The Woman Who Had Imagination (18 page)

‘How d'ye do, Mrs. Abrahams?' said Phillips, shaking hands; and catching in a flash the feeling of cool distance in her outstretched hand: ‘I'll bet you wondered what the tide had washed up, didn't you, Mrs. Abrahams?'

‘I did wonder,' she said, ‘what all the laughter was about.'

‘Oh! Mr. Phillips is a case,' said Abrahams. ‘He's a fair caution. I haven't laughed so much for years.'

‘Ah! but be careful,' said Phillips. He advanced, and tapping Abrahams waistcoat, said with a mock seriousness that set Abrahams tittering again: ‘Do you know, sir, that the valves of your heart are worn out? Yes sir, worn out. Absolutely finished. You may go pop any minute. Punctured.'

And as Abrahams wiped the tears of laughter from his eyes Rose smiled a small, half-stiff, half-indulgent smile with unparted lips.

At the lunch table Phillips was irrepressible. He was a rather small, fleshy man, with a cherubic face and little vivid eyes that shone and quivered like blue glass marbles, with ecstatic joviality. His face was the face of a true comedian. He was never still, never silent. His eyes travelled electrically everywhere, untiringly, in search of fresh jokes, jokes which, when they came, might have been in bad taste, but for some reason never were. Rose sat at first aloof and frigid, as though ready to freeze the first germ of indelicacy or blasphemy, but it never came. ‘The wages of gin,'
said Phillips once, taking up his water to drink, ‘is breath.' Her face stiffened, then, with its first and only sign of offence, a sign that was lost on both Phillips and Abrahams, laughing into their serviettes. After that she sat a little less strained and less upright, though still with a shadow of severity in her face, her smiles mere polite motions of her thin lips. Phillips saw this, and as though it were all a game in which she must keep her lips set and smiling while he tried to make her smile in spite of it, he began to direct his jokes at her. It flattered her subtly and gradually, in spite of herself, she felt warmer and more tolerant of him, and at last she broke out softly, ‘Oh! Mr. Phillips, you're too bad!'

‘You'll laugh, Mrs. Abrahams, you'll laugh if you're
not
careful,' cried Phillips. ‘You'll laugh, as sure as my name's Napoleon. You will — I warn you. You'll laugh. Now, now! — smile but don't laugh. Smile —' he threw his serviette over his head, like a photographer, his voice comically muffled, —
‘smile
please. That's it — now hold it — the left hand clasped on the right — splendid — exquisite — how delighted
he
will be — enchanting! Hold it — one — moment — tchtk!'

He threw the serviette off his head, making gestures of mock despair. ‘But you
laughed
— you
laughed
,' he cried.

‘Oh dear,' she said, her face flushed and her eyes moist with confusion and laughter. ‘And no wonder.'

‘Ah! didn't I tell you he was a case!' cried Abrahams.

‘Oh! how silly of me,' said Rose, wiping her eyes.

Phillips was still making them laugh, Rose still half against herself, when they went down to the lake in the afternoon. Rose was unprepared to go, but first Abrahams and then Phillips insisted, Abrahams saying:

‘It's really my wife's idea — she first saw how it could be done.'

‘Oh, no, really,' said Rose.

‘Now, now, Mrs. Abrahams,' Phillips joked. ‘Come, come. Don't be afraid. The big man will pull out the nasty tooth and then it will all be over.'

‘Really you could do much better without me,' she said.

But she went with them, protesting a little out of politeness and biting her lips or twisting them in order to keep her laughter quite circumspect. By the lake the kingcups had opened wide, their yellow petals glistening as though varnished, and further up the slopes of grass, in the damp places, the first lady smocks trembled, tenderest mauve, still half shut, on fragile stems. In the hollow by the flood water the sun was quite hot, and Rose, sitting down on an elm-bole again, could hear spring in the silence, a silence broken only by the singing of larks, far up, and the trickling of the waterfall, both very sweet and soft, the water faintest, like an echo of the birds.

