“I’m sorry.”
Her voice was sudden, and it was different. It retained its frank abruptness, while discarding its hostility. Its effect upon Scarsdale was curious. It was as though he stood on the threshold of a new age and heard the voice of youth speaking, while the face of youth was veiled. She was strange, and he was three and forty, and feeling himself mute in the face of her young strangeness.
She stood aside.
“You have something for me.”
“Yes. A packet of letters. Your father asked me—”
“Please come in. You won’t mind if I close the door. They are so fussy about lights.”
He found himself with her in the darkness of the passage.
“I think all the fuss is nearly over.”
She slid past him and opened a door, and he saw her profile against the light. Her hair was bobbed, and it stood out rebelliously in a vigorous cloud, nor did it soften the squareness of chin and forehead. She wore black, with nothing to relieve it. Her strong throat had a defiant austerity.
“Come in.”
Scarsdale followed her into the front room of No. 53 Spellthorn Terrace. It was like thousands of other rooms in thousands of other back streets. The furniture, imitation mahogany, chairs and sofa covered with a fabric that suggested a reddish plush, was the obvious cheap suite bought at some suburban shop. The sofa looked as though it had never been sat upon, and would have resented any such familiarity. A chiffonier and a cheap, glass-fronted bookcase confronted each other. The grate had vivid orange tiles. A plant stand in the form of a tall tripod supported a brass pot. On the mantelpiece a marble clock separated two gaudy purple and gold vases.
“Please sit down.”
Scarsdale sat down on the severe sofa. There was no fire, and the room felt chilly. He held his cap by the peak. The girl had closed the door, and as she closed it the brass rod supporting a purple plush portiere uttered a melancholy squeak. She stood a moment looking at Scarsdale, and he, meeting her eyes for a moment, realized her as a dark and handsome young creature, but somehow strangely cold.
She too sat down, deliberately, with her eyes still on him. She had chosen to sit on one of the hard and ugly chairs that were so firmly and obviously stuffed with some alien substance, for they had no resiliency, neither youth nor age. She sat very upright, with a dignity in her square shoulders and strong young throat. Her very deep-blue eyes had a stillness; they looked black.
Scarsdale did not feel at ease under the stare of her eyes. She disturbed him, for like the war she was somehow strange and unexpected and a little terrifying, and unbuttoning the flap of a pocket he produced a small packet done up in brown paper. He rose and handed it to her.
“I was with your father when he died.”
She took the parcel and proceeded to open it, and Scarsdale sat down again as though effacing himself. He wondered whether she would shed tears over those letters, for Marwood had been dead less than six weeks. But she did not show any emotion. Having opened the parcel, and turned over one or two of the letters, she replaced them in the brown paper, and looked again at Scarsdale. Her apparent lack of emotion puzzled him.
“You were with father?”
He made a movement with his cap.
“Yes, at the Clearing Station. I’m an orderly there. He asked me to bring these letters home. He said there was one particular letter, a letter to you.”
“The one on the top that hasn’t been opened?”
“Probably. He had written it just before he was hit.”
She sat for a moment staring at a mark on the carpet, and then suddenly she rose and stood by the door. Her eyes seemed less dark, and Scarsdale’s impression was that she was suppressing inward emotion, and that she wanted to be alone. He got up. He felt that he ought to say something sympathetic.
“I’ll be going now. Probably, you—”
She looked him straight in the face and gave him her hand.
“Thank you so much. It has been very good of you. I suppose you are going back again?”
“Yes, next week.”
Her bright young pallor offered him no illusions, and then quite suddenly her face changed. Someone had opened the street door, and had opened it exuberantly, and was making vigorous use of the doormat. A voice hailed the whole house.
“Ju, I say—Ju.”
“Hallo.”
“I trod in an awful squdge in the dark. Where are you?”
“Here.”
He came in to them with a cheerful troubling of the purple portiere, a boy with brown eyes and a little eager face. He looked at his sister, and then at Scarsdale, and his glance at Scarsdale was sudden and questioning and almost hostile.
