The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [79]
"Hullo," said Dickie to Portia. "And how are you this morning?"
"Very well, thank you."
"Well, at least it is over," said Dickie, returning to the Sunday Pictorial.
Daphne was still wearing her red mules. "Oh goodness," she said. "Cecil is so wet! Coming early like that, then sticking round like that. I don't know how he has the nerve, really... Oh, and I ought to tell you: Clara's left her pearl bag."
Mrs. Heccomb, rearranging one or two objects, said: "How wonderfully you have tidied everything up."
"All but the bookcase," Dickie said pointedly.
"What do you mean about the bookcase, dear?"
"We shall need a glazier to tidy up that bookcase. Daphne's soldier friend put his elbow through it—as you might notice, Mumsie, if you cared to look. There seems to be no suggestion that he should foot the bill."
"Oh, I don't think we could quite ask him, dear... It seemed to be a very successful party."
Daphne, from behind the Sunday Express, said: "It was all right." She raised her voice: "Though some people cut their own friends, then are stuffy to other people's. Mr. Bursely was shoved against the bookcase by Wallace Parker shoving, that rude way. I'm only thankful he didn't hurt himself. I didn't like him to see us so rough-house."
"If you ask me," said Dickie, "I don't suppose he noticed. He'd have stayed stuck in the bookcase if Charlie Hoster hadn't pulled him out. He arrived here pretty lit, and I'm told he nipped down the front and had two or three quick ones at the Imperial Arms. I wonder what he'll smash next time he comes blowing in. I cannot say that that is a fellow I like. But apparently I do not know what is what."
"Well, Clara liked him all right. That is how she forgot her bag. She stopped on to give him a lift home in her car."
"So you pointed out. Well, if that bag is Clara's, I don't like it: it seems to me to be covered with ants' eggs."
"Well, why don't you tell her so?"
"I no doubt shall. I shall no doubt tell her this afternoon. Clara and I are going to play golf."
"Oh you are a mean, Dickie! You never said! Evelyn's expecting us all to badminton."
"Well, she will simply have to expect me, I'm afraid. Clara's picking me up at half-past two. We may buzz back here for tea, or we may go back to her place—By the way, Mumsie, can Doris be sharp with dinner?"
"She's just going to lay, dear. May I move your paper? Daphne, what are you doing after lunch?"
"Well, a lot of us thought we might go for a short walk. Then we're all going round to Evelyn's to badminton. Do you mean you'd like me to take Portia along?"
"That might be nice, dear. You'd like that, wouldn't you, Portia? In that case I may just take a little rest. Last night was so successful that we were rather late."
The walking party—Daphne, Portia, Evelyn (the fine girl who had worn orange last night), Cecil (who did not seem to have been asked) and two other young men called Charlie and Wallace—deployed slowly along the top of the sea wall in the direction of Southstone. The young men wore plus fours, pullovers, felt hats precisely dinted in at the top, and ribbed stockings that made their calves look massive. Daphne and Evelyn wore berets, scarves with dogs' heads and natty check overcoats. Evelyn had brought her dog with her.
The road on top of the wall was as deserted as ever: at the foot of the wall the sea, this afternoon mackerel blue, swelled sleekly between the breakwaters. Here and there a gull on a far-out post would be floated off by the swell, looking rather silly. There was a breakwater smell—a smell of sea-pickled planks, of slimy green boards being sucked by the tides. The immense spring sky arched from the inland woods to the marine horizon. The wall made a high causeway on which the walkers walked between sea and land: here you smelled not only the sea but a land breath—from the market gardens, the woods in clefts of the chalk hills, the gorse budding in its spiney darkness up there on the links where Dickie and Clara were. The crests of two airy tides, the sea's and the land's, breaking against each other above the asphalt, made a nervous elation, so that you spun, inwardly, in the blue-whiteness of the quiet and thrilling day.