shall be going. Because this is my last whole day, Mrs. Heccomb and Cecil’s mother are going to take me to see a ruin. We are to pack our tea and go in a motor bus.

Clara is going to drive me in her car to the Junction tomorrow, to save the having to change. Clara says she feels really upset. Because this will be my last evening, Dickie and Clara and Cecil are going to take me to the Southstone rink, so’s I can watch them skate.

I cannot say anything about going away. I cannot say anything even in this diary. Perhaps it is better not to say anything ever. I must try not to say anything more to Eddie, when I have said things it has always been a mistake. Now we must start to take the bus for the ruin.

Thursday.

I am back here, in London. They won’t be back till tomorrow.

THOMAS
and Anna would not be back from abroad till Friday afternoon.

Everything was ready for them to come back and live. That Friday morning, 2 Windsor Terrace was lanced through by dazzling spokes of sun, which moved unseen, hotly, over the waxed floors. Vacantly overlooking the bright lake, chestnuts in leaf, the house offered that ideal mould for living into which life so seldom pours itself. The clocks, set and wound, ticked the hours away in immaculate emptiness. Portia—softly opening door after door, looking all round rooms with her reflecting dark eyes, glancing at each clock, eyeing each telephone—did not count as a presence.

The spring cleaning had been thorough. Each washed and polished object stood roundly in the unseeing air. The marbles glittered like white sugar; the ivory paint was smoother than ivory. Blue spirit had removed the 
winter film from the mirrors: now their jet-sharp reflections hurt the eye; they seemed to contain reality. The veneers of cabinets blazed with chestnut light. Upstairs and downstairs, everything smelt of polish; a clean soapy smell came out from behind books. Crisp from the laundry, the inner net curtains stirred over windows reluctantly left open to let in the April air with its faint surcharge of soot. Yes, already, with every breath that passed through the house, pollution was beginning.

The heating was turned off. Up the staircase stood a shaft of neutral air, which, upon any door or window being opened, received a tremor of spring. This morning, the back rooms were still sunless and rather cold. The basement was still colder; it smelled of scrubbing; the light filtered down to it in a ghostly way. City darkness, a busy darkness, collected in this working part of the house. For four weeks, Portia had not been underground.

“Gracious, Matchett, you have got everywhere clean!”

“Oh—so that’s where you’ve been?”

“Yes, I’ve looked at everywhere. It really
is
clean— not that it isn’t always.”

“More likely you’d notice it, coming back. I know those seaside houses—all claptrap and must.”

“I must say,” said Portia, sitting on Matchett’s table, “today makes me wish only you and I lived here.”

“Oh, you ought to be ashamed! And mind, too, you don’t get a place like this without you have a Mr. and Mrs. Thomas. And then where would you be, I should like to know? No, I’m ready for them, and it’s proper they should come back. Now don’t give me a look like that—what is the matter with you? I’m sure Mr. Thomas, for one, would be disappointed if he was to know you wished you were still at that seaside.”

“But I never did say that!”

“Oh, it isn’t only what’s
said.”

“Matchett, you do fly off when all I just said was—”

“All right, all right, all right.” Matchett tapped at her teeth with a knitting needle and marvelled at Portia slowly. “My goodness,” she said, “they have taught you to speak up. Anyone wouldn’t know you.”

“But you go on at me because I have been away. After all, I didn’t go, I was sent.”

Sitting up on the table in Matchett’s basement parlour, Portia stretched her legs out and looked at her toes, as though the change Matchett detected (was there a change really?) might have begun there. Matchett, knitting a bedsock, sat on one of the chairs beside the unlit gas stove, feet up on the rung of another chair—she had unbuttoned the straps across her insteps, which were puffy today. It was twelve noon: the hands of the clock seemed to exclaim at the significant hour. Twelve noon—but everything was too ready, nothing more was to come till an afternoon train steamed into Victoria and a taxi toppling with raw-hide luggage crossed London from S.W. to N.W.1. Therefore, there had happened this phenomenal stop. In the kitchen, the cook and Phyllis tittered to one another, no doubt drinking tea. In here, the two chairs now and then creaked with Matchett’s monolithic repose.

