A View of the Harbour

by Elizabeth Taylor

  ‘It will be all right,’ she promised.

  When he had gone, she went to the bathroom and bathed her eyes. ‘It will be all right,’ she promised herself, but with a sinking heart.

  Prudence was at the foot of the stairs, coughing, her head bent, her hand grasping the newel of the staircase. Her -forehead reddened and whitened and a great twisting vein divided it.

  Robert went to her and steadied her with his arm.

  ‘Come into the surgery and have a draught,’ he told her.

  She followed him obediently and sat on the slippery couch waiting.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he asked, busy mixing her dose.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she replied.

  ‘I have been to Mrs Bracey’s, and to Tory’s,’ he said carefully.

  ‘And I have been for a walk.’

  ‘Tory tells me you have imagined a lot of nonsense about – about Tory and me.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Neither do I. I only want to say that almost nothing you imagine is true, and the rest – won’t be true any longer.’

  ‘I don’t want to discuss it, I said.’

  She felt sickened by him, as the young are by the love affairs of their elders.

  ‘Drink this up!’ He handed her the glass and she drank, making a wry face. ‘And don’t go out in the damp night again,’ he added, trying to regain normality.

  ‘I shall do as I please. I am not a child.’

  ‘I am talking to you as a doctor, not as a father. Good night, Prue.’

  Without answering him she walked out of the room and up the stairs.

  ‘Good night, dear!’ Beth called out from the morning-room, but in the muffled voice which meant she had not raised her head from her desk.

  ‘Good night, Mother, dear!’ Prudence called loudly and warmly.

  ‘She has come back safely,’ Robert thought. ‘But not to me. Not ever to me again.’

  Prudence lay in bed with her cats in her arms. She was in no hurry to go to sleep. ‘To-morrow!’ she thought. ‘And tomorrow. And so on, perhaps, for always.’

  For the rose, in spite of Tory, was beginning to unfurl.

  15

  The day comes in slowly to those who are ill. The night has separated them from the sleepers, who return to them like strangers from a distant land, full of clumsy preparations for living, the earth itself creaking towards the light.

  Now, a great hand seemed to hold Mrs Bracey back to her pillows; the hand of God, she thought. She had always been aware of the concentration of God upon her, an omnipotent God, vaguely, and yet, over small matters, still at her beck and call. When she wished Him to give her His attention she opened a little shutter in her soul: in this way she could be sure of His presence at her prayers; He would receive her orders and listen to her explanations (taking them at their face value), but at the same time could be excluded from any shameful thoughts or family quarrels, nor need He soil His ears listening to any obscenities or what Mrs Bracey herself euphemistically called ‘suggestive stories’.

  When she shut God away she did not imagine Him turning His thoughts to any others of His flock. It was rather like giving a maid the afternoon off, except that she imagined Him mooning about, idle, restless, waiting to return.

  Always He had revolved round her, as the moon about the earth – until the afternoon of the previous day, when the world had come at last to a standstill and the pain in her chest and shoulders a great weight pinning her back, so that all her energy must be expended on the business of filling and emptying the lungs so cramped beneath that burden.

  Children know, too, those long periods of watching light as it fans out across ceilings, descends the walls. The ghost against the door returns to dressing-gown, the chest-of-drawers stands forward at last, so prosaically, a piece of furniture merely. Then, somewhere in the house, a bed moves, a grating, a creaking, prelude to the day.

  So Maisie stirred and stretched. The door standing open reminded her at once of her mother’s illness, and she groped for her slippers, sitting on the edge of the bed, her bosom grey in the early light, her body criss-crossed from the wrinkled cotton nightgown, her hair netted up close to her head. Iris lay curled among the draping bedclothes, an arm crooked round her profile and her lips parted, smiling almost.

  ‘How do you feel this morning?’ Maisie asked her mother, rattling the curtains back along their rod. But her mother only turned her head wearily on her pillow, unable any more to play her own rôle. It had all been effected by words, by the quick lash of her tongue, and now she had not the breath for talking.