“O, sorry—”
The girl’s eyes were different when she looked at him. Her face lost its squareness, it’s air of reserve.
“This is Harry. Harry, Mr. Scarsdale brought me some letters. Your supper’s waiting in the kitchen.”
Scarsdale liked the boy’s delicate little face. He smiled down at it, and a sudden smile came back to him. They had nothing to say to each other; the smile was sufficient. But the boy had left the door open, and Scarsdale had a feeling that Julia Marwood was willing him to pass through it and out into the street.
He went. She accompanied him to the door, even opened it for him, and gave him her hand.
“Thanks—ever so much. Perhaps we shall see you again some day.”
“Perhaps.”
He realized that he was a mere messenger, a stranger appearing out of the night and returning to it. He had fulfilled a function. She wanted to be alone with those letters and her brother.
4
To Scarsdale the street seemed darker than before, perhaps because he had been sitting in a lighted room, but when he had closed the gate of No. 53 Spellthorn Terrace, he felt suddenly and depressingly alone. He hesitated, and then, turning towards Spellthorn Square, he knew that his visit to Marwood’s house had both disturbed and disappointed him. But why? What claim had he upon those other Marwoods, that dark young woman with the enigmatic face and the boy her brother? He had been a mere bearer of letters, and yet something in him had come away unsatisfied.
But why? Was it that he had nowhere to go save to that cheap little hotel in Bloomsbury? Was it that he was realizing that at three and forty his old self, the familiar self of the last twenty years had lost its physical solidity, and was becoming dematerialized? The change was indefinable yet somehow startling. It was as indefinable as this new London cloaked in darkness, yet menacingly there like a sinister presence. Yes, sinister, that was the word. The war had stripped him naked, and in this new strange London he felt chilled and raw and vaguely scared.
He paused under the dark trees of Spellthorn Square. The pavement was slimed with dead and sodden leaves. Not autumn, brilliant and crisp, if strangely sad, but a sense of life falling, of decay, of old things gone, and of the darkness pregnant with some strange renewal. What would happen when the war was over? What would happen to him? Would he find himself sub-editing the Sabbath, and reviewing books for the Scrutator, and writing his weekly article for Harvest? The Sabbath? What a dead word! And his rooms in Canonbury Square, and all that pleasant and rather old-maidish routine!
Something in him felt frightened. He seemed to breath raw air. His very feet felt insecure on those slimy leaves.
He had strolled on. He stopped dead. Something was happening close to the railings. He got the impression of a struggle going on, of two bodies interlocked, of rapid breathing. And then one of those dark figures uttered a little spasm of a cry. It was like the low cry of an ecstatic, satisfied animal.
Scarsdale slipped past. He fled; he felt shocked, and surreptitious, yet strangely tantalized. He realized that he was walking very fast, and breathing hard like those two shadowy, interlocked figures. The damp darkness had grown muggy and hot.
This new, raw world! Or was it that he was seeing life afresh, as it was, reality? Had some conventional skin been
stripped from him by the war?
And then he became conscious of a face, the face of Marwood’s daughter floating in the darkness, tantalizing, strange. It was like the face of the new world, enigmatical, vivid, disturbing, real. It was youth. And he—he was three and forty.
Chapter Three
Harry had been persuaded to go to bed and he had been the more easily persuaded because he was a page at the Ponsonby Hotel in Cromwell Road, and had been on his feet most of the day; also, he was devoted to Julia, and his devotion made him docile. He slept with his brother Bob, in the back room at the top of the stairs, but brother Bob was seventeen and full of swagger, and earning four pounds a week and spending it on swagger. He stayed out late. He was a swarthy, awkward, sensual young brute who wore yellow boots and flaring ties, and greased his hair, and spoke with a slight snuffle.
