The Heat of the Day (27 page)

doggedly footing it in the direction of Stella's new flat, automatically swerving clear of buildings liable at any time to be struck and fall. The block she lived in teetered its height up into the dangerous night. Inside, no porter was in the lodge: Harrison for himself set in motion the gothic lift. The halt of the hum and the rattle of gates on her floor gave her time to wonder before her bell rang: when it did, she came to the door, though promptly, with the air of one who had already decided this must be a mistake. She wore an overcoat and was carrying a cat. They stared at one another. She exclaimed: "Where _have__ you been!" The cat gave a start and tried to run up her shoulder. "I hope this is not an awkward hour to drop in?" "Why, no," she said, civilly if uncertainly, "I wasn't doing anything particular--reading, listening to the guns. Gome in." She went ahead of him through another door to put the cat down; while he had, owing to the un-familiarity of this other, no less minute, hall, a renewal of difficulty over the old business of putting down his hat. "Yes, it's been quite a time since we met," he agreed, eventually following her in.--"I see," he added, glancing about the carpet as though he'd have liked to check up on a first impression, "you've got a cat now?" "Why, no; it's not mine. Nothing in this flat is--either," she said with a vagrant, echo-aroused smile. "It belongs next door, but its people are out, away, and I think it's nervous." "Pussy, hey, pussy--where are you?" said Harrison, clicking his fingers. Nothing having emerged, he squinted round to read the name of her book, left open face downward on the black fur hearthrug. "Quite like old times," he remarked, "quite a dirty night. Animals don't care for this sort of thing." "Quite like old times," she said, kneeling down, with her back to him, by the fire. "Before I met you, even." She warmed her hands. "_Is__ it cold in here? Perhaps not.--Do sit down," she added, over her shoulder. "What have you been doing?" "One thing and another. In fact, been out of this country. But that would be a long story." "Yes, I expect it would. You didn't lose your job, then? Once or twice I wondered whether you had." "What, me? Oh, you mean over _that__ affair? Oh no-no-no-no-no. Still, I was sorry that slipped up. So you held that against me?" While she still did not answer, he sat himself down quickly in one of two 'armchairs, taking advantage of the very last moment in which it might be possible or at any rate sensitive to do so. She registered what had gone on behind her without turning her head. He seemed glad, eager, to take this as however negative a reply. Anything more coming? From her, apparently not--anything further seemed to be due from him. Forward in the armchair he began frowning, pushing fist into palm. "Yes, that was bad," he agreed. "In my own way I may say I took quite a knock." "You did?" Stella said, rising from the hearthrug as though there were something weakening in that perpetual warming of the hands. She searched the chimney-piece for cigarettes to offer him, meanwhile recollecting that she and Robert still owed him what was left of a packet. A burst of close-up gunfire shook the building--whereupon she started to pace about, looking under the furniture for the cat. Harrison, silenced by the guns, seemed at the same time to feel exonerated from making any secret of the fact that he was following her with his eyes--even, when her movements took her behind his chair, turning right round to see where she was. She scooped up the cat and stood with it held against her: its fur seemed to shrink and dampen as a stick of bombs fell diagonally across the middle distance. Then it all died down. "It's so long," she said, "since we've had this. Hasn't it come back different?" Remarking the unsteadiness of her hand on the cat's flank, he said, with intimacy and insolence: "Perhaps you were not so sorry I came, then?" "I wish you had come before. There was a time when I had so much to say to you. There once was so much I wanted to know. After I gave up thinking I should see you again, I still went on talking and talking to you in my own mind--so I cannot really have felt you were dead, I think, because one doesn't go on talking and talking to any one of _them__: more one goes on hearing what they said, piecing and repiecing it together to try and make out something they had not time to say--possibly even had not had time to know. There still must be something that matters that one has forgotten, forgotten because at the time one did not realise how much it did matter. Yet most of all there is something one has got to forget--that is, if it is to be possible to live. The more wars there are, I suppose, the more we shall learn how to be survivors.