A View of the Harbour

by Elizabeth Taylor

  (‘Ask me again in a year,’ her heart cried. ‘Surely I cannot be so wicked that I would marry Bertram, deliberately intending to be unfaithful to him?’)

  ‘A sort of sordid reunion in London once a year?’ he continued, and his lip curled, so that she was thankful she had held her tongue.

  She put her arms round him and her head down on his shoulder and her throat ached intolerably so that she could not speak.

  ‘My sweet Tory, forget the things I said . . .’

  ‘None of them was true.’

  ‘I know. It has been the only really wonderful and miraculous thing in my life, the way you lifted me out of the dullness of my everyday existence. It will be painful to sink back again and know there will never be anything like it for the rest of my life.’

  ‘Please go quickly.’

  ‘Shall I write to you?’

  ‘Yes, write. Always write.’

  ‘Good-bye.’

  ‘Good-bye, Robert. And, Robert!’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Don’t see me again.’

  ‘I promise.’

  When he had gone Tory ran upstairs and flung herself across her bed.

  While the sun was setting Prudence and Geoffrey sat under the may-tree in the churchyard. Prudence wore her sage-green dress, her coral bracelets. Geoffrey read poetry out of a little suede-covered book. Prudence passed her hand across her jaw and put a little yawn into it as she did so.

  ‘Good night!’ Robert said briefly, lifting his hat to Tory and Bertram as they passed at the street corner much later in the evening.

  19

  When the furniture-vans arrived Beth felt as sickened as if they were tumbrils bound for the guillotine. Stevie, however, was pleased with all the excitement and went out and stood at the kerb to watch. Strange men carried out, as if unaware of their importance, sacred and heartbreaking objects such as Edward’s high chair, Tory’s bedroom furniture stripped of its petticoats, Teddy’s walnut writing-desk. All the morning it went on and Beth tried to work, but could not. ‘So it has really happened,’ she thought, drawing little faces down the edge of the page.

  Bertram worked hard, feeling himself in command, quite indispensable. The removers, taking a cup of tea at ten, decided that ‘he was the sort who knows everybody else’s job better than what they know it theirselves.’ And all his care for Tory’s glass and china they considered unmanly.

  Meanwhile, Tory conducted the estate agent round the echoing rooms, standing against patches of damp, and bewildering him with her appeal to his manhood, concealing cracked plaster, damaged woodwork, with smiles and arch remarks, until he thought her the most accessible woman he had ever met. ‘And now,’ she said, sweeping him past Edward’s bedroom door on which was scribbled ‘Private Mr E. Foyle Esq. Kindly knock’, ‘now I will show you the little garden.’

  He followed, with yardstick and notebook. The men sitting round a box in the kitchen eating sandwiches, watched in silence as they passed through. Significant glances were exchanged.

  ‘Oh, delightful!’ the young man said, as Tory led him out to the paved courtyard. ‘Quite Continental, isn’t it?’

  ‘I hate leaving it,’ Tory said simply. She did not explain that she was leaving only the paving-stones, and that as soon as the young man was out of sight, iron chairs, bay-trees in tubs, Alpine garden in old stone sink, hydrangeas, were all to be snatched up and taken away.

  ‘Creeper-clad walls,’ the man wrote in his notebook.

  ‘Hardly “clad”,’ Tory laughed, glancing at the thin growth of virginia-creeper straggling up one wall, and seeking to imply that she could only be frank with him about her property. When he had gone she took up a bottle of milk that was left and went to say good-bye to Beth.

  ‘This is left over,’ she said, putting it down on the hall-table and glancing nervously round. ‘And Bertram is bringing you a loaf of bread and some butter and three rashers later.’

  ‘What time are you going?’

  ‘The taxi is coming in about half an hour. Bertram will see the vans off and then he is coming to London in a day or two.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I am no use at saying good-bye. I always howl.’

  ‘And I.’

  ‘Once in London when a maid left, Teddy came in and found us in one another’s arms weeping. Yet the next day I had forgotten her. But this isn’t really a good-bye at all for us. We have said so many in all the years we’ve known one another, this is just another, like the end of term, or the day we left school, or our little booze-up the night before you were married. I thought then you were going out of my life for ever.’

  Stevie came in from the sunshine to have a good look at them.

  ‘I’ll always remember your telling me,’ Beth said, ‘that one day something would happen that I’d never be able to bear writing about . . . and I feel this is it . . .’

