Prudence stood quite still, forbearing to scuffle. He had never before embraced a girl who remained completely motionless, and felt a little put out. Then the next lot of foam came down like a canopy. In the silence that followed it, in the backwash of shingle, he said: ‘You are very annoyed.’
Prudence said nothing.
‘Why?’
‘You make me feel like those two back there in the shelter.’
‘Well, why not?’ His bravado was assumed, for the deep and trembling scorn in her voice disconcerted him.
‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘I expect it is quite the sort of thing you do yourself.’
He was relieved at this, feeling he could deal with mere jealousy.
‘No. I can say I have never made love to a girl in a shelter in my life,’ he said airily.
They were obliged to stand close to one another to make themselves heard, and he leant against a ledge of sandstone and looked at her. She murmured something, but it was lost in the sound of a wave breaking.
‘Is it the shelter you object to or the fact of my kissing you?’ he asked.
This time he heard several words – ‘furtive’ for one, and perhaps even ‘loathsome’ as well.
‘I didn’t kiss you furtively,’ he pointed out. This was true.
‘It wasn’t that. But the fact that they’ – she waved her hand contemptuously the way they had come – ‘they put it into your head to do so.’
‘Indeed they did not. I don’t need other people to give me ideas of that kind. I kissed you because it suddenly came to me that I wanted to; you look so very beautiful to-night. So I did. And I enjoyed it, liked the taste of it.’ (‘But was it worth all this discussion?’ he wondered to himself.) ‘I imagine you didn’t enjoy it?’
‘I didn’t mind either way,’ she said coldly.
‘I could kiss you so that you would mind. Shall I try?’
‘No.’
‘You are deeply upset,’ he observed. And he wondered what exactly had been going on in the shelter, and felt like going back to have a look.
‘If you so hate things being secret, I will kiss you next time on the Esplanade at noon.’
‘You know it is not that I mind. It’s nothing to do with you.’
‘Then who is it to do with?’ he asked more gently.
But she began to walk on, keeping close to the side of the cliff, and he could see her hair and one shoulder wet with spray.
He followed her. As they turned a corner the lighthouse flashed and they saw the little half-hoop of lights along the foreshore. Here the path bent away from the sea, and the wind was suddenly silenced as if it were shut up in a box. In this lull, Geoffrey said: ‘I wish you’d listen to me for a moment and not walk so fast.’ He wondered what to say next, knowing that she would not answer. ‘You are angry with me because I have reminded you of something you would rather forget. Don’t walk so quickly. I refuse to skip along beside you as if I were a child. An adult person does not go on and on, trying to pay off old scores. Whatever has happened to you, it doesn’t belong to me, or to now.’
‘To now!’ she thought to herself. ‘What is happening now in that house, where both Tory and my father intrigued to be rid of me this evening?’
‘People making love in a shelter!’ he was saying furiously, his indignation gathering momentum. ‘What the hell’s that to do with me, or you, or anyone but themselves? Making love is secret, not furtive. Secret – like blood.’ She started at the word and gave him an astonished, frightened look. ‘People who cannot bear the sight of blood have good instincts, for it was meant to be hidden, not seen. The skin keeps it from sight, as convention keeps love from sight. Not shame. It isn’t furtive, but meet and proper. You remember what dear Turgenev said: “It is a great sin to bring blood to the light of day.” ’ He knew she would not remember nor ever have known, but he threw in one word after another against her silence. ‘And it is the same between men and women.’ (‘Someone has made love to her who should not have done so,’ he decided. ‘What else could account for her disgust or that reiterated word?’) ‘It is my misfortune that I have reminded you of something you are perhaps trying to forget. Let me kiss you again as myself. And you think of me as I am. Someone only belonging to now.’
She stopped, but he had the wit to know it was not for the kiss but to make some explanation.
‘Nothing has happened to me,’ she said quite fiercely. ‘And I will never tell you.’
‘Nothing has happened and you will never tell me!’ he repeated drily, for he had overlooked the very words which made the phrase significant.
