Nora stared steadily into her mother’s face. ‘I said drowned, Mother. I went out for a walk last night to “the Ponds” … It’s nobody else’s business – and I fell in.’
‘Fell in, my dear?’ Mr Hopper’s voice rang dulcet as a bell in the midst of the baa-ings of a flock of sheep.
‘Yes, Dad, and went clean under, too. Miles! It’s deep there. But it was nothing to worry about. I soon scrambled out. But naturally,’ she drew her hand over her forehead, ‘it’s given me a bit of a headache, perhaps.’
‘What I wouldn’t wonder at, my fine lady,’ cried her mother, ‘is if you aren’t in bed, come tomorrow morning, with a raging cold and inflammation of the lungs or something of that sort. Trapesing back all that way through the streets like a cod in a fishmonger’s shop! I don’t know what they’ll think of you. And not to say a single word to your mother neither!’
‘Feel my hand, Dad,’ said Nora. ‘That’s cool enough, isn’t it? There’s nothing wrong with me, Mother. And I came back by the back-ways. It’s when everybody begins talking, and I don’t see why, and you all keep on at George – why, it makes every-thing look silly. What can’t be made to look silly? There’s always those who’ll laugh. But I’d rather not say anything more about it.’
‘Now, what I say,’ Uncle Ben as usual pranced gallantly to the rescue, ‘what I say is,’ he repeated, his two cold small eyes as grey-blue as agates on either side his long inquisitive nose, ‘is that’s what they call a parable. Didn’t I say an hour ago that George here had taken the plunge, and come up smiling? And what’s Nora done else! She won’t hurt. Bless you! Strong, healthy young creature like that, Polly. None of your lacksidasical young ladies that die of pneumonia from a draught not strong enough to blow the powder off their noses. She’s all right. There now, Polly, she’s all right. The prettiest of chips from the handsomest of blocks.’ He pushed himself in on to the little sofa beside his sister-in-law, and put his arm round her waist.
‘Oh, you old fool!’ retorted Mrs Hopper with amiable scorn, flinging his hand aside. ‘You are all fat, and nothing to fry! I’ve no patience with you.’
But the position was saved, and Nora’s only penalty was a good-sized couple of spoonfuls of Uncle Ben’s whisky, in half a tumbler of scalding hot water.
‘If you insist on gadding about by yourself in the dark, my girl, and having cold baths in public, you must take the consequences,’ said Mrs Hopper, as she dropped two lumps of sugar into the steam.
Nora slipped out after George into the dusky passage.
‘Honest, Nora,’ he breathed hoarsely into her ear, ‘you’re not feeling ill?’
‘Ill! Not me. I’ll come along with you. George. Keep quiet. Stay there. I won’t be a minute.’ She hastened up to her room. It was filled with a clear, still, darkening twilight. Her face glowed softly in the glass; and she could see dove-cote and greenhouse in the dark-shadowed garden below, as plainly as if they had been carved, by magic out of mystery, for the scene of a play. She paused in marvel of it a moment, then pulled on her hat and hurried softly out again. And George was waiting for her where she had left him. Like the Lion on the Brewery he hadn’t moved the fraction of an inch.
‘I like coming out when no one knows anything about it,’ she whispered, as he opened the door. ‘I’m tired of all that, George.’
Not even the faintest of the fleeciest of clouds showed in the sky above the double row of small brick houses in the empty street; and the air was crisp and cold – as if the small hours might bring a tang of frost. A waning moon was showing in the west, shedding her faint light into the crystalline, grey-blue sky.
The two of them walked on in silence until they reached the end of the street. A few hundred yards beyond the next, the branches of plane trees jutted out at right angles from their parti-coloured boles above the asphalt walks of the ‘Recreation Grounds’. There was a faint musty odour in the air, mingled with that of autumnal flowers, beginning now to go to seed, in the borders around them.
‘Honest, Nora, did you really fall into the Ponds?’ George asked. His voice still sounded slightly thick and inhuman, as if an animal were attempting to converse.
‘You didn’t think I was telling a lie, George?’
