The Dead of Night

by Oliver Onions

  4

  Mr Thorne was talking amiably on, but Verney Arden did not hear him. That side of the room was of a semi-clear glass, that varied faintly in colour, and it gave on the garden outside. Through it mazy sunspots of brightness and shadowy nodding palms showed. They had left the dining-room, Mrs Van Necker throwing him another backward smile, as if to say ‘Presently’, but they had not reappeared outside yet. The girl who couldn’t keep her eyes in the boat had glanced his way too as she had gone out. But Xena had not so much as turned. She hadn’t even looked round at the closing door.

  Of course it was Xena’s doing. It could only be Xena. But why hadn’t she looked? It was O.K. and perfectly in order that the invit­ation should come through Mrs Van Necker, but surely she might have looked! She was shy, of course. He remembered her shyness in Cairo. But she hadn’t been too shy to get Mrs Van Necker to send the message.

  He sat looking through the tinted glass, watching the mazy sun­spots that dissolved into the cool greenness of the palms.

  Suddenly they appeared, a muslined variegated patch, with Xena’s blue hat swimming faintly in it. Rabat, the scarlet-fezzed negro, was dimly to be seen in the doorway behind them. Verney Arden pulled himself together. Anyway Xena would have to look at him in a moment or two. With a good-morning to Mr Thorne he rose. He walked down the room, through the adjoining lounge. As he approached the door where Rabat busied himself among the pip­kins on his copper table he heard a voice say ‘Here comes your friend, Xena –’

  What happened after that he could never afterwards quite remem­ber in its proper order.

  Presumably Xena would be the first to speak, introducing him in her shy moving little voice to Mrs Van Necker. Thereupon (he supposed) Mrs Van Necker would introduce him to the others. It couldn’t very well be any other way. But all that had nothing to do with what really happened. In the dining-room Xena had not looked at him. She had come in behind Mrs Van Necker not looking at him. She had kept her head turned during the whole of lunch. And she had gone out without looking round.

  Yet she had known all the time he was there.

  Now she looked at him. Nothing more, nothing less. Her eyes met his in a slow lifting look.

  Mrs Van Necker was talking, pronouncing names – ‘My daughter Mollie – Miss Cicely and Daphne Bruce-Harries –’

  Still, as she stood under a palm, Xena’s eyes were on his, three parts as if they would have run away, but the fourth holding bravely on. The palm threw a shadow over the blue hat, so that the light from the sunspots on the ground made the eyes under the hat’s brim the lighter blue of the two.

  And he knew now why she hadn’t looked at him in the hotel. Looks like that are no looks to let loose across dining-rooms, or to shoot, blue and bottomless, from the edge of a closing door!

  ‘ – Miss Amalia Sherren – Amalia’s a painter –’

  He had wondered whether he was still a little in love with her. Still! What was that word ‘still’, that implied a continuance, not a beginning? He was not still in love with her. He was in love with her. Wherever she had got it, it came from her, was her, and if there was anything in him worth saving and keeping it was his own no longer.

  And the world continued to exist and function as usual – the little knot of guides and hawkers gathered about the gate they were not allowed to enter, a carpet-seller passing, somebody closing sun-shutters across the street, people sitting at other tables, Rabat approach­ing to know which coffee they would have –

  ‘Well, now that everybody knows who everybody is let’s all be comfortable –’

  It had all taken just as long as it had taken to pronounce a few names –

  And that (he told himself) was that.

  Presently he found himself listening to Mrs Van Necker, replying to her.

  ‘Signor Francavilla saw us off at Palermo.’

  ‘How is Signor Francavilla?’

  ‘Naturally just a little,’ – Mrs Van Necker dropped her voice a little as she glanced towards Xena – ‘but of course it’s the first time –’

  ‘I saw him last in Cairo.’

  ‘Yes, Xena told me. Have you been in Tunis long?’

  ‘A little more than a fortnight.’

  ‘Then you’ll be able to tell us everything there is to see.’ More surprising still, he could actually turn to the girl on his right and talk to her.

