The Death of the Heart (29 page)

“Wait a moment—damn I I’ve got a stone in my shoe.”

“I have, too, as a matter of fact.”

“Why didn’t you say so, silly? Why suffer away?”

They sat down on a roll of beach and each took a shoe off. The light from the lighthouse swept round to where they sat, and Portia said: “I say, you’ve got a hole in your sock.”

“Yes. That lighthouse is like the eye of God.”

“But are you frightening, do you really think?”

“You ask such snubbing questions. You mean I make a fuss. I suppose, that I’m I at all is just a romantic fallacy. It may be vulgar to feel that I’m anyone, but at least I’m sure that I’m not anyone else. Of course we have all got certain things in common, but a good deal that we have in common is dreadful. When I so much hate so much I see in myself, how do you expect me to tolerate other people? Shall we move on, darling? I love sitting here like this, but these pebbles hurt my behind.”

“Yes, they hurt mine rather, as a matter of fact.”

“I do hate it when you are a dear little soul— It’s sweet to be here with you, but I don’t feel really happy.”

“Have you not had a nice week in London, then?”

“Oh, well—Thomas gives me five pounds a week.”

“Good gracious!”

“Yes, that is what brains cost by the pound … I nearly got another stone in my shoe: I think we’d better get back to the promenade. Who lives all along there?”

“Those are just lodging-houses. Three of them are to let.”

They climbed back on to the esplanade, faced round 
and started back to Waikiki. “All the same,” said Portia, “don’t you think Mrs. Heccomb is very nice?”

On a gust of at once excellent spirits Eddie swept in upon Daphne and Dickie, who with the wireless on were standing about the hearth. They looked at him doubtfully. He exchanged a manly handshake with Dickie, and with Daphne a bold look. Then Mrs. Heccomb came downstairs, and Daphne at once adopted her policy of addressing striking remarks only to her. Above the wireless going full blast, Mrs. Heccomb and Daphne agreed that supper ought to be early, as some of the party wished to go to a movie.

Daphne bawled: “And Clara’s going to meet us there.”

Dickie did not react.

“I say, Clara’s coming along to meet us.”

Dickie looked up coldly from the
Evening Standard
to say: “This is the first I have heard of that.”

“Well, don’t be so silly. Clara’ll probably pay.”

Dickie grunted and stooped down to scratch his ankle, as though an itch
were
a really urgent matter. For a minute Daphne’s eyes, dull with consideration, seemed to be drawn right into her face. Then she said to Portia: “You and your friend coming?” and shot her most nonchalant look into the mantelpiece mirror behind Eddie’s ear.
“
Shall
we, Eddie?” said Portia, kneeling up on the sofa. At once Eddie dropped into her eyes the profoundest of those quick glances of his. A peaceful malicious smile illuminated his features as he continued not to look Daphne’s way. “If we really are invited,” he yelled back above the music, “it would be quite divine.”

“Do you really want us, Daphne?”

“Oh, it’s all the same to
me.
I mean,
just
as you like.”

So directly after supper they set out. They stopped at Wallace’s house to pick up Wallace, then marched, five abreast, down the asphalt walk to the town. It was dark under the trees and the lights twinkled ahead. A breath mounted from the canal as they trooped over the foot bridge with a clatter; through an evergreen grove the Grotto Cinema glittered its constellation of gold, red, blue. Clara, with her most sacrificial expression, waited by a palm in the foyer, wearing a mink coat. There was polite confusion at the box office window, where Dickie, Wallace and, less convincingly, Eddie all made gestures of preparing to stand treat. Then Clara bobbed up from under Dickie’s elbow and paid for them all, as they had expected her to do. They filed down the dark aisle to seat themselves in this order—Clara, Dickie, Portia, Eddie, Daphne, Wallace. A comic was on the screen.