‘I didn’t think nothing about it, except you never told me. Do you often go out alone?’
Nora’s breast rose beneath her jacket. ‘You know I often go out alone. And why shouldn’t I? I like being alone. I shall always want to be alone when – when I want to be. There’s no harm in that that I can see. I can take care of myself. Mother just talks. She wants things to go as she wants them to go.’
‘You might have been drowned in that pond. It’s a good eight feet deep near that upper bank. If that’s what you call going out alone, why …’
‘But I didn’t get drowned, or I wouldn’t be here now. As if catching cold and that stuff – why, what about them sillies that break the ice in the Serpentine all through the winter? And it wasn’t the falling into the Ponds that I was thinking about. It wasn’t that at all.’
‘If you don’t want to tell me nothing, I don’t know as how I want to hear it,’ mumbled the young man in the billycock hat.
‘Oh lor’, George, for heaven’s sake! There’s a seat. Let’s sit down.’
The two of them seated themselves, a few inches coldly apart, in a dusk cast by a neighbouring lamp-post and by the increasing luminousness of the moon.
‘When in the dark I went down into that pond, George – and I want to tell you about it – it was not like what they say about such things. I seemed to be falling into an enormous black pit, and it seemed it would never end. But it wasn’t, as they say, just memories that came back to me. There were horrible eyes staring at me, and voices shouting. No, not at me; but together, across. And when at last I came up again, and managed to breathe and to see a little, I was just clutching at anything and … It was a lucky thing for me that stubby root was there.’
But George had guessed, in some obscure groping fashion of his own, that this was not the end, was not even the important part of Nora’s confession. He refused to be sympathetic. He sat stiff as a ramrod, staring straight in front of him under the brim of his hat. ‘You had no call to be there alone at that time of night. You had no call to be doing things secret-like.’
Nora listened, her knees pressed tight together, her lips set hard. There would be time to argue when she had finished what she wished to say.
‘But it wasn’t just that that I’m trying to tell you. There isn’t anything in that. It was what happened … Then.’
George’s mouth opened a little; his face groped round in her direction.
‘It was the face I saw that won’t … I keep on seeing it. I don’t know how to explain. It was while, knowing I was safe, I was floating there in the water. It was there, above, looking at me; smiling at me, as if’ – her speech had become more and more animated – ‘what I mean is, it wasn’t a dream, it wasn’t in my head, in my mind, as you might say. It wasn’t fancy.’ The clear young voice trembled, as if in triumph at the word. ‘I know that. It was outside. There, a little above me, before my very eyes. I saw it, George, as I hung there in the water, and I wasn’t excited, or scared, or struggling any more; I looked through my eyes, straight up at it. And by then I think the moon must have come out of the clouds. It was all silver on the water. And that face there – smiling at me. It seemed, as you might say, I had gone in under a dark dreadful tunnel, and come out the other side.’
‘Come out on what other side?’ the young man blurted.
‘Why, the other side’ – Nora lifted her hand, as if she could make a picture of what she intended in the air. ‘The other side of all this, I mean. It was real. And yet it wasn’t real. You might almost have been a child, it was so clear, so simple. And it’s never left me. It’s made everything different. You see, George, and oh, I know it sounds ridiculous – it was something to do with me myself.’ She stooped forward over her lap, staring h
ard at the asphalt beneath her foot. ‘And I don’t know as how I’ve ever seen anything that …’ The square, young, ardent face turned sidelong a little – and lit with a vague, elusive smile he had never seen before – solemnly challenged the young man: ‘You aren’t trying to help me much!’
George once more shifted uneasily in his seat.
‘You told me to shut my mouth a minute ago. So I’m keeping it shut. You say you’d never seen him before?’