--Yes, I missed you. _Your__ dropping out left me with completely nothing. What made you?" "That would be a long--" "--I'm not asking for stories. What happened?" "For one thing, I was switched." She stared at him. "That was how it was," he said, with a take-it-or-leave-it shrug. "There was quite a bit going on around that time, if you remember. That was the long and the short of it: I was switched." "I see," she said, paused, and put down the cat. "Well, here I still am," she said in a different tone. "Though now, as you see, _here__." "Here, you're still fairly snug?" he asked, looking round the room, making an obvious effort to see it all as other than sheer "otherness" of surroundings. These walls, of an unreflecting brown, were hung round with a set of Old London prints; there was an upright piano, a locked-looking glazed bookcase. The neck of a reading-lamp had been so twisted as to direct light on to the sage-green cushions of an armchair at present empty of her. Writing paper was stacked on a folding table, on which stood a wineglass holding a bunch of snowdrops--damaged, perhaps unpinned from her coat. From the shortness of the substantial curtains it could be guessed that the windows were set in high. He knew himself to be on the seventh floor. A dull little gunmetal ashtray caught his eye--"Funny, you know," he confessed, "how I still seem to be seeing that other place. That other place where you were." "Yes?" "I have so often thought of our times there." "What _was__ our quarrel?" She hesitated, after asking him this, but then sat boldly down in the green chair, full in the light. "What did I do?" "You were wonderful. As, as a matter of fact, you are tonight--wherever you are, you are. I don't know how it is!" "Please!" she cried, holding up her hand sharply. "I asked you a question. _What__ happened? After all, you killed Robert." "Now how do you make out that?" "Only you know what happened," she went on, indifferently giving this as a fact. "You know what I don't: the whole of the story. You chose to take that with you: you disappeared. For a long time, that's been what I've wanted to ask you. Now you're back--but _now__, why? Why ask? Possibly the time's passed." He shifted his feet, equivocally, on the black hearthrug. "What, not altogether?" she said, as though in reply to the movement. "Very well, then in that case, tell me--you knew Robert was going to be arrested that night. How much say in that had you? When had that been decided?--or was it not?" "_I__ always rather took it," Harrison said, "that he himself rather took it the game was up? In that case, frankly, he knew as much as I did. That was up to him, naturally--/ was out." "Since when?" "Since the night before." "Since the night we quarrelled?" "Quarrelled?" he said. "When?" She put out a hand and bent the lamp away from her. "If you don't remember," she said, "perhaps it never happened. Perhaps I've thought too much." "I've thought, all right." He stopped to frown at a thumb-nail, then looked across at her now in-shadow face. "About this thing between us--but how 'a quarrel'?" The guns rested her by opening up once more: she leaned back to hear them, acquiescent, against the cushions. The bulb of the lamp in its socket and frames of the windows shook--otherwise, this room remained a dark-lined kernel of silence under the flare-pale resounding sky. In the subsidence of the shocks of the guns could be heard the lofty drumming of the raider: while this lasted one kind of utter solution was in the offing--but no, it was not to be that way; nothing fell. The guns, made fools of, died out again, askance. "No right _or__ wrong to it after all, perhaps?" she at last said. Harrison, who had sat through the minutes with a concentrated appearance of hearing nothing, went on: "Yes, thought about you--and in some pretty queer places." "All this time, you've been out of England?" "Obviously--surely?" "Still, you knew where to find me." "Oh, one soon picks up threads.... Well, here we are, back to it. Or, don't you think so?" He fixed his eyes on her with an only wavering certainty, as though, possibly, for guidance. "No--one never goes back. One never is where one was. I see you may have been right; I see there may _have__ been something between us--if there had not _been__ something, how should we both, tonight, know it wasn't there any more? If you had been here immediately after--if you had not disappeared when you did--who knows? You were the last of him.