The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [137]
"Because I suppose I am," was all he could say.
"I told Eddie you were a person I made happy."
"Good God, yes. But don't you see—"
"Do think it over, please," she said calmly. "I'll wait."
"It's no good beginning to think, my dear."
"I'd like to wait, all the same."
"You're shivering," he said vaguely.
"Yes, I am cold." With a quite new, matter-of-fact air of possessing his room, she made small arrangements for comfort—peeled off his eiderdown, kicked her shoes off, lay down with her head into his pillow and pulled the eiderdown snugly up to her chin. By this series of acts she seemed at once to shelter, to plant here and to obliterate herself—most of all that last. Like a sick person, or someone who has decided by not getting up to take no part in a day, she at once seemed to inhabit a different world. Noncommittal, she sometimes shut her eyes, sometimes looked at the ceiling that took the slope of the roof. "I suppose," she said, after some minutes, "you don't know what to do."
Major Brutt said nothing. Portia moved her head on the pillow; her eyes roved placidly round the room, examined things on the washstand. "All sorts of pads and polishes," she said. "Do you clean your own shoes?"
"Yes. I've always been rather fussy. They can't do everything here."
She looked at the row of shoes, all on their trees. "No wonder they look so nice: they look like chestnuts.... That's another thing I could do."
"For some reason, women are never so good at it."
"Well, I'm certain I could cook. Mother told me about the things she used to make. As I say, there'd be no reason for you and me to always live in hotels."
The preposterous happy mirage of something one does not even for one moment desire must not be allowed to last. Had nothing in Major Brutt responded to it. he would have gone on being gentle, purely sorry for her As it was, he got up briskly, and not only got up but put. back his chair where it came from, flat with some inches of wall, to show that this conversation was closed for good. And the effect this cost him, the final end of something, made his firm action seem more callous than sad. To stop any weakening pause, he kept on moving—picked up his two brushes, absently but competently started to brush his hair. So that Portia, watching him, had all in that moment a view of his untouched masculine privacy, of that grave abstractedness with which each part of his toilet would go on being performed. Unconscious, he could not have made plainer his determination always to live alone. Clapping the brushes together, he put them down with a clatter that made them both start. "I'm sure you will cook," he said, "I'm all in favour of it. But not for some years yet, and not, I'm afraid, for me."
"I suppose I should not have asked you," Portia said—not confusedly but in a considering tone.
"I feel pleased," he admitted. "In fact, it set me up no end. But you think too much of me, and not enough of what I'm trying to say. And, at the finish of this, what I still ask you to do, is: forget this and go home." He dared hardly look at the eiderdown, under which he still heard no stir. "It's not a question of doing the best youcan do, it's a question of doing the only thing possible."
Portia, by folding her arms over it tightly, locked the eiderdown, her last shelter, to her chest. "That will do no good, Major Brutt. They will not know what to say."
"Well, let's hear what they do say. Why not give them a chance?" He paused, bit his upper lip under his moustache, and added: "I'll come with you, of course."
"I can see you don't really want to. Why?"
"I don't like to spring this on them—your just turning up with me, I mean, when they've had hours to worry. I've got to telephone—Why, you know," he added, "they'll be calling out the police, the fire brigade."
"Well, if you so much want to, you may tell them I'm with you. But, please, you are not to tell them I'm going back. That will all have to depend."
"Oh, it will, will it? On what?"
"On what they do then."
"Well, let me tell them you're safe."
Without any further comment, she turned over and put her hand under her cheek. Her detachment made her seem to abandon being a woman