She sat with her eyes closed and the train seemed to stretch itself and gather its great length forward out of the fish-smelling station to the open sky along the shoulders of cliffs.
‘A man,’ she thought suddenly, ‘would consider this a business outing. But, then, a man would not have to cook the meals for the day overnight, nor consign his child to a friend, nor leave half-done the ironing, nor forget the grocery order as I now discover I have forgotten it. The artfulness of men,’ she thought. ‘They implant in us, foster in us, instincts which it is to their advantage for us to have, and which, in the end, we feel shame at not possessing.’ She opened her eyes and glared with scorn at a middle-aged man reading a newspaper.
‘A man like that,’ she thought, ‘a worthless creature, obviously; yet so long has his kind lorded it that I (who, if only I could have been ruthless and single-minded about my work as men are, could have been a good writer) feel slightly guilty at not being back at the kitchen-sink.’
The man began to shift uneasily under her scrutiny, to fold his arms and clear his throat and glance out of the window; so Beth, coming again to her senses, took out her writing things and wrote Chapter Eighteen at the head of a page. But she could not go on. Her spirits were too low to describe Allegra’s death. She had looked forward to it so much, but now as she watched fields flying by, wondering where to begin, it was not Allegra’s face which interposed, but Stevie’s, crimson and tear-furrowed.
‘I am sorry to be so rude and inquisitive,’ Stevie said, going quickly through Tory’s handbag. ‘What a dear little silver box!’
‘I thought, by-the-bye,’ Tory began coldly, ‘that you behaved pretty meanly to your mother just now.’
‘You see, I wanted to go to London.’
‘She never has a day off from you.’
‘I never have a day off from her, either.’
‘Well, you have got one now.’
‘I didn’t want it. Look at this photograph of Edward.’
‘Don’t try to change the subject. What I am trying to say is that you have made your mother set out unhappily on her day’s pleasure.’
‘She will soon cheer up.’
‘I don’t think so. Grown-ups don’t cheer up as quickly as children do.’
‘If she is miserable without me, she could have taken me with her,’ Stevie said, exhausted by this absurd argument. ‘I wanted to see Peter Pan again.’
‘Peter Pan is not on,’ said Tory, taking a false step.
‘Yes it is. They go on doing it all the time when I am not there, and as soon as they finish it they begin it all over again, but they have a cup of tea and go to be excused first. I wish my mother was like Mrs Darling.’
‘All children wish that. It is very unfair to their mothers, because she wasn’t much put to the test. Anyhow,’ Tory said quickly, recovering her false move, ‘her children let her go out. They didn’t make a scene and cry in the street.’
‘As soon as she’d gone they weren’t safe, though.’
‘Do you like the pink junket or just plain white?’ Tory inquired, getting up and going to the door.
If Stevie thought that Tory in her turn was changing the subject she was too polite to say so.
‘I like the pink,’ she replied, ‘but it is up to you.’
At eleven the sun came out. At eleven-thirty it was obscured. Later, it rained again. So it went on all day. Mrs Bracey enjoyed the sudden changes. Down below her on the broken pavement the puddles reflected the blue sky or the blown clouds. The baker’s van had dripped oil over the wet road and it lay there, a great iridescent splash of colour like a peacock’s feather, bronze and pink and green. Now the surface of the sea was dinted like beaten metal by the rain, or pitted, a few minutes later, by glancing sunlight.
At tea-time the fleet put out again towards the fishing-grounds. She watched the trawlers as they were steered towards the mouth of the harbour, one after another until they were all spread out upon the open sea, and in the harbour there were only the coloured rowing-boats rocking to and fro on the littered water, and gulls.
Mrs Flitcroft came out on to the front steps of the Cazabons’ house and waved a duster at the first trawler and then, seeing a neighbour from Lower Harbour Street, where the shops were, stood and chatted for half an hour, her hands folded across her stomach, her head nodding up and down. Mrs Bracey watched her grimly.