Julia had views upon Bob, even as she had views upon her mother. Harry was different; he had mischievous, soft eyes, eagerness, a kind of fragility; he was a clean and lovable child. His smile was like the buttons down his little blue jacket, and at the “Ponsonby” people smiled at him kindly.
“ ’Morning, Marwood.”
“Good morning, sir. Your paper, sir.”
He was a page in the book of the day’s good manners.
His sister had sent Harry to bed. Julia had other things to do, urgent, secret, significant things. She had read that last letter of Marwood’s and her eyes had given a dark gleam. She went into the kitchen and opened a drawer in which her father had kept an assortment of tools, a claw-hammer, a screwdriver, a couple of chisels, a gimlet and a box of nails and screws. She chose the screwdriver, and returning to the front room, she locked the door and moved the chiffonier aside. The floor-boards were stained, and in one of the boards she saw two faint lines running across the board’s length, the marks of a saw. She knelt down; she found the heads of the screws, and withdrawing them, she prised up the panel. In the little black oblong cavity, a small black, japanned box lay between two floor joists. Julia lifted it out, and letting it lie in her lap, she opened the lid.
Her father’s will.
She spread the stiff and crackling sheet. She read. The will was very brief and simple, and even its legal jargon could not cloud its blunt purpose. She noticed the date, and the names of the witnesses. Marwood had had this will drawn nine months ago when he had been at home on his last leave.
In it he left No. 53 Spellthorn Terrace and all the fitments and furniture absolutely to his daughter, also a sum of two hundred pounds. His wife’s name was not mentioned.
For half a minute she squatted there motionless. Her dark eyebrows seemed to come closer together; her right hand clenched itself. And then, suddenly, upon her stern young face tears trickled. She might be in confusion as to her emotions, but the thinking and purposive part of her saw life clearly through its tears. She felt very near to her father, nearer than when he had been the man about the house. She understood, as far as a young girl can understand, the moods and vagaries of a worried man who had a very indifferent mate, and a family to keep. She could remember him using these tools, pottering about in slippers, sallow and solemn and rather silent. He had had sudden strange rages, and days when he had been submerged in silence. She could remember a night when he had thrashed his elder son with a fury and a mercilessness that might have shocked her had she not been prejudiced against Bob. Poor, funny old Dad! The little house seemed suddenly full of him, and his hammerings and his slippers, and the big curved briar pipe, and his air of rather sullen wistfulness. They had been great pals. His pet name for her had been “Ju-Ju”. Almost she expected to hear his voice—“Come on, Ju-Ju. Half an hour and Battersea and back before supper.”
She had divined in her father a kind of secretiveness, as though the hiding of certain things had given him a whimsical satisfaction. He had had a streak of mystery in him, perhaps because his life was so very unmysterious, and like a boy he felt the lure of mischief. She could remember the way he would wink at her with an air of sallow gravity, and lure her out into the little back garden, and perhaps prod her with his finger, and whisper.
“What about a little skylark? Charlie Chaplin’s on. Let’s sneak out.”
She had known that her father’s secretiveness had been directed against her mother, but until the coming of the war she had not understood the inwardness of their hostility. Always she had sided with her father, and now, as she sat on her heels and folded up his last testament and put it back in the black box, she realized the significance of their comradeship. Something endured. Hatred and love could be signed and sealed to the purpose of life, and to the business of getting a living.
She replaced the piece of floor-board and the screws, and rising to her feet, pushed the chiffonier back into its place. She was grave, deliberate, determined. Her tears were dry. Unlocking the door she carried the box up into her bedroom, put it away in the bottom drawer of her chest-of-drawers, and covered it with underclothing. It would be safe there until the morning.
Julia Marwood was half-way down the stairs when she heard the front door knocker in action. The sound startled her, for the hand had not produced Scarsdale’s restrained rattat, but a summons that was ferociously playful. She expected her mother, and she expected that young swashbuckler Robert, but Robert even in his most swaggering moments did not knock like that. For a moment she remained leaning against the banisters. She had something of the air of a cat with her fur rising, and her eyes at gaze for the possible dog.
