The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [118]
"It was in the dark, so I could not show how I felt. Besides, his sister was holding my hand. They really are a fast lot—I do think, Anna, you ought to be more careful where you send Portia off to another time."
This did not go down well. "Portia knows how to behave," said Anna frigidly. "Which makes more difference than you would ever think." She gave Portia what could have been a kindly look had there been the least intention behind it. To Eddie she said, with enraged softness: "For anybody as clever as you are, you are really not good at describing things. To begin with, I don't think you ever know what is happening: you are too busy wondering what you can make of it."
Eddie pouted and said: "Very well, ask Portia, then."
But Portia looked down and said nothing.
"Anyhow," Eddie said, "it has been an effort to talk, when I don't feel in the mood to. But one has got to be so amusing here. I'm sorry you don't like what I say, but I have been more or less talking in my sleep."
"If you are so sleepy, you had better go home."
"I can't see why the idea of sleep should offend you as much as it seems to, Anna. It is the natural thing on a rainy spring afternoon, when one's not compelled to be doing anything else, especially in a nice quiet room like this. We ought all to sleep, instead of talking away."
"Portia has not said much," said Anna, looking across the fire.
At the very sound, on Eddie's lips, of the word, desire to sleep had spread open inside Portia like a fan. She saw reflections of rain on the silver things on the tray. She felt blotted out from the room, as little present in it as these two others truly felt her to be. She moved a little nearer the fireplace, so as to lean her cheek on the marble upright, with as little consciousness of her movement as though she had been alone in some other place. Behind shut eyes she relaxed; she refreshed herself. The rug under her feet slid and wrinkled a little on the polished floor; the room, with its image of cruelty, swam, shredded and slowly lost its colour, like a paper pattern in water.
Since the talk with St. Quentin, the idea of betrayal had been in her, upon her, sleeping and waking, as might be one's own guilt, making her not confront any face with candour, making her dread Eddie. Being able to shut her eyes while he was in this room with her, to feel impassive marble against her cheek, made her feel in the arms of immunity—the immunity of sleep, of anaesthesia, of endless solitude, the immunity of the journey across Switzerland two days after her mother died. She saw that tree she saw when the train stopped for no reason; she saw in her nerves, equally near and distant, the wet trees out there in the park. She heard the Seale sea, then heard the silent distances of the coast.
There was a pause in the drawingroom. Then Anna said: "I wish I could just do that; I wish I were sixteen."
Eddie said: "She looks sweet, doesn't she?" At some later time, he came softly across to touch Portia's cheek with his finger, to which Anna, though still there, did not say anything.
III
"REALLY, Anna, things have gone too far!" Eddie, out of the blue, burst out on the telephone. "Portia has just rung me up to say you've been reading her diary. And I could say nothing—someone was in the office."
"Are you on the office telephone now?"
"Yes, but it's lunch time."
"Yes, I know it is lunch time. Major Brutt and two other people are here. You are ruthlessly inconsiderate."
"How was I to know? I thought you might think this urgent. I do. Are they in the room?"
"Naturally."
"Well, goodbye. Bon appétit," added Eddie, in a loud bitter tone. He hung up just before Anna, who returned to the table. The three guests, having heard in her voice that note of loverlike crossness, tried not to look askance: they were all three rather naive. Mr. and Mrs. Peppingham, from Shropshire, had this Monday been asked to lunch because they were known to have a neighbour in Shropshire who was known to be looking for an agent, and it seemed just possible Major Brutt might do. But during lunch it became clearer and clearer that he was only impressing the Peppinghams as being the sort of thoroughly decent fellow who never, for some reason, gets on in the world. Tough luck, but there you are. He was showing a sort of amiable cussedness; he ignored every hoop that Anna held out for him. The Peppinghams clearly thought that though no doubt he had done well in the War, he had not, on the whole, been unlucky in having had the War to do well in. It became useless for Anna to draw him out, to repeat that he had grown rubber, that he had had