That afternoon two strangers appeared on the quay. They walked out to the lighthouse, mackintoshes over their shoulders; two school-mistresses, Mrs Bracey decided, watching them. One had a walking-stick with which she pointed out to the other places of interest along the coastline, also the church tower. At four o’clock they entered – rather dubiously – the Mimosa Café for a pot of tea. Lily Wilson, sweeping mice-dirts out of her window, rearranging the show cards, smiled to herself as she watched them. The first visitors.
It had been an exciting day, beginning for Mrs Bracey with Stevie’s scene of farewell in the morning and ending now (when Maisie came to draw the blind later in the evening) with a French sailor strolling along outside at the water’s edge and entering the Anchor.
But after that it was a dull evening, a long wait for Iris to bring news, no visitors, and Maisie downstairs ironing. ‘I wish I’d stayed where I was,’ Mrs Bracey thought. She banged on the floor with her stick and when Maisie came she said: ‘I meant to tell you, when they was carrying me upstairs, I noticed that hand-rail could do with a dusting.’
‘Oh!’ said Geoffrey Lloyd, when Prudence opened the door to him after tea. ‘Is your mother in?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘She said I might come . . .’ He held up a roll of foolscap and then put it behind his back. He looked over Prudence’s -shoulder to the stairs. Up there, he could hear the sounds of Stevie being bathed and a woman’s voice, and he had the idea that the girl was hiding her mother from him.
‘She has gone to London.’
‘Then she must have forgotten . . .’ It did not seem conceivable that she could have done so.
‘Prue!’ Tory called, coming to the top of the stairs, a damp apron round her. ‘Oh, I beg your pardon, dear, but where is Stevie’s nightgown? Why . . .!’ She began to descend the staircase in a gliding, affected way, her hands outstretched in greeting. ‘I am sure it is dear Rosamund’s boy. I am sure you must be young Godfrey . . .’
‘Geoffrey,’ Prudence said.
‘Geoffrey, I meant. How very exciting! Your mother was a most dear friend of mine when we were girls. Come in and tell me all about her.’ She stripped off the sopping apron with a flourish and made so decisive a gesture that he was bound to follow her. Indeed, he had nothing else to do with the evening.
In the drawing-room, she still seemed to be entranced to see him. ‘But I won’t keep you, for I know it is Prudence you have come to talk to, and not I . . .’ she assured him, ‘and if I am making you late for the cinema you must tell me at once . . . but first of all, how is dearest Rosamund?’
‘She is very well, really, except in the damp weather, when she gets a little rheumatism.’
‘She would!’ Tory thought secretly. ‘And as slim as ever, I expect?’ she asked with gay confidence.
‘Well, I don’t know about slim . . .’
‘I know I should see no difference in her, and yet it’s every moment of twenty years since we met. We were in the same form together at school.’
Geoffrey could not believe this, looking at Tory. ‘Are we going through all that again?’ he wondered.
‘Tell her you met Victoria Lawson – my maiden name,’ she smiled brilliantly, ‘and give her my dear love, and now I won’t keep you a second longer, for I know you want to be off to the cinema. Where did you say the nightgown is, Prue?’
‘It should be under her pillow,’ Prudence began, going towards the door.
‘All right, my dear. Don’t bother!’ Tory went running upstairs as fast as she could.
After a pause, Geoffrey said: ‘I ha
d a feeling she was making fun of my mother. I expect it was my imagination.’
Prudence felt a slight warmth towards him.
‘I don’t think so. She makes fun of my mother, too.’
‘I am not often ill at ease with women,’ Geoffrey lied, ‘but with her I felt definitely . . .’ he shrugged.
‘I know.’
‘What is at the cinema?’ he inquired.
‘I haven’t the least idea.’
‘Would you like to take the chance?’
‘The chance of what?’
‘Of its being a bad film.’
Before she could answer Robert came in.
‘Oh, I’m afraid my wife is in London,’ he said to Geoffrey.
‘I was just asking Prudence if she would care to come to the cinema with me.’
‘Oh, fine!’ Robert became enormously enthusiastic, Prudence noticed. ‘Excellent idea!’
‘I don’t care for films,’ she faltered. ‘They give me headaches.’
‘Nonsense. Do you good. Make you snap out of yourself. All young girls like films, don’t they, Geoffrey?’
