‘Stop picking up ornaments and putting them down roughly. It is a thing Bertram does and fidgets me very much.’
‘Bertram?’
So artlessly, he straightened himself and frowned.
‘The old boy who is staying at the pub.’
‘Does he come here often?’
‘Oh, quite often.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t, Tory.’
‘Wouldn’t what?’
He almost said: ‘You will be gossiped about,’ and she smiled, just as if he had said it.
‘I shall have to go.’ ‘Words, words!’ he thought. ‘We try to put a barrier of words between us.’ He took her hands and drew her up from the sofa into one of those embraces they could neither endure nor forgo, which had no ending for them except by the limit of time or interruption from the outside world.
Now Mrs Bracey was convinced of treachery. Perhaps a glance from Maisie had been sufficient to induce the curate to the violation of his trust, the interception of messages, the frustration of her plans. At nine o’clock she sent Bertram off to follow up the note, watched her daughter’s face while she gave her instructions, and saw nothing there but indifference.
Bertram went on the errand quite willingly; an opportunity to see inside another door, he thought, ringing the Cazabons’ bell.
Prudence looked a little surprised, for no note had arrived, she said, and, half-turning back to the hall as if proving her words, saw the folded paper lying there by the umbrella-stand.
‘What a draught!’ Beth said, coming through an open door into the hall, loose papers flapping in her hand.
‘It is a message for Father,’ Prudence said.
‘Where is your father?’
‘I’ll fetch him,’ Prudence said suddenly, and rushed past Bertram and out through the front door, as if there were not a minute to be lost.
‘Well, please do come in and wait!’ Beth said to Bertram, with a faintly puzzled air, and she opened the door into the dining-room with a hospitable gesture, at once annulled, he thought, by the cheerless lake of table, the massive architecture of the sideboard, with its tarnished toast-racks and empty decanters.
‘If only there were hours and hours!’ Tory whispered. ‘These snatched-at fragments are death. A lingering death.’
They sat in the firelight, while Robert tried to break away, to make himself leave her; but his reluctance amounted to a physical pain such as a limpet must surely feel, he thought, when it is prised from the ledge of a rock.
He stroked her rounded forearm, laced her white fingers into his, and ran his thumb over her throbbing wrist and the beautiful flatness that came down from the back of her hand. Then the serenity, the delight he felt in doing so would be broken up by a sudden, mutual quickening of their blood, so that their fingers gripped desperately together and in the thickening silence oceans roared in their ears and the room was full of the sound of their hearts beating.
When the door-bell rang they seemed to spin apart, horror between them, and tried to scramble back to everyday life out of a pit of blackness.
Prudence, on the doorstep, noted how the dark windows were suddenly lit up, throwing oblongs of light over the pavement and a lunette of yellow shining above the door. She dreaded the footsteps which came at last along the passage, the quick tap of Tory’s high heels and her voice thrown back to someone inside a room.
‘It must be Bertram,’ Tory had said and opened the door with a sort of bravado she could no longer sustain before Prudence. A mad plan for slamming the door in the girl’s face was rejected with an effort.
‘Why, Prudence—!’ she began.
‘I have a message for my father,’ Prudence said breathlessly, holding out the note but retaining it.
‘Come in, my dear.’
Tory became very grave and preceded the girl into the room so that she could at least meet Robert’s eyes with a flicker of warning in her own which made no difference except to reflect alarm.
Prudence came forward with the look of a sleep-walker, the note still held out in her hand.
‘What is it, Prue?’
‘A note from Mrs Bracey. It has only just been found in the hall.’
‘Have you been searching for me?’ he asked.
‘No, I came straight here,’ she said artlessly, telling him what he needed to know.
He had unfolded the note and stood reading it. Prudence kept quite still, looking down at a pale medallion upon the blue carpet, fixedly, as if the rest of the room had some power to frighten her. Tory (oh, so carelessly!) put up her hand and pressed in hair-pins.
‘I’ll go at once,’ Robert said, glancing at his watch. ‘Will you fetch the black case from the surgery, Prue?’
