The Death of the Heart (41 page)

Covent Garden just after six o’clock, with its shuttered arcades, was not gay. Across the facades, like a theatre set shabby in daylight, and across the barren glaring spaces, films of shade were steadily coldly drawn, as though there were some nervous tide in the sky. Here and there, bits of paper did not blow about but sluggishly twitched. The place gave out a look of hollow desuetude, as though its desertion would last for ever. London is full of such deserts, of such moments, at which the mirage of one’s own keyed-up existence suddenly fails. Covent Garden acted as a dissolvent on Eddie: he walked round like a cat.

Then he saw Portia, waiting at the one corner he did not think they had said. Her patient grip on her small case, her head turning, the thin, chilly stretch of her arms between short sleeves and short gloves struck straight where his heart should be—but the shaft bent inside him: to see her only made him breezily cross.

“Well, you have come a way,” he said. “I do feel so flattered, darling.”

“I came in a taxi.”

“Did you? Listen, what ever happened? You seemed to have some sort of fit on the line, just when I was thinking about some much better place to meet.”

“I don’t mind here; it’s all right!”

“But you did rattle me, ringing off like that.”

“I was using the telephone in Miss Paullie’s study, and she came in and caught me. We’re not allowed to telephone from that place; we may only ask to send messages.”

“So then you got hell, I suppose. Who would be young!”

“I’m not so young as all that.”

“Well,
in statu pupillari.
Where now?”

“Can’t we simply walk about?”

“Oh, all right, if you like. But that isn’t much fun, is it?”

“How can this be fun?”

“No it’s not very promising,” said Eddie, starting to walk rather faster than she could. “But now, look here, darling, I’m ever so sorry for you but really you must not work yourself up like this. I think it’s
dingy
of Anna to read your diary, but I always told you not to leave it about. And what a good thing, now, that I made you promise not to write about us. You didn’t, of course?” he added, flicking a look at her.

She said, all in a gasp: “I see now why you asked me not.”

A perceptible twitch passed over Eddie’s features. “What on earth are you getting at
now?”
 
he said.

“Please don’t be angry, please don’t be angry with me—Eddie, you told Anna about my diary?”

“Why in God’s name should I?”

“For some sort of a joke. Some part of the joke that you always have with her.”

“Well, my poor dear excellent lamb, as a matter of interest—no, I didn’t. … As a matter of fact …”

She looked dumbly at him.

“As a matter of fact,” he went on,
“she
told
me.”

“But I told you, Eddie.”

“Well, she had told me first. She’s been at that book for some time. She really is an awful bounder, you know.”

“So when I told you, you knew.”

“Yes. I did. But really, darling, you make too much of things, like keeping this diary. It’s ever so honest and it’s beautifully clever, and it’s sweet, just like you, but is it extraordinary? Diaries are things almost all girls keep.”

“Then, why did you pretend it meant something to you?”

“I loved to have you tell me about it. I am always so moved when you tell me things.”

“And all this time, you’ve let me go on with it. I did write down
some
things about you, of course.”

“Oh God,” said Eddie, stopping. “I did think I could trust you.”

“Why are you ashamed of having been nice to me?”

“After all, that’s all between you and me. I can’t have Anna messing about with it.”

“You don’t mind, then, about all the rest of my life? As a matter of fact, there’s not much rest of my life. But my diary’s me. How could I leave you out?”

“All right, go on: make me hate myself. … By the way, how did you find this out?”

“St. Quentin told me.”

“There’s
a crook, if you like.”

“I don’t see why. He was kind.”

“More likely, he was feeling bored with Anna. She goes on with the same joke far too long… . Now for God’s sake, darling—you really
must not
cry here.”

“I only am because my feet do hurt.”

“Didn’t I say they would? Round and round this hellish pavement. Look, shut up—you really
can’t,
you know.”

“Lilian always thinks people are looking. Now you are just like Lilian.”

“I must get a taxi.”

On the crest of a sob, she said: “I’ve only got sixpence. Have you got any money?”

Portia stood like a stone while Eddie went for a taxi, came back with one, gave the address of his flat. Once they were in the taxi, with Henrietta Street reeling jerking past, he miserably took her in his arms, pushing his face with cold and desperate persistence into the place where her hair fell away from her ear. “Don’t,” he said, “please don’t, darling: things are quite bad enough.”

“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

“Well, weep if it helps. Only don’t reproach me so terribly.”

“You told her about our walk in the wood.”

“I was only talking, you know.”

“But that wood was where I kissed you.”

“I can’t live up to those things. I’m not really fit to have things happen, darling. For you and me there ought to be a new world. Why should we be at the start of our two lives when everything round us is losing its virtue? How can we grow up when there’s nothing left to inherit, when what we must feed on is so stale and corrupt? No, don’t look up: just stay buried in me.”

“You’re
not buried; you’re looking at things. Where are we?”

“Near Leicester Square Station. Just turning right.”

Turning round in his arms to look up jealously, Portia saw the cold daylight reflected in Eddie’s dilated eyes. Fighting an arm free, she covered his eyes with one hand and said: “But why can’t we alter everything?”

“There are too few of us.”

“No, you don’t really want to. You’ve always only been playing.”

“Do you think I have fun?”

“You have some sort of dreadful fun. You don’t want me to interfere. You like despising more than you like loving. You pretend you’re frightened of Anna: you’re frightened of me.” Eddie pulled her hand from his eyes and held it away firmly, but she said: “You’re like this now, but you won’t let me stay with you.”

“But how could you? You are so childish, darling.”