Nora burst out laughing. She listened to herself laughing – laughter as carefree as a green woodpecker’s. ‘Seen him before! Oh, George! Him! I clean don’t know what you’re talking about! I never thought of it as being a him, and I didn’t say it was, either. I’ve had enough of those claptrap islands of Uncle Ben’s this evening, and all that widow talk, and I should have thought you had too. As if there wasn’t anything but he’s and she’s to sniff and snigger about! As if there was nothing but silly jokes about just two people like you and me getting married, and all that. I don’t know how they come to it, that I don’t. What I’m saying is’ – yet again the challenge rang out almost shrilly – ‘that’s what I saw, and keep on seeing. And, I’m asking you, George, why shouldn’t I? As if I cared what people think of me – as long as it’s my own self. Who has any right, I should like to know, to say anything about what happens in anybody’s mind?’
She looked away, paused, then turned almost tenderly to the young man.
‘Oh, George, if only I could make you see it, too! I don’t believe as you’d ever care to look at me again! There’s pictures; but not like that. I’m nothing.’
‘And yet,’ cried the rational young man, ‘only a minute or two ago, on this very seat here, you were just making fools of us all for being he’s and she’s. As if that old Nosey! … I can’t make out what you’re getting at, and’ – he gulped – ‘I don’t know as how really I want to.’
His voice died away. The earthy cold night air, having been rent asunder by its stridency, welled back unwounded, unreceptive. Not a soul was in sight, and that hastening footstep beyond the clustering trees might be nothing but a phantasm’s for all that was actually visible.
Nora gazed vacantly. She was perfectly at ease, perfectly happy. All would come right. It was curious, indeed, when things looked so muddled and gloomy, that she should be conscious how strong and how free she felt in her body. It seemed that nothing she would ever attempt to do again could possibly fret or weary her – that she was capable of an infinitude of patience, of energy, and labour. But for the moment she must grope along gently and quietly.
‘This is what I mean, George,’ she said, ‘if you will try and be a little patient. Did you ever see anything as if you had never really seen it before? I mean, more beautiful, as they say: more as though there was a sort of secret between you and it? Why, this lamp-light here now, George, on this old plank, on the wood; look at that! Do you see? There are two kinds of shadows of the leaves. They are like curious hands, webbed – like ducks’ feet. And you can hardly tell where the dark and where the light begins. It’s the moon and the lamp there; shining together: and here are you and me sitting here together too, and we don’t know where it all comes from or what it all means, either. It’s so still, George. I feel I could escape out of my body for ever and ever. Not that I want to: I’m too strong for that. But that’s what I mean when I think about the face I’m telling you of. Only, much more … It will all fade away and go, of course, but’ – she turned eagerly – ‘supposing I’d sunk right down into that pond again, under the willow trees, and my body had stayed there – well, I shouldn’t be here now, talking to you, should I, George?’
‘All I can say is,’ retorted the young man bitterly, ‘it’s lucky your mother isn’t hearing what you are saying.’
‘I’m leaving Mother out now,’ Nora said. ‘But I believe Father would understand a little what I mean. We don’t know, George. You can’t say that if I’d gone then, I’d be the same as I am now. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe that what I was then, sinking down as if for ever into that dark and cold and then looking up calm and peaceful at what was waiting there for me – is what I was when I was sitting there just now hearing Uncle Ben singing that silly rubbish, leering and going on like that, and all. He’s soured – is Uncle Ben. And he doesn’t want to show it.’
‘I don’t see as how the songs were particularly silly, as you call it,’ George lied. ‘There’s some like to take a high-and-mighty view.’
‘Well, never mind, George, they were,’ Nora said. ‘I didn’t mean to be high and mighty; only just the truth. And it doesn’t matter either way. If you want me, George, I suppose you’ve got to have all of me, but if you don’t know what’s there, you can’t blame me if some of it’s kept back. No, I don’t mean that either. No one can ever have all of anybody, I mean. Now and then when I think of it, I’m almost sorry I didn’t not come back last night. I’d like to be where that face came from. Why shouldn’t I be, if it was my own? You can call it just a silly dream or you can call it a nightmare, if you like. What’s words? It’s what it meant to me that matters most, and if you can’t put up with me, George, I don’t know what we shall do.’
Nora hadn’t suspected that the nerves of the young man beside her were quite so near the snapping point. The only sound he uttered was a sort of breathless grunt as he stooped forward, his elbows on his knees, and hid his face in his hands, thrusting back his hard, round hat on his neatly oiled hair, as he did so.
