The Heat of the Day (25 page)

round in circles. _Talk__ has got to begin--_where__? How am I to know how to talk, after so much thought? Any first time, is one much good? Unformulated--what was?" "I don't know. Or perhaps, missing?" "How am I to know what's missing in my own thought? I'm committed to it. What did you want, then--brass tacks?" She did not seem certain, half shook her head, but then amended: "Though they are always something." Embarrassed by the naïvety of the question, she said: "You are out for the enemy to win because you think they have something? What?" "They have something. This war's just so much bloody quibbling about something that's predecided itself. Either side's winning would stop the war; only their side's winning would stop the quibbling. I want the cackle cut.--Well, what have I still not said?" "I still don't know," she said, taking the burned-down stump of the cigarette from between his fingers. "Never mind." "Never mind then, sweetheart." "I wish we could sleep," she said. "_What__ is Harrison doing?" Robert suddenly said, in the tone of somebody asking something he probably did or should know but had forgotten. "What's he meaning to do? Just now you said something: say that again. In the end, what is he out after--nothing but to make you? I can't get him." "He cannot see why everything should not be arranged; it seems to him a fair deal, and he's obsessed by it--or was. As to what he does expect to get out of it I can't think. He says he knows what he wants; I suppose he wants what he doesn't know. He likes it here," she added, looking round her at the extinct pretty room. "Likes the ashtrays, for instance: he's always fingering things. That may be it, really: he wants to live here." "Live with you?" "Live here with me. The uneasier he is the happier he is. He cannot see any objections, or see how I can. And yes, there's more than that--he's convinced I am really doing you a mean, bad turn by saying 'no' to him, or at any rate by not saying 'yes.' He has quite a feeling for you." "That could be, I suppose." "He has you at heart--it's inconceivable to him that a man wouldn't rather have his immunity--a clean sheet to get on with what he wants to--than any woman. How can I not sometimes ask myself if he mayn't be right? At the same time, look at the contradiction--by his showing, he's continually trading in his own safety for the purpose of getting me.... Tonight I see, I _should__ have taken a chance on it. But that that was to have to mean, outright, the end of you and me he did from the outset make quite brutally clear. If I had been certain, if I had been certain! Last night, when I _was__ certain, I... But then, he turned round and sent me home." "I wish we knew why. What was in the wind?" "I had hurt his feelings." "Nonsense. He must have had something else to do." She was silent. "Sent you home from where?" he said, searchingly looking at her. "Where had you got to with him? Where were you?" "I don't _know__, Robert," she cried, distractedly slipping down from the sofa to kneel beside it. "I forgot to ask. It might have been anywhere; even a girl we met there thought she was somewhere else. I'd been rattled from the beginning of the evening by Roderick's suddenly ringing up; but if I'd had any idea what Harrison was going to come out with I'd have kept my head; I can keep my head.--As it was, what do you imagine I came back here to, after he'd sent me home? I lay all night wondering what he had meant to do, what he might or might not have done if I'd been different, what he'd be doing next. Not knowing whether he ever really had meant to stop things taking their course, not knowing whether that had ever, really, been in his power. Wondering whether that had once been in his power, when first he put the thing up to me, but now no longer was. Asking myself what really he _had__ been up to, these last two months, and whether my always keeping on hedging, stalling, had made him angrier than he'd shown. Whether his having thrown me back in my own face meant he had, all at once, out of anger, decided to let things ride. Whether what Harrison had decided or not decided did matter, ever had mattered, really? Whether, knowing last night that things _were__ taking their course, outside his control, his idea was to save his face? The fascination for him in this thing with me could have been so much less me than himself, his own all-powerfulness--a one-sided love's unnatural: there must be vice in it somewhere. If so, he would see my 'yes,' at _that__ point, only in one way: my having called his bluff. Not that he might jib at breaking a bargain--me his: a new lease of safety for you--but, what value could I have left for him once he'd watched me see he _couldn't__ do what he'd said? Very little, odiously little, none.... But then I went all the way back again: I _had__ hurt his feelings. If you can't conceive those you can't conceive what he is. In the end that's what makes him a dangerous man." Twisting round on the carpet beside the sofa, doubling into the bulky quilted folds of her dressing-gown, Stella buried her face in the cushions stacked under Robert's head. He, in the gathered stillness of someone resolved to move in a moment more, lay a moment longer staring up at the ceiling. She, in a muffled voice, ended up: "So you see, I've no idea how we left it." "What?