--No, not that: I _am__ the last of him. You, then? Were you then, somehow, love's necessary missing part? You brought that into us, if you killed him. But now, you and I are no longer two of three. From between us some pin has been drawn out: we're apart. We're not where we were--look, not even any more in the same room. The pattern's been swept away, so where's the meaning? Think!" He only repeated: "But I have thought about you," in an unrelinquishing tone. "There _was__ a night--yes, that last time we met--when I said, 'Very well, then, yes,' but you sent me home." "Yes: that was not what I wanted." "What _did__ you want, then, when it came to the point?" He fitted his thumb-nails together, did not answer. "You did not know; you did not know what to do." "What, didn't I?" he said in a driven way. He got up suddenly and walked across to the table with the snowdrops; he stood over them--"Pretty," he stated under his breath, giving the bruised petals an automatic touch. "If you mean," he added, "that evening there was the dog, I don't remember. More, there was that other evening when there was the rain. All I know is, as I say, I've thought about you. I didn't come back all this way only to say goodbye--did I?" "You don't think there's any virtue in a goodbye? I do. I've wanted to be able to say goodbye to you: till this could be possible you've haunted me. What's unfinished haunts one; what's unhealed haunts one.--Harrison?" "That's the first time you've called me anything, I think." "I don't know your other, your Christian name." "I don't know that you'd care for that very much," he said, shouldering into the curtain behind the table. "Why, what's wrong with it?--what is it?" "Robert." "Oh, I see.... Well, I expect in any case I should have gone on thinking of you as Harrison. I'd been going to say--" she dropped her wrist across her eyes, as though the averted lamp were still full upon her. "I'd been going to say, goodbye any way you like. Stay tonight, if you like, if that would finish your thoughts?" He picked up the glass of snowdrops, then put it down again. "No, I thought not," she said. "What's the good of doing anything for the sake of the past?" "No, it's more," he said, with his back to her, "that I never did, remember, expect you to do anything for nothing." "What is 'nothing'?" "As I told you, I never have been loved.--No," he added, coming briskly back from the table, taking up a position on the hearthrug to stare down, more unequivocally than he ever yet had, at the chair with her in it, "my forte has I suppose always rather more been, plans.--What are yours, for instance, these days? You staying on here?" "For one thing, I think I am going to be married." "Indeed. Is that so?" He paused, needing all he had to keep in command his features during their change, their change into the expression of a violent, fundamental relief. "That's so, then?" But he now began to re-eye her with severe closeness, on behalf of an unknown somebody else. "All the same, what do you mean, you 'think,' though? As to a thing of that kind, surely you ought to _know__?" "Well, I do know--now." "Ha-ha: better.--May one ask who it is?" She told him, adding: "He's a cousin of a cousin." "Rather more than that, he's a brigadier, surely?" "Well, I know," she said, with a touch of the old irritation. "So you think this is an extraordinary thing for him to do?" "No, I wouldn't--" "--I agree, it's nice of him." "No, now, come, Stella, what I do mean's this: if this _is__ the case, this is quite a different affair. You've got yourself to take care of. What do you think you're doing skittering round in a top-floor flat on a night like this, with this heavy stuff coming down all over the place? Far from fair on the chap: you should think of him. You might not give a damn _what__ happened--I must say, you gave me that impression, first. Does that make sense, now you've got prospects?" "Prospects have alternatives." "Collect that cat, if you must, but if this keeps on you ought to think of cutting down to the hall." "I always have left things open.--As a matter of fact, though, I think the raid's over." "In that case..." said Harrison, looking at his watch. "Or would you rather I stayed till the All Clear?" Towards the end of that week of nights, Louie and Connie were doing their hair and faces, side by side, in front of the long horizontal mirror of the marbled subterranean Ladies of a West End caf6. This was about ten o'clock in the evening. Connie's work on herself was thorough; Louie had for some time stood in a vacuum, twiddling at her bow clip, before, turning away her head from her own reflection, she said that she was going to have a baby. Connie continued work on her fringe. "Oh, you never listen to what I say!" "You're always saying _something"__ grumbled her friend, groping around the basin for invisible hairpins. "What is it now?" "I said--it looks as if I was going to have a baby." Connie hissed: "Shut up!--Where do you think we are?" She cast a wary rapid look round the place. Louie, however, had not chosen her moment as badly as it seemed--no other ladies happened to be down here. "The things you think of! However could--?" All the same, slowly she put her comb down. Their eyes met in the glass. Less in despair than fatalism, Connie exclaimed: "Well, you _have__ been a silly girl.... Haven't you?" Louie, as though in extenuation, said: "Well, it's been on my mind." "I told and told you! Nature's ever so sharp!" Louie, not without dignity, assented: she hung her head. Connie, in a mechanical stunned way, amassed the rest of the hairpins and pronged them back into different curls of her