They came to the flight of steps which went down beside the Waxworks, and Prudence looked quickly along the waterfront and saw light spilling from every window over the cobblestones.
‘I don’t want you to come in with me,’ she said breathlessly. ‘I want to go the rest of the way alone.’
Now she seemed agitated. When he took her hands and held them against his chest, she allowed him to, but her eyes implored him to let her go on alone.
‘All right. And you won’t kiss me good night?’
‘Please not.’
‘Promise me that one day . . .’
‘Yes, one day,’ she agreed, nodding hurriedly, not caring what she promised.
He stood at the top of the steps and watched her going along the quay towards her home. As she drew level with the pub, light came from the door like an opening fan. An old man came out and seemed to consider the night air. He closed the door and walked towards Prudence. This little scene, watched from above, had, Geoffrey thought, some meaning which he could not for the moment fathom – the old man’s movement towards the girl, and her sudden curvetting avoidance of him, like a cat, or a ballet-dancer. A second later she had entered the house, and the old man was standing on the quayside alone, looking down at the water.
‘Someone has made love to her who should not have done so,’ Geoffrey repeated to himself. And he had a great deal to occupy his mind as he turned and began the long walk back to camp.
Prudence had not stopped to speak to Bertram, her head ached so. She opened the front door and entered the dim hall. Then she slammed the door behind her with a great crash and went towards the morning-room, where they always sat in the evenings. Robert was writing busily at the table.
He looked up and smiled at her before he spoke.
‘Nice hats!’ Iris said vaguely, staring at the French sailor.
Lily nodded.
‘They don’t understand the money, though,’ Mr Pallister said. ‘Asking for change out of sixpence! Up in London now, you won’t get a light ale under tenpence, I’m told.’
‘That so?’ Lily murmured, her eyes on the sailor-hat with its red pom-pom. As if aware of her scrutiny, he took it off and placed it on his knee. He sat on a high stool by the bar and the light ran over his dark, greased hair when he moved. Each time Lily looked up he was studying her carefully. To prove to herself that this was not coincidence, she looked up more frequently and, yes, his eyes were each time upon her. She felt uncomfortable, and then elated.
He drank very slowly, sipping even. ‘They’re used to wines,’ Lily thought. The idea of wine always appealed to her, of tasting something sweet. The brown ale was so cold, so metallic.
Ned Pallister was pulling beer; Iris had moved away, it was difficult to catch her eye. Lily coughed delicately into her hand once or twice, fidgeting with a half-crown on the counter, not liking to be seen sitting there without a drink.
The sailor suddenly leant forward and spoke to Iris, indicating Lily with a very exact and foreign gesture. ‘If he’s going to offer me a drink, I’ll smile in a friendly way, but refuse,’ she decided. But he had merely drawn Iris’s attention to her.
‘I’ll have a small port, please, Iris.’
‘Red or white?’
‘Red,’ she said recklessly. She thought: ‘It seems more like wine when it’s red.’ ‘How much?’
‘Go on. That’s
with me.’
Lily protested awkwardly.
‘Do you good. Go on.’
‘Well,’ Lily began, lifting the glass and smiling shyly. ‘That’s better,’ she thought, sipping and glancing at the sailor. He drank very slowly. He picked up the beer and took a small mouthful and their eyes met as they drank, as if they pledged one another.
The wine ran down her throat and then seemed to branch out in all directions, even to her finger-tips. The world was about to burst into blossom as she remembered it doing when she was a girl. The next moment might bring . . . but the wine did not help her to formulate her desires, merely enhanced the mood for indulging them.
Then the sailor drained off his glass, put his hat on and went out.
She felt fooled and baffled: the wine, tasteless now, was wasted. To hide her disappointment, she lit a cigarette, glanced at the clock and fiddled with her brittle, untidy hair.
When Tory spent an evening alone she used it as a successful General might – a pause in the forward movement for consolidation and reinforcement. Clay was spread over her face, her fingers trailed in bowls of warm olive oil, her chin was tightly strapped.
