The Death of the Heart (2 page)

“She said more about your being always polite. She does not seem to think you are a snake in the grass, though she sees a good deal of grass for a snake to be in. There does not seem to be a single thing that she misses, and there’s certainly not a thing that she does not mis-construct. In fact, you would wonder, really—How you do stamp, St. Quentin! Are your feet so cold? You make the bridge shake.”

St. Quentin, abstracted and forbidding, suggested: “We might walk on.”

“I suppose we ought to go in,” Anna admitted, sighing. “Though you see,
now,
why I’d rather not be at home?”

St. Quentin, stepping out smartly, showed one of his quick distastes for more of the lake scene. The cold was beginning to nip their features, and to strike up through the soles of their feet. Anna looked back at the bridge regretfully: she had not yet done saying what she began there. Leaving the lake behind them, they made for the trees just inside the park fence. The circle of traffic tightens at this hour round Regent’s Park; cars hummed past without a break; it was just before lighting-up time—quite soon the All Out whistles would sound. At the far side of the road, dusk set the Regency buildings back at a false distance: against the sky they were colourless silhouettes, insipidly ornate, brittle and cold. The blackness of windows not yet lit or curtained made the houses look hollow inside…St. Quentin and Anna kept inside the park railings, making towards the corner where she lived. Interrupted in what she had been saying, she swung disconsolately her black muff, walking not quite in step with him.

St. Quentin always walked rather too fast—sometimes as though he did not like where he was, sometimes as though resolved to outdistance any attraction of the hour or scene. His erect, rather forbidding carriage made him look old-fashioned, even military—but this was misleading. He was tall, wore his dark, rather furry hair
en brosse
, and had a small Gallic moustache. He entered rooms with the air of a man who, because his name is well known, may find himself involved in some situation from which his nature revolts—for writers find themselves constantly face to face with persons who expect to make free with them, and St. Quentin, apart from the slackish kindness he used with Anna and one or two other friends, detested intimacy, which, so far, had brought him nothing but pain. From this dread of exposure came his tendencies to hurry on, to be insultingly facile, to misunderstand perversely. Even Anna never knew when St. Quentin might feel he was being presumed upon—but he and she were on the whole on such easy terms that she had given up caring. St. Quentin liked her husband, Thomas Quayne, too, and frequented the Quaynes like a ghost who had once understood what married good feeling was. In so far as the Quaynes were a family, St. Quentin was the family friend. Today, unnerved by having said too much, breathless from the desire to say more, Anna wished that St. Quentin did not walk so fast. Her best chance to speak had been in keeping him still.

“How very unlike Thomas!” St. Quentin said suddenly.

“What is?”

“She must be, I mean.”

“Very. But look what different mothers they had. And poor Mr. Quayne, quite likely, never counted for much.”

St. Quentin repeated: 
‘“
So I am with them, in London.
’
 
That’s
what is so impossible,” he said.

“Her being with us?”

“Could it not have been helped?”

“Not when she had been left to us in a will—or in a dying request, which is not legal, and so worse. Dying put poor Mr. Quayne in a strong position for the first time in his life—or, at least, for the first time since Irene. 
Thomas felt very strongly about his father’s letter, and even I felt bound to behave well.”

“I do doubt, all the same, whether those accesses of proper feeling ever do much good. You were bound to regret this one. Did you really imagine the girl would enjoy herself?”

“If Mr. Quayne had had anything besides Portia to leave us, the situation might not have been so tricky. But anything that he died with went, of course, to Irene, then, after
her
death, to Portia—a few hundreds a year. With only that will to make, he could not make any conditions: he simply implored us to have his daughter in what seemed (when he was dead like that, when we got the letter) the most quavering voice. It was Thomas’s
mother
, you know, who had most of the money—I don’t think poor Mr. Quayne had ever made much—and when Thomas’s mother died her money came straight to us. Thomas’s mother, as no doubt you remember, died four or five years ago. I think, in some curious way, that it was her death, in the distance, that finished poor Mr. Quayne, though I daresay life with Irene helped. He and Irene and Portia, all more and more piano, trailed up and down the cold parts of the Riviera, till he caught a chill and died in a nursing home. A few days before he died, he dictated that letter to us about Portia to Irene, but Irene, detesting us—and I must say with some reason—put it away in her glove-box till she died herself. Of course, he had only meant it to come into effect in case of anything happening to Irene: he didn’t mean us to take the kitten from the cat. But he had foreseen, I suppose, that Irene would be too incompetent to go on living for long, and of course he turned out to be right. 
After Irene’s death, in Switzerland, her sister found the letter and posted it on to us.”

