The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [134]
But that still did not matter. He watched, with an odd grim sort of acquiescence, three more people come between the pillars, sit down. Then older ladies in semi-evening dresses cruised through the hall and upstairs: they were the drawingroom contingent. Major Brutt's grey eyes returned to Portia's dark ones. "No, there's nowhere else," he said. He waited: a conversation broke out at the other end of the lounge. He pitched his voice underneath this. "You'll just have to talk more quietly. And mind what you say—you've no business to talk like that."
She whispered: "But you and I are the same."
"Besides, anyhow," he went on frowning at her, "that doesn't alter—nothing alters—anything. You've got no right to upset them: can't you see that's a low game? I'm going to take you right back—now, pronto, at once."
"Oh no," she said, with startling authority. "You don't know what has happened."
They sat almost knee to knee, at right angles to each other, their two armchairs touching. Their peril, the urgent need to stop him from this mistake, made the lounge, the rest of the world not matter—ruthless as a goddess, she put a small sure hand on the arm of his chair. So he wavered more when he said: "My dear child, whatever's happened, you'd so much better go home and have it out."
"Major Brutt, even if you hated them you couldn't possibly want me to do anything worse. It would never stop at all. Having things out would never slop. I mean. Besides, Thomas is my brother. I can't tell you flown here.... Do you like this hotel?"
Here-adjusted to this in two or three seconds, hummed slowly at her, said: "It suits me all right. Why?"
"If you left tomorrow, what they thought would not matter: you could tell them I was your niece who had got a pain and had got to lie down, then we could talk in your room."
"That would still not do, I'm afraid."
But she interposed: "Oh, quickly! I'm starting to cry.'1 She was: her dilated dark eyes began dissolving; with her knuckles she pressed her chin up to keep her mouth steady; her other fist was pressed into her stomach, as though here were the seat of uncontrollable pain. She moved her knuckles, to mumble: "There've been people all day... I just want half an hour, just twenty minutes.... Then, if you say I must..."
He shot up, knocking a table, making an ash-bowl rattle, saying loudly: "Come, we'll look for some coffee." They went through the diningroom arch to the other stairs—there was no lift—then she darted up ahead of him like a rabbit. He followed, stepping heavily, ostentatiously, whistling nonchalantly a little flat, fumbling round all the time for his room key, passing palms on landings with that erect walk of the sleep-walker—his usual walk. Her day had been all stairs—all the same, her look became wilder, more unbelieving as, whenever she turned her head, he kept signalling: "Up, up." This house seemed to have no top—till she came to the attic floor. At Windsor Terrace, that floor close to the skylight was mysterious with the servants' bodily life—it was the scene of Matchett's unmentioned sleep. Under this hotel skylight he came abreast with her: whistling louder, he unlocked his own door. Till now, she had not seen him approach anything with the authority that comes from possession. After that second, she was looking doubtfully over a lumpy olive sateen eiderdown at a dolls' house window dark from a parapet.
"I fit pretty tight," he said. "But, you see, they give me cut price terms."
His anxious nonchalance, and his caution—for he went out again to knock on the other doors, to be certain there was nobody on this landing—made her not speak as she passed the end of the bed to sit, facing the window, on the edge of his eiderdown. He said: "Well, here we are," with an air of solemn alarm—he had just fully realised their position. His chair back grated against the chest of drawers: on the mat there was just room for his feet. "Now," he said, "go on. What made you cry just now?"
"All those people everywhere, the whole time."
"I mean, what brought you here? What is this you say you are running from?"