A View of the Harbour

by Elizabeth Taylor

  Beth rapped with her knuckles at the window. ‘Bed, Stevie!’ she called. ‘It’s time for bed.’

  After tea, Mrs Bracey felt an aching in her shoulders and Maisie had to leave the washing-up to rub in oil.

  ‘The left side!’ her mother said. ‘The left side more especially.’

  ‘Well, that’s the window side. You must be in a draught. You’d be far better moved away against the other wall.’

  ‘Or downstairs,’ her mother suggested, ‘leaving this room nice and vacant.’

  Maisie shrugged.

  Nothing but the threat of death would have persuaded Mrs Bracey to move now. She would not read even, except in the most desultory fashion, nor take her eyes from the window for long. Last night, drowsing, she had been aware suddenly of footsteps stopping outside, of low voices, and she had drawn the curtain along a very little, leaning as close to the pane as she could and, waiting there, shivering, had been delighted to see Lily Wilson emerge from the shadows of the houses walking with a French sailor. Just as they had come to the porch of Lily’s home Maisie had brought in the cocoa. Some instinct had made Mrs Bracey drop the curtain and cover her prying; and she sat there sipping, and shivering with frustration.

  By the time she was left alone the street was empty, but she did see Lily going to the front window and peeping out between the lace curtains. Lily had not known she was being watched, nor that at that moment her reputation was slipping into that no-man’s-land from which one can fall, with so little warning, from respectable widowhood to being the local harlot: and, as it was in Mrs Bracey’s imagination that the first move towards that decline was made, the descent, no doubt, would be swift as well as untraceable (for gossip is a fluid, intangible thing). Scandals must have their beginnings somewhere, and the soil of Mrs Bracey’s imagination was so fertile that often there seed and flower were one and the same thing.

  Peacefully, she let her mind seethe and ferment, relaxed as she did so, and Maisie kneading her oily shoulders.

  Beth had put Allegra away in her desk and now tried hard to forget her. She staved her off all the while she was bathing Stevie, and later, when Stevie sat up in bed eating a fruit-salad, Beth told her a story, so determined was she that, beginning with this evening, she would be a good mother. She sat at Stevie’s little dressing-table, dreamily reciting, and brushing her own hair as she did so.

  ‘. . . And as she sewed, the queen pricked her finger and a drop of blood fell on the snow-white cloth . . .’

  Beth thought of her own mother who had so many times told her this story, and many others besides. Nothing ever spoils the first enchantment, she decided. No overlay of vulgarity from Walt Disney, no sicklying o’er from the Children’s Hour ever can penetrate to the heart of the first experience of poetry, of cruelty, of beauty. I remember it now with my vivid child’s mind, the first heart-catching magic – the golden key lying on the glass table, the castle enclosed by briars; and then words meaning more than they mean in after-life. ‘The King sits in Dunfermline town drinking the blude-red wine,’ and ‘Yestr’een the Queen had four Maries, The night she’ll hae but three; There was Marie Seton and Marie Beaton, And Marie Carmichael and me.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Stevie, spooning up juice.

  Beth brushed the hair from her temples.

  ‘Eat the fruit, dear.’ She watched her through the glass. ‘But the huntsman so loved Snow White that he had not the heart to kill her, and led her deeper into the forest . . .’

  ‘I suppose you loved this story when you were a little girl,’ said Stevie condescendingly.

  ‘Yes, but darling, don’t interrupt . . . That night when the old Queen looked into her mirror . . .’

  ‘You can leave that bit out,’ Stevie said. ‘I don’t like it.’

  ‘Leave it out!’ Beth cried. Leave out those sinister reverberations! ‘If I am to tell the story I must tell it as it is.’

  ‘All right,’ Stevie said quickly. She took a mouthful of chopped apple and began to munch, her eyes turned once more upon her mother.

  ‘Blink your eyes, dear,’ Beth said, seeing them unfocused. Blinking and crunching, Stevie waited. A thunderous darkness lay over the forest scene which Beth described, as the story moved on with composed horror. Stevie finished her fruit and laid the dish aside. Sitting up in bed, looking at her mother through the mirror, her eyes were stretched wide, her mouth loosely open.