“What a number of deaths in Thomas’s familyl”

“Irene’s, of course, was a frank relief—till we got the letter and realised what it would mean. My heavens, what an awful woman she was!”

“It embarrassed Thomas, having a stepmother?”

“Irene, you know, was not what anybody would want at all. We tried to overlook that for Thomas’s father’s sake. He felt so much in the wrong, poor old man, that one had to be more than naturally nice to him. Not that we saw him much: I don’t think he felt it right to see very much of Thomas—because he so wanted to. He said something one day when we all had lunch at Folkestone about not casting a shadow over our lives. If we had made him feel that it didn’t matter, we should have sunk in his estimation, I’m sure. When we met—which I must confess was only two or three times—he did not behave at all like Thomas’s father, but like an off-the-map, seedy old family friend who doubts if he has done right in showing up. To punish himself by not seeing us became second nature with him: I don’t think he wanted to meet us, by the end. We came to think, in his own way he must be happy. We had no idea, till we got that letter of his, that he’d been breaking his heart, all those years abroad, about what Portia was missing—or, what he thought she was missing. He had felt, he said in the letter, that, because of being his daughter (and from becoming his daughter in the way that she had), Portia had grown up exiled not only from her own country but from
normal,
cheerful
family life. So he asked us to give her a taste of that for a year.” Anna paused, and looked at St. Quentin sideways. “He idealised us rather, you see,” she said.

“Would a year do much—however normal you were?”

“No doubt he hoped in his heart that we’d keep her on—or else, perhaps, that she’d marry from our house. If neither should happen, she is to go on to some aunt, Irene’s sister, abroad… . He only
spoke
of a year, and Thomas and I, so far, have not liked to look beyond that. There are years and years—some can be wonderfully long.”

“You are finding this one is?”

“Well, it seems so since yesterday. But of course I could never say so to Thomas—Yes, yes, I know: that
is
my front door, down there. But must we really go in just yet?”

“As you feel, of course. But you’ll have to some time. At present, it’s five to four: shall we cross by that other bridge and walk once more round the lake?—Though you know, Anna, it’s getting distinctly colder—After that, perhaps we might have our tea? Does your objection to tea (which I do frightfully want) mean that we’re unlikely to be alone?”

“She just might go to tea with Lilian.”

“Lilian?”

“Oh, Lilian’s her friend. But she hardly ever does,” jaid Anna, despondent.

“But look here, Anna, really—you must not let this get the better of you.”

“That’s all very well, but you didn’t see all she said. Also you know, you do always seem to think there must be some obvious way for other people to live. In this case there is really not, I’m afraid.”

Beside the crisscross diagonal iron bridge, three poplars stood up like frozen brooms. St. Quentin stopped on the bridge to tighten his scarf and shake himself down deeper into his overcoat—he threw a homesick glance up at Anna’s drawingroom window: inside, he saw firelight making cheerful play. “It all certainly does seem very complex,” he said, and with fatalistic briskness went on crossing the bridge. Ahead lay the knolls, the empty cold clay silence of inner Regent’s Park beneath a darkening sky. St. Quentin, not in an elemental mood, did not happily turn his back on a drawingroom as agreeable as Anna’s.

