Eddie’s bedroom was empty, and they did not lower their voices to-night.
‘Now, this summer,’ Iris went on, brightening, ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if someone like Cecil Beaton came down and discovered the place. Well, it’s picturesque; it stinks enough. The only trouble is that people who like old places are always such peculiar old fogies themselves, especially the women; well, the men, too, really. But still, I’d make a good photograph, I think, taken in front of that cut-glass panel in the saloon bar, with some of those pots of tongue-ferns lying on their sides. I’ve seen pictures like that in those Vogues Mrs Foyle gave me. Might get on the films that way, you know. Photogenic.’ She seemed to like that word and repeated it.
Her silk slip crackled as she pulled it off.
‘I believe you’re sulking, Maisie darling. All about a pair of stockings.’
She climbed into bed beside her sister.
Maisie wasn’t sulking. She was thinking about Eddie, trying to imagine what he was doing at that moment and, for the first time in her life, wondering what it was like out there in the dark.
‘Now, remember!’ Iris said, as if it were her final word. ‘No talking to-night.’ And she heaved over, taking most of the bedclothes with her.
Moving stiffly in his oilskins, Eddie had forgotten his brief sleep. His uncle was up at the winch in front of the wheelhouse and they had begun to haul in the net. First the otterboards came over the bulwarks, and then the wooden rollers, and, at last, the great net itself, water pouring from it as it emerged from the sea, and the gulls suddenly gathering from nowhere, it seemed, and clustering above the haul. With a great slithering the net was emptied over the deck, shells clattering down with the fish, bits of wreckage, parts of aircraft – a fantastic cornucopia, starfish, weeds and other rubbish, crabs, plaice, sole, cod.
When the net had gone down again Eddie went forward up the slimy deck among the brown and ice-white of the fish, stooping down in the cold dawn light, sorting good from trash, working hard as he always did. He annoyed the men often enough with his youthful, flamboyant ways; all that crooning, they said, and changing into his good navy suit before going ashore; but while he was on the job he worked, and while he worked he moaned away everlastingly at those self-pitying songs of his, and thought of Maisie and the nice little suppers she cooked, and how smooth her shoulders were when he touched them that night, how sweet she smelled of soap, and how often, through the thin bedroom wall, he heard her turning over in her sleep and murmuring. Or was it Iris, after all? – he suddenly wondered.
9
Mrs Bracey began to sense something which was not visible enough for comment – an assumed silence between her daughter Maisie and Eddie Flitcroft. It was as if they were in a conspiracy to say as little as possible to one another, and for this reason any words that did chance to pass between them were weighted with meaning, something for Mrs Bracey to puzzle over, to unravel for hours at a time. This exhausted her. She felt like saying, quite definitely, ‘I’m not having it,’ but could not be definite about what she was not going to have. If anything more than the most trivial phrases were ever exchanged between them she, with all her searching looks, could not discover it. Yet she knew there was something, and the perpetual bantering between Eddie and Iris did not fog her in the least. ‘How long are they going on like this?’ she would wonder, and then it would occur to her that they were waiting to be rid of her and perhaps confident of her early death. Before long, Eddie came to symbolise to her the imminence of death, which was a strange thing for him to symbolise, with all his swaggering, defiant ways and lively assurance.
She did not know how to be rid of him, having let him in in the first place, to enrich the scene, hoping he would bring some life in to her; but he had brought only the idea of death.
Maisie had grown quieter, as if she had but to hold her tongue and wait. When her mother grumbled about Eddie – his whistling, unpunctuality, door-slamming, appetite and badinage – she did not answer. When the complaints were made directly to him, a glance from Maisie checked his reply.
Eventually, one afternoon when Mr Lidiard, the curate, had called, a brilliant idea came to Mrs Bracey.
‘I see young Foyle is home for his holidays,’ he had begun.
‘That’ll clip her wings,’ she said at once.
‘He’s grown a lot – a nice lad.’
‘I daresay, but I’m not likely to see.’
And then in a flash it came to her that she could see, for if she moved upstairs again to her old front bedroom, she could see it all once more, a good view of the harbour, too, the waterfront, the little flights of steps, the lighthouse, the people on the quay, and the fishing-fleet putting out and returning, the fish-baskets going up to the market – all the sights she had known since she was a little girl, skipping about those narrow passages, up and down those flights of steps, and which she had never thought to see again.
‘I’ve been thinking, Maisie,’ she said (and that was untrue, because the idea had come to her only a second before in that flash of brilliance which artists call inspiration), ‘why not move me up to my old room now the summer’s coming? I could get a nice view out of the window there, something to pass the time. All I see here is this blasted wall and the basket of tongue-ferns, rain dripping out of it all the winter, too, gets on my nerves; I find myself counting the drops. And that drainpipe, too. I see it in my dreams. Hours and hours I’ve stared at it, wet and fine. That’s no way to spend the last years of my life.’
‘Years!’ Mr Lidiard thought, depressed. Maisie felt the same.
‘But we moved you down because you said you were lonely up there and felt left out of things.’
‘It won’t hurt Mr Lidiard to climb the stairs.’
He smiled professionally.
And then Iris said, for Maisie would not: ‘What about Eddie?’
‘Eddie’s nothing to me,’ her mother said sharply. ‘I’m not called upon to consider him. If I want the room he’ll have to go.’
No one answered. A little while later Maisie said casually: ‘All right, but I don’t take the responsibility of moving you till Dr Cazabon’s been asked.’
