The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [40]
This accumulating worry made Thomas ask himself what on earth had made him go to the door when he might have stayed playing possum. Had the sense of siege in here oppressed him, or had he, in fact, felt lonelier than he thought? The worry of sitting facing this patient manl Then he gave Major Brutt a quick, undecided mean look. One had clearly got the idea this Brutt was out of a job: had he not said something about irons in the fire? That meant he was after something. That was why he had come. Now, no doubt, he had something soft in Quayne and Merrett's in view—he would not be the first old buffer who had.
Then, Thomas had a crisis of self-repugnance. Twitching his head away, with a shamefaced movement, from that block of integrity in the armchair, he saw how business had built him, Thomas, into a false position, a state of fortification odious, when he noticed it, to himself. He could only look out through slits at grotesque slits of faces, slits of the view. His vision became, from habit, narrow and falsified. Seeing anything move, even an animal, he thought: What is this meant to lead to?
Or a gesture would set him off: Oh, so that's what he's after...... Oh, then what does he want? Society was self-interest given a pretty gloss. You felt the relentless pressure behind small-talk. Friendships were dotted with null pauses, when one eye in calculation sought the clock. Love seemed the one reprieve from the watchfulness: it annihilated this uneasy knowledge. He could love with regard to nothing else. Therefore he loved without any of that discretion known to more natural natures—which is why astute men are so often betrayed.
Whatever he's after, or not after, he thought, we certainly can't use him. Quayne and Merrett's only wanted flair, and one sort of distilled nervosity. They could use any number of Eddies, but not one Brutt. He felt Brutt ought to try for some sort of area travel in something or other—perhaps, however, he was trying for that already. All he seemed to have to put on the market was (query) experience, that stolid alertness, that pebble-grey direct look that Thomas was finding morally hypnotic. There was, of course, his courage—something now with no context, no function, no outlet, fumbled over, rejected, likely to fetch nothing. Makes of men date, like makes of cars; Major Brutt was a 19x4-18 model: there was now no market for that make. In fact, only his steadfast persistence in living made it a pity that he could not be scrapped.... No, we cannot use him. Thomas once more twitched his head.—Major Brutt's being (frankly) a discard put the final blot on a world Thomas did not like.
Major Brutt, offered Thomas's cigarette case with rather hostile abruptness, hesitated, then decided to smoke. This ought to steady him. (That he wanted steadying, Thomas had no idea.) The fact was, the fact of Thomas, Thomas as Anna's husband, was a lasting shock. Major Brutt remembered Anna as Pidgeon's lover only. The picture of that great evening together—Anna, himself, Pidgeon—was framed in his mind, and could not be taken down—it was the dear possession of someone with few possessions, carried from place to place. When he had come on Anna in the Empire foyer, it could be no one but Pidgeon that she was waiting for: his heart had gone up because he would soon see Pidgeon. Then Thomas had come through the foyer, spoken about the taxi, put his hand under Anna's elbow with a possessing smile. That was the shock (though she had first said she was married), and it was a shock still. That one great evening—hers, Pidgeon's, his own—had made one continuous thread through his own uncertain days. He would recall it at times when he felt low. Anna's marriage to Pidgeon had been one great thing he had to look forward to. When Pidgeon kept saying nothing, and still said nothing, Major Brutt only thought they were waiting a long time. There is no fidelity like the fidelity of the vicarious lover who has once seen a kiss. By being married to Thomas, for having been married to Thomas for eight London years, Anna annihilated a great part of Major Brutt. He thought, from her unhappily calm smile in the Empire foyer, that she must see what she had done to him; he had taken some of her kindness for penitence. When later, back in her home, she with her woman's good manners had led him to talk of Pidgeon, their sole mutual friend, she had laid waste still more. He had not known how to bear it when she spoke of Pidgeon and the plate and the orange. Only Portia's presence made him bear it at all.