  ‘But as they carried her down the steep path in her glass coffin they stumbled on a rock and the piece of poisoned apple fell out of her cheek.’

  ‘No more!’ Stevie suddenly screamed. ‘Stop it! Please stop!’

  Beth dropped the hairbrush and turned round.

  ‘Don’t go on!’ Stevie shrieked, beginning to thrash about in bed.

  ‘What is wrong?’ Beth asked her, and bunched her up in her arms, trying to soothe her.

  ‘I shall dream about it. I know I shall dream about it.’

  ‘But it all ended happily, if only you would let me finish.’

  ‘I don’t want another word even. It isn’t a nice story. A sensible mother wouldn’t tell her children stories like that.’

  ‘Well, I won’t ever again. Now stop crying.’

  ‘I can’t. When I start a thing I can’t ever stop until I’ve finished. I never can.’

  ‘What is the matter?’ Robert asked, putting his head round the door. ‘Stevie, pull yourself together. Let us at least hear ourselves speaking.’

  ‘My mother frightened me. She’s been trying to frighten me. She made my heart beat.’

  ‘Well, really . . .!’ Beth began.

  ‘All right, Stevie,’ Robert said, in his nice, kind, calm, doctor’s voice. To Beth he murmured, ‘Leave her to me. I’ll manage her.’

  ‘Good night, Stevie,’ Beth said politely.

  Going downstairs she could not see that she had done anything wrong, could only assure herself that children nowadays are too coddled. Everything was round the wrong way. In the days when she had been a little girl, the horrors were in the story-books (Sister Anne! Sister Anne!) and the outside world was cosy: now, the horrors were real, and, to compensate, the child’s imagination must be soothed and cosseted with innocent bread-and-milk.

  She took Allegra out of the desk again and turned the pages, altering a word here, a word there. No good had come out of the last hour except that her hair had had a good brushing.

  Bertram was brought down to spending the evening with Mrs Bracey. He would not try Tory’s door again. Mrs Bracey was in two minds: whether to feel pleased or exasperated. While he was there she could not peek out of the window to see what Lily Wilson might be doing; on the other hand, Bertram’s company was invigorating and lively. She relished his great sea-faring lies: how, in the moonlight, he had mistaken sea cows for mermaids; how he and many of his crew had watched the sunset over the Pacific form into a vast crucifixion scene, the oddly contorted violet clouds against the blood-red, and eastwards the sky a clear pistachio with one pale star. A premonition, Bertram insisted, since that night one of the crew fell ill of yellow fever. The world came very close to Mrs Bracey as she listened to his descriptions. Sometimes, he told her, diamonds were set in the living flesh, or ears weighted to the shoulders and the skin slashed and rubbed with dung for beauty. In one place, the cold might be so intense that the horses’ breath froze solid as it left their nostrils, falling in strange shapes upon the iron roads and breaking there, while only a day’s journey away the moon slowly cooled the burning desert sand. The sheikh, folding back his mosque-embroidered sleeve, touched a scorpion’s bite with the agate of his ring, the pain vanishing at once.

  ‘I never went there,’ Mrs Bracey thought. ‘I never went any-where. I just stayed here at the harbour all my life, and, just as my eyes first focused on that scene, so they will close upon it.’

  Bertram was discussing food with her (how cantaloups were fed with arak until a slice would intoxicate a man, how sucking-pigs were stuffed with truffles and mel
on-flowers crystallised and filled with burnt cream) when Maisie came in with a jug of cocoa and a plate of Marie biscuits.

  As soon as Bertram went Mrs Bracey pulled the curtains aside, but there was nothing to be seen.

  ‘There’s a button off this jacket,’ Robert said as he undressed.

  Beth was in bed already, lying there with her eyes closed.

  ‘Remind me in the morning,’ she murmured. She heard him taking money and keys from his pockets.

  ‘I wonder how Prue got on with young Geoffrey?’ Beth continued. ‘What on earth can they have to talk about? For they have nothing in common. Was the stew all right?’

  ‘Very nice.’

  ‘You managed to warm it up?’

  ‘Tory did.’

