The Death of the Heart (4 page)

Matchett’s voice was flat and dispassionate: when she had done she folded her lips exactly. Letting her hair fall forward to hide her face from Matchett, Portia stooped over the table, getting her books together. Books under her arm, she stood waiting to go up.

“All I mean is,” went on Matchett, “don’t give her more to pick on. Not for a day or two, till it passes off.”

“But what was she doing in my room?”

“I suppose she just took the fancy. It’s her house, like it or not.”

“But she always says it’s my room…Has she touched things?”

“How would I know? What if she did? You didn’t ought to have secrets, at your age.”

“I noticed some toothpowder had come off the top of one of my bears’ cakes, but I thought that was the draught. I suppose I ought to have known. Birds know if you have been at their eggs: they desert.”

“And, pray, where would you desert to?—You’d better go on up, if you don’t want her and Mr. Miller right in on top of you. They’ll be in early, likely, with this cold.”

Portia, sighing, started up to her room. The solid stone staircase was so deep in carpet that her feet made no sound. Sometimes her elbow, sometimes her school-girlish overcoat, unbuttoned, brushed on the white wall. When she got to the first landing, she leaned down. “Will Mr. St. Quentin Miller be having tea?”

“Why not?”

“He talks so much.”

“Well, then, he won’t eat you. Don’t you be so silly.”

Portia went on up, up the next flight. When the bedroom door had been heard shutting, Matchett returned to the basement. Phyllis was darting about in her saucy new cap, getting ready the tray for drawingroom tea.

When Anna, with St. Quentin on her heels, came into the drawingroom it appeared to be empty—then by the light of one distant lamp and the fire they perceived Portia, sitting on a stool. Her dark dress almost blotted her out against a dark lacquer screen—but now she rose up politely, to shake hands with St. Quentin. “So here you are,” said Anna. “When did you get back?”

“Just now. I’ve been washing.”

St. Quentin said: “How dirty lessons must be!”

Anna went on, with keyed-up vivacity: “Had a nice day?”

“We’ve been doing constitutional history, musical appreciation and French.”

“Goodness!” said Anna, glancing at the tea-tray set inexorably with three cups. She switched on all the other lamps, dropped her muff in a chair, came out of her fur coat, and peeled off the two
tricots
she had worn under it. Then she looked round with these garments hanging over her arm. Portia said: “Shall I put those away for you?”

“If you would be angelic—look, take my cap as well.”

“How obliging …” St. Quentin said, while Portia was out of earshot. But Anna, propping her elbow on the mantelpiece, looked at him with implacable melancholy. In the pretty air-tight room with its drawn aquamarine curtains, scrolled sofa and half-circle of yellow chairs, silk-shaded lamps cast light into the mirrors and on to Samarkand rugs. There was a smell of freesias and sandalwood: it was nice to be in from the cold park. “Well,” St. Quentin said, “we shall all be glad of our tea.” Loudly sighing with gratification, he arranged himself in an armchair—crossed his legs, tipped up his chin, looked down his nose at the fire. By sitting like this, he exaggerated the tension they had found in the room, outside which he consciously placed himself. Everything nearly was so pleasant—Anna rapped on the marble with her fingernails.

He said: “My dear Anna, this is only one of what will be many teas.”

Portia came back again; she said: “I put your things on your bed: was that right?” For tea, she returned to her stool by the fire; here she sat with her plate on her knees, her cup and saucer on the parquet beside her—when she drank she stooped half way to meet her cup. Sideways on to the hearth she commanded an equal view of Anna on the sofa, pouring out tea and smoking, of St. Quentin constantly wiping buttered toast from his fingers on to his handkerchief. Her look, steady, level and unassuming, missed nothing the other two did. Once the telephone rang: Anna crossly reached round the end of the sofa to answer it.

“Yes, it is,” she replied. “But I’m not here at teatime; I never am; I told you. I thought this was when you were so busy? Surely you ought to be?… .Yes, of course I have… .Must you really?… .Well six, then, or half-past.”