  ‘I’ll bring you up a cup of tea,’ Maisie said, looking at her. ‘I’ll change the poultices.’

  Mrs Bracey turned her head towards the window. ‘Anyone about?’ she whispered.

  Maisie went over to see. Her mother watched her breath come and go upon the pane.

  ‘No, there’s no one.’

  The buildings were so sharply outlined. There were no shadows and there was no colour. ‘An exquisite little ink drawing,’ Bertram might have called it. (But he was finishing his last half-hour of sleep, peaceful, rosy, and wearing striped pyjamas, like a schoolboy’s.)

  Then, suddenly, Maisie saw the doctor come hurrying out of his house. He put up the collar of his coat and shut the door carefully. Setting off with that familiar jog-trot of his, he soon rounded the corner and was out of sight. In the silence of the morning she could even hear him starting up his car in the garage behind his house.

  ‘The doctor,’ she said aloud. ‘It’s all hours for him; when we call him out late at night we forget that; we don’t think how early he may have to get up, or not go to bed at all.’

  She admired Robert. He was a quiet, sensible man, she thought, without eccentricity, flamboyance, like, for instance, Bertram Hemingway’s. He was a man you could trust, rely upon, she decided, and she placed this reliability far above any other of his qualities. She sighed as she turned from the window, partly for him and a little for herself, feeling a sympathy with him, the two of them up so early and each leaving another undisturbed in bed.

  Mrs Bracey moved her head quickly from side to side on the pillow, denoting impatience, and indeed Maisie had been standing there a long time staring out at the harbour.

  ‘I’ll go,’ she said. She stayed a moment longer pulling at her hair-net until presently the hair flopped down over her shoulders, unrolling into corkscrews. She yawned until her eyes watered and then groped her way down the dark stairs to the kitchen.

  Mrs Bracey lay still, trying to think about the doctor, endeavouring to keep her thoughts along their old road of seeing evil where she could and sensing guilt before it was committed. But she could not do so. The doctor retreated and faded a dozen times and instead vague memories of childhood, her own childhood, ranged across the landscape of her mind. Dr Cazabon no longer mattered. She did not care if Tory Foyle eloped with him. ‘Yet I want to live,’ she thought. ‘I still want to live. Perhaps if I could but look out of the window all the old interests would come back to me!’

  The light lay full over the room now and a gull rose on its wings, gliding close by the window and crying. The fleet was out in the fishing-grounds, all the men withdrawn from the place like a tide that has fallen back. ‘There’s a whiteness over the ceiling when the harbour’s empty,’ she thought. ‘Almost as white as if there was a fall of snow outside.’

  Robert could not say that every time he went into his garage he remembered having kissed Tory there; but sometimes he did, and this morning, perhaps because he was sleepy, he felt her presence there very palpably. As he drove up the hill towards the nursing-home he thought of the evening when he met her at the station, when they had for the first time acknowledged their secret. ‘It’s no use,’ he now told himself (his patient, almost ready to be delivered of her child, imagined him speeding towards her, all his thoughts on her and on this important hour of her life), ‘it is of no avail to excuse ourse
lves by saying that facts cannot be hidden, for of course they can be and should have been, and nothing but wretchedness would ever result from bringing them to the light of day.’

  He drove in between shining laurels, lawns sopping wet with dew, geraniums. Small bleatings now arose from rows of cradles, where mauve, mottled fists were crammed against hungry mouths, furiously strong lips fastened upon and rejected knuckles and fingers. A young nurse lifted the babies and -carried them, two at a time, to their mothers’ bosoms.

  ‘Good morning,’ Robert said, leaving his hat on the hall-table. ‘Good morning,’ he repeated to his old enemy advancing down the corridor, her skirts and veil snapping and crackling as she came. ‘If I had not succumbed that evening,’ he thought, going up the stairs, ‘if I had been five minutes earlier or later passing the station, Prudence might have been spared. I should not have lost her love and her confidence in me, and my own peace of mind.’

