The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [131]
"You won't want all that just to get back from here."
"I'd rather have five shillings. I'll send you a postal order for it tomorrow."
"Yes, do do that, darling, will you? I suppose you can always get money from Thomas. I've run rather short."
When she had put her gloves on, she slipped the five shillings in small silver, that he had rather unwillingly collected, down inside the palm of her right glove. Then she held out her hand, with the hard bulge in the palm. "Well, goodbye, Eddie," she said, not looking at him. She was like someone who, at the end of a too long visit, conscious of having outstayed his welcome, does not know how to take his leave with grace. This unbearable social shyness of Eddie, her eagerness to be a long way away from here, made her eyes shift round different parts of the carpet, under their dropped lids.
"Of course I'll see you down. You can't wander about the stairs alone—this house is lousy with people."
Her silence said: "What more could they do to me?" She waited: he put the same stone hand on her shoulder, and they went through the door and down three flights like this. She noted things she had not seen coming up—the scrolls, like tips of waves, on the staircase wallpaper, the characters of scratches on the olive dado, the chaotic outlook from a landing window, a typed warning on a bathroom door. For infinitesimal moments in her descent she paused, under Eddie's hand, to give these things looks, as though it helped to fix her mind on them. She felt the silent tenseness of other people, of all those lives of which she had not been conscious, behind the shut doors; the exhausted breath of the apartment house, staled by so many lungs, charged with dust from so many feet, came up the darkening shaft of the stairs—for there were no windows down there near the hall.
Down there, Eddie glanced once more at rack, in case the next post should have come in. He" swung open the hall door boldly and said he had better find a taxi for her. "No, no, no, don't: I'll find one easily.... Goodbye," she said again, with a still more guilty shyness. Before he could answer—while he still, in some reach of the purely physical memory, could feel her shoulder shrinking under his hand—she was down the steps and running off down the street. Her childish long-legged running, at once awkward (because this was in a street) and wild, took her away at a speed which made him at once appalled and glad. Her hands swung with her movements; they carried nothing—and the oddness of that, the sense that something Was missing, bothered him as he went back upstairs.
Here he found, of course, that she had left the despatch case, with all her lessons in it, behind. And this quite small worry—for how on earth, without comment, was he to get it back? This looked like further trouble for the unlucky pupil at Cavendish Square—pressed just enough on his mind to make him turn for distraction to the more pressing, dangerous worry of Anna. He got bottles out of a cupboard, made a drink for himself, gave one of those defiant laughs with which one sometimes buoys up one's solitude, drank half the drink, put it down and opened the letter.
He read Anna's note about the office telephone.
V
THE Karachi Hotel consists of two Kensington houses, of great height, of a style at once portentous and brittle, knocked into one—or, rather, not knocked, the structure might hardly stand it, but connected by arches at key points. Of the two giant front doors under the portico, one has been glazed and sealed up; the other, up to midnight, yields to pressure on a round brass knob. The hotel's name, in tarnished gilt capitals, is wired out from the top of the portico. One former diningroom has been •exposed to the hall and provides the hotel lounge; the other is still the diningroom, it is large enough. One of the first floor drawingrooms is a drawingroom still. The public rooms are lofty and large in a diluted way: inside them there is extensive vacuity, nothing so nobly positive as space. The fireplaces with their flights of brackets, the doors with their poor mouldings, the nude-looking windows exist in deserts of wall: after dark the high-up electric lights die high in the air above unsmiling armchairs. If these houses give little by becoming hotels, they lose little; even when they were homes, no intimate life can have flowered inside these walls or become endeared to them. They were the homes of a class doomed from the start, without natural privilege, without grace. Their builders must have built to enclose fog, which having seeped in never quite goes away. Dyspepsia, uneasy wishes, ostentation and chilblains can, only, have governed the lives of families here.