It was obvious that she would not answer the door in this state, and Bertram, who had finished his darning and was lonely, went away again, drawing incorrect conclusions.
Prudence had overlooked the fact that Tory would not leave her son alone in the house, nor could Robert leave his daughter. She had served him with the cheerless stew Beth had prepared, and hurried away to put Edward to bed. At the dining-room door he had held her for a brief moment and kissed her. Then, utterly hollowed, shaken, she had hastened from him.
Just as Lily thought she would leave, the door opened and the strange sailor walked in again. This time he came to her side of the bar, and once more he removed his hat. He felt in his pocket and brought out a handful of coppers, which he laid touchingly, like a child, along the edge of the bar.
‘Yes?’ Iris asked, showing no surprise; but, as she turned to get his beer, she winked at Lily, who looked down quickly, blowing out a cloud of smoke.
After a while she and the sailor resumed their contemplation of one another, which, as they drank, became more explicit, less veiled.
Another man, she felt, would have sat beside her, bought her a drink, tried his way forward with jocularities, flattery. The steady excitement between them was more subtle, more exquisite. She forgot her terror of going home.
She let her eyes, through the smoke, rest boldly upon his, using her power over him with confidence now. They might have been alone. When at last he had finished his drink he put down the glass, staring at her, and then, without shifting his gaze, stood up and straightened his tunic. He went to the door and, as he turned to go out, his eyes gave her a message she could not misunderstand.
She finished her drink in a panic. ‘I’ll go,’ she thought, ‘but I’ll walk briskly and turn into home as if that’s all I meant. As, of course, it is all I mean.’
‘Good night, dear,’ Iris called after her.
‘Good night,’ she said huskily. And now she was beyond caring what Iris or anyone might think of her. She opened the door and stepped out on to the pavement. Faint moonlight struck the rounded cobbles, blanched the lighthouse. The dark water slapped at the slime-covered steps. Little chalky boats rose and fell.
He was standing across the pavement, looking into the water. She pulled the door behind her with a bang and he turned and came towards her. To her chagrin, she felt sweat breaking out over her body and drew her coat tightly round her.
He greeted her with some words she could not hear, and when she moved her lips in reply she could not speak, but felt as if she were drowning.
‘You are going this way?’
She pointed helplessly along the waterfront, leaning a little towards him to catch his words, so strangely pronounced.
‘I am attracted by your face all the evening. I find myself watching you.’ He turned his small brown hand in the moonlight, as if the words were not enough.
‘Where do you come from?’ she asked, hoping that her own voice would steady her.
‘From Paris. Unfortunately, they did not yet change my money into English.’
They walked slowly, with bowed heads, beneath the uneven, lowering buildings.
‘Do you like scent?’ he suddenly asked.
‘I . . . well . . . yes. It depends.’
He looked at her with quick, mournful eyes, as if trying to make something exact out of her hesitation. From his pocket he brought a little square, glinting bottle. Pausing by Mrs Bracey’s doorway, he took her bare hand and smeared some scent across the palm and put it to her face.
‘Yes, lovely,’ she murmured, in a dream. They walked on.
‘Perhaps you would like to buy this bottle from me. It is from Paris last week. Only a little money.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said quickly, stopping at her doorway. ‘This is my home. Good night.’ She put the key in the lock, her face turned from him.
He shrugged and slid the bottle carefully back into his pocket and mooched on down the harbour.
She breathed the musty darkness of indoors and closed out the fishy-smelling quayside, shutting the door quickly. ‘Oh, Bob!’ she thought. ‘Why did you leave me?’ She blamed the dead, feeling herself exposed to danger and humiliation. As she put her hand up to her eyes her scented skin made her shudder. Her shame seemed to be a real thing, following her upstairs and into her room.
When she drew the curtain and looked out the sailor had disappeared. The place was empty. Only Bertram stood by the water’s edge.
