The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [23]
Also, I once heard you say, in the natural way you say things, that you did not very often get letters, so I thought perhaps you might like to get this. You and I are two rather alone people—with you that is just chance, with me, I expect, it is partly my bad nature. I am so difficult, you are so good and sweet. I feel particularly alone tonight (I am in my flat, which I do not like very much) because I tried just now to telephone to Anna about something and she was rather short, so I did not try any more. I expect she gets bored with me, or finds me too difficult. Oh Portia, I do wish you and I could be friends. Perhaps we could sometimes go for walks in the park? I sit here and think how nice it would be if—
"Portia!" said Miss Paullie. Portia leaped as though she had been struck. "My dear child, don't sit hunched like that. Don't work under the table. Put your work on the table. What have you got there? Don't keep things on your knee."
As Portia still did nothing, Miss Paullie pushed her own small table from in front of her chair, got up and came swiftly round to where Portia sat. All the girls stared.
Miss Paullie said: "Surely that is not a letter? This is not the place or the time to read your letters, is it? I think you must notice that the other girls don't do that. And, wherever one is, one never does read a letter under the table: have you never been told? What else is that you have on your knee? Your bag? Why did you not leave your bag in the cloakroom? Nobody will take it here, you know. Now, put your letter away in your bag again, and leave them both in the cloakroom. To carry your bag about with you indoors is a hotel habit, you know."
Miss Paullie may not have known what she was saying, but one or two of the girls, including Lilian, smiled. Portia got up, looking unsteady, went to the cloakroom and lodged her bag on a ledge under her coat—a ledge along which, as she saw now, all the other girls' bags had been put. But Eddie's letter, after a desperate moment, she slipped up inside her woollen directoire knickers. It stayed just inside the elastic band, under one knee.
Back in the billiardroom, the girls' brush-glossed heads were bent steadily over their books again. These silent sessions in Miss Paullie's presence were, in point of fact (and well most of them knew it) lessons in the deportment of staying still, of feeling yourself watched without turning a hair. Only Portia could have imagined for a moment that Miss Paullie's eye was off what any girl did. A little raised in her gothic chair, like a bishop, Miss Paullie's own rigid stillness quelled every young body, its nervous itches, its cooped-up pleasure in being itself, its awareness of the young body next door. Even Lilian, prone to finger her own plaits or to look at the voluptuous white insides of her arms, sat, during those hours with Miss Paullie, as though Lilian did not exist. Portia, still burning under her pale skin, pulled her book on the theory of architecture towards her, and stared at a plate of a Palladian facade.
But a sense of Portia's not being quite what was what had seeped, meanwhile, into the billiardroom. She almost felt something sniffing at the hem of her dress. For the most fatal thing about what Miss Paullie had said had been her manner of saying it—as though she did not say half of what she felt, as though she were mortified on Portia's behalf, in front of these better girls. No one had ever read a letter under this table; no one had even heard of such a thing being done. Miss Paullie was very particular what class of girl she took. Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life. So now, not only diligence, or caution, kept the girls' smooth heads bent, and made them not glance again at Irene's child. Irene herself—knowing that nine out of ten things you do direct from the heart are the wrong thing, and that she was not capable of doing anything better—would not have dared to cross the threshold of this room. For a moment, Portia felt herself stand with her mother in the doorway, looking at all this in here with a wild askance shrinking eye. The gilt-scrolled paper, the dome, the bishop's chair, the girls' smooth heads must have been fixed here always, where they safely belonged