The Eye of Love

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Praise for the Writing of Margery Sharp

“A highly gifted woman … a wonderful entertainer.” —
The New Yorker

“One of the most gifted writers of comedy in the civilized world today.” —
Chicago Daily News

“[Sharp's] dialogue is brilliant, uncannily true. Her taste is excellent; she is an excellent storyteller.” —Elizabeth Bowen

Britannia Mews

“As an artistic achievement … first-class, as entertainment … tops.” —
The Boston Globe

The Eye of Love

“A double-plotted … masterpiece.” —John Bayley,
Guardian Books of the Year

Martha, Eric, and George

“Amusing, enjoyable, Miss Sharp is a born storyteller.” —
The Times
(London)

The Gypsy in the Parlour

“Unforgettable … There is humor, mystery, good narrative.” —
Library Journal

The Nutmeg Tree

“A sheer delight.” —New York Herald Tribune

Something Light

“Margery Sharp has done it again! Witty, clever, delightful, entertaining.” —
The Denver Post

The Eye of Love

A Novel

Margery Sharp

To Geoffrey Castle

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

1

Seen from eye-level, (as the child Martha, flat on her stomach, saw it), the patch of pebbly grass in the back-garden of 5, Alcock Road had all the charm, mysteriousness and authority of a classic Chinese landscape. Tall shot-up bents, their pale yellow stems knotted like bamboos, inclined gracefully before the wind; across a sandy plain boulders in proportion carried a low scrub of lichen to the foot of a mountain shaped like a mole-hill. There was only the right amount of everything, and only one sharp note of colour: pimpernel-red a wild azalea bloomed under the bamboos.

Suddenly the whole composition was altered, the whole landscape receded, as into the foreground leapt a tiger—drawn to a different scale, in fact life-size. For a moment the round striped face glared with Chinese ferocity, the lips writhed back in a Chinese scowl; then the cat recognised the child, and the child a cat.

From the house, from one of the pink-curtained windows, a voice called high and urgent—Miss Diver's.

“Martha! Come and say how do you do to Mr Gibson!”

Martha remembered it was Tuesday, and reluctantly rose, and dusted herself down the front.

More precisely, it was the second Tuesday in June, 1932: a date to be of importance.

2

Ladies of ambiguous status have by convention hearts of gold, and Miss Diver was nothing if not conventional; but a child in an irregular household is often an embarrassment. It had been wonderfully kind of Miss Diver to save her brother's child from an orphanage, but not surprising; what was surprising was how well the arrangement worked out.

Martha came when she was six, and was now nine: during those three years the quiet harmony of life at 5, Alcock Road continued unjarred. In part this was due to Mr Gibson's good-nature; even more important, in the daily contacts between aunt and niece, was a safeguard never in fact recognised as such—though it had operated from the start. Little Martha was never allowed to address her benefactress as Aunt. To the latter's ear the appellation lacked romance; romance being of Miss Diver's life the essence, she instructed Martha to call her by her first name instead; the happy if un-aimed-at result was a superficial chumminess putting no strain on the emotions of either.—Also due to Miss Diver's romanticism was the fact that they no longer shared the same patronymic, which was for both, legally, Hogg. Miss Diver's brother, Martha's father, had been Richard Hogg: Martha was Martha Hogg: but even while still vending haberdashery Miss Diver had so sincerely felt herself not-Hogg, so to speak, and practically going under a false name, that in the interests of truth (or at least of verisimilitude), she changed to Diver. Besides commemorating a favourite authoress, it went euphoniously with her initial D. The D stood for Dolores, itself modulated from Dorothy because Miss Diver was a Spanish type.

“You shall call me Dolores,” instructed Miss Diver—actually in the taxi going home from Richard Hogg's funeral.

She had never seen the child until an hour earlier; she had never before visited the shabby Brixton lodging-house in whose shabby parlour the thinly-attended wake was being held. A dozen or so of Richard Hogg's ex-colleagues from the Post Office stared inquisitively; this meeting between the two chief mourners provided a touch of drama, something to talk about afterwards, otherwise conspicuously lacking. (As Doctor Johnson might have said, it wasn't funeral to
invite
a man to: only one bottle of sherry, and fish-paste sandwiches. Richard Hogg, with his motherless daughter, had lodged two full years in Hasty Street; but a landlady never does these things so whole-heartedly as relations, even with the Burial Club paid up and next week's rent in hand.) Interest naturally focused on Miss Diver, partly because her brother had never mentioned her, and partly because of her appearance. Though the only person present in proper mourning—even Martha had no more than an arm-band—Dolores' total blackness somehow produced a brighter effect than the neutral tints of everyone else. She was jetty, they merely subfusc. Her black Spanish hair gleamed beneath her eye-veil. Her black fur was a black fox. Her black pumps were patent leather. Dolores, for her part, felt like a bird of paradise among crows …

She felt also like an angel of mercy; and so took little Martha home with her, in obedience to a law not so much unwritten as written to excess, in every sentimental novel of that date, which was 1929.