While she sat there, Abrahams and the engineer surveyed the stream, made notes, took measurements,
and at intervals laughed a great deal. When they returned to her Abrahams was simmering with enthusiasm, like a boy — it could be done, the thing could be done, easily, just as she had said it could!

‘Not easily,' cried Phillips, serious for once. ‘It will take time — all summer.'

‘Time's nothing,' said Abrahams. ‘Nor money. I want the thing done, that's all.'

Phillips returned to the house for tea. Abrahams had taken a fancy to him, there was more laughter, and at last Abrahams suggested that Phillips, instead of driving backwards and forwards from the town each day, should come and spend the summer at the house with them. It would be so much easier, so much more convenient. Phillips seemed to hesitate and then said:

‘Could I fish in the lake?'

‘Fish? You're not joking? You can fish, swim, row — do anything.'

‘I should like to come then,' said Phillips.

Before the week was out he had brought over his belongings, and before the end of another week the work by the lake was in progress, a band of workmen arriving each morning in a lorry and Phillips driving down in his dilapidated car soon afterwards, to superintend. He rushed hither and thither all morning, electric, untiring, coming back to the house at noon to eat a hasty meal, flying off a joke or two, and then returning. Dumps of yellow clay and piles of pink
brick and wooden shacks for the workmen appeared by the lake and became visible from the house through the half-leafed trees.

Every afternoon, if it were fine, Rose and Abrahams walked down to watch the work. She, while Abrahams talked with Phillips, sat on the elm-bole and watched the workmen digging out the pure yellow clay, like stiff cheese, as they deepened and widened the trench which later would be the new water-course. Farther up they had dammed the stream and only a thin trickle of water came down the trench, so that the waterfall was soundless and dry.

On the first evenings, when the dusk still fell early and a little cold, Abrahams and Phillips would go into the billiard room and the click of the billiard balls would be drowned by their boisterous laughter until Rose at last would join them, ostensibly to see if they needed anything but in reality to share that laughter.

And gradually it became an unconscious habit to go down to the lake each afternoon and into the billiard room each evening. It was not until the evenings became longer and warmer and the two men began to play a game of bowls on the lawn that it became a conscious thing, something to which she looked forward. Realising it, she reproved herself at once, and she did not go down to watch the work for two afternoons. But first Phillips and then Abrahams noticed it and Phillips made gentle banter about it, half teasing. Strangely, she felt hurt, and the next
afternoon she went down to watch the work again. But Phillips was not there. When Abrahams explained that he had gone off on business for the afternoon she felt a spasm of unexpected disappointment that was almost a shock.

It was already early June, and Phillips had gone into town, not on business, but to fetch his fishing-tackle. In the evening and again the next evening he was at the lake and she did not see him until late. Coming back on the second evening he carried an immense basket, covered with green reeds, staggering along with it like a man with a load of lead. The basket was for her — an offering. He went through mock solemnities. At last, when she removed the reeds it was to reveal a roach, pink and silver, no bigger than a sardine. It was all that the basket contained. At the joke Abrahams and Phillips went off into explosive laughter.

It was a laughter in which, inexplicably, she could not join. She felt hurt again, and again without knowing why. It was as if they were laughing at her, and she could not bear it. She reproached herself: it was so silly, such a trivial thing. What was she thinking about? What was coming over her? Yet the sense of injury remained.

For a day or two she felt a strange resentment against Phillips. She went down to the lake, but she hardly spoke to him, and in the evenings his laughter irritated her. And suddenly she closed up, as into a
shell again, with all the old primness and straight-lipped austerity.

Phillips, as before, noticed it.

‘Have I done anything to offend you?' he said, one afternoon by the stream.

‘To offend me?' she said. ‘Why should I be offended?'

But the very tone of her voice was offended. As soon as he had walked away she hurried over the bridge, past the lake, and took the old path up to the rectory. At the top of the slope she sat down, in the sunshine, to regain her breath and think and come to a decision about it all. When she got up again she had solved the problem with the old formula and was half-content. It was her duty to behave differently to him. She would make amends. She would apologise. It was her duty to apologise.