“A quarter-past,” put in St. Quentin, “I’m going at six.”

“A quarter-past,” Anna said, and hung up with no change of face. She sat back again on the sofa. “Such affectation …”

“Oh, no?” said St. Quentin. They just glanced at each other.

“St. Quentin, your handkerchief’s terribly buttery.”

“Your excellent toast …”

“You wave it about so much—Portia, do you really like a stool without any back?”

“I like this particular stool—I walked all the way home, Anna.”

Anna did not reply; she had forgotten to listen. St. Quentin said: “Did you really? We just walked in the park. The lake’s frozen,” he added, cutting himself some cake.

“Well, it can’t be
quite:
I saw swans swimming about.”

“You are quite right: it’s not frozen completely. Anna, what
is
the matter?”

“I’m sorry, I was just thinking. I hate my lax character. I hate it when people take advantage of it.”

“I’m afraid we can’t do much about your character now. It must have set—I know mine has. Portia’s so lucky; hers is still being formed.”

Portia fixed St. Quentin with her blank dark eyes. An alarming vague little smile, already not quite childish, altered her face, then died. She went on saying nothing—St. Quentin rather sharply recrossed his legs. Anna bit off a yawn and said: “She may become anything… .Portia, what hundreds of bears you’ve got on your mantelpiece. Do they come from Switzerland?”

“Yes. I’m afraid they collect dust.”

“I didn’t notice the dust; I just thought what hundreds there were. All hand-carved, I suppose, by the Swiss peasants. … I went in there to hang up your white dress.”

“If you’d rather, Anna, I could put them away.”

“Oh no, why? They seemed to be having tea.”

The Quaynes had a room-to-room telephone, which, instead of ringing, let out a piercing buzz. It buzzed now, and Anna put out a hand, saying: “That must be Thomas.” She unhooked. “Hullo?… .Yes, St. Quentin is, at the moment… .Very well, darling, soon.” She hung up the receiver. “Thomas is back,” she said.

“You might have told him that I am just going. Does he want anything special?”

“Just to say he is in.” Anna folded her arms, leaned her head back, looked at the ceiling. Then: “Portia,” she said, “why don’t you go down to Thomas in the study?”

Portia lit up. “Did he say for me to?” she said.

“He may not know you are in. He’d be ever so pleased, I’m sure… .Tell him I’m well and will come down as soon as St. Quentin goes.”

“And give Thomas my love.”

Getting up from the stool carefully, Portia returned her cup and plate to the tray. Then, holding herself so erect that she quivered, taking long soft steps on the balls of her feet, and at the same time with an orphaned unostentation, she started making towards the door. She moved crabwise, as though the others were royalty, never quite turning her back on them—and they, waiting for her to be quite gone, watched. She wore a dark wool dress, in Anna’s excellent taste, buttoned from throat to hem and belted with heavy leather. The belt slid down her thin hips, and she nervously gripped at it, pulling it up. Short sleeves showed her very thin arms and big delicate elbow joints. Her body was all concave and jerkily fluid lines; it moved with sensitive looseness, loosely threaded together: each movement had a touch of exaggeration, as though some secret power kept springs ing out. At the same time she looked cautious, aware of the world in which she had to live. She was sixteen, losing her childish majesty. The pointed attention of St. Quentin and Anna reached her like a quick tide, or an attack: the ordeal of getting out of the drawingroom tightened her mouth up and made her fingers curl—her wrists were pressed to her thighs. She got to the door, threw it ceremonially open, then turned with one hand on it, proudly ready to show she could speak again. But at once, Anna poured out another cup of cold tea, St. Quentin flattened a wrinkle out of the rug with his heel. She heard their silence till she had shut the door.

When the door shut, St. Quentin said: “Well, we might do better than that.
You
did not do well, Anna—raving about those bears.”

“You know what made me.”

“And how silly you were on the telephone.”

Anna put down her cup and giggled. “Well, it is something,” she said, “to be written up. It’s something that she should find us so interesting. If you come to think of it, we are pretty boring, St. Quentin.”

