The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [67]
Standing midway between these two distances, hands knotted behind her back, Portia looked out to sea: the skyline was drawn taut across the long shallow bow of the bay. Three steamers' smoke hung in curls on the clear air—the polished sea looked like steel: amazing to think that a propeller could cut it. The edge of foam on the beach was tremulous, lacy, but the horizon looked like a blade.
A little later this morning, that blade would have cut off Thomas and Anna. They would drop behind the horizon, leaving behind them, for only a minute longer, a little curl of smoke. By the time they landed at Calais, their lives would have become hypothetical. To look at the sea the day someone is crossing is to accept the finality of the defined line. For the senses bound our feeling world: there is an abrupt break where their power stops—when the door closes, the train disappears round the curve, the plane's droning becomes inaudible, the ship enters the mist or drops over the line of sea. The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We have really no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgement is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart. Willing absence (however unwilling) is the negation of love. To remember can be at times no more than a cold duty, for we remember only in the limited way that is bearable. We observe small rites, but we defend ourselves against that terrible memory that is stronger than will. We defend ourselves from the rooms, the scenes, the objects that make for hallucination, that make the senses start up and fasten upon a ghost. We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.
Happily, the senses are not easy to trick—or, at least, to trick often. They fix, and fix us with them, on what, is possessable. They are ruthless in their living infidelity. Portia was learning to live without Irene, not because she denied or had forgotten that once unfailing closeness between mother and child, but because she no longer felt her mother's cheek on her own (that Eddie's finger-tip, tracing the crease of a smile, had more idly but far more lately touched) or smelled the sachet-smell from Irene's dresses, or woke in those hired north rooms where they used to wake.
With regard to Eddie himself, at present, the hard law of present-or-absent was suspended. In the first great, phase of love, which with very young people lasts a long time, the beloved is not outside one, so neither comes nor goes. In this dumb, exalted and exalting confusion, what actually happens plays very little part. In fact the spirit stays so tuned up that the beloved's real presence could be too much, unbearable: one wants to say to him: "Go, that you may be here." The most fully-lived hours, at this time, are those of memory or of anticipation, when the heart expands to the full without any check. Portia now referred to Eddie everything that could happen: she saw him in everything that she saw. His being in London, her being here, no more than contracted seventy miles of England into their private intense zone. Also, they could write letters.
But the absence, the utter dissolution, in space of Thomas and Anna should have been against nature: they were her Everyday. That Portia was not more sorry, that she would not miss them, faced her this morning like the steel expanse of the sea. Thomas and Anna by opening their door to her (by having been by blood obliged to open their door) became Irene's successors in all natural things. He, she, Portia, three Quaynes, had lived, packed close in one house through the winter cold, accepting, not merely choosing each other. They had all three worked at their parts of the same necessary pattern. They had passed on the same stairs, grasped the same door handles, listened to the strokes of the same clocks. Behind the doors at Windsor Terrace, they had heard each other's voices, like the continuous murmur inside the whorls of a shell. She had breathed smoke from their lungs in every room she went into, and seen their names on letters each time she went through the hall. When she went out, she was asked how her brother and sister were. To the outside world, she smelled of Thomas and Anna.