--can't hear you." She repeated: "I've no idea how we left it." The expression on those lips of hers was familiar--its many contexts, vagrant, social, so very much not mattering, had become too many for him to count. It had come as the end, or rather the fading-out, of so many stories at the end of so many days; or, as a sort of confession as to why many stories, now that she came to tell them, had no ending. So much had had to be left in the air, so often, that her manner of saying so, every time, always had the same intonation--of fatalism, of fleeting but true regret. She had been given the slip once more. "I've no idea how we left it." Ineffectual little expression, blent of boredom and chagrin, it had become conventional; but, at the same time, a sort of convention or shorthand of lovers' talk, stamped with a temperament and endeared by usage. She had said this so many times: again it was said tonight--and the monstrous, life-and-death disproportion between tonight's context and all that host of others did not, could not, stand out as it should. She did not sound, so could not seem to be feeling, very much more inadequate than she ever had felt. Which was enough to make Robert laugh. He laughed as it would have been possible to weep, thrown round towards her on an elbow driven into glissading cushions. It was a laughter of the entire being, racking as it was irregular in its intakes upon his body, making his face a mask of shut eyes and twisting lips, convulsing the rest of him in a sort of harmony of despair at the situation and joy in her. The sofa shook--she clung to its scrolled end as though in a high gale. "Why?" she cried, "what is the matter--what?" Not letting go of the sofa, she put out her other hand; which he, by immediately catching at and holding by its wrist to his breast, used to establish a sort of circuit for the joke or agony. She under this compulsion began to laugh too, though rebelliously, with bewilderment and uncertainty: it was only by laying her cheek to his, as though either to extinguish the laughter by sheer weight or draw out of him into her its unholy cause, that she comprehended. She then had to laugh entirely. "I see," she admitted, drawing a sob of breath, "I see how it sounded. But that _was__ how it was." At once the laughter left him. "What a position I've put you in, all the same!" He sprang up from the sofa--"Anyway, I must dress!" "Going?" she said dully. "But there might be someone outside the door. We must think of that." "I have been thinking of that. There has been a step." She, tracing back by touch her one white lock of hair, said: "When has there been a step?" "Every now and then." "Every now and then?" She went to the nearer window, to stand, white face to the white curtain, arguing: "I didn't hear. And if it had been _his__ step I should have heard it; in fact, I should have known it before I heard it. I wonder..." "Stella! Don't touch the curtain!" "I wasn't going to--was I?" "I thought you were." "I wanted to. Wanted to crash the window open and blaze the lights on. To think of him makes me angry--I wanted to say, 'Yes, here we are, together: what else do you suppose?' " "If he is down there, that's why he _is__ down there. Imagine it's being gay for him, with his thoughts?" "It's we who must think," she said, turning from the window. "Think away," said Robert, shrugging his shoulders. His clothes were over a chair; already he was beginning to dress quickly: she remained, arms folded, leaning against a corner of the chimneypiece, intently blindly watching him, saying, "I could always let you out at the back, down through the basement into the yard. There would be walls round that, but would they be such high walls? There would be the caretakers, but they would be asleep." "If there's somebody at the front there could be somebody at the back," he said, dressing so mechanically that he seemed indifferent. "No; that could depend on _who__ the somebody at the front is. Whether it's Harrison or not." "Why?" "He's in love: I live here. He could have followed you here. He could be watching the house for his own reasons: people torment themselves." "That doesn't alter the fact that he's what he is." "What is anyone? Mad, divided, undoing what they do. You were mad to come here. I told you on the telephone, as plainly as I dared to word it, not to--not on any account." "But you expected me." "I was waiting for you somehow to get in touch with me, to say where else to meet. We could have met somewhere else." "If I _am__ tailed, what matter where I go? Somewhere else--where else? Some street corner?" "We could have talked." "Yes, we could have talked. But what do you suppose I thought in my mother's house?