  The Matron preceded him through a door and stood aside as if in triumph. ‘Brought to this by a man,’ she seemed to announce, directing Robert’s attention to the woman on the bed who turned restlessly from side to side, seeking to evade pain.

  ‘Vomiting,’ Matron said, ‘since five.’

  The woman put up her hands and took Robert’s, gripping them tightly.

  ‘So very cold,’ she whispered apologetically, and smiled.

  At that moment Robert was dearer to her than her own husband. She put her life in his hands with love and confidence. While he gave his orders to the nurse he stood there close to her, chafing her wrists with the utmost tenderness. She no longer thrashed about in the bed, but lay very still, and when the pain overwhelmed her she merely closed her eyes.

  ‘Perfect weather!’ customers said, turning away from it into the dark coolness of the public-house. ‘A really lovely spell.’

  Ned Pallister, that indoor creature, was glad, he implied, for their sakes.

  Bertram wore a cream alpaca jacket and Tory a large floppy hat to shade her face. When she encountered Bertram on the quay he remarked on this.

  ‘It would not suit me to be sunburnt,’ she explained, and, with one of those impulsive gestures she thought out so well beforehand, she tucked her hand under his elbow and strolled with him along the waterside towards the cliff-walk.

  ‘You are good at knowing what is right for you,’ he agreed. ‘Your face is like painted china.’

  ‘I hope it is carefully painted.’

  ‘All the same, I can also admire the Californian type of beauty.’

  ‘Those sun-baked women?’ she asked coldly.

  ‘I like the little white bits that get left.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ she said. ‘I imagined them so bold that there’d be none of those.’

  They sat down upon a blistering hot seat among plants with rubbery leaves, dismal blossoms puce in colour. The sea quivered with light and was purple above the rocks, green elsewhere. A yacht was passing out of sight round the Point.

  ‘I never would go sailing with Teddy,’ Tory continued. ‘It roughens the skin, tangles the hair. It is no use trying to be what you are not. Now, he has married a very sporty girl called Dorothy, who romps about and tousles his hair and is a real pal to him, a real comrade and helpmeet. And I expect goes sailing with him, wearing trousers, and hoisting the jib whenever she’s told . . . or whatever else it is wives are supposed to do on boats . . .’ She spoke disdainfully, looking out at the distant yacht.

  ‘What is that noise?’ Bertram asked.

  ‘Oh, I think it is the band on the promenade at the New Town.’

  ‘Surely we could never hear it from so far?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she answered carelessly. ‘It sounds better like this.’ And then she suddenly said: ‘Bertram!’

  ‘Yes, my dear?’

  ‘You may remember that you have often asked me to marry you . . . I daresay you spoke in jest . . .?’

  A sense of great danger came over him. ‘In jest?’ he repeated, to gain time in which to digest, make use of this warning.

  ‘Yes, in jest!’ She laughed, bowing her head.

  ‘How could I jest about such a thing?’ he asked with automatic gallantry.

  ‘Then if you meant it before and mean it still . . . well, it will give me great pleasure to accept, that is all.’

  He said nothing for the reason that he could think of nothing to say. As if his feelings were too deep for words, he took her hand and kissed it. (‘It is just that I have not had time to think,’ he comforted himself. ‘I am really transported with joy.’)

  ‘It is high time I settled down,’ he said aloud. ‘But no other woman has made me wish to marry.’

  ‘Of course, there is Edward,’ Tory said.

  (‘Yes, of course, there is Edward as well,’ Bertram thought.)

  ‘He is just the sort of boy I should like to have for a son,’ he said. ‘But let us talk about ourselves. What has made you change your mind? For I think I now have the right to ask you that, my sweetheart.’

  Tory thought, too, that he certainly had a right, but that that could not be a guarantee of receiving the truth.

  ‘Oh, I am lonely,’ she said.

  He held her hands and from time to time lifted them and put little kisses into the palms.

  ‘I am lonely, too.’

  They looked at one another and laughed.

  ‘One thing merely,’ he began, ‘any prospective employer would wish to know the same – before I take you in marriage, I feel I am entitled to know why your former husband left you.’