  A wild flash of thankfulness seemed to strike Tory’s heart at these words, a sense of relief at unimaginable danger safely escaped. The appalling disaster she had so nearly not spared Beth she saw in all its enormity for the first time.

  ‘You haven’t said good-bye to Robert and he is out,’ Beth was saying.

  Tory looked down steadily, for great tears came up so solidly in her eyes that if her lids moved they would surely fall.

  ‘I will say good-bye to him for you,’ Beth suggested.

  ‘No . . . I – no, don’t do that. I did say good-bye to him. I met him outside . . .’

  To hide her face from Beth, she stooped and drew Stevie to her. ‘Good-bye, darling! You shall come to me in London and I will take you to the theatre.’

  Stevie remained calm, feeling this to be the kind of promise that is never fulfilled.

  At last, for a second, Tory managed to raise her eyes to meet Beth’s.

  ‘Good-bye, then.’

  ‘Good-bye, Tory dear. I hope you’ll be so very . . .’

  As they did not ever kiss one another there was nothing left for Tory to do but to go quickly out of the house into the blinding sunshine.

  ‘Steady, steady!’ Bertram said, as she collided with him. Stevie followed and watched her disappear into the house. When the taxi arrived Tory came out with Bertram, looking quite restored, but Beth did not appear at the windows. Only Stevie waved, standing at the kerb, wearing on her head a battered aluminium jelly-mould which Tory had thrown away. Bertram put a suitcase into the car and then got in himself. They both waved to Stevie as they drove away.

  Upstairs, at her bedroom window, Prudence knelt in the sunshine, watching, her cats in her arms.

  All along the waterfront blinds were drawn down. Maisie, wearing black, opened the shop door from time to time to receive wreaths and crosses with black-edged cards tucked among the lilies, carnations, or mauve and white everlastings.

  At lunch Robert asked Beth to lower the blinds as soon as the meal was finished.

  ‘But, Robert!’ she protested. ‘What good can it do? Such a ridiculous custom! And the house seems quite sad enough as it is to-day.’

  ‘You only need to do it at the front. The point is, it means a lot to others and does not inconvenience us greatly.’

  ‘How long must they stay down?’

  ‘Oh, I think until the cars have gone to the church. In fact,’ he added, ‘I had thought that it would be much appreciated if you yourself went to the funeral.’

  ‘I?’ Beth cried in alarm ‘But, Robert, I couldn’t! I have never been to a funeral in my life. I shouldn’t know what to do. I should hate it. Oh, hate it!’

  ‘All right, my dear. There is no need to wring your hands. I didn’t mean to upset you. On the contrary, I thought it would be quite your cup of tea. But it doesn’t matter in the least. It is true you hardly ever saw the woman. You are eating nothing.’

  ‘I know.’ She sighed.

  ‘Prudence! I’ve asked you a thousand times if I’ve asked you once to leave those cats outside at mealtimes.’

  Beth pushed he
r plate away with a gesture of finality. ‘And, Stevie! will you please use your handkerchief,’ she said sharply.

  No one mentioned Tory.

  When she and Prudence had cleared the table Beth went to the window to draw down the blinds.

  Outside, Bertram was standing in the road and the removal men were just closing the door of the remaining van with a great rattling of chains. Bertram stood watching it as it moved off, his hand sheltering his eyes from the glare of the sun. Then he turned in at the Anchor and Beth drew down the blind, so that a thick, syrupy light lay over the room.

  ‘There we are, then!’ said Bertram, hanging his picture in the bar-parlour. As the curtains were drawn the painting looked quite subdued.

  ‘Capital!’ Ned Pallister exclaimed, struggling into his funeral jacket. ‘Yes, well that makes a nice pair along with Mr Walker’s picture.’ He went from one to the other. ‘Interesting,’ he observed, ‘what two people can make of the same view. We all see places a bit different to what the next man does. That stands to reason.’

  ‘We see with our souls,’ Bertram said sententiously. ‘And what we reveal in our paintings is the soul of man, not a mere row of buildings.’ Standing in front of Mr Walker’s picture, he felt complacently that Mr Walker’s soul did not come off too well, looked dingily out from behind the gravy-like paint.

  ‘You coming along?’ Mr Pallister inquired.