  ‘If your name’s Bruce-Harries I knew a fellow of that name at Eton.’

  ‘Oh, he knows Ronnie, Daffy! Were you at Eton?’

  ‘No. Winchester. But I caught-and-bowled him one match. But I say – you mustn’t think I’m a gentleman of leisure – I’m here in this part of the world as a sort of boxwallah really –’

  Followed talk of Ronnie, of Eton, of the match.

  Something told Verney Arden that he must now look at Xena less than at any of them. He must keep as it were to the environs of her, her garments, her little dangling foot, the green shade in which she sat. She was leaning back in a green wooden chair, with her head a little on one side and one hand along the chair’s arm. And at the hand he did look. He had noticed her hands in Cairo. If he had been asked to put her whole meekness into one image it would have been an image with knees bent, eyes trustingly lifted, and the two little soft palms together. But now the fingers on the chair were moving ever so minutely, patiently rather than impatiently, and it was as if her eyes shut themselves up with their own happy thoughts now that his own had run, leapt, flown to their bold yet bashful appeal. For hers had done the calling. ‘I want somebody to love me,’ had been their message. ‘I’m not a little girl now, but a grown-up person with girls of my own age, and they’re loved, and I want to be loved. And I want somebody for me to love too. I’ve only just learnt about it, but I feel I want that more than anything. I didn’t mind so much when father was there, but it’s dreadful having nobody, and I don’t know anybody but you yet.’ This, from those Easter-cards of eyes he had seen in Cairo, blue as the robes of the little images they place in niches in the walls! Sweet, shy, yet adventurous little heart! He had heard that girls ‘shot up’ quicker than boys, but had she glowed and deepened into this in three short months? Two years – a year even – he could have understood that. But this –

  ‘I think we ought all to get tinted glasses,’ Mrs Van Necker was saying lazily. ‘The sun is so glaring in the afternoons.’

  Nearly half an hour had passed, and they had had coffee. Her daughter laughed.

  ‘Oh, we know all about you, mother! Do you know what mother’s going to do, Mr Arden?’

  Astounding, Verney Arden thought, that this should be a girl too, with eyes so different!

  ‘She’ll go upstairs, and take the Guide Book with her, and she’ll read it for nearly five minutes, and then – ’ Mollie made the unlady­like sound of a snore. ‘The question is what are we all going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to unpack my painting-things,’ said Amalia Sherren.

  There was a suppressed colloquy a little apart, of which Mollie Van Necker was the centre. It ended in a shocked exclamation from Cicely Bruce-Harries.

  ‘Mollie! You aren’t!’

  ‘I am!’

  ‘But you’ve only seen him once!’

  ‘Then I shall have seen him twice.’

  ‘Hallo, where Xena’s off?’

  For Xena had got up from the wooden chair. She approached Mrs Van Necker.

  ‘I think Verney and I would like to go for a walk,’ she said, with the same mixture of diffidence and resolution as before. ‘May we, please?’

  Mrs Van Necker’s manicured finger tips were delicately at her mouth. – ‘Child! In the heat of the afternoon!’

  ‘I like the heat. Will you come, Verney?’

  ‘May I take her?’ Verney asked, his heart beating fast.

  Of th
e battle between yawn and finger tips the yawn won. – ‘When you say it in that English voice of yours – and you know Umberto Francavilla better than I do’ – Mrs Van Necker replied.

  ‘I shan’t be five minutes, Verney,’ said Xena; and she walked past Rabat and his tray and disappeared into the hotel.

  Verney! When had she used that name before? Still a little bewild­ered, he turned to Mrs Van Necker.

  ‘It’s awfully good of you. What time would you like her brought back?’

  To his surprise, another person answered him. He had not yet spoken to the ice-water-looking girl who had said she was going to unpack her paintbox. It was this girl who spoke, from behind his chair.

  ‘Girls like Xena used sometimes to go out and not come back at all, I guess,’ she said.

  The fair-haired boy looked round and up at her. But he thought it best to turn it off as a joke.

  ‘Oh, we aren’t going to elope!’ he laughed.