“No, I don’t think I’m boring.”

“No, I don’t either. I mean, I don’t think I am. But she does, if you know what I mean, rather bring us up to a mark. She insists on our being something or other—what, I’m not quite sure.”

“A couple of cads—What a high forehead she’s got.”

“All the better to think about you with, my dear.”

“All the same, I wonder where she got that distinction. From what you say, her mother was quite a mess.”

“Oh, the Quaynes have it: one sees it in Thomas, really,” Anna said—then, palpably losing interest, curled up at her end of the sofa. Raising her arms, she shook her sleeves back and admired her own wrists. On one she wore a small soundless diamond watch. St. Quentin, not noticing being not noticed, went on: “High foreheads suggest violence to me… .Was that Eddie, just now?”

“On the telephone? Yes. Why?”

“We know Eddie is silly, but why must you talk to him in such a silly way? Even if Portia
were
here. ‘I’m not here; I never am here.’
Tcha!”
said St. Quentin. “Not that it’s my affair.”

“No,” Anna said. “I suppose it isn’t, is it.” She would have said more, had not the door opened and Phyllis sailed in to take away the tea. St. Quentin looked at his handkerchief, frowned at the butter on it and put it away igain. They did not pretend to talk. When tea had gone, Anna said: “I really ought to go down and talk to Thomas. Why don’t you come too?”

“No, if he’d felt like me,” said St. Quentin, without resentment, “he’d have come up here. I shall go very soon.”

“Oh, I wanted to ask you—how is your book going?”

“Very nicely indeed, thank you very much,” said he promptly, extremely repressively. He added with some return of interest: “What happens when you go down? Do you turn Portia out?”

“Out of her brother’s study? How ever could I?”

Thomas Quayne had been standing near the electric fire, holding a tumbler, frowning, trying to shake the day off, when his half-sister came round the study door. Her face—hair back in a snood from the high temples, wide-apart unfocusing dark eyes—seemed to swim towards him over the reading lamp. To come in here at all was an act of intimacy, for this was Thomas’s own room. He never studied down here, except in so far as his relaxation was studied, but the room had been called the study to suggest importance and quiet. It had matt grey walls, Picasso-blue curtains, armchairs and a sofa covered in striped ticking, tables for books, book-shelves, and a desk as large as a dinner-table. Having heard a step that was not Anna’s, Thomas ground his feet pettishly into the goat’s-hair rug.

“Oh, hullo, Portia,” he said. “How are you?”

“
Anna
said you might like me to come down.”

“What’s Anna doing?”

“Mr. Miller is there. They’re not doing anything special, I don’t think.”

Shaking what was left of the drink round in his glass, Thomas said: “I seem to be back early.”

“Are you tired?”

“No. No, I just got home.”

Portia stood with her hand on the back of an armchair; she ran one finger along a dark red stripe, then a grey stripe, looking down at the finger attentively. Then, as Thomas said nothing more, she came round the chair and sat down—drew up her knees, nursed her elbows and stared forward into the red concavity of the electric fire. At the other end of the hearth-rug Thomas sat down also, and remained also staring, but staring at nothing, with a concentration of boredom and lassitude. Anyone other than Anna being near him, anyone other than Anna expecting something gave Thomas, at this time of the evening, a sense of pressure he could hardly endure. He liked best, at this time of the evening, to allow his face to drop into blank lines. Someone there made him feel bound to give some account of himself, to put on some expression or other. Actually, between six and seven o’clock he thought or felt very little.

“It’s freezing,” he unwillingly said at last. “It bites your face off, out there.”

“Yes, it nearly bit mine off—and my hands too. I walked all the way home.”

“Do you know if Anna went out?”

“I think she walked in the park.”

“Mad,” said Thomas, with an intimate pleasure. He brought out his cigarette case and looked into it flatly: it was empty. “Would you mind,” he said, “passing that cigarette box—No, just there by your elbow—What did you do today?”