--that I'd never be in your arms again. What do you suppose I had to make sure of? That. That, then to tell you. Because yes, that too I saw, in my mother's house--you left to wonder, to hear, to not believe, to have to believe, to never know why. So, to tell you. I came here to tell you, even if you had not asked. Why not the telling first? How was I to know that might not lose me the other? Better the last of a love in ignorance than no love, no love in knowledge." "But there could have been that." "Yes? Tonight, yes. But there may be a thing that's too much to go on knowing. A thing not meant to be known--too much to live with, to love in the face of, under the everlasting weight of. How do we know we haven't both known this was that? Dared we ever have come to the point of breaking silence if we had not known this was goodbye? Better to say goodbye at the beginning of the hour we never have had, then it will have no end--best of all, Stella, if you can come to remember what never happened, to live most in the one hour we never had.--Because now I must go," he added, dressed, looking quickly round him to make sure he had forgotten nothing. She recollected one thing, picked up his dressing-gown and gave him his lighter out of the pocket. He corrected himself--"Or, try to go. I do want to make it, I want to make it--my ideas, you know, are too good to be merely died for: they want life.--Did you once say there was a way out on to the roofs?" "Yes, the landing skylight; it's been trapdoored over since I've been in the flat, but they showed me how I could get out that way if I were cut off by a fire, or to put out incendiaries. There's that ladder that lets down on a pulley. Oh Robert, you must have seen it every night!" "Show me." "But--" she began unbearably. "Very well, what?" he cried, wheeling round. "What do we know for certain? He may have kept his mouth shut. None of this may be true." "Then no harm's done: what a laugh on the roof! Either this is nothing or it's the pay-off. I don't think it's nothing--you _were__ right, I had no business to come: I should have thought of you. What else should it be but this? My time's run right out; I'm watched and they know I'm wise: you know that better than I do--use your reason. Think as much as you like, but for God's sake let me get out of here while it's still dark.--Do _you__ want me taken?" "Then they'd think of everything we could think of?" "Yes, that would be up to them. Why?" "Then there could be somebody on the roof." "There's one great thing about a roof; there's one way off it." She stood for two or three seconds, then said: "The roofs steep. I wish you hadn't got your stiff knee." "I wish I hadn't had my stiff knee. We've never danced, for instance.... If by any chance this did have to finish that way, you wouldn't have wanted anything else for me, would you? You'd know if it came to that there could only have been one other thing, the alternative?" "Having to face it out..." "I could. Should I? Would you be ashamed of me? Not while I was not ashamed of myself.... But what a stink, though, Stella--think, Stella: what a stink for you all!" "Terrible for Ernestine," she said, turning away her face, thinking, it is the awful ones who are the little ones one must not offend. "There may not be anyone on the roof: it's fifty-fifty. I still somehow think I'll make it. I want to go by the roof." "Where are you expecting to get down again?" she said, with a light sudden curious release of her natural voice. He repeated: "I want to go by the roof--I don't want to run out; I want you to send me off." "Gome on, then," she said, in no more time than it took to draw the breath, "we'll let down the ladder." They went hurriedly out through the little hall of the flat, turned on the landing light overhanging the shaft of staircase and began to unwind from its staple the pulley-rope of the ladder, which from its hinge under the blinded skylight came down towards them slowly. Robert looked up it: "Now we'll soon see," he said. He went up it at the most eager speed compatible with the unequal action of the stiff knee, then heaved with his shoulder against the skylight, which gave: he came down again far enough to kiss her. "Take care of yourself," he hurriedly said. "Now turn off the light and get back into the flat and shut the door." She turned off the. light. "Goodnight," she said in the dark. "Goodnight." She went back into the flat and shut the door. In the street below, not so much a step as the semi-stumble of someone after long standing shifting his position could be, for the first time by her, heard.