‘I don’t know by what right —’ Nora looked at him and looked again, ‘I don’t know by what right you’re taking what I’ve said like that, George. I needn’t have told you at all.’
‘What I don’t follow,’ replied a stubborn, almost blubbering voice, ‘is why anybody should want to hush up anything about their own faces. How could it have been more lovely-like if it was yours?’
‘You didn’t mean that so nice as it sounds! Haven’t you – don’t you carry about any picture of yourself better than the reflections of what you see in a glass? And even that’s often better than real. You don’t think, George, surely, it’s just your face I love – and looking like that either! Why, it’s you; you; what perhaps nobody else sees at all. We don’t know where we come from, do we …?’
‘Keep your secrets,’ groaned the young man. ‘And I’ll keep mine.’
‘If you call that secrets, George,’ she flamed, ‘then all I can say is, you’re treating me mean. But, oh, you don’t seem to see it. I’ve never been so happy as I was all the time when I was alone today sitting up there in my bedroom and you with your pigeons and the sunshine and all. And I thought – I thought perhaps you might understand … I don’t think I wish to be sitting here any more like this, now. We’ll go home …’
They walked in silence together till they reached the turn of the street, and then Nora slipped her firm hand into George’s hard square one as he stalked along beside her. And so they arrived at No.29. The lights had been put out in the sitting-room. Not a gleam showed between the Venetian blinds, but the moon had now begun to shine full on Allenbury Street. They came to a standstill. Nora drew her hand away, lifted her face, and looked up at the solitary glaring satellite.
‘Won’t you say a single word?’ George breathed huskily. ‘You aren’t going to leave me like that?’
Nora stooped forward, the hard brim of her young man’s hat biting deep into her cheek as she did so.
‘I don’t believe as you’re anything more than a child, George, when all’s said. Are you jealous because my face is more lovely than you’ll ever see it? My face! Lord!’
‘You can’t marry a child,’ George almost sobbed. ‘Promise. Nora, promise —’
Nora drew back. ‘I’ll never promise a single thing,’ she retaliated. ‘As if you don’t know that whatever was not me wouldn’t just shed off like – like the skin from an onion. I’ll just keep what I’ll keep. And what I meant was, I’m glad to be back, but I’m gladder still to know …
’ She stared at the moon, squeezed the hard hand clutched in hers, but could get no further. And in less than a minute the door had closed behind her.
And George, a few tiny drops of dew chilling his face, having surveyed the glittering curtained windows, presently went on, along with his shadow, in his dark clothes and his round-topped hat, along the narrow, vast-skied, vacant, moon-glossed street.
* First published in World Review, December 1950.
The Cartouche*
The clatter of the mowing-machine from beyond the laurel hedge had ceased. An almost complete silence had fallen – the silence of the ended. Every daisy that during the previous week had ventured to lift its eager face to the sun, every skulking or audacious dandelion had been swiftly beheaded. For lawns are lawns. They are intended to follow the even tenor of man’s way, and not to indulge in the wild. The only sound that now interrupted the minute and steady click of Mrs Millington’s needle was the slightly rasping lament of a greenfinch, or the whsst of a swallow’s wing, hawking low – stealthy as destiny – through the air of approaching evening.
Mrs Millington’s dark pretty head was stooping lower than appeared to be necessary over her sewing as she sat by the dark-framed wide-open window. The light cast up by the frilled linen pillow-case which she was mending paled the green reflected on cheek and brow from the sunlit leaves of the garden beyond and the intertwined bush of honeysuckle now languidly sweetening the sultry air.
The sun would soon be setting – as it had set the evening before, and the evening before that. The sun of all her yesterdays indeed. But with how many different kinds of adieu! – cloudless, ardent, of fair promise; indifferent, cold, obscure. Soon would come twilight, then deepening dusk, then night. And at night, although her heart then became more restless with longing, with hope reiteratedly deferred and with an ever-encroaching despair, her mind and her thoughts were more closely her own.
Short Stories 1927-1956 Page 62