But Geoffrey merely waited for her reply, quietly considering her. She stared at her father in a dazed and helpless way. ‘Snap out of myself,’ she thought. ‘What can have happened to make him talk like that?’ And then she knew what had happened to her. She had grown up. And she no longer loved him. Nor looked to him for assistance. ‘Yes, I’ll come,’ she said to Geoffrey. ‘I’ll run and fetch my coat.’
Lily Wilson was the first in. ‘Two beers,’ she thought, ‘and then home before it grows too dark. And beer it must be—’ for she was a little frightened of the way her money seemed to melt, leaving no trace.
Iris poured her brown ale carefully.
‘And for yourself,’ Lily was obliged to say.
Iris filled another glass.
‘Here’s cheers, then, dear.’
‘Quiet to-night,’ Ned Pallister said. He stood up on a chair and adjusted the clock to public-house time.
‘I always enjoy a drink early on,’ Iris said. ‘You can take your time over it, then.’ It looked as if she might take the whole evening over it, so undisturbed were they.
‘How’s your mother?’ Lily asked.
‘She keeps the same, thanks. Well, I never!’ Iris lifted the bar-flap and went over to the window. ‘Look at that!’ she said. ‘The doctor’s girl out with a boy. Quite nice-looking, too.’
Prudence and Geoffrey walked by, rather apart from one another, and both looking as if they were not on speaking terms. In spite of Ned Pallister urging her to come away from the window, Iris stayed there to watch them go up the steps by the Waxworks into Lower Harbour Street.
‘They must be going the cliff way to the New Town,’ she said. ‘To the pictures, I suppose.’
‘What’s it to do with you if they are?’ Ned asked. ‘She’s as bad as her mother,’ he thought.
‘What awful clothes she wears!’ Iris sighed. ‘That camel-hair coat! You can see it’s quite threadbare across the . . . where she sits down.’ She took her place behind the bar again, not that there was anyone to serve. ‘Her mother’s dowdy, not like Mrs Foyle. They wear for years, of course,’ she went on, rather as if she were talking to herself, ‘camel-hair coats, I mean. But that’s the very reason I wouldn’t want one. You get tired of things. It’s no use saying you don’t. The only thing I wouldn’t tire of would be a nice mink coat . . .’
‘Mink coat!’ Mr Pallister said.
‘I wouldn’t mind how plain the dress was underneath.’
‘That’s decent of you, I’m sure.’
‘But good material, of course . . .’
‘Naturally.’ He winked at Lily, who smiled uneasily.
‘And well-cut. That’s one thing that puzzles me about Mrs Foyle. She doesn’t have a decent fur coat.’
‘Just being cussed, I daresay,’ Mr Pallister suggested, with a sarcasm which only Iris ever evoked.
Lily felt too dejected to talk. All the afternoon she had been tidying up for the summer, securing loose spangles upon Queen Mary’s bosom and, with a small brush, going over the pink baby-faces of démodé murderers, poking fluff from their eyelids and dust from their nostrils. In a few weeks, the scornful, loutish crowds from the New Town would go guffawing through the exhibition. Or if they did not she had no idea of how she would live.
For the first time, acting on the principle that when one has nothing there can be nothing to lose, Lily asked Iris about Bertram; but she did so casually while sipping her beer, glancing out of the window, as if she could scarcely be expected to listen to the answer. Iris’s reply was a matter of delicate insinuation, a tongue in her cheek and a movement of her head in the direction of Tory’s house. Then, aloud, briskly, for Mr Pallister’s hearing, she said (her voice so forthright): ‘I don’t know. He’s not in the bar so much these light evenings.’ And winked.
It was then, in the middle of Lily’s great mental anguish, that the door was opened and the French sailor walked in. He looked a little uncertain, rather puzzled, as if he had been bidden to a party and found instead a house of mourning.
Bertram was not with Tory. He was in his little bedroom above the bar, sitting on the edge of the bed in shirt-sleeves, darning a pair of socks. This he did beautifully, with great care, weaving the black wool so finely that it had the texture of linen. Sitting there, unobserved, slack, he looked his age, his head bent with its little bald patch, his beard untidy, and the top button of his trousers undone to ease his belly. He could not send his socks to be washed until they were mended lest some woman should cobble them together.
