by Mary Renault
“Who’s Joe?” asked Elsie, rather nervously. She felt she had heard the name before, but without its registering. Leo looked at her in vague surprise, as if she had pointed to some object in common use, a chair or a jug, and asked what it was.
“Joe? He lives on the island. He’s just the chap next door, as you might say. You’ll be seeing him, he’s always around.” She unhooked a striped towelling bath-robe from behind the galley door, hitched it round her, and began setting the table. “You can watch the coffee, if you like.”
“Who lives on the other two houseboats?” Elsie asked. “The ones on either side?”
“The one down-river belongs to a couple called Jennings. They’re only here at week ends. They bought it because it was the only place where Pop Jennings’ mother couldn’t stay with them; she’s rheumatic. They do their best to pretend they’re living in comfort at Golders Green, and play bridge every evening to pass the time. You don’t play bridge, do you?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“Stick to that if you meet them, you won’t regret it. Otherwise they’re rather sweet. Then the Anitra on the other side, the big place with the yellow awnings, that belongs to a technician from Elstree. He isn’t here much, but when he is you’ll know it. He’s quite intelligent when you get him alone, but to keep up with his crowd you need twelve evening frocks and a head like old teak, so we just grin at each other in passing. I’m afraid you won’t find much more social life here than you did at home. The bacon’s ready; come on and eat.”
“Where’s Helen?” asked Elsie, missing the third place.
“Left for town an hour ago. The man she works for today starts his list at eight-thirty. Probably she’ll be hanging about till after eleven, but she has to be there. She’ll be back for tea, I expect.”
“I like Helen,” said Elsie, “very much.”
“Everyone does.” Leo spoke like one who states a commonplace fact.
“She’s rather a deep character, isn’t she? I mean, she makes you feel there must be more in her than meets the eye.”
“Do have some mustard.”
Elsie did not pursue the subject. Conversation with Leo, she remembered, had always been liable to dead ends. In the old days one had come to them with a jolt; but now it no longer seemed to matter, one merely continued with something else. When the meal was over, and cleared away, Leo said, “Come up to my room and talk to me while I dress. You haven’t seen it yet.”
There was a second ladder, in the bow end of the boat. It led straight into Leo’s room, a big light one with windows on three sides. Through the ones at the end showed the back of the carved figure-head, a stout nymph whose bosom must have been bared for many years to the breeze, for it was cracked here and there, and weather had blunted her nose; though patches of gilt still clung to her serpentine tresses. The room itself was more like a living-room than a bedroom, and, in places, even more like the garden shed at home where Leo had kept her things. It had become tidier in the interval (Helen would see to that, Elsie thought), the big divan bed had a blue silk cover, the wall-cupboards housed clothes that looked decently kept, and there were many new books; but there was still a corner full of fishing tackle, another corner contained two old canoe paddles and one new one, and a shelf of the book-case was given over to tools.
Elsie wandered round, while Leo brushed her hair and rummaged for clothes. Only two pictures, and in such a big room. Elsie liked them three or four to a wall. One was a photograph of Helen, with all the light coming from one corner and the rest dark; the other a pen-and-ink drawing of a cowboy “fanning” a bucking horse with his Stetson. She went to the book-case; not very hopefully, for Leo’s books had always been disappointing. Time, she found, had brought no improvement. Fishing, sailing, climbing; a beginner’s textbook on flying; a huge volume called Gray’s Anatomy—that would be Helen’s, she supposed—Shakespeare, Hakluyt’s Voyages, a good deal of poetry and some flat, yellow, paper-covered books in French. Perhaps the novels were somewhere else. Over the big roll-top desk there was a shelf that looked more promising; the nine or ten books in it had the red shiny covers with which Elsie felt more at home. She explored them, but with diminishing zest. Silver Guns, by Tex O’Hara. The Mexican Spur, by Tex O’Hara. Quick on the Draw, Yippee-ih! Lone Star Trail, by Tex O’Hara. One might have known; Leo had never possessed what Elsie, following Mrs. Lane, called nice books. She took down Lone Star Trail, whose title had some faint suggestion of romance, and sat down with it on the hard chair at the desk,
“I don’t suppose,” said Leo without looking round, “horse-operas are much in your line, are they?”