During most of the programme, Dickie was more oncoming with Portia than he was with Clara—that is to say, he put one elbow on Portia’s arm of his
fauteuil,
but did not put the other on Clara’s arm. He breathed heavily. Clara, during a brief hitch in the comic, said she hoped Dickie had had nice hockey. When poor Clara dropped her bead bag, money and all, she was left to recover it. Portia sat with eyes fixed on the screen—once or twice, as Eddie changed his position, she felt his knee touch hers. When this made her glance his way, she saw light from the comic flickering on his eyeballs. He sat with his shoulders forward, in some sort of close complicity with himself. Beyond Eddie, Daphne’s profile was tilted up correctly, and beyond Daphne comatose Wallace yawned.

Then the news ran through, then the big drama began. This keyed them all up, even the boys. Something distracted Portia’s mind from the screen—a cautiousness the far side of Eddie’s knee. She held her breath—and failed to hear Eddie breathe. Why did not Eddie breathe? Whatever could be the matter? She felt some tense extra presence, here in their row of six. Wanting to know, she turned to look full at Eddie—who at once countered her look with a bold blank smile glittering from the screen. The smile was diverted to her from someone else. On her side, one of his hands, a cigarette between the two longest fingers, hung down slack: she only saw one hand. Hitching herself up on her seat, she looked at the screen, beseechingly, vowing not to wonder, never to look away.

The screen became threatening with figures, which seemed to make a storm: she heard Clara let out a polite gasp. Proof against whatever more was to happen, Dickie heaved till he got his cigarette case out. Not ceasing to give the screen impervious attention, he selected a cigarette, closed his lips on it and re-settled his jaw. Then he started to make his lighter kick. When he had used the flame, he kindly looked down the row to see if anyone wanted a light too.

The jumping light from Dickie’s lighter showed the canyon below their row of knees. It caught the chromium clasp of Daphne’s handbag, and Wallace’s wrist watch at the end of the row. It rounded the taut blond silk of Daphne’s calf and glittered on some tinfoil dropped on the floor. Those who wanted to smoke were smoking: no one wanted a light. But Dickie, still with the flame jumping, still held the lighter out in a watching pause—a pause so marked that Portia, as though Dickie had sharply pushed her head round, looked to see where he looked. The light, with malicious accuracy, ran round a rim of cuff, a steel bangle, and made a thumb nail flash.

Not deep enough in the cleft between their
fauteuils
 
Eddie and Daphne were, with emphasis, holding hands. Eddie’s fingers kept up a kneading movement: her thumb alertly twitched at the joint.

THE
empty lodging house rustled with sea noises, as though years of echoes of waves and sea sucking shingle lived in its chimneys, its half open cupboards. The stairs creaked as Portia and Eddie went up, and the banisters, pulled loose in their sockets, shook under their hands. Warped by sea damp, the doors were all stuck ajar, and ends of torn wallpaper could be heard fluttering in draughts in the rooms. The front room ceilings glared with sea reflections; the back windows stared north over salt fields. Mr. Bunstable’s junior partner Mr. Sheldon had inadvertently left the key of this house at Waikiki the other night, when he had come in to cards. The key bore the label 5 Winslow Terrace: Dickie had found it; Eddie had had it from Dickie, and now Eddie and Portia let themselves in. There is nothing like exploring an empty house.

It was Sunday morning, just before eleven: the church bells from uphill came through the shut windows into the rooms. But Mrs. Heccomb had gone to church alone. Dickie had gone off to see a man about something; Daphne had stayed reading the
Sunday Pictorial
in a
chaise longue
in the sun porch—though there was no sun. She had set her hair a new way, in a bang over her forehead, and she had not so much as batted an eyelid as Eddie, steering Portia by one elbow, walked away from 
Waikiki down the esplanade.

The front top bedrooms here were like convent cells, with outside shutters hooked back. Their walls were mouldy blue like a dead sky, and looking at the crisscross cracks in the ceiling one thought of holiday people waking up. A stale charred smell came from the grates —Waikiki seemed miles away. These rooms, many flights up, were a dead end: the emptiness, the feeling of dissolution came upstairs behind one, blocking the way down. Portia felt she had climbed to the very top of a tree pursued by something that could follow. She remembered the threatening height of this house at the back, and how it had frightened her that first afternoon when she was in the taxi with Mrs. Heccomb. Today when they turned the key and pushed open the stuck door boldly, they had heard papers rustle in the hall. But it was not only here that she dreaded to be with Eddie.