“Not even complex,” said Anna. “Stupid from the beginning. It was one of those muddles without a scrap of dignity. Mr. Quayne stayed quite devoted to his first wife—Thomas’s mother—and showed not the slightest wish to leave her whatever happened. Irene or no Irene, the first Mrs. Quayne always had him in the palm of her hand. She was one of those implacably nice women whose niceness you can’t get past, and whose understanding gets into every crack of your temperament. While he was with her he always felt simply fine—he had to. When he retired from business they went to live in Dorset, in a charmng place she had bought for him to retire to. It was after some years of life in Dorset that poor Mr. Quayne started skidding about. He and she had married so young—though Thomas, for some reason, was not born for quite a number of years—that he had had almost no time to be silly in. Also, I think, she must have hypnotised him into being a good deal steadier than he felt. At the same time she was a woman who thought all men are great boys at heart, and she took every care to keep him one. But this turned out to have its disadvantages. In the photographs taken just before the crisis, he looks a full-blooded idealistic old buffer. He looks impressive, silly, intensely moral, and as though he would like to denounce himself. She would never let him denounce himself, and this was rather like taking somebody’s toys away. He used to say her belief in him meant everything, but probably it frustrated him a good deal. It was rather slighting, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” said St. Quentin. “Possibly.”

“Have I told you all this before?”

“Not as a story. Of course, I’ve inferred some things from what you’ve said.”

“As a story it really is rather long, and in a way it makes me rather depressed…Well, what happened happened when Mr. Quayne was about fifty-seven, and Thomas at Oxford in his second year. They’d already been living in Dorset for some time, and Mr. Quayne seemed to be settled for the rest of his life. He played golf, tennis, bridge, ran the Boy Scouts and sat on several committees. In addition to that he had paved most of the garden, and when he’d done that she let him divert a stream. Much of his own company put him into a panic, so he was always dangling round after her. People in Dorset said it was good to see them together, because they were just like lovers. She had never cared very much for London, which was why she’d put pressure on him to retire young—I don’t think the business had amounted to much, but it was the one thing he’d had that was apart from her. But once she got him to Dorset, she was so nice that she was constantly packing him off to London—that is to say, about every two months—to stay at his club for a few days, see old friends or watch cricket or something. He felt pretty flat in London and always shot home again, which was very gratifying for her. Till one time, when for a reason that did not appear till later, he sent her a wire to say, might he stay on in London for a few days more? What had happened was that he had just met Irene, at a dinner party at Wimbledon. She was a scrap of a widow, ever so plucky, just back from China, with damp little hands, a husky voice and defective tear-ducts that gave her eyes always rather a swimmy look. She had a prostrated way of looking up at you, and that fluffy, bird’s-nesty hair that hairpins get lost in. At that time, she must have been about twenty-nine. She knew almost nobody, but, because she was so plucky, someone had got her a job in a flower shop. She lived in a flatlet in Notting Hill Gate, and was a protegee of his Wimbeldon friend’s wife’s. Mr. Quayne was put beside her at dinner. At the end of the party Mr. Quayne, all in a daze already, saw her back in a taxi to Notting Hill Gate, and was asked in for some Horlicks. No one knows what happened—still less, of course, why it did. But from that evening on, Thomas’s father lost his head completely. He didn’t go back to Dorset for ten days, and by the end of that time—as it came out later—he and Irene had already been very wicked. I often think of those dawns in Notting Hill Gate, with Irene leaking tears and looking for hairpins, and Mr. Quayne sitting up denouncing himself. His wife was much too nice to have pretty ways, but I daresay Irene had plenty—if that is how you like them. I’ve no doubt she made the most fussy capitulations; she would make him feel she had never fallen before—and I should think it’s likely she never had. She would not be everyone’s money. You may be sure that she let Mr. Quayne know that her little life was from now on entirely in his hands. By the end of those ten days he cannot have known, himself, whether he was a big brute or St. George.

“At all events, he arrived back in Dorset at once pensive and bouncing. He started in digging a lily pond, but at the end of a fortnight said something about a tailor, and went dashing off back to London again. This went on, apparently, all through that summer—he and Irene had met in May. When Thomas got back in June he noticed at once, he remembers, that his home was not what it was, but his mother never said anything. Thomas went abroad with a friend; when he got back in September his father was black depressed—it stood out a mile. He didn’t once go to London while Thomas was home, but the little person had started writing him letters.