  ‘That was thoughtful of her. And did Prue say anything about her evening out?’

  ‘Not a word. She came in in a state of excited hostility, I thought, and then calmed down and drank a cup of tea and went to bed.’

  Beth sighed. ‘And now Tory says she is thinking of going away.’ The relevance of this was that it was the last straw.

  ‘Oh, yes?’ Robert said casually, as if trying to summon interest for the sake of courtesy.

  ‘She said at tea-time that she couldn’t bear the thought of another winter here. I shall miss her so very much that, even if it is for her good, I hope it won’t happen. It seemed so lovely when she came to live here, and, even before that, I looked forward enormously to the summer when she came on holidays. If she goes away now there won’t be that, even, for she will sell the house, she says. If she and Edward come to stay with us it won’t be at all the same.’

  He contemplated the idea of Tory under the same roof. ‘Aren’t you rather leaping ahead?’ he asked. ‘I can’t seem to find a collar for the morning.’

  ‘Top right-hand drawer.’ Beth opened her eyes and closed them again. ‘Tory’s so impulsive,’ she resumed. ‘When she was a young girl she used to write letters to actors . . .’

  ‘What has that to do with it?’

  ‘And she was always in trouble at school. I remember when she cut off one of her plaits – and she had such lovely hair. She wanted it bobbed, d’you see, and her mother said not on any account. So she snipped it off herself in the school train and threw the plait into some bushes beside the railway lines and when she arrived at the school she said a strange man had cut it off at the station. The headmistress called in the police and Tory told one lie after another until they wore her out and she confessed. She was nearly expelled, but they had to cut off her other plait to match, so she did have her way. She was always so . . .’

  ‘You speak of her as if she is dead,’ Robert suddenly interrupted.

  ‘It’s just that I can’t bear for her to go away,’ Beth said pathetically. She lay there imagining life without Tory.

  When Robert got into bed, he lay there and imagined the same, but for much longer.

  13

  Edward went back to school with a different set of clothes and his first cricket bat, the key to his tuck-box hanging on a tape round his neck. Tory saw him into the school train, watched his face reddening and whitening as he leant from the compartment to wave, knew how the tears were hard as pebbles under his lids and so nearly not kept back. Then she walked up the platform and straight to the ladies’ room where she wept. After a while, feeling restored, she made her way to the little restaurant at which she sometimes saw Teddy; but he was not there, and in spite of having been drawn to the place, she was relieved. She ate a large meal and drank a glass – to cheer herself – of most ordinaire vin. It was still light when she arrived home.

  It was the summer. Mr Lidiard, taking his short cut through the churchyard, walked under flowering trees, carrying books to Mrs Bracey which she no longer read. For, as the warmer weather came, the harbour lost its closed-up appearance and the scene changed. People loitered at the water’s edge, front doors were left open, and life overflowed on to the quayside. What Mrs Bracey could not see was none the less indicated and her imagination was ready to supply the rest. Lily Wilson on one side, Tory on the other, Eddie sulking, his hands in his pockets, slouching along the quay, leaning against the Customs house with the other men, always conscious, or it seemed so by his glances, of Mrs Bracey herself at the window.

  Each day she saw a little added to their lives: for none of them remained the same. Even in Maisie, so outwardly cold and unmoved that her mother was deceived, the knot of bitterness tightened up, contorted and involved, so that soon it would be the sort of knot no one could manage to untie.

  ‘That’s my book!’ Mrs Bracey would tell the curate, pointing out of the window. Lily Wilson was hanging up a painted card, ‘Waxworks Now Open – Admission 3d’. Along the water’s edge Stevie Cazabon pushed her doll’s pram. Presently Prudence came out and tried to persuade her back to the house. She appeared to refuse, her hands gripping the pram handle stubbornly, her face darkening. At the bottom of the flight of steps children played hopscotch on chalked squares, just as Mrs Bracey herself had done, or skipped, with a rope tied to the lamp-post, chanting the meaningless rhymes which alter so little from one generation to another. But life was less varied now, she thought, less rich, the streets less crowded – gone the lamplighter and those yellow, spreading gas-lights; gone the organ-grinder with his wretched precocious monkey; gone the drunkenness, the church-going, the wife-beating, the wonderful funerals, the social calls to see the corpse (now the bereaved kept their dead private as if it were their own business merely, or as if ashamed). Distinctions were smoothed out, no curtsies were dropped, no coins thrown. Even the sea was smoothed out, for it no longer seemed to wash in wreckage, no longer deposited corpses at the cliff-foot. Mrs Bracey remembered the time of wrecks, when the whole harbour turned out with storm-lanterns to launch the lifeboat and await its return. She had sat up all night with the widows of drowned men, tried to coax warmth into frozen limbs, seen a woman lifted from the sea with her wet hair bound round and round her face and over her mouth, as if the waves themselves had tried to stop her cries.