He lighted a cigarette and leaned on the mantelpiece. He seemed to measure the small room with his eye, swinging the key from his finger on its loop of string. Portia went to the window, and looked out. “All these windows here have got double glass,” she said.

“A fat lot of good that would do if the house blew down.”

“Do you think it might really? … The bells have stopped.”

“Yes, you ought to be in church.”

“I went last Sunday—but it doesn’t really matter.”

“Then why go last Sunday, you little crook?”

Portia did not reply.

“I say, darling, you are funny this morning. Why are you being so funny with me?”

“Am I?”

“You know you are: don’t be so silly. Why?”

Her back turned, she mutely pulled at the window clasp. But Eddie whistled twice, so that she had to face him. By now, he had twirled the string round his finger so tight that the flesh, with its varnish of nicotine, stood out in ridges between. His eyes held behind their brightness a warning tense look, as though the end of the world were coming. Instinctively putting up one hand to her cheek, she looked at his teeth showing between his lips. He said: “Well?”

“Why did you hold Daphne’s hand?”

“When do you mean?”

“At the cinema.”

“Oh, that. Because, you see, I have to get off with people.”

“Why?”

“Because I cannot get on with them, and that makes me so mad. Yes, I noticed you gave me rather a funny look.”

“You mean, that time you smiled at me? Were you holding her hand then?”

Eddie thought. “Yes, I would have been, I expect. Were you worried? I thought you cut off rather early to bed. But I thought you always knew I was like that. I like touching, you know.”

“But I have never been there.”

“No, I suppose you haven’t.” He looked down and unwound the string from his finger. “No, you haven’t, have you,” he said much more affably.

“Was that what you meant on the beach when you said you never knew how you might behave?”

“And you shot back and wrote it down, I suppose?

I thought I had told you not to write down anything about me?”

“No, Eddie, it’s not in my diary. You only said it yesterday, after tea.”

“Anyhow, what you mean is not what I’d call behaving—it’s not even as important as that. It didn’t mean anything new.”

“But it did to me.”

“Well, I can’t help that,” he said, smiling reasonably. “I can’t help the way you are.”

“I knew something was happening before Dickie moved his lighter. I knew from the way you smiled.”

“For such a little girl, you know, you’re neurotic.”

“I’m not such a little girl. You once spoke of marrying me.”

“Only because you
were
such a little girl.”

“That it didn’t matter?”

“No, and I also thought you were the one person who didn’t take other people’s completely distorted views. But now you’re like any girl at the seaside, always watching and judging, trying to piece me together into something that isn’t there. You make me—”

“Yes, but why
did
you hold Daphne’s hand?”

“I just felt matey.”

“But … I mean … You knew me better.”

Eddie’s metallic mood broke up, or completely changed. He went across the room to the wall cupboard that he had fixed his eyes on, and carefully latched it. Then he looked round the room as though he had stayed here, and were about to remove his last belongings. He picked up his dead match and dropped it into the grate. Then he said vaguely: “Come on; let’s go down.”

“But did you hear what I said?”

“Of course I did. You’re always so sweet, darling.”

Going downstairs brought them one floor nearer the mild sound of the sea. Eddie stepped into the drawingroom for another look round. The margin of floor round where there had been a carpet was stained with reddish varnish, and in the woodwork over the bow window was a hook from which a birdcage must have hung.

Through the window the sea light shone on Eddie’s face as he turned quickly and said, in his lightest and gentlest way: “I can’t tell you how bad I feel. It was only my bit of fun. I honestly didn’t think you’d bother to notice, darling—or, that if you did, you’d ever think twice of it. You and I know each other, and you know how silly I am. But if it really upset you, of course it was awful of me. You really mustn’t be hurt, or I shall wish I was dead. This is just one more of the ways I keep on and on making trouble. I know I oughtn’t to say so, when I’ve just said I was sorry, but really, darling, it was such a small thing. I mean, you just ask old Daphne. It’s simply the way most people have to get on.”