  ‘No,’ said Bertram. ‘I am going for a stroll. I did what I could for the woman while she was alive, but I feel it would be imposing myself to go to the funeral.’

  ‘I shall be glad to have Iris back to-morrow,’ Mr Pallister said, glancing round the dusty bar.

  Just as Bertram set out, a hearse and two cars pulled up outside the Braceys’. Children began to congregate. He saw Stevie emerge from the Cazabons’ house, wearing her jelly-mould, but she was immediately drawn back inside by an arm probably belonging to her mother, since Mrs Flitcroft was at the Braceys’. At all harbour funerals she was the provider of teas; she was the one who stayed behind to put the kettle on, to slice beetroot into glass dishes and cut currant bread.

  The Waxworks was shut, the lace-curtains drawn together.

  ‘Well, I compromised myself there,’ Bertram smiled as he passed by. ‘If all I hear of that girl is true. I should never have believed it, scarcely can believe it, either. It is amazing how one can be so mistaken about people.’

  He walked on down the side of the harbour. The fleet was out, and the trawlers still visible, smudging the skyline with tufts of smoke. Bertram thought of Tory, wondered how near to London she might be, and contemplated, without any more uneasiness than would be natural in so established a bachelor, his coming marriage.

  The lighthouse-keeper went up into the lamp-room to wind the clock. Glass flashed in the sun, with rose, with violet. Just at that moment the door opened at the Braceys’ and the wreath-covered coffin was borne out rather unsteadily to the hearse – a moment Mrs Bracey herself had often touched upon in conversation. Bertram thought of this, pausing in his walk, standing for a moment and looking back. Then Maisie and Iris came out, followed by an assortment of relatives who had never been seen at the harbour before but who had been gathered up from the length and breadth of England almost for this occasion.

  The sun steadily drenched the scene and a cracked bell dropped a note or two down the narrow streets, over the rooftops, even out across the water. The pause between each note was so long that there was no rhythm or regularity, it seemed; only one sound idly following another and floating out over the harbour.

  Up at the church Mr Lidiard, with many strange thoughts locked in his heart, awaited the funeral cortège.

  Doors were closed, and very reverently the cars moved forward. The children dispersed and Bertram continued his walk.

  The lighthouse-keeper, looking out to sea, saw the trawlers wide across the horizon, and noticed, too, the white sails of a yacht approaching across the purple, the turquoise water.

  And now, one by one, discreet hands released blinds along the harbour-front, and Mrs Flitcroft, with a flourish, as if to a burst of music, parted Mrs Bracey’s bedroom curtains, threw up the sash, letting death out of the window and sunlight in.

  Prudence and Stevie had been peeping at the funeral from between their curtains.

  ‘Did Tory come to say good-bye?’ Prudence asked casually.

  ‘Yes. And Mother cried. Her face went red and she put her hands over her mouth.’

  ‘Did Tory cry?’

  ‘No. She was the one who was going away. Prudence, will they bring Mrs Bracey out and sit her up in the taxi?’

  ‘Mrs Bracey will be in a coffin,’ Prudence said.

  ‘Yes, I know. She is a corpse now,’ Stevie agreed.

  ‘Don’t tell Mother I let you look.’

  ‘No, I won’t. But why do those children watch so close up?’

  ‘Because they don’t consider other people’s feelings,’ Prudence explained, wiping the breath-steamed pane with her handkerchief.

  In the morning-room, at the back of the house, Beth finished her novel, her arm cramped, her wrist throbbing. She wrote the last sentence, dwelt on the full stop with her pen, and then drew a little line.

  ‘This is it,’ she thought. ‘This is the only moment and the whole reward. The ends of the circle are brought together and tied, and in the tying of the knot is perfect bliss, a second only, before all the doubts and anxieties begin again and other people step in.’

  She felt empty, clean, deserted, as if a whole world had been swept away out of her bosom, leaving her clear as crystal. And her heart turned over painfully as she laid down her pen.

  As the yacht came into harbour, the view unclenched itself, the houses sank down tier after tier, the church tower lowered itself behind the roofs, the lettering on the shop-fronts grew clear.

  ‘Nothing has changed,’ Teddy Foyle thought. He climbed the iron ladder and stood for a moment on the quay, the breeze combing his hair. Then, with sensations in his heart of both dread and delight, he set off along the curving arm of the harbour wall towards the waterfront.