“This one looks very nice.” Elsie spoke politely; Leo must think highly of Tex O’Hara to have collected what might well be his complete works; perhaps one ought to have heard of him. She dipped into the middle, as her custom was, looking for a love-scene, but encountered, as she had feared, only strife and masculine pronouns.
Leo was dressed, in fawn corduroys and a cream wool sweater. Elsie put down the book without reluctance.
“Do let me help you make the bed.”
“Don’t bother, it doesn’t take a minute.”
“What a pretty nightgown. Do you wear them for a change sometimes?”
“Good Lord, no, that’s Helen’s.” Leo folded it, neatly for her, and put it under the pillow. “She’s gone and left all the lids off her powder and stuff again. They won’t have any smell. Must have been late getting up—I was too sleepy to notice.” There was a little walnut chest of drawers near the bed, with an eighteenth-century swing glass on top; when Elsie, eager to be helpful, began putting the jars and boxes to rights, the faint scent that came from them seemed to make Helen present in the room. So, Elsie thought, she had turned out with a vengeance, taking all her things, and camped with Leo. It was very good indeed of both of them to put up with it so cheerfully. She would have liked to say so, but felt, for some reason, too shy.
“Well,” said Leo,” in a minute we’ll go out in the canoe and get some food.” She pulled a lipstick out of her pocket, lined in her mouth with a few brisk strokes, lit a cigarette, and sat down with it, cross-kneed on a corner of the bed.
“Look here,” she said. “About this running away. If you don’t feel like talking about it, don’t. These things are bad enough when they happen, without digging them up afterwards. On the other hand, if it makes you feel better, go ahead. It does, sometimes; it depends what it was, I suppose.”
Elsie looked at her shoes. She would have been happy, indeed, to talk about Peter: but not now. Everything prevented her; the room, the books, the memory of Leo, brown and stripped and confident, standing in the morning sun and drying her hair.
“Nothing happened really. Except the usual things. It just came to me that I had to get away.”
“You mean,” said Leo, “that you don’t want to go into the final row. Well, I don’t blame you. I didn’t myself, for a year or two afterwards. It seems odd, though, to think of you bursting out. Didn’t Mother mind a good bit when you said you were going? You and she always seemed to belong, somehow.” Her face had a look which, for the second it lasted, took Elsie a long way back. “I suppose it was Mother who told you where to find me. You know, don’t you, whatever she said at the time, sooner or later she’ll be here to bring you home?”
“She won’t,” said Elsie. “Nobody will.” She stared, again, at the floor between her feet. Suddenly Leo seemed too sharply outlined, too direct and clear, to be looked at without flinching. “There wasn’t any row. No special one, I mean. Mother doesn’t know I know where you are, or anything about you. I—I looked in her drawer when she was out, and found the address.”
“Oh,” said Leo slowly. “I see.” She pulled at her cigarette. Elsie moved her shoe a little, watching a crack across the toe. “I think, if you don’t mind, you’d better just tell me this. Are you going to have a baby?”
“Why, no!” Elsie was so shocked that she looked up. Leo was gaz
ing at her, thoughtfully, with her light-brown eyes; her brows were contracted a little, as if she were trying to understand something difficult. “Of course not, Leo. I mean, I’ve never. …” She knew no way of saying it, and stopped.
“All right,” said Leo. “Sorry. I only asked because I couldn’t think of any other reason to do it. … Mother was so fond of you. You and she did everything together. You dress like her, even now.”
“It wasn’t anything—anything sordid. I just wanted to live a life of my own.”
Leo looked at her cigarette smoke. A faint smile, half bitter and half amused, moved the corners of her long mouth.
“You mean,” she said, “you got sick of it. Don’t you think perhaps you’d better just scribble a note to Mother to let her know you haven’t been knocked on the head and put in a brothel? She probably thinks you have. Helen can post it for you, in town.”
