The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [132]
In the Karachi Hotel, all upstairs rooms except the drawingroom have been partitioned up to make two or three more: the place is a warren. The thinness of these bedroom partitions makes love or talk indiscreet. The floors creak, the beds creak; drawers only pull out of chests with violent convulsions; mirrors swing round and hit you one in the eye. Most privacy, though least air, is to be had in the attics, which were too small to be divided up. One of these attics Major Brutt occupied.
At the end of Monday (for this was the end of the day unless you were gay or busy) dinner was being served. The guests could now dine in daylight—or rather, by its unearthly reflections on the facades of houses across the road. In the diningroom, each table had been embellished, some days ago, with three sprays of mauve sweet peas. Quite a number of tables, tonight, were empty, and the few couples and trios dotted about did not say much—weighed down, perhaps, by the height of the echoing gloom, or by the sense of eating in an exposed place. Only Major Brutt's silence seemed not uneasy, for he, as usual, dined alone. The one or two families he had found congenial had, as usual, just gone: these tonight were nearly all newcomers. Once or twice he glanced at some other table, wondering whom he might get to know next. He was learning, in his humble way, to be conscious of his faint interestingness as a solitary man. On the whole, however, he looked at his plate, or at the air just above it; he tried hard not to let recollections of lunch at Anna's make him discontented with dinner here—for, really, they did one wonderfully well. He had just finished his plate of rhubarb and custard when the head waitress came and mumbled over his ear.
He said: "But I don't understand—'Young lady'?"
"Asking for you, sir. She is in the lounge."
"But I am not expecting a young lady."
"In the lounge, sir. She said she would wait."
"Then you mean she's there now?"
The waitress gave him a nod and a sort of slighting look. Her good opinion of him was being undone in a moment: she thought him at once ungallant and sly. Major Brutt, unaware, sat and turned the position over—this might be a joke, but who would play a joke on him? He was not sprightly enough to have sprightly friends. Shyness or obstinacy made him pour himself out another glass of water and drink it before he left the table—rhubarb leaves an acid taste in the teeth. He wiped his mouth, folded his table napkin and left the diningroom with a heavy, cautious tread—conscious of people pausing in what they were hardly saying, of diners' glum eyes following him.
One's view into the lounge, coming through from the other house, is cut across by the row of shabby pillars that separate the lounge from the entrance hall. At first, in those dregs of daylight, he saw nobody there. Glad there was no one to see him standing and looking, he challenged the unmeaning crowd of armchairs. Then he saw Portia behind a chair in the distance, prepared to retreat further if the wrong person came. He said: "Hullo, hul-lo—what are you doing here?"
She only looked at him like a wild creature, just old enough to know it must dread humans—as though he had cornered her in this place. Yes, she was terrified here, like a bird astray in a room, a bird already stunned by dashing itself against mirrors and panes.
He pushed on quickly her way through the armchairs, saying, more urgently, less easily, lower—"My dear child, are you lost? Have you lost your way?"
"No. I came."
"Well, I'm delighted. But this is a long way from where you live. At this time of night—"
"Oh—is it night?"
"Well, no: I've just finished my dinner. But isn't this just the time when you ought to be having yours?"
"I don't know what time it is."
Her voice rang round the lounge which, whatever despair it may have muffled, cannot have ever rung with such a homeless note. Major Brutt threw a look round instinctively: the porter was off duty; nobody was arriving; they had not begun to come out from dinner yet—there would be the cheese, then the coffee, always served at table. He went round the chair that barricaded her from him and kept them in their two different worlds of uncertainty: he felt Portia measuring his coming nearer with the deliberation of a desperate thing