“You shall call me Dolores,” instructed Miss Diver, in the taxi that bore them away.

The child Martha, then aged six, looked placidly co-operative. She was a fat, placid-looking child altogether. Her squarish face, pale under a sandy fringe, didn't appear ravaged by any particular sorrow, as her rather small grey eyes, under rudimentary eye-brows, weren't red with weeping. The bundle of clothes at her feet—her last link with the past—she simply put her feet on, to make her short legs more comfortable. It was Miss Diver, aged thirty-seven, who wept.

3

The arrangement worked out better than anyone could have expected. In Hasty Street, indeed, for many a day to come Martha was looked for back bag and baggage. “I've seen
her
sort before,” declared the landlady—in grim reference to Miss Diver. “Give a thing and take a thing—! By which same token, if
she
don't tire, someone else will.” The luscious prognostication proved false. Mr Gibson, he who subsidised the little house with the pink curtains, accepted Martha without demur. He had often feared that his Dolores might be lonely, and trusted her not to let the child become a nuisance. As was inevitable, Miss Diver went through a brief period of sentimentality—during which she bought little Martha a three-legged stool to sit on and a box of beads to thread: fortunately if there was one thing Mr Gibson detested it was treading on a bead. He didn't actually swear at Martha, but the effort not to was obvious, and Dolores was saved from prolonging what might have been a disastrous experiment. She was a trifle let down herself. All children under eight have charm, just as all young animals have, but little Martha had less than most. She didn't
perch
on the stool, she squatted on it. The beads stuck to her fat fingers, when she didn't drop them, and she was always losing her needle. The picture envisaged by Miss Diver had been very different. She was still thankful she hadn't started with bubble-blowing, because heaven knew what little Martha mightn't have done with a basin of soapy water …

After this preliminary fumble, however, Miss Diver managed very well. She realised at once that if the child was unacceptable as a fixture, she would be even less acceptable—how to put it?—dodging about. From dodging about, therefore, Martha was above all things discouraged; but the situation wasn't dodged either. Whenever Mr Gibson arrived, Miss Diver summoned her to say how do you do and shake hands; thus not only avoiding any tedious pretence that she wasn't there, but also giving the signal for her to lie low.

Martha soon learnt. She didn't mind. Solitude suited her temperament. If it was fine enough, she lay low in the garden. It wasn't at all a pretty garden, the tiny lawn was rank and all the flowers nasturtiums; but Martha discovered landscapes in the wild grass, also after rain, or heavy dew, one could collect from the round nasturtium-leaves, employing a teaspoon, whole egg-cupfuls of liquid quite possibly medicinal. If it was necessary to stay indoors, an attic bedroom afforded delights of its own: a fresco of rabbits (legacy of Miss Diver's first enthusiasm), a window overlooking the road, a whole year's back numbers of the
Tatler
… For the epicurean enjoyment of these last Martha often put herself to bed, especially in winter, immediately after giving herself tea; a supper of milk and doughnuts to hand on the historic three-legged stool.

In Brixton she'd slept on a box-ottoman at the foot of the landlady's bed. Ma Battleaxe, (Martha at least knew no other name for her), was a noisy sleeper. Snores half-articulate and vaguely threatening equally disgusted and alarmed—as did the set of false teeth in the beer-mug on the night-table. Any bedroom of her own would have made Martha happy, even without the
Tatlers
.

Solitude suited her. She had no other children to play with, and didn't want any. She didn't go to school. The point occasionally worried Dolores, but it didn't worry Martha. No education-officer spied her, and Dolores kept putting the matter off—reluctant to ask Mr Gibson for fees, reluctant also to encounter local officialdom. Martha slipped through the net of education as an under-sized salmon slips through the seine. She learnt to read and write—Dolores could manage that much; otherwise her mind was beautifully unburdened, and she had plenty of time to look at things.