Then she went silently down into the passage, and gliding toward the door, stood listening, her head bent forward and slightly to one side. The curve of her neck had the tenseness of a bow. She put her hand to the key, but did not turn it.
She could hear voices, surreptitious, gloating, conspiratorial. There was a scuffling sound, a little giggling laugh. She withdrew her hand from the key, and stood back, and then with a sudden and savage shake of the head, she turned the key and the handle and drew the door open with a gesture of violence.
She saw her mother, and behind her mother a man’s brown slouch hat, the hat of an Australian soldier.
Her eyes met her mother’s. The mere defiance of that mutual stare was but brittle glass covering infinite and hidden secrecies. Nothing and everything had been confessed long ago and in silence, and between them tacit hatreds and scorns, accusations and protests, looked out from two dark chambers. The girl was motionless, the woman in a kind of smirk of movement, her hands unfastening the buttons of her black mackintosh. Her hat seemed tilted, and under it her bland, bold face had a jocund recklessness.
“Hallo, my dear.”
Julia stood back to let her mother in, but one arm was tense and waiting like a spring.
“Supper’s been ready. Harry’s gone to bed.”
Her mother silked her way in with her wet mackintosh gleaming. It had been raining. And instantly Julia slammed the door, and locked it, and did the thing so swiftly that the man in the slouch hat was left mute and effaced upon the doorstep. There was silence. The woman’s figure, arrested in its glide towards the parlour door, seemed to adhere to the wall.
A foot kicked the door. And again there was silence, and then the sound of a man saying foul things as he blundered down the steps. The two women did not move. The girl’s right hand was clenched as though she clutched a knife.
2
Mrs. Marwood removed her hat. She had her back to the room and was facing the mirror over the mantelpiece. Her daughter had remained in the doorway.
Mrs. Marwood placed her hat on the curved back of the very hard sofa, and jabbed the two long pins through it so that the hat was speared to the cushioned surface. She looked at herself in the mirror, and raising her hands, patted her hair, but she was observing the reflection of her daughter’s face as well as her own. The sleek gestures of her hands and arms both suppressed and flaunted her anger.
“Harry in bed?”
“Yes.”
“Bob in yet?”
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“No.”
They exchanged blows in uttering those curt and purely perfunctory words. Mrs. Marwood continued to be busy with her hair. She had brought into that stuffy and over-furnished little room suggestions of perfume and heat and yellowness, and the large movements of a well-fleshed body. Her eyes were blue and slightly protuberant, and like the eyes of an impudent and greedy child. These eyes were watching the implacable pale face of her daughter. It enraged her. It looked so square and stern and resolute. Also it was the face of an enigma, of the watchful and baffling silence of youth. Also it was the face of the dead Marwood.
“Anybody been?”
“No.”
Mrs. Marwood, revolving suddenly like a figure turning on a pedestal, stared at her daughter, and then, with a flaunting aggressiveness, sat down on the sofa.
“You’d better go to bed.”
The stillness of Julia’s figure was exasperating. Consciously and wilfully it seemed to close the doorway, even as Marwood’s dull and undistinguished figure had blocked the free play of his wife’s exuberant adventurousness. Florence Marwood had been married at seventeen, and marriage had become for her a kind of cage in which her mature and intense vitality had raged rebelliously. She had been married too young; and then in the end the war had to come to tantalize her very discursive appetite for all things that could happen outside No. 53 Spellthorn Terrace.
Seeing that her daughter did not move, she gave a shrug of the shoulders. She wanted to say things to Julia; bold, bitter, hazardous things, but never yet had she said them. It is possible that she was a little afraid of Julia, for Julia had the strength of her silence. She looked and said little, and to a woman like Florence Marwood, who had no restraint, this obdurate young face was like a granite wall. Instinctively she knew that no satisfaction was to be obtained from flaring in the face of such reserve. Julia reduced her mother to a mute, exasperated restlessness.
Old Wine and New Page 3