The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [61]
But then Mrs. Heccomb got up and drew the curtains. "You never know," she said. "It does not quite do." (She referred to being looked in at.) Then she gave Portia another cup of tea and told her how much she must miss her mother. But she said how very lucky she was to have Thomas and Anna. For years and years, as Miss Yardes, she had had to be tactful and optimistic, trying to make young people see things the right way. This may have exaggerated her feeling manner. Now independence gave her a slight authority: when she said a thing was so, it became so forthwith. She looked at the mahogany clock that ticked loudly over the fire and said how nice it was that Daphne would soon be home. This Portia could not, of course, dispute. But she said: "I think I will go up and brush my hair, then."
While she was up in her room combing her hair back, hearing the tissue paper in her suitcase rustle, watching draughts bulge the new matting strip, she heard the bang that meant Daphne was in. Waikiki, she was to learn, was a sounding box: you knew where everyone was, what everyone did—except when the noise they made was drowned by a loud wind. She heard Daphne loudly asking something, then Mrs. Heccomb must have put up a warning hand, for the rest of Daphne's question got bitten off. Portia thought, I do hope Daphne won't mind me.... In her room, the electric light, from its porcelain shade, poured down with a frankness unknown at Windsor Terrace. The light swayed slightly in that seaside draught, and Portia felt a new life had begun. Downstairs, Daphne switched the wireless on full blast, then started bawling across it at Mrs. Heccomb: "I say, when is Dickie going to mend that bell?"
II
WHEN Portia ventured to come down, she found Daphne pottering round the tea table, biting pieces out of a macaroon, while Mrs. Heccomb, busy painting the lamp shade, shouted above the music that she would spoil her supper. Mrs. Heccomb's shouting had acquired, after years of evenings with Daphne and the music, the mild equability of her speaking voice: she could shout without strain. There was, in fact, an air of unconscious deportment about everything that she carried through, and as she worked at the lamp shade, peering close at the detail, then leaning back to get the general effect, she looked like someone painting a lamp shade in a play.
As Portia came round the curtain Daphne did not look at her, but with unnerving politeness switched the wireless off. It snapped off at the height of a roar, and Mrs. Heccomb looked up. Daphne popped the last piece of macaroon into her mouth, wiped her fingers correctly on a crepe-de-chine handkerchief and shook hands, though still without saying anything. She gave the impression that she would not speak till she had thought of something striking to say. She was a fine upstanding girl, rather tall; her close-fitting dark blue knitted dress showed off her large limbs. She wore her hair in a mop, but the mop was in an iron pattern of curls, burnished with brilliantine. She had a high colour, and used tangerinelipstick. Pending having something to say to Portia, she said over her shoulder to Mrs. Heccomb: "None of them will be coming in tonight."
"Oh, thank you, Daphne."
"Oh, don't thank me."
"Daphne has so many friends," Mrs. Heccomb explained to Portia. "But she says that none of them will be coming in tonight."
Daphne gave the rest of the cakes a rather scornful once-over, then bumped into an armchair. Portia, as unostentatiously as possible, edged round the room to stand beside Mrs. Heccomb, who worked with her tray of painting materials drawn up under a special lamp. Though all this was alarming, she did not feel so alarmed as she did at Windsor Terrace, where St. Quentin and all those other friends of Anna's always tacitly watched. On the lamp shade she saw delphiniums and marble cupids being painted in against a salmon pink sky. "Oh, how pretty!" she said.
"It will look better varnished. I think the idea is pretty. This is an order, for a wedding present, but later I hope to do one for Anna, as a surprise