The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [106]
The spring cleaning had been thorough. Each washed and polished object stood roundly in the unseeing air. The marbles glittered like white sugar; the ivory paint was smoother than ivory. Blue spirit had removed the winter film from the mirrors: now their jet-sharp reflections hurt the eye; they seemed to contain reality. The veneers of cabinets blazed with chestnut light. Upstairs and downstairs, everything smelt of polish; a clean soapy smell came out from behind books. Crisp from the laundry, the inner net curtains stirred over windows reluctantly left open to let in the April air with its faint surcharge of soot. Yes, already, with every breath that passed through the house, pollution was beginning,
The heating was turned off. Up the staircase stood a shaft of neutral air, which, upon any door or window being opened, received a tremor of spring. This morning, the back rooms were still sunless and rather cold. The basement was still colder; it smelled of scrubbing; the light filtered down to it in a ghostly way. City darkness, a busy darkness, collected in this working part of the house. For four weeks, Portia had not been underground.
"Gracious, Matchett, you have got everywhere clean!"
"Oh—so that's where you've been?"
"Yes, I've looked at everywhere. It really is clean—not that it isn't always."
"More likely you'd notice it, coming back. I know those seaside houses—all claptrap and must."
"I must say," said Portia, sitting on Matchett's table, "today makes me wish only you and I lived here."
"Oh, you ought to be ashamed! And mind, too, you don't get a place like this without you have a Mr. and Mrs. Thomas. And then where would you be, I should like to know? No, I'm ready for them, and it's proper they should come back. Now don't give me a look like that—what is the matter with you? I'm sure Mr. Thomas, for one, would be disappointed if he was to know youwished you were still at that seaside."
"But I never did say that!"
"Oh, it isn't only what's said."
"Matchett, you do fly off when all I just said was—"
"All right, all right, all right." Matchett tapped at her teeth with a knitting needle and marvelled at Portia slowly. "My goodness," she said, "they have taught you to speak up. Anyone wouldn't know you."
"But you go on at me because I have been away. After all, I didn't go, I was sent."
Sitting up on the table in Matchett's basement parlour, Portia stretched her legs out and looked at her toes, as though the change Matchett detected (was there a change really?) might have begun there. Matchett, knitting a bedsock, sat on one of the chairs beside the unlit gas stove, feet up on the rung of another chair—she had unbuttoned the straps across her insteps, which were puffy today. It was twelve noon: the hands of the clock seemed to exclaim at the significant hour. Twelve noon—but everything was too ready, nothing more was to come till an afternoon train steamed into Victoria and a taxi toppling with raw-hide luggage crossed London from S.W. to N.W.1. Therefore, there had happened this phenomenal stop. In the kitchen, the cook and Phyllis tittered to one another, no doubt drinking tea. In here, the two chairs now and then creaked with Matchett's monolithic repose.
She had had her way like a fury. Tensed on the knitting needles (for she could not even relax without some expense of energy) her fingers were bleached and their skin puckered, like the skin of old apples, from unremitting immersion in hot water, soda, soap. Her nails were pallid, fibrous, their tips split. Light crept down the sooty rockery, through the bars of the window, to find no colour in Matchett: her dark blue dress blotted the light up. She looked built back into the half darkness behind her apron's harsh glaze. In her helmet of stern hair, a few new white threads shone—but behind the opaqueness of her features control permitted no sag of tiredness. There was more than control here: she wore the look of someone who has augustly fulfilled herself. Floor by floor over the basement towered her speckless house, and a reckoning consciousness of it showed like eyes through the eyelids she lowered over her knitting.