Out of the swollen, gilded Turneresque sky, a shaft of blood-red sunshine struck the painted jug on the washhand-stand and also a picture of Our Lord carrying a nouveau-art lantern and surrounded by a flock of Hampshire Down ewes.
The film was falsely emotional. Prudence sat timidly watching, finding no way of understanding; for her own immaturity had in it the hope of growing up, and that of the people in the film had not. She felt strange, sitting there beside Geoffrey. Other young men in uniform surrounded them, their arms round girls. In the darkness the heads fell together, cheek lay against shoulder, lips whispered into hair.
In colonnaded gardens, the screen-lovers encountered one another in a perpetual moonlight, or stood upon rustic-work bridges looking down at water-lilies; were always on holiday or never worked, created emotional problems to pass the time, kissed often, always unhappily. Eyes flashed and swam with tears, yet behind the grief was always delight and excitement, music surged up, covering banalities of dialogue, to heights which the ears could scarcely endure. Geoffrey blew his nose.
With a little sensation of terror, Prudence felt his foot move against hers, and his thigh came into line with her thigh. His proximity seemed to her too steady, too relentless to be accidental; yet he seemed to be absorbed enough in the film, sitting there bolt upright with his arms crossed on his chest.
When the lights went up he smiled at her in a cool and friendly way. ‘Awful tripe. I’m sorry.’
The lads in uniform pushed their young women savagely through the exits, trying to get out before the National Anthem was played. Those who, like Prudence and Geoffrey, were caught, stood stiffly and piously to attention.
‘This is a great nuisance,’ Geoffrey thought, as they went back along the cliff-path to the Old Town. He felt gloomy, contemplating the walk back on his own.
‘You might as well leave me,’ Prudence said abruptly. ‘There’s no sense in coming all this way. I can go home alone, surely?’
‘I shouldn’t dream of it,’ he assured her. ‘Besides, I enjoy the walk.’
‘But it will be such a long time before you get back to . . . to camp.’
‘I have a late-pass.’ (Though he had not meant to use it in this way.)
They walked on in silence which they could scarcely help doing, for their words would have been lost in the wind and the sound of the sea at hig
h-tide. Waves exploded and crashed one after the other, falling away, sucking and dragging at the loosened shingle. Geoffrey had never lived at the seaside and the great waves fascinated him. He lingered at the railings from time to time to watch just one more break, but then another. Prudence stood by, waiting, her hands in her pockets. The wind lifted her hair in curving wings away from her forehead, ‘Like that head of Hypnos,’ he thought, turning from the rail and seeing her grave face bent down slightly, her eyelids lowered. He felt moved by this comparison, although he considered an interest in any Greek sculpture other than archaic to be a sign of a bourgeois outlook.
‘If she had her mother’s intelligence!’ he found himself thinking, in spite of Beth having shown little intelligence about his own poetry. He wondered about this as they walked on. Perhaps Beth was not intelligent, after all; indeed, he found it difficult to concede the quality to any woman. ‘In-tuition,’ he thought, and seemed to clasp this word to his bosom, so agreeable did he find it. Having dispensed with the stumbling-block of intellect, he could feel more warmly towards Prudence, especially walking there in silence and in the moonlight.
Prudence enjoyed walking against the wind. As it struck her body she experienced the same sensual delight as she felt when lying in bed with her silken cats warm and heavy in her bare arms.
Even her thick coat assumed the appearance of marble drapery, Geoffrey thought, and she walked well, meeting the wind with indifference.
They passed one of the little glassed-in shelters which faced the sea, and which were always occupied after dark by whispering and entangled couples.
Prudence walked more quickly, frowning. ‘Love,’ she thought, impatiently, ‘what a scuffling thing it is. How sly and sickening!’
Spray flew suddenly over their heads and they moved back against the side of the cliff for an instant, awaiting the next wave, wondering where the foam would spatter down.
Geoffrey drew her up close to him, half curious to know her reaction, half moved by the look of her in the moonlight. He kissed her cheek, which tasted salty.
A View of the Harbour Page 17