  ‘No, I guess you’re to be trusted,’ Amalia replied, looking at him as she had looked at Xena.

  Because it had been no part of his upbringing to talk from a chair while one of the opposite sex stood, Verney Arden had arisen. ‘One of the opposite sex,’ he couldn’t help thinking, rather described this girl.

  ‘Are you afraid somebody’ll take her from me?’ he asked, smiling.

  ‘A man wouldn’t, maybe. But I’ve heard of their gods getting a hold of people and not letting them go.’

  ‘I – I’m sorry – I don’t quite understand –’

  ‘I guess I don’t travel to see the things I can see at home,’ the girl replied as she turned away.

  In front of Rabat’s red fez and sooty face Xena’s blue hat appeared.

  ‘Are you ready, Verney?’ she called softly.

  5

  He was bursting with questions, quite apart from the sweet, secular confession itself; what had she said about him to Mrs Van Necker? Why had she, who had never before called him anything, suddenly called him Verney? That heavenly look she had given him had been no practised look; it had been touchingly the other way; where had she found it? And what in the name of goodness had the painter-girl meant about gods who took people and didn’t bring them back?

  But he had only to gaze at the sunshiny little feet moving by his own to forget everything else.

  She wore shoes so slight that they were hardly more than pods for those little peas, her toes. Her stockings too were filmy, so that the busy tendons showed through them. The honey-coloured skirt flowed like windy corn as her knees knocked against it. And because it had all nothing to do with Greenway’s Bottled Products it didn’t matter what nonsensical loveliness he let his mind give way to. The pavements were full of other feet, varnished boots, high heels, shuffling heelless slippers, dusty brown feet with nothing on them at all. His own boots had been bought in Malta, for he couldn’t send to England every time he wanted a pair of boots, and he was just a young fellow on the move, trying to do business in schoolboy French. But he told himself that those little feet had come all the way from Cairo, all the way from Palermo, all the way from wherever they had been, to walk beside his own. Darling little pilgrim pair! And then suddenly she gave the first laugh he had ever heard her give.

  ‘What long strides you take!’ she said. ‘Nearly twice mine!’

  ‘Not twice –’

  He shortened his, she lengthened hers. Both laughing, they made for a few moments grotesque timing along the pavement.

  ‘Where shall we go?’ he asked, as the feet fell into their natural irregularity again.

  There were the souks, the Avenue, the Belvedere, the quays. They could walk, or take one of the low-hung carosses. Or they could seek the shade of a café. It was Ramadan. Devout Mahommedans who would not break their fast by as much as a cup of coffee until six o’clock sat grave and silent behind screens and awnings. The African sun seemed to burn away the colour from the tops of the ficus-trees, imprisoning it in that gentle glow within. Watercarts sprinkled the streets, Renault cars picked up and dropped their passengers. It was at the sight of one of these that she suddenly spoke again.

  ‘The car ought to be here tomorrow,’ she said, as if out of her thoughts.

  ‘What car?’

  ‘Oh, I haven’t told you. Father’s sending us a car.’

  ‘You girls?’

  ‘I shall let the others use it,’ she said with a little air of magnan­imity that also struck him as new.

  They walked on, he watching the feet again that popped in and out.

  They were approaching the Porte de France, not far from the entrance of the souks, and all at once he knew where he would take her. He would take her to Hayoun’s. His job made him known here and there in the bazaar quarter, and Hayoun was a good fellow. He had refused the agency Verney had asked him to take up, but Verney wished that some of the Frenchmen he knew were half as decent about it as Hayoun. Hayoun understood, and would give him coffee as a friend, and not as a guide-tout who, in Xena, had brought a possible customer.

  ‘This way,’ he said, and led her under the arch and across the busy Place.