Bertram looked down at the water. He felt dejected. Tory had not opened her door. Prudence had avoided him. No one, apparently, needed him. He was tired of the cronies in the bar, tired of the dingy pub bedroom. ‘I shall go away,’ he told himself. ‘In the end I always move on somewhere else, as all selfish people do, who do not let themselves become deeply involved in others, nor bound to one place. For all I feel is curiosity; and curiosity, unlike Mrs Bracey’s hunger for life, and Tory’s illicit hunger for her next-door neighbour, is quickly satisfied, a fleeting thing, leading nowhere.’ Curiosity had tired him, too, but he did not admit that. He would have liked to have settled down now, to marry Tory. To-night, confronted by that silent yet lighted house, he had realised the improbability of such a thing. Standing there, with his hand still upon the brass ring of the knocker, he had felt that Tory’s passion was not a thing ever to be put on one side for promises of devotion or for friendship, nor overthrown by conscience or convention. It put her beyond the pale, in every sense, and out of his reach.
But that glimpse of imagined comfort and companionship, of being settled, had fascinated him more than he thought. He no longer cared about what was round the next corner, unless it was Tory and his life running alongside hers.
He walked back towards the lighted windows of the Anchor, his lungs filled with their bedtime breath of fresh air. ‘I am a man with a passion for turning stones,’ he thought. ‘And wherever I went there were always more stones than I could turn.’
When he went in and shut the door there was nobody about. The scene was quite empty.
Twenty miles out at sea the fish fought and slithered in the nets, floundering and entangled.
12
Beth was glad to be back. She came home at tea-time and Tory was waiting for her with Stevie so brushed and tidied that it was almost a reproach. Tory was full of the story of how she had managed to despatch Prudence to the cinema with Geoffrey, and laughed and spoke in a sort of French, above Stevie’s head, explaining how she had contrived it.
Prudence was in the kitchen cutting up lights for the cats. From time to time she rushed to the sink and retched, her face drawn, her eyes watering, and then bravely returned to the job. The cats sniffed delicately at the dreadful stench, their nostrils quivering, as at the bouquet of wine. When the dish was put down, Guilbert hunched up over it, chewing, while Yvette sat
behind like a squaw, until he was filled. This always annoyed Beth, whose feminism was kindled at the sight.
‘It is only their instinct,’ Prudence would point out, for nothing would make the queen come forward until her mate had eaten. Beth had for a long time distrusted the nature of all those instincts which work so much for the benefit of the other sex, and she would shut Guilbert outside in the garden and try to make Yvette betray her nature by coaxing her with little scraps of meat.
She would never move. Only her eyes changed, the blue turning slowly to crimson.
Now Guilbert stopped eating, dug his claws into the kitchen rug, stretched, yawned, and walked away. Very humbly, gratefully, Yvette came up to get the leavings.
After tea Beth took the two thousand words she had written in the train and laid them on the top of the pile of papers on her desk. She dared not read them, for it seemed to her now – tired from her journey – that scars, great fissures broke up and marred her work and no genius was there to rivet it together.
She stood for a moment alone in the room. Tory had gone. Stevie pushed her doll’s pram along the garden path. Beth watched her from the window, watched how she moved the doll gently on the pillow, murmuring busily to her, adjusted the torn hood, all her interest and emotion centred there in the pram, an absorption Beth had so often noticed in other mothers, never felt in herself. ‘But it was through no fault of my own,’ she thought, her mind reverting to those cracked and riven chapters of hers; all of her books the same, none sound as a bell, but giving off little jarring reverberations now here, now there, so that she herself could say as she turned the pages (knowing as surely as if the type had slipped and spilt): ‘Here I nursed Prudence with bronchitis; here Stevie was ill for a month; here I put down my pen to bottle fruit (which fermented); there Mrs Flitcroft forsook me.’
Round and round the little garden Stevie went, between the old fruit trees which in autumn dropped twisted, pock-marked apples into the grass. Through the ferns, Guilbert wove his way, stealthily, supple, moisture on his whiskers, his eyes -diamond-shaped, a great jungle animal now, his lean sides brushed by dense foliage.
A View of the Harbour Page 18