“You say that because I speak the truth. Something awful is always with you when I’m not. No, don’t hold me; let me sit up. Where are we now?”

“I wanted to kiss you—Gower Street.”

Sitting up in her own corner of the taxi, Portia knocked her crushed hat into shape on her knee. Flattening the ribbon bow with her fingers, she moved her head away a little and said: “No, don’t kiss me now.”

“Why not now?”

“Because I don’t want you to.”

“You mean,” he said, “that I didn’t once when you did?”

She began to put on her hat with an immune little smile, as though all that had been too long ago. The tears shed in that series of small convulsions—felt by him but quite silent—had done no more than mat her lashes together. Eddie noted this while he examined her face intently, while he with one anxious finger straightened her hat. “You’re always crying now,” he said. “It’s really awful, you know… . We’re just getting there. Listen, Portia, how much time have you? When do they expect you home?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Darling, don’t be sappy—if you’re not back, someone will have a fit. Is there really any good in your coming into my place? Why don’t I see you home, instead?”

“It’s
not
‘home’! Why can’t I come in?” Knotting her her hands in their prim, short gloves together she screwed her head away and said in a muffled voice: “Or have you invited somebody else?” The taxi drew up.

“All right, all right then: get out. You must have been reading novels.”

The business with the taxi fare and the latchkey, the business of snatching letters from the hall rack, then of hustling Portia quietly upstairs preoccupied Eddie till he had turned a second Yale key and thrown open the door of his own room. But his nerves were at such a pitch of untoward alertness that he half expected to find some fateful figure standing by his window, or with its back to the grate. In the state he was in, his enemies seemed to have supernatural powers: they could filter through keyholes, stream through hard wood doors. The scene with Portia had been quite slight so far, but the skies had begun to fall—like pieces of black plaster they had started, still fairly gently, flaking down on his head.

However, there was no one. The room, unaired and chilly, smelled of this morning’s breakfast, last night’s smoke. He put the two letters (one was “By Hand”, with no stamp) down on the centre table, threw open a window, knelt to light the gas fire.

With the crane-like steps of an overwrought person, Portia kept going round and round the room, looking hard at everything—the two armchairs with crushed springs, the greyish mirror, the divan with its scratchy butcher-blue spread, pillows untidily clipped into butcher-blue slips, the foreign books overcrowded, thrust with brutality into the deal shelves. She had been here before; she had twice come to see Eddie. But she gave the impression of being someone who, having lost his way in a book or mistaken its whole import, has to go back and start from the beginning again.

Only a subtler mind, with stores of notes to refer to, could have learned much from Eddie’s interior. If this interior showed any affectation, it was in keeping the bleakness of college rooms—the unadult taste, the lack of tactile feeling bred by large stark objects, tables and cupboards, that one does not possess. The concave seats of the chairs, the lumpy divan suggested that comfort was a rather brutal affair. Eddie’s work of presenting himself to the world did not, in fact, stop when he came back here, for he often had company—but he chose by all kinds of negligence to imply that it did. Whatever manias might possess him in solitude, making some haunted landscape in which cupboards and tables looked like cliffs or opaque bottomless pools, the effect (at least to a woman) coming in here was, that this was how this fundamentally plain and rather old-fashioned fellow lived when
en pantoufles
.
On the smoky buff walls and unpolished woodwork neurosis, of course, could not write a trace. To be received by Eddie in such frowsty surroundings could be taken as either confiding or insolent. If he
had
stuffed a bunch of flowers (never very nice flowers) into his one art vase, the concession always seemed touching. This was not all that was touching: the smells of carpet and ash, of dust inside the books and of stagnant tea had a sort of unhopeful acquiescence about them. This was not all phony—Eddie did need to be mothered; he was not aesthetic; he had a contempt for natty contrivances, and he did sincerely associate pretty living with being richer than he could hope to be. In the hideous hired furniture and the stuffiness he did (with a kind of arrogance) acquiesce. Thus he kept the right, which he used, to look round his friends’ room— at the taste, the freshness, the ingenuity—with a cold marvelling alien ironic eye. Had he had a good deal of money, his interior probably would have had the classy red Gallic darkness of a man-about-town’s in a Bourget novel—draperies, cut-glass lamps, teetering bronzes, mirrors, a pianola, a seductive day-bed and waxy
demi-monde
flowers in
jardinières
.
Like the taste of many people whose extraction is humble, what taste he had lagged some decades back in time, and had an exciting, anti-moral colour. His animal suspiciousness, his bleakness, the underlying morality of his class, his expectation of some appalling contretemps which should make him have to decamp from everything suddenly were not catered for in his few expensive dreams—for there is a narrowness about fantasy: it figures only the voulu part of the self. Happily he had to keep what taste he had to himself. For as things were, this room of his became a
tour de force
—not simply the living here (which he more or less had to do) but the getting away with it, even making it pay. He was able to make this room (which was not even an attic) a special factor, even the key factor, in his relations with fastidious people… . There were some dying red daisies in the vase, which showed he had had someone to tea last week.

“Your flowers are dead, Eddie.”

“Are they? Throw them away.”

Portia, lifting the daisies from the vase, looked with a sort of unmeaning repulsion at their slimy rotting stalks. “High time, too,” said Eddie. “Perhaps that was the stink—In the waste paper basket, darling, under the table, there.” He took up the vase and prepared to make off with it to the lavatory. But there was a dripping sound as Portia went on holding up the daisies. She said: “Eddie …”

He jumped.

“Why don’t you open that letter from Anna?”