She had had her way like a fury. Tensed on the knitting needles (for she could not even relax without some expense of energy) her fingers were bleached and their skin puckered, like the skin of old apples, from unremitting immersion in hot water, soda, soap. Her nails were pallid, fibrous, their tips split. Light crept down the sooty rockery, through the bars of the window, to find no colour in Matchett: her dark blue dress blotted the light up. She looked built back into the half darkness behind her apron’s harsh glaze. In her helmet of stern hair, a few new white threads shone—but behind the opaqueness of her features control permitted no sag of tiredness. There was more than control here: she wore the look of someone who has augustly fulfilled herself. Floor by floor over the basement towered her speckless house, and a reckoning consciousness of it showed like eyes through the eyelids she lowered over her knitting.

Portia, looking through the bars of the window, said: “It was a pity you couldn’t wash the rockery.”

“Well, we did spray that ivy, but that doesn’t go far, and those tomcats are always after the ferns.”

“I did imagine you busy—but not
so
busy, Matchett.”

“I don’t see you had call to imagine anybody, not with all you were up to with them there.” (This, though worded sharply, was not said sharply: all the time Matchett spoke she was knitting; there was something pacific about the click-click-click.) “You don’t want to be in two places, not at your age. You be at the seaside when you’re at the seaside. You keep your imaginings till you need them. Come a spring like this one we’ve been having, out of sight out of mind should be good enough. Oh, it has been a lovely spring for the airing—down at Mrs. Quayne’s, I’d have had my mattresses out.”

“But I thought about you. Didn’t you think of me?”

“Now when do you suppose I’d have had a minute? If you had have been here, you’d have been under my feet one worse than Mr. and Mrs. Thomas if they hadn’t gone away. No, and don’t you say to me that you went round moping, either: you had your fill of company where you were, and I’ve no doubt there were plenty of goings on. Not that you’ve got much to tell; you keep it all to yourself. However, that’s always your way.”

“You didn’t ask me; you were still so busy. This is the first time you’ve listened. And now I don’t know where to begin.”

“Oh, well, take your time: you’ve got the rest of the summer,” said Matchett, glancing at the clock. “I must say, they’ve sent you back with a colour. I can’t see that this change has done you harm. Nor the shake-up either: you were getting too quiet. I never saw such a quiet girl, for your age. Not that that Mrs. Heccomb, poor thing, could teach anyone to say bo. All I’ve ever heard her say to Mrs. Thomas was yes. But the rest of them down there sound a rough lot. Did you have enough stockings?”

“Yes, thank you. But I’m afraid I cut the knees out of one pair. I was running, and I fell smack on the esplanade.”

“And what made you run, may I ask?”

“Oh, the sea air.”

“Oh, it did, did it?” said Matchett. “It made you run.” Without a pause in her knitting, she half lifted her eyelids, enough to let her look stay tilted, through space, at nothing particular. How far apart in space these two existences, hers and Portia’s, had been for the last weeks; how far apart they still were. You never quite know when you may hope to repair the damage done by going away. Removing one foot cumbrously from the rung of the chair, Matchett hooked with it at the ball of pink knitting wool which had been rolling away. Portia got off the table, picked the ball of wool up and handed it back to Matchett. She said boldly: “Is that bedsock for you?”

Matchett’s half nod was remote, extremely unwilling. No one
knew
that she slept, that she went to bed: at nights she just disappeared. Portia knew she had trespassed; she said quickly: “Daphne knitted. She used to knit at the library. Mrs. Heccomb could knit, but she used to paint lamp shades more.”

“And what did you do?”

“Oh, I went on with my puzzle.”

“That wasn’t much of a treat.”

“But it was a new puzzle, and I only did that when I wasn’t doing anything. You know how it is—”

“No, I don’t, and I’m not asking, and I don’t want mysteries made.”

“There’s no mystery, except what I’ve forgotten.”

“You don’t have to say; I’m not asking you. What you do’s all one on a holiday. Now it’s all over, get it out of your head—I see you’ve worn the elbows out of that blazer. I told Mrs. Thomas that wouldn’t be wearing stuff. Did you use your velvet, or was I wrong to pack it?”