‘But it’s so late,’ Tory began, as soon as the girl had fled.
‘Mrs Bracey is one of my crosses. She might last for years, but if she is going to die it would be as well for me to be there and not here.’
‘How did Prue know?’
‘I can’t do this, Tory. At times like this, the enormity of it all seems . . . and how hopeless, and cheap, and farcical.’
‘I know. I wonder what Beth imagines. And what am I to say?’
‘Nothing. Say nothing until I’ve thought. Just keep out of the way.’
As soon as he heard his own door slammed he went out to meet Prudence, to take the case from her, and hurry off, with nothing but a brief word of thanks to her.
‘Where did you find Robert?’ Beth asked.
‘He was just coming in,’ Prudence said. ‘I met him outside.’
‘I’ll heat some milk for him,’ Beth said. ‘He will be dreadfully tired. Poor Mrs Bracey. Are you going to bed, my dear?’
But Prudence had gone already. She walked slowly up the stairs, the cats going up lightly beside her, her hands covering her face and wet with tears.
‘What’s all this fuss about?’ Robert demanded. ‘You can change rooms if you want to without calling me out in the dead of night! Or must I carry you upstairs in my arms? Is that it?’
Beth would have been quite astonished by his robust manner. Tory would have been astonished, too.
‘Make doctor a cup of tea!’ Mrs Bracey called to Maisie, who half hesitated, waiting for his usual refusal. It did not come. For once he seemed in no hurry to be away, and Mrs Bracey, although delighting in this, noted the fact carefully.
He lingered over his tea, had a second cup, ate a biscuit, made a few jokes. When he went at last, she said: ‘Doctor’s in fine fettle to-night,’ and felt she was herself, full of excitement about the morrow.
As soon as he stepped outside, tiredness and depression dropped over him like a damp cloak.
10
Tory was right as well as unusual when she described her son Edward as an ordinary little boy. She did so not only because she believed it to be true, but partly because she was weary of all the mothers of her acquaintance claiming sensitive and highly-strung children, no matter how phlegmatic, even bovine, they might be.
Edward returned from school more or less the same as when he went away; cheerful, rigidly conservative, and lazy with the instinctive, deeply-rooted preserving laziness of a growing boy.
A feeling of wonderful security had enfolded him as he opened his bedroom door. The room seemed much smaller at first; the picture of ‘When Did You Last See Your Father?’ (over which Tory so grimly smiled) less brilliant in colour, less poignant in anxiety and noble falsehood.
The dormer window was above the cobbled yard Robert had mentioned so disparagingly and to which Tory had given – she hoped – a Continental air, with creeper on a trellis, a bay tree in a tub and two chairs of overwrought iron. Unfortunately, sheets of corrugated roofing, bright with rust, were plainly -visible above the wall, on the other side of which they made a shelter for crates and empty barrels at the pub.
After the vast asphalt of the school yard, the flat vistas of playing-fields, it was a relief to have the eye checked, the pace slowed, by cramped surround
ings. Detail entrances a child and warms his imagination and at school there is a dearth of detail, so that the imagination loses its glow and often dies. Edward found newly exquisite the prettiness of his mother’s house, the collection of blue glass, the copper plates with their pinkish lights, the tongue-ferns lolling out between the stones of the garden wall, and, especially, perhaps, the detail of the food he ate – scatterings of parsley, radishes cut like water-lilies, the fleurons, the garnishings, and all the touches which distinguish private food from institutional.
‘And how does your son like school?’ Bertram asked, having looked in after breakfast, curious to see the boy. Edward, however, was up at the fish-market, standing on the slimy stone floor and watching the baskets of cod and whiting being brought in.
‘He says it is not bad,’ Tory answered reservedly.
‘In fact, grounds for any other mother to say he has taken to it as a duck to water.’
