The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [47]
"Oh Eddie—would she ever say that?"
"She'd say anything. The thing about Anna is, she loves making a tart of another person. She'd never dare be a proper tart herself."
Portia looked puzzled. "But I'm certain you like her."
"Yes, I do in a way. That is why she annoys me so."
"You once said she'd been very kind."
"Indeed she has—that's her way of getting under my skin. Darling, didn't you think me being Anna was funny?"
"No, not really. I didn't think you enjoyed it."
"Well, it was: it was very funny," said Eddie defiantly.
Then he made several faces, pulling his features all ways, as though to flake off from them the last figments of Anna. The impersonation had (as Portia noticed) had fury behind it: each hypothetical arrow to him from Anna had been winged by a demoniac smile. Now he pulled his cup towards him and abruptly drank up some cold tea. He looked so threatening, Portia thought for a moment he might be going to spit the tea out—as though he were no more than rinsing his mouth with it. But he did swallow the tea, and after that smiled, though in a rather fagged-out way, like an actor coming off after a big scene. At the same time, he looked relieved, as though he had shot a weight off, and pious, as though a duty had been discharged. He seemed now to exist in a guiltless vacuum. At last he turned her way and sat filling his eyes with Portia, as though it were good to be home again.
After a pause he said: "Yes, I really do quite like Anna. But we have got to have a villain of some sort."
But Portia had a slower reaction time. During the villain's speech, while she ate crumpet, her brows had met in a rather uncertain line. While not really surprised, she had seemed to be hypnotised by this view of Anna. She was disturbed, and at the same time exhilarated, like a young tree tugged all ways in a vortex of wind. The force of Eddie's behaviour whirled her free of a hundred puzzling humiliations, of her hundred failures to take the ordinary cue. She could meet the demands he made with the natural genius of the friend and lover. The impetus under which he seemed to move made life fall, round him and her, into a new poetic order at once. Any kind of policy in the region of feeling would have been fatal in any lover of his—you had to yield to the wind. Portia's unpreparedness, her lack of policy—which had made Windsor Terrace, for her, the court of an incomprehensible law—with Eddie stood her in good stead. She had no point to stick to, nothing to unlearn. She had been born docile. The momentarily anxious glances she cast him had only zeal behind them, no crucial perplexity. By making herself so much his open piano that she felt her lips smile by reflex, as though they were his lips, she felt herself learn and gain him: this was Eddie. What he said, how he looked was becoming inevitable. From the first, he had not been unfamiliar to her. It might be said that, for the first time since Irene's death, she felt herself in the presence of someone ordinary.
Innocence so constantly finds itself in a false position that inwardly innocent people learn to be disingenuous. Finding no language in which to speak in their own terms, they resign themselves to being translated imperfectly. They exist alone; when they try to enter into relations they compromise falsifyingly—through anxiety, through desire to impart and to feel warmth. The system of our affections is too corrupt for them. They are bound to blunder, then to be told they cheat. In love, the sweetness and violence they have to offer involves a thousand betrayals for the less innocent. Incurable strangers to the world, they never cease to exact a heroic happiness. Their singleness, their ruthlessness, their one continuous wish makes them bound to be cruel, and to suffer cruelty. The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet—when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.
Portia and Eddie, side by side at the table, her diary between them under one of her hands, turned on each other eyes in which two relentless looks held apart for a moment, then became one. To generate that one look, their eyes seemed for the first time to be using their full power. The look held a sort of superb mutual greeting rather than any softness of love. You would have said that two accomplices had for the first time spoken aloud to each other of their part in the same crime, or that two children had just discovered their common royal birth. On the subject of love, there was nothing to say: they seemed to have no projects and no desires. Their talk today had been round an understood pact: at this moment, they saluted its significance.