Chapter 16

THAT day whose start in darkness covered Robert's fall or leap from the roof had not yet fully broken when news broke: the Allied landings in North Africa. Talk was of nothing else. Nor had the quickening subsided when Montgomery's Order of the Day to the Eighth Army--"We have completely smashed the German and Italian armies"--became the order of yet another day for London. There came the Sunday set for victorious bell-ringing: throughout the country every steeple was to break silence. When at last it came, the bells' sound was not as strange or momentous as had been expected: after everything these were still the bells of the former time, climbing, striving, searching round in the air in vain for some still not to be found new note. All that stood out in cities were unreverberating lacunae where there were churches gone. At the beginning, the invitation to rejoice brought out a few people into the sunless November morning streets, as though the peals and crashes were a spectacle to be watched passing: eyes for a moment seemed to perceive a peculiar brightness. Soon, however, even before the bells had come to a climax, people began turning away from the illusion, either because it had already begun to fade or because they knew it must. There was a movement indoors again: doors and windows shut. Louie had anticipated the bells in heart ever since she heard they were to be rung; but when it came to their hour they rang false--she heard them dry-eyed; she should have been hearing the bells of home, the bells from Seale hill over the open marsh and sea. Connie, early that morning, had intercepted the Sunday papers on her way out to the post, therefore no other directive for feeling was to be found--Louie sought refuge in the streets, looking in this and that direction in hopes of a crowd moving any one way. This led her to nothing better than isolation, ever more at a loss, on an island in the middle of Marylebone Road. Then it was that she decided to view in daylight the street in which she had said goodnight to Stella--there, she could be certain, _someone__ in London lived. She bent her steps that way not knowing exactly with what in mind. But to enter Weymouth Street was to quail at the unspeakingness of its expensive length. She had had no notion that Mrs. Rodney lived so far from her; and, worse, it was impossible to be certain at the foot of which of those flights of steps they had said goodbye--for goodbye, and nothing but that, she now saw it was. The chattering variation of the architecture, from house to house, itself seemed to cheat and mock her--she looked at Dutch-type gables, bronze-grilled doors, leaded casements, gothic projecting bays, balconies, discrepantly high parapets, outwitted. Outwitted, but only just--for, anything ever to _be__ remembered here would be never, never to be forgotten. One unity, this morning, the empty Sunday street had, up and down its length--the sunless toneless reverberation, from planes of distance, of the victory bells. _That__ could but be being heard--from behind which window out of this host of windows?--by Mrs. Rodney. Louie stood still to listen again, in company. She stood face up, one hand instinctively grasping one of the spearheads of railings topping an area, as though to bridge, forever, in some memory of the body's, the sound and scene. But then instantaneously she was struck, pierced, driven forward into a stumbling run by anguish--_an__ anguish, striking out of the air. She looked round her vainly, blindly, for her assailant. Flee?--no, she was clutched, compelled, forbidden to leave the spot. She remained pacing to and fro, to and fro, like a last searcher for somebody said to be still alive, till the bells stopped. The street had again been empty for some hours when Stella came out of a door and down steps not far from where Louie had stood. This was the afternoon she had promised to visit Roderick, and there appeared no reason to change the plan. She made her way across London to the right station and took the right train. It was a slow tram, one-class, made up of old stock, departing from a remote platform, crowded out of the way of anything more important on to a bye line, even so halting diffidently between its many stops. Sunday short-distance travellers getting in and out, in and out of the carriage in which sat Stella found themselves being eyed with a sort of frozen attention by the woman in the corner: they shared an uneasy feeling that she was for some reason trying to learn their faces. She seemed to be someone for the first time finding herself alone among humanity. At the same time, the conveyance of that look of hers from one to another face was to be taken as the one sign of life: otherwise this person sat like an image, upright against the grime-impregnated tapestry of the compartment, dead gloved hands crossed in her lap, palms up. There were moments, between its being a look at faces, when the look became not a look at