Yet the days went past and she never apologised. She began to avoid Phillips and then, having avoided him, would feel wretched. He, absorbed in his fishing, seemed to take not the faintest notice of her.

She half made up her mind that if he spoke to her again she would make the fishing an excuse for her behaviour. He had begun to fish on Sundays. She objected to that. Yet, when he asked if she objected she said ‘No', as if she had not the heart to rob him of that pleasure. And so he fished all day on Sundays, taking food with him, sitting lost in the reeds that grew taller and ranker as the summer richened to
midsummer, and to the first arid days of July. Coming back in the evening there would be the same jocularity as ever, the same mocking play on something, the same roars of laughter from Abrahams. She sat aloof, as though it did not interest her. Then, after one intense cloudless blazing Sunday by the lake, Phillips returned in the evening without a single fish, not even a stickleback, not so much as an undergrown roach with which to play another joke on her.

For the first time since she had known him Phillips was silent, in absolute dejection. She could not resist the opportunity.

‘Well,' she said, ‘perhaps it will be a lesson to you.'

‘A lesson? — What in?'

‘A lesson not to abuse the sabbath.'

He burst into roars of laughter. ‘So you think the fish know Sunday when it comes!' he said.

There was no derision either in his words or his laughter. But she was bitterly hurt again. Yet it comforted her to go about nursing that sense of injury secretly.

Then also she hoped that he would, perhaps, take notice of what she had said and not go to the lake on the following Sunday. It would mean that he had, once at least, taken her seriously.

But the next Sunday, when she came down to breakfast, he had already gone. Hard and aloof, she put on her white gloves and went to church with Abrahams. It was nothing, she must forget it, it
meant nothing to her. But she was troubled and would not acknowledge it and by noon she had fretted herself into a strange state of misery which her denials only increased.

In the afternoon she could endure it no longer. She left Abrahams asleep and went out into the hot Sunday stillness, across the Terrace and down into the park. She had made up her mind: she would walk by the lake, he would see her, she would speak to him, there would be an end of it all.

As she walked along, in and out of the great tree shadows, she reasoned out what she would say. It seemed very simple: she would say that his violation of her dearest principles had hurt her. That was all. Not those very words, perhaps, but she would convey that. She would make him understand.

Before she was aware of it she was by the lake. Panic-stricken, she hurried along, looking straight ahead along the reed-fringed bank, never pausing once until she caught sight, on the opposite bank, of Phillips, in his shirt-sleeves, watching over his rod, the wet float flashing scarlet in the white sunlight. But she hurried along, terrified that he might see her or shout, never pausing even when she was out of sight.

Back at the house she was angry that he had not noticed her. She felt that he had seen her and then, purposely, with deliberate indifference, had ignored her. And then, illogically, she felt a moment of acute tenderness for him. Perhaps, after all, he had not seen
her, had been too absorbed even to look up. She must not misjudge him. It was her duty not to misjudge him.

For some weeks she went about half-comforted and half-troubled by the renewal of that anger and tenderness, not understanding either. Then one morning, at breakfast, Phillips declared:

‘Well, another week and you can turn on the new tap.'

She sat very straight in her chair, prim but intense.

‘Then you will be leaving us?' she said.

‘Yes — no more fishing on Sundays.'

She could not speak.

A week later the work of the lake was finished.

‘Mrs. Abrahams ought to pull the lever,' suggested Phillips.

‘Oh! no!' she said. ‘Really no.'

‘But that's only proper,' said Abrahams. ‘It was your idea. Yes, you pull the lever. We must do it properly.'

‘But I shouldn't be strong enough,' she protested desperately.

‘You don't need to be,' said Phillips. ‘I'll work it so that just a touch will be enough.'

‘It's easy,' said Abrahams. ‘Phillips will make it easy.'

She gave in. On the afternoon itself she walked down to the lake with Abrahams and Phillips. The first trees were turning yellow, a few leaves floated about the still lake, and the air was very quiet. An
odd workman or two stood about and she felt very nervous. Phillips had arranged it so that she should raise a lever and that the old dam should collapse and release the water. It was very simple.