Tory would not encourage him with a smile. She wanted only to be rid of him this morning so that she could attempt to untangle her thoughts as she had tried and failed to do during the night. She stood very still by the window, obviously waiting for him to go. Her instructions from Robert, to keep out of Beth’s way, would be simple enough, for Beth so seldom went out of the house; but she did feel all sorts of compulsions, which seemed to her vulgar and petty – the compulsion of telling lies, not in the grand manner, but in an intricacy of excuses, trivial explanations, distortions, all to be devised beforehand, and complicated by the necessity of making the same explanations and distortions as Robert; all this, moreover, to her dearest friend with whom there had been since childhood only clarity and candour and intimacy, and to Prudence, a young girl to whom it would be lowering to explain anything. Useless it would be, too, she must now admit, having considered during the long night, how hopeless her case was with Prudence, who had guessed at once where she might find her father and must have noticed that careless switching-on of lights before Tory opened the front door. Inadvertently, by her behaviour, and deliberately, by hints, she had shown how she felt herself to be confronted by their guilt.
As she stood there hoping that Bertram would go, she was horrified suddenly by the appearance of Beth, who had come out of her own house and now stood looking at the harbour, where the trawlers, closely packed in a small space, grated against one another, masts and funnels like a forest along the sea-wall.
‘Now here’s Beth!’ Tory said crossly, as if this were entirely Bertram’s fault. She felt in a great flurry and tried to will Beth away, moving discreetly from the window as she did so.
‘I must go,’ Bertram said. ‘I have a great job on hand to-day, and I could not mean that more literally. This afternoon young Flitcroft and I are to carry Mrs Bracey upstairs. Perhaps this is the last time you will see me as I am.’
Tory laughed at last. ‘It will be a lesson to you not to romanticise yourself, nor to see poetry in people in whom it does not exist. Even Rembrandt didn’t have to carry those fat old women about. I could not be more delighted.’ She moved to the door as Beth rang the bell. She was determined now, in spite of having had no time to lay the lies out ready in her mind, to seem at her gayest, most self-possessed, and she crossed the hall and opened the door, still smiling.
Beth’s gravity smote her heart.
‘Well, now!’ said Bertram, coming into the hall after her, bowing to Beth. ‘I will go and collect some strength together, prepare myself.’
‘What does he mean?’ Beth asked after he had gone.
‘He has to help Mrs Bracey upstairs this afternoon; or rather carry her up as a dead weight. I can’t imagine how it is to be done. And as soon as she’s there, no doubt she’ll want to be moved down again.’
They had drifted back into the little sitting-room. Beth sat down at an angle to the table, suggesting that her call was of a temporary nature. Tory waited, her heart lurching about drunkenly. She turned away to light a cigarette.
Beth launched upon one of her long explanations and was a good way through it before Tory realised that favours were being asked of her, and favours of a safe and trivial kind.
‘. . . And it would mean staying the night in London,’ Beth was saying. ‘If I were to do any shopping as well . . .’
Tory looked blank at her.
‘If you could keep an eye on Stevie . . .’
‘Of course.’
‘And perhaps have her in to lunch . . .’
Beth floundered wretchedly, awaiting the generous offers she had been so sure of, so sure, that she had not prepared herself for asking each favour separately. Then suddenly Tory warmed and thawed and smiled.
‘My dear Beth, she shall come for as long as you like and be welcome every minute of it. Don’t dream of coming home until you want to. You deserve a change.’
And then again Beth saw the warmth fade even from Tory’s face, which paled. She was like one of those spring days, full of flooding sunshine and curt showers.
‘Whom did you say you have to see?’
‘My publisher,’ Beth said, surprised at having to repeat what she had already explained.
‘Oh, yes. Then you can make a day of it, as they say, go to the theatre afterwards to cheer yourself up . . .’
‘I said “publisher”, not dentist.’
‘Oh, well . . . And buy yourself something beautiful – a new summer hat.’
Beth smiled at Tory’s idea of a good day out.
‘But don’t come back with string bags full of children’s shoes,’ Tory went on, ‘or I shall be quite cross. When did you say it was to be?’
‘To-morrow. I don’t believe you are listening to a word I say.’