all; but then invariably, as though in recoil from its own abeyance, it would turn to the window, taking the head with it. This was always so at the many unaccountable, meaninglessly fateful stops between the stations: sometimes there was to be found nothing more speaking than embankments of bleached, soiled, already wintry grass; but sometimes Stella was fortunate in being able to see through railings or over fences not only yards and gardens but right into back windows of homes. Prominent sculleries, with bent-forward heads of women back at the sink again after Sunday dinner, and recessive living-rooms in which the breadwinner armchair-slumbered, legs out, hand across the eyes, displayed themselves; upstairs, at looking-glasses in windows, girls got themselves ready to go out with boys. One old unneeded woman, relegated all day to where she slept and would die, prised apart lace curtains to take a look at the train, as though calculating whether it might not be possible to escape this time. Children turned out to play went through with the mime of it, dragging objects or pushing one another up and down short paths where vegetables had not been able to be sown. It was striking how listlessly, shiftlessly and frankly life in these houses--and what else was life but this?--exposed itself to the eyes in the passing or halting trains: eyes to be taken, one could only suppose, to be blinded by other preoccupations. It was not to be taken into account that from any one train there should be looking any one pair of eyes which had no other preoccupation, no other resort, nothing; eyes themselves exposed forever to what they saw, subjected to whatever chose to be seen. Though she had many times made this journey, she did not seem to know how soon, at what point along the line, she should be beginning to be expecting to get out: she was therefore forced to listen intently each time the name of a station was being called. Someone in the carriage remarked that if bells could be rung again he did not see why names should not be written up--who were we hiding from now? it was a disgrace. In the end, Stella only was made to realise she _was__ arriving by the sight of Roderick, accompanied by the still taller Fred, on the platform: her carriage ran past them slowly and they saw her. Fred, with a nod to Roderick, thereupon made off quickly. The train stopped; Stella got out and was kissed by her son. "Where's Fred gone?" she asked. "He only came to the station." Roderick continued to hold her arm as they walked down the platform. "I'm so glad you came," he said. "I wondered whether you would. It's very good of you, Mother." "Why, because Robert's dead?" she asked, showing her ticket at the barrier. "Perhaps it is better for you having something to do. I had been wondering what you'd most rather _I__ did. I decided I'd leave it and see if you came today; but then, if not, somehow to get to London to you. I was anxious about you. What I'd have liked best, when I heard, would have been to go to you there at once. _Would__ you have liked that? Only not knowing what you would really like stopped me. Because a man always does get off comparatively light when he beats it off home because of some bad news; though of course what they invariably do say is, why on earth instead of losing his head and taking the law into his own hands didn't he apply for compassionate leave, which would under the circumstances almost certainly have been granted." "Darling Roderick... I don't think it would have been granted under these circumstances." "I know how I could have put it; in fact I was going to put it that way if it came to the point--I should have put it that you and Robert were engaged. Because you easily could have been, I should think.--_Would__ you have liked me to?" "No," she said, shaking her head but wearing the smile suddenly granted her by his love. "For one thing, I should have been out at work; one cannot stay away if one's not ill. And, no. No, there would have been nothing for you to do." "Was there anything for you to do, Mother?" "No, nothing. No, as far as I remember there wasn't anything." "I was so afraid that... Nobody came and bothered you?" She opened her handbag, took out her handkerchief, touched her lips with it. After which, "Where shall we go?" she said. "Yes, that's what I've been wondering." Roderick looked about at what was outside the station, which did not so far offer any solution. "How would it be if we simply went to the cafe and sat down quietly? It isn't exactly time for tea yet, but we've been there so often that I don't suppose they'd mind us just sitting down, especially as I imagine almost nobody else will be wanting to sit there till it _is__ teatime." "No, let's walk first," she said. She guided Roderick's look in direction of the asphalt field-path she had seen in her mind's eye while she was still with Robert. "Let's walk that way." The path obliquely ran across exhausted grassland offered for building: