The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [63]
Wondering if this could ever make her suffer, she thought of Windsor Terrace. I am not there. She began to go round, in little circles, things that at least her senses had loved—her bed, with the lamp turned on on winter mornings, the rug in Thomas's study, the chest carved with angels out there on the landing, the waxen oilcloth down there in Matchett's room. Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain. Looking back at a repetition of empty days, one sees that monuments have sprung up. Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie: when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness. So, she and Irene had almost always felt sad when they looked round a hotel room before going away from it for always. They could not but feel that they had betrayed something. In unfamiliar places, they unconsciously looked for familiarity. It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home. The need to attach themselves makes wandering people strike roots in a day: wherever we unconsciously feel, we live.
Upstairs in Waikiki, the bedroom ceilings sloped because of the roof. Mrs. Heccomb, saying good-night to Portia, had screwed a steel-framed window six inches open, the curtain flopped in the light of a lamp on the esplanade. Portia put her hand up once or twice to touch the slope of ceiling over her bed. Mrs. Heccomb had said she hoped she would not be lonely. "I sleep just next door: you need only tap on the wall. We are all very near together in this house. Do you like hearing the sea?"
"It sounds very near."
"It's high tide. But it won't come any nearer."
"Won't it?"
"No, I promise, dear, that it won't. You're not afraid of the sea?"
"Oh, no."
"And you've got a picture of Anna," Mrs. Heccomb had added, with a beatific nod at the mantelpiece. That had already been looked at—a pastel drawing of Anna, Anna aged about twelve, holding a kitten, her long soft hair tied up in two satin bows. The tender incompetence of the drawing had given the face, so narrow between the hair, a spiritual look. The kitten's face was a wedge of dark on the breast. "So you won't be lonely," said Mrs. Heccomb, and, having so happily concluded, had turned out the light and gone.... The curtain started fretting the window sill; the sea filled the darkness with its approaching sighing, a little hoarse with shingle. High tide? The sea had come as near as it could.
Portia dreamed she was sharing a book with a little girl. The tips of Anna's long fair hair brushed on the page: they sat up high in a window, waiting till something happened. The worst of all would be if the bell rang, and their best hope was to read to a certain point in the book. But Portia found she no longer knew how to read—she did not dare tell Anna, who kept turning pages over. She knew they must both read—so the fall of Anna's hair filled her with despair, pity, for what would have to come. The forest (there was a forest under the window) was being varnished all over: it left no way of escape. Then the terrible end, the rushing-in, the roaring and gurgling started—Portia started up from where they were with a cry—
"—Hush, hush, dear! Here I am. Nothing has happened. Only Daphne running her bath out."
"I don't know where I—"
"You're here, dear."
"Oh!"
"Did you have a dream? Would you like me to stay a little?"
"Oh no, thank you."
"Then sleep with no dreams, like a good girl. Remember, you can always rap on the wall."
Mrs. Heccomb slipped out, closing the door by inches. Then, out there on the landing, she and Daphne started a whispering-match. Their whispers sounded like whispers down the clinic corridor, or sounds in the forest still left from the dream. "Goodness," said Daphne, "isn't she highly strung?" Then Daphne's feet, in mules, clip-clopped off across the landing: the last of the bath ran out; a door shut.
Perhaps it was Portia's sense that by having started awake she had not been a good girl that now kept her in the haunted outer court of the dream. She had not been kind to Anna; she had never been kind. She had lived in that house with her with an opposed heart.... That kitten, for instance