She had spoken quite coolly; but the sense of injury and injustice prickled under Elsie’s skin. She did not, as she would have done at home, put it into words; but Leo answered it.
“I never pretended. I never wanted them to pretend. If they ever faced a single plain fact in their lives, they must always have known that I’d go away. Even before I told them so. … I’m sorry. I’ve no right to talk like this. I got out eight years ago. The fact is, I suppose, I always excused myself by thinking they had you.”
Elsie looked away, trying to think of Peter; Peter who had made her feel exalted, emancipated, brave and in the right. She had kept faith with his revelation; but he was not here to tell her so. Only Leo was here, lighting absently another cigarette, perplexed, uncompromising, cruelly real. Elsie snatched her handkerchief up from the hem of her stocking, and burst into tears.
“I can’t help it,” she sobbed. Confused thoughts, which she had never shaped consciously even to herself, broke from her in words, to which she listened as if someone else were speaking. “I’m not like you. I can’t live like that, standing by myself and fighting everyone. I haven’t wanted to be deceitful. I wanted to be good to both of them, and for everyone to be happy. It’s easy for you to talk, you’ve never tried. You don’t know what it’s like to think up something that will please one of them, and know if you do it the other will behave as if you’d done it to hurt them. And in the end you just never do anything, you’re afraid even to be anything, you just go on one day after another, making yourself smaller, and flatter, and duller; you daren’t say yes or no because it’s sure to be taking sides, you feel mean and wicked if you go out of a room and mean and wicked if you stay. You’ve forgotten what it’s like to try extra hard to be good and find you’re more in the wrong than ever. … I know I’ve been underhand, going to Mother’s drawer and saying I was spending the day in Newquay. It makes you underhand. And now you say I’m wrong, too. I may as well go back. I’ll never know how to live properly. I’ll make a mess of everything I do.”
Leo had blown out her match before it touched the tobacco. Slowly she put the unlit cigarette back in the box, and got to her feet. She came round behind Elsie and put a hand on her shoulder. Her touch was diffident and Elsie, shut in her own misery, did not feel it.
“Elsie. Elsie, stop a minute. Don’t. There’s nothing to cry about.”
But Elsie, deaf and blind, wept on.
“Shut up!” shouted Leo in her ear. “Stop it! I want to speak to you.” A sharp twinge of pain shot through her shoulder, as Leo’s strong fingers dug into it. She winced, gulped, and opened her eyes.
“What is it?”
“Well, when you’ve got a minute to listen, I just wanted to say I’m sorry. I’ve been a fool. I often am. What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. I thought I’d train at something. I’ve got fourteen pounds.”
“We’ll think later. Don’t worry; you can stay here as long as you like. No, I mean it, we’d love to have you.”
Elsie was silent; only her eyes ran over again. She wondered, as she mopped them, why sudden kindness should produce this effect; there seemed no sense in it.
“I’ll be a nuisance to you,” she sniffed.
“Of course you won’t. You’ll probably be a great help. Look how you did the pumping.” She retrieved her cigarette, and lit it. “Helen and I spend a lot of time working. I hope you won’t be bored.”
A momentary concern arrested Elsie’s tears. “You’ll get into trouble, staying away because of me.”
“That’s all right.” Leo looked a little amused. “I take a morning off now and again. I’ll do some in the afternoon. Come on, let’s get out the canoe.”
“I’ll just get my hat.”
“Hat? Don’t be crazy. What you want to do is powder your nose. Use some of mine.”
The canoe was beached, in the garden. To find a garden was such a surprise that Elsie forgot the aching sensation of recent tears. It ran the length of the houseboat, reached by a little plank bridge, and ran about a dozen yards deep along the bank; it was fenced with a white wooden rail overgrown with ramblers, which, as thick as a hedge, overflowed the top of it and dripped down again into the long grass of the lawn. There was a rickety arch, covered with roses too—some of them had the beginning of buds already—and, in the tangled grass, an apple-tree in flower. The willow she had seen from her window grew there too, at the water’s edge.