the offer remained open; the board was down--that there _was__ to be building here you could never doubt. This that met the eye was the merest ghostly lingering of a landscape, gone by now if it had not been for the war. The recalcitrant swell of earth which had cracked the path would present not more than a moment's difficulty to the sinkers of foundations, however shallow. Meanwhile, the path led, ahead of the walkers, in the direction of a thin line of poplars, beyond which, one seemed to remember, was a foot-bridged brook. For some reason, because she thought of the path _as__ running, she envisaged all else as standing still; so it was with surprise that, from halfway across the bridge, she saw motion, more fateful for being slow, in the disks of scum and the shreds of froth on the clayey water below her. Pausing to rest her hands on the rail, she wondered what the hazards of navigation would be for a paper boat, was passed through by an impulse to fold and launch one, recollected that there was now nothing for which the boat's fortune could be an augury, but all the same turned to Roderick with her lips apart, reassembling her sharing of his childhood in her glance. But for Roderick, on the bridge beside her, this moment had a quite different sense--some sort of assuagement or satisfaction at her having rested even so much of her as her hands, for however short a time, on even this bar of unknowing wood. His pity, speaking to her out of the stillness of his face, put her in awe of him, as of a greater sufferer than herself--no pity is ignorant, which is pity's cost. She perceived him as knowing in whole the sorrow of which she, still, knew less than her little part. More than Robert's death was there in Roderick's face; the world weighed down for this instant upon this single soul. She shrank from her son as might an unavailing friend--she set herself to counting the disks of foam being sucked from sight slowly under the bridge. She asked: "You heard the bells, here, this morning?" "I don't think so; I don't know where bells are, here. Fred mentioned yesterday evening that there was some rumour that they'd got to be rung; he said in that case they would be something completely new to his sister's baby.--You didn't mind Fred's coming to the station? He said he would like to, as a mark of respect." "You and Fred haven't looked at the Sunday papers?" "No. I don't think so. Why?" Stella did not answer. "I naturally," Roderick went on, "told Fred something, but not what it was exactly. I think he thinks there's been somebody killed in battle." "Well, there has been.--Roderick, I said I would come today because you wanted me to tell you about your father." "Yes. Still, I don't think we need talk about him today, now." "Just as you like; but I do not mind what I talk about. If anything, I should rather like to tell you the story now that I am beginning to understand it." "Just as you like, Mother; anything you'd like,--but today _I'd__ rather not talk about my father." He restlessly turned away his head, looking along the shabby continuation of the path; he struck the bridge rail with an authoratively childish gesture of dismissal--making the vibration jump through her hands. "_He__ really is dead," he said. "After all, it was Cousin Francis who's given me my house; and with you I can only connect Robert. Cousin Nettie's bringing my father out like that may have just shown how determined she is to be mad. How is one even to know he'd have wanted that? How am I even to know he was my father? He went away." "Very well then, Roderick; then let's leave that story." "Wisteria Lodge is really the only place for anybody knowing so much that does not matter. It was stupid of me to mix myself up with that. I've kicked myself," he said sadly, "for ringing you up like that--but how could I know what was just going to happen?" "Very well then, Roderick." "Mother?" he said suddenly. "Yes?" "Do you really not mind what we talk about?" "No. No." "What _was__ Robert doing on the roof?" Once more she touched her lips with her handkerchief--a timid widowed habit which had come out in her only that afternoon: the white cambric bore a series of little pink-red smudges, each fainter; now there was almost no more lipstick left to come off. She then put her arm through Roderick's, as a sign of agreement that, yes, it would be better to leave the bridge. They turned, by the same kind of unspoken agreement, back, retracing the first few of their steps in silence, hearing Sunday afternoon wireless coming across the wasteland from a bungalow. It would have been easy to recline, to become suffused by indifference, to be thankful that all was over--but it was not, yet; the rest was not yet ready to be silence. By delaying her answer she would be giving her answer too much weight. "That seemed his best way out of my flat," she said. "He was expecting to be arrested at any minute." "Oh. Why was he? _Could__ he have been arrested?" "Yes, he