‘My thoughts run on at once to all the important things, you see – what you are going to buy and what you are going to wear.’
‘My green suit, I thought.’
‘Oh, no! You look all behind in that. I always knew it was a mistake.’
‘Well, I am all behind. It’s because I sit on it so much. I can’t disguise it.’
‘But of course you can. Everybody else does.’
‘What does it matter? I’m middle-aged,’ Beth said tactlessly. ‘I don’t care any longer.’
‘Nonsense. You’re the same age as me. I will lend you a corset and my new hat.’
‘It sounds,’ said Beth, ‘like one of those indecent slot-machines “The Secrets of an Actress”. There is one at the Fun Fair, Prudence told me – a pack of fading postcards flicking over, showing a woman unlacing some black stays . . .’
‘Oh, I know! And as soon as she gets them unlaced she skips behind a screen and throws them over the top, and then there is a prim click and that’s all. Edward is very fond of it, although he can’t possibly appreciate its daring.’
‘Where is Edward?’ Beth glanced round as if he might possibly have been overlooked.
‘He went out early to watch the fishing-fleet come in.’
‘Oh . . . well, then!’ Beth hesitated and then stood up. ‘If you are quite sure about to-morrow . . . I am sorry to have to ask you when I have a grown-up daughter, but Prue is behaving so strangely . . .’
‘Prue!’ Tory said coldly, alarmed now that she had not escaped after all.
‘She is so rude to Robert, as if she had some grudge against him. She sits and stares at him at mealtimes, and yet won’t meet his glance. Her manner is – uncomfortable. She is like a thorn-tree encased in ice.’ Beth spread the fingers of one hand along the edge of the table and seemed to consider them, while in reality she reconsidered her simile. ‘Yes!’ She raised her eyes and smiled and Tory saw in them a little flicker of pleasure, of triumph, even, soon filmed over by anxiety.
‘I think she ought to go away, you know,’ she heard herself telling Beth. She was shocked at herself, had never imagined that she could sink to such treachery or scheming or lack of compassion. The vulgar voice of rationalisation whispered: ‘It’s true. She ought to go . . .’, but she was still too proud to listen to it, a
nd brushed the words aside with shame and impatience.
‘Robert won’t hear of it,’ Beth said in the proud, complacent way some wives describe their husband’s obstinacies. ‘He says she’s much too delicate to go away at present.’
As she was taking leave she suddenly asked with the direct attack dreamy people can often use with good result: ‘This . . . Bertram, is it? . . . is he fond of you?’
‘He appears to be.’
‘And what do you think of him?’
Tory’s instinct was at once to laugh, but that new acuity she despised in herself enforced a sort of coy hesitation, and she shrugged her shoulders in an expressive way, yet without knowing what it signified, only conscious of a desire to fog poor Beth and foist on her imagination notions of romance, of relationships which were welcome and permissible.
Beth, to whom human nature was an open book, which, moreover, she would finish writing herself, could see through her friend’s hesitation and drew in her cheeks with a sly smile. This Tory noticed with a confusion of feelings, despising Beth for her lack of perception and herself for misleading her; and, above all, annoyed that a romantic attachment for an old man should be so easily attributed to her.
‘So you would consider that a good match?’ she asked frostily.
‘You couldn’t make a good match. You would always be throwing yourself away, my dear, as you threw yourself away upon Teddy.’
‘Oh, Beth, you are the sort of person who insists on making gallant speeches at weddings and on the other side of every compliment is an insult for somebody or other. Come in this evening and let me dress you up for to-morrow! We will have some good fun trying clothes on.’
‘You shall not dress me up as a girl of seventeen,’ Beth insisted.
‘It is beyond me how tactless you are!’ Tory laughed.
When Beth had gone, Tory leant for a moment against the inside of the front door. ‘If I throw away Beth,’ she told herself, ‘I throw away my best chance of happiness.’ And she felt that that must answer the hedonists, since we do not appear to seek what will give us pleasure, nor to feel ourselves satisfied by mere happiness.
A View of the Harbour Page 15