“It’s in rather a mess,” said Leo unregretfully. “We just do it when we feel like it, you know. You’ll have to watch out in the canoe, if you’re not used to them. It’s just a question of sitting tight.” It was a Canadian canoe, not at all new, but light, slender and well made. Leo, holding it steady, showed her how to drop her weight all at once into the middle. It seemed, at first, terrifiyingly unstable; but, as with a bicycle, the sense of balance came in time. They glided out into mid-river; Leo, perched in the stern, dipped the single paddle with long firm strokes, almost soundless, which thrust them forward with effortless speed. “There’s Joe,” she said suddenly, and lifted the paddle over her head with a carelessness which rocked them dangerously, so that Elsie, clutching the sides, was too frightened to look at the island and see who replied, and next moment they had turned away. She watched Leo instead. Her face was quiet, open and impersonally happy. She looked, Elsie thought, like a nice boy but less alarming. It seemed, at this moment, strange ever to have been afraid of her; stranger still to have taken seriously the things that were said at home. Elsie wondered, all over again, what reckless scrape could have created the misunderstanding.
“A penny for them,” Leo said.
Elsie blushed; but here in the sunlight, with the fresh wind in her face and the open water ahead, there seemed no undertones, no mystery, no danger except the decreasing one of upsetting the canoe. She smiled and said, “Nothing, really.”
“What did you expect me to be like?”
“Well—I suppose I expected you to have changed a lot.” Suddenly and to her own surprise, a gust of confidence carried her on. “I mean, I see now there must have been a mistake. Or perhaps they meant something else, and I missed the point. They sort of—said things, you know, without saying them. And nobody talked about you, as if there was something queer. And then my being away at Aunt Lottie’s when it happened, and everyone refusing to say where you were and that I’d know when I was older … you don’t ever like to ask, when people say that.”
Leo trailed the paddle; the canoe glided onward with its accumulated speed.
“Well, if you feel old enough now, why didn’t you ask me?”
“I was going to. But I didn’t know if you’d like it.”
“Compared with watching you deliberate about it,” said Leo, “it’s a holiday.” Her voice was light and careless; but to know that after all these years it was coming now so simply, gave Elsie the sensation that everything around them was standing still to listen. “It’s a long time ago. Eight years. I can’t think how you managed not to find out. But I suppose you didn’t want to very much. One wouldn’t. Did you get the general i
mpression that I ran away with a man?”
Elsie put her hand over the side, and fished up from the cold pull of the water a strand of weed. Examining it closely, she said, “Well, yes, I suppose.”
“Don’t look so nervous. You’re not having breakfast at home now. Of course I did.”
“Oh,” said Elsie. She pulled off some of the weed and dropped it back into the water.
“Well, you must have known that.” Leo dipped the paddle again; a movement as easy and unconscious as walking. “How astonishingly tactful ordinary people are. You’ve lived all these years in the village and nobody ever told you who it was?”
“I didn’t think it would be anyone I knew.”
“How could it be anyone you didn’t? It was Tom Fawcett.”
“Tom Fawcett?” Her imagination stopped of its own accord, unassisted. She remembered only an overgrown, light-haired schoolboy who made elementary jokes with the unpredictable effects of a half-broken voice, and had a reputation for foolhardiness on the cliffs.
“I don’t think you met him,” said Leo, “after he went to sea.”
“I hardly met him at all. I didn’t know he was back, or there when it happened. Nobody said.”
“Social amenities are a wonderful thing.” The smoothness of Leo’s stroke disguised its increasing force and speed. Her face looked bright and hard. She seemed, Elsie thought, very cheerful about it all. “It’s a silly story. You may as well have the whole thing and get rid of it, mayn’t you? There’s nothing to it, anyway.”
With sudden inspiration, Elsie said, “So that’s why we stopped calling on the Fawcetts any more.”
“Yes, that would be why.”
“I used to think,” Elsie’s voice was tinged with faint regret, “that it was an artist.”
“Well, no.” Leo’s mouth curled at the corners, making her look a little like Helen’s portrait of her. “No, not exactly. Look out, keep her steady while this launch goes by.”