  Now she watched the trawlers coming safely in, or sometimes the white, slanting sail of a yacht. On Saturday nights the men sang for a little while, half-heartedly, outside the pub (the beer was not what it had been, either). Then (and they were scarcely stupefied with liquor) they would drift back home, money still in their pockets, and in the morning would go, more half-heartedly than ever, to church or, more likely than not, stayed at home to mend the children’s shoes or read The News of the World, tame creatures, enfeebled by weak drink.

  She would have missed so much if her imagination had not run before her, preparing the way. Thus, she knew that the very fact of Tory and Robert not smiling at one another when they met was a plain endorsement of their guilt: for friendly smiles between lovers are so laboriously devised that when they imagine themselves to be alone they seldom make the effort. So she watched them curtly greeting one another as they did this evening – Robert driving up in the car just as Tory rounded the corner – watched them exchange a few words, and Robert running his eye over Tory’s London clothes as if in disapproval: and she knew, as surely as if she could hear their words, how briefly, how cunningly, they laid their plans, their lives whittled down to those few moments when they could be together, a few words passing swiftly between them or their finger-tips contriving to brush together as if by accident, a glance, a touch, an innuendo in the presence of others – the rest darkness.

  Up at her window, and in some discomfort (for her shoulder, her chest ached), Mrs Bracey sat in judgment. Guilt she saw, treachery and deceit and self-indulgence. She did not see, as God might be expected to, their sensations of shame and horror, their compulsion towards one another, for which they dearly paid, nor in what danger they so helplessly stood, now, in middle-age, not in any safe harbour, but thrust out to sea with none of the brave equipment of youth to buoy them up, no romance, no delight.

  ‘Rather stark,’ Tory said. ‘It is
all rather stark.’ She went on saying the word until it had become absurd, as most words do become absurd when they are repeated.

  ‘Did you see Teddy?’ Robert asked, choosing to ignore her comments on their relationship.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You went to look for him, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, I went to look, but he was not there.’

  ‘Why? Why did you?’

  ‘Curiosity.’

  ‘No. Tory, I believe that after everything, you still love him.’

  ‘I don’t love him. I don’t understand, though, how it can be that he doesn’t love me.’

  ‘If ever he came back to you . . .’

  ‘He won’t!’ she said quickly, as if she had told herself this so often.

  ‘If he did, would you go back to him?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘For Edward’s sake, perhaps?’ he suggested cunningly.

  ‘No, not for Edward’s sake, either.’

  She picked up some sewing, but he took it from her hands.

  ‘Tory, what have you been saying to Beth about going away?’

  ‘Just that – that I am going. What sort of life is this for me? Nothing to look ahead to, but the one thing that must come – Beth knowing about this, and her great distress and horror when she sees what I truly am, and have been all these months. And how can I continue with this . . . this duplicity? Being with her part of each day . . . the treachery of being with you is nothing to that, to the lies I act when I am with her. Ask yourself where this is leading to? Are we to go on until we are old, with just these odd moments here and there and danger always so narrowly evaded? Love draining away our vitality, our hold on life, never adding anything to us. Always . . .’ and she put her trembling hand into his . . . ‘always ourselves fanning up the flames which will torment us until we are consumed. It cannot go on for ever. You must know that. The only way of dealing with love is being alone together for a long time, the world shut out, being in bed together all night long, waking together in the morning. What prospect of that? Ever? None at all, as you know full well. Meanwhile, these furtive . . .’