  ‘Oh, you feel that?’

  ‘You see, you might fail me in the same ways.’

  ‘I didn’t fail him. I irritated him.’

  ‘In what ways?’

  ‘Oh . . .’ She looked out to sea. The yacht had gone and there was nothing to concentrate upon. ‘For instance, by unwinding balls of string from the outside, squeezing my tooth-paste from the top – those sort of things.’

  ‘Those are not reasons for divorce.’

  ‘I also thought they were not.’ Suddenly she said: ‘I forgot to tell you that I want to be married at once. I hate making plans and waiting for things. And I want to get away from here and find somewhere else to live. I am so tired of the seaside and all the squalor of this dreadful little place . . .’

  As her agitation grew – and he could feel it in her hands as she spoke – his pity for her grew, too, and his uneasiness about the future.

  ‘Look at me!’ he said, when she had finished speaking.

  She raised her eyes and smiled at him, the warmth gathering and breaking over him.

  ‘I am not a passionate man . . .’

  ‘You reassure me,’ she said lightly. (‘Why, it is quite a lark after all,’ she thought. ‘It is quite easy – so long as it is quickly done.’)

  ‘Let us go for a drink!’ she suggested. ‘Let us break the news a great deal, and celebrate.’

  16

  There really were a few visitors at last, but only day-trippers from the New Town. They hired boats and were rowed out of the harbour into the open sea. After half an hour, perhaps, they turned and came back, for there was nothing to see, they said, only the view: they did not often marvel at or even notice the transformation of the harbour buildings, dulled and diminished, becoming picturesque. Ashore once more, they ate crab-teas at the Mimosa Café or were shown over the lighthouse, exclaiming at the steps, commiserating with the lighthouse-keeper, so that he began to boast, telling them how sometimes (because they were directly in the line of migration) he was obliged to sweep up the dead birds from the outer balcony with broom and shovel, the poor creatures dazed by the light and dashed to pieces. As he told this story he believed it, but it was not true; he had merely read something of the kind in a book. ‘How terrible!’ the visitors exclaimed, and felt that something was added to them, something they could take home after their holidays. They did not feel this over the threepence they paid to see over the Waxworks, and grumbled openly, so
that Lily Wilson, sitting in the little pay-box at the entrance, heard them and was frightened.

  Their voices floated up to Mrs Bracey through the open window. Her bed was moved away from the draught now, but there must be an abundance of fresh air, the doctor said. Mr Lidiard sat beside her, but she did not want him, and was glad when Bertram came. She did not want to talk, but to listen, and Mr Lidiard seemed incapable of holding a one-sided conversation, which Bertram, fresh from the silent service, did admirably. He rarely had such an opportunity and was inclined to forget Mrs Bracey and pretend to himself that he was giving a talk on the wireless – one of the things he had always wanted to do.

  But this afternoon, the minute Mr Lidiard crept away, he leant over the bed and whispered dramatically: ‘I am going to be married.’

  ‘Who to?’ she asked, looking up at him grotesquely out of the corners of her eyes because it hurt her to move her head in his direction.

  ‘To Mrs Foyle, of course.’

  She closed her eyes. ‘Then God help you,’ she murmured. ‘God help you.’

  ‘I thought you would like to hear of my intention to settle down.’

  ‘Not to her. She’s a bad woman.’

  ‘I like bad women,’ Bertram assured her, for there was no need, he thought, to defend his future wife against the slander of the dying.

  ‘So you may,’ she whispered. ‘Not to live with, though.’

  Then the commotion of coughing smothered her and she snatched frantically at his hands as if she were drowning. When it was over he wiped her face with his own linen handkerchief and laid her back on her smoothed pillows.

  Presently she asked: ‘They didn’t come next door, after all, did they?’

  ‘Next door?’

  ‘The Fun Fair.’

  ‘No,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘No, they haven’t come.’

  In the middle of her packing Tory suddenly thought she had enough courage to go to tell Beth her news. The packing was something definitely done against changing her mind, and she was rolling up her glasses in dusters and burying them in sawdust.