  They entered a crowded, vaulted ruelle, arcaded with painted wooden pillars and lighted by piercings overhead. In dark niches men tapped with little hammers, filed, incised, polished objects of brass. Slow-moving Arabs in hooded burnous jostled bare-legged porters with sacking on their backs, and half-naked figures slept under the bulks. All was a throng of lights and hues and noise and the odour of attar . . . and all at once, as somebody pushed him close to her, it came over him that he wanted nothing so much on earth as to see again that look she had given him in the garden, that soft wide-templed look, blue as artichoke flowers, blue as the piercings of the vault over their heads that let in the African sky.

  But it was another blue that suddenly caught his eye. It was the horizon-blue of a young French officer in black riding-boots and a red képi. He was absorbed in lighting a cigarette at a match that a girl with her back turned to Verney shielded between her palms. The girl did not turn, but the officer, engaged as he was, nevertheless moved his eyes sideways. They rested on Xena’s face in a way that Verney suddenly loathed. It was a familiar look, almost as if he claimed to know her. He hurried Xena past. He was glad that she had noticed neither officer nor look.

  Hayoun’s bazaar was round by a green-shuttered door up another cobbled and vault-roofed alley. It was only a tiny shop, just big enough for Hayoun himself; a broad low divan, a desk, an assort­ment of bric-a-brac, and the carpets on the walls. His principal stock of carpets was kept in the room at the back. Hayoun himself; enormously fat, red-fezzed and in a choke-collared black frock coat, greeted his English acquaintance with a friendly smile. He bowed as Verney presented Xena.

  ‘Ça marche toujours?’ he asked the youth, his clever eyes twinkling.

  Verney made a face. – ‘No, I can still take lessons from you, Hayoun. You give a thing away and they buy it. They eat my dinners and that’s all.’

  Hayoun chuckled as he moved a burnous from the divan and invited them to sit down.

  ‘Everything comes with the years,’ he said. ‘La jeunesse – ah! It has better things to do than sell carpets and copper dishes. You will see –’

  He disappeared to prepare coffee.

  As Verney Arden sat down by Xena’s side on the divan the strange­ness of it all came over him once more. It was too strange; it was unreal. In Cairo she had glanced back at her father if she had left his side for a few moments. She had run to him again the instant the excursion was over. Now she called him Verney, asked him to take her out for a walk, and told him with her eyes that she wanted him to love her. All this could not have come to pass in three short months. And yet it most evidently had come to pass.

  ‘Well, tell me about since I saw you. Where have you been?’ he asked.
<
br />   ‘I’ve been at home,’ she replied, almost shyly again.

  ‘At home in Palermo?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All the time?’

  ‘Except for little journeys,’ she answered, the eyes dropped.

  ‘And you only left there yesterday?’

  ‘Yes.’ And suddenly she turned the blue gaze on him, not with the look of the garden this time, but anxiously, as if she thought he understood, but was not quite sure. ‘But I know what you mean,’ she added.

  ‘What do I mean, Xena?’

  ‘You mean I’m different, don’t you?’

  ‘You are different.’

  ‘Don’t you like me different?’ she said in a low voice.

  ‘Oh, I – ’ but he checked himself. There would be time for that by and by. ‘I mean why do you say you’re different? Other people notice of course, but one doesn’t strike oneself as being different.’

  ‘I think it began on that boat,’ she said reflectively.

  ‘What began on the boat? The difference?’

  ‘Yes. It hasn’t been like this ever since Cairo. I’m certain it only began yesterday.’

  He would have loved to hear her say that it had begun with her first sight of him, whatever it was, but she hadn’t said that.

  ‘Tell me all about it,’ he begged her.

  She spoke slowly, conscientiously. – ‘I don’t think I can tell you quite all about it, Verney, because that wouldn’t be fair; you can’t tell other people’s secrets, can you?’

  ‘Then tell me as much as you can tell me.’

  ‘I was going to. I want to. I want to get all that part finished. – Is there another lake here, besides the one we came in at?’ she suddenly asked.

  ‘Here in Tunis? Yes. There’s Es Sedjoumi, just beyond.’

  ‘I thought there was. And I knew the mountain too, as if I’d dreamed about it sometime. I knew the mountain best of all. And then Amalia came up and said my legs were like the sand and I’d got my eyes out of the sea, and I was frightened at first.’