‘So that’s your way out, sly little madam!’ her mother thought, and she was determined that Maisie should not get a word in first with the doctor. She called for the pot of ink and a writing-pad, and, in letters which were duplicated because the pen nib was split, she wrote a little note to the doctor urging him to call at once. She folded this over and wrote ‘By Hand’ in one corner and then gave it to Mr Lidiard. ‘You can drop that in on your way,’ she told him, feeling that clergymen, though dense and foolish, are to be relied upon.
‘By Hand,’ he read out, laughing a little.
‘Meaning it wasn’t the postman delivered it,’ she explained grandly.
‘Don’t postmen have hands?’ Iris giggled.
‘You’re quiet, Maisie,’ Mrs Bracey said. ‘What’s upset you? The thought of me having a bit of a change, I suppose?’
‘That’s right,’ Maisie said quietly.
‘Sarkey little tripehound.’
‘Now, come . . .!’ Mr Lidiard began persuasively, as if to an ill-behaved child.
Maisie went out into the scullery to get tea, shutting the door so softly that her mother was enraged. She put the kettle on the gas and stood with her hands spread over the warmth, trying to sort out her tangled emotions. She had come to rely on Eddie’s support, the feeling that in all her trials he was upholding her by the very fact of being an ordinary person, as she felt she herself was an ordinary person. When he was away she looked forward to his return and liked to feel that he slept under the same roof. She realised now that her mother was determined to get rid of him and that her little inspiration about Dr Cazabon had already been perceived and defeated. Eddie would go, and she could imagine how fractious her mother would become once she had her way, how peevish each time she heard voices in the shop below, how often her stick would be banged on the
floor and self-pity force tears down her cheeks. Her own life would become a misery of running up and down stairs, much more of a misery even than it was now. The hope that Dr Cazabon, unless reasoned with beforehand, would refuse to let her be moved was faint indeed, for, as Mrs Bracey’s body had reached a standstill, so her age seemed to have done the same, and years added nothing noticeable to her, nor moved her one inch nearer death, her daughter thought. Thus her energy had been stored and had nothing else to expend itself upon but only the evasion of illness, the building up of reserves.
So Maisie made the tea and carried it in, feeling hopeless and suffocated, as if she suffered from a paralysis of nerves and brain, deadened into a clockwork motion only between shop and sick-bed and into ministrations which had become duty only and performed now with hatred and loathing.
Presently Mr Lidiard rose and stood smiling, his fingers tapping gently on the folded paper Mrs Bracey had given him. ‘Well . . . I must get this note to the doctor before surgery, I suppose,’ he began, thanking heaven for the excuse.
For once, she did not attempt to restrain him: her will seemed to propel him out of the room. So, dully, Maisie gathered the cups and saucers and carried them to the scullery.
The letter came flying through the Cazabons’ door soon after tea. In that hall, the heavy chairs, the carved table seemed to crouch in darkness all day long, each tick of the clock sounded as if it would very likely be the last, and smells of English dinners drifted through a pair of plush curtains hanging in an archway. It was so much a house which had been taken over half-furnished from previous owners, and only a gathering shabbiness had been Beth’s contribution; for she, often observant of detail, so that her characters might move in significant and vivid atmospheres, quite oblivious of her own surroundings, saw nothing of the sum-total of drabness, was never afflicted by ugliness nor irritated by disorder. When she tripped over the threadbare rugs, she patiently straightened them; pictures remained crooked until Robert set them right, and the books on the shelves were in no more order than the vast jumbles of underclothes and woollies in her chest of drawers, or that surrealist collection in the attic, where waves of rubbish had now reached forward to the door, so that it could scarcely be opened for all the gymnastic apparatus, cracked mirrors, mounted antlers and dressmaker’s dummies which arose before it.
The folded sheet of paper fluttered into the darkness and came to rest against the umbrella-stand. Each time a door opened or a skirt brushed by one of its halves lifted and quivered slightly like the wing of a dead butterfly.
‘I think,’ said Bertram, ‘that it would be an excellent idea.’ He clapped his hands together to match the heartiness of his words and looked pleased, as if it had been his own idea entirely. ‘If you hate it, if you find you have made a mistake, it will still have been a change. As with a holiday, if it ends in your wishing to come home, its aim is accomplished.’
It was only Mrs Bracey’s move upstairs he was discussing, and Maisie could not feel that it was in the least his concern, a stranger to the place.
‘Doctor’s a long time,’ Mrs Bracey said, beginning to be afraid that her plan had been overthrown, that Maisie had smuggled messages out of the house under her very eyes. ‘I thought he’d have been here by now.’ She felt terribly nervous and overwrought, so anxious to look once more at the outside world and to see, moving and in colour, that view of the harbour which had been a grey and white, remembered, half-imagined scene for so long, flat like a picture-postcard view. She wanted to watch the great dappled waves riding in to the foot of the cliffs, breaking and crumbling and scurrying back in confusion, to be conscious of the pulse of the lighthouse, to see once more visitors with folded raincoats stepping into rowing-boats named Nancy or Marigold or Adeline; the moving water, the sauntering people, the changing sky, the wrinkled moonlight on the sea, and fishermen coming out of the Anchor on Saturday nights, standing round the lamp-post singing Sweet Genevieve. ‘It must be to-morrow,’ she thought, wondering how she had existed so long shut away in that back room with her view of the -drainpipe and the blank wall, with rain, always it now seemed, falling down it. Yet, powerful as she was, in the end she could decide nothing. Like a baby, she could vent bad temper on them, but could not even move of her own accord.
When he had finished his coffee Robert went out. Beth thought he had gone to put the car away and she took up her work quickly to make the most of his absence. As he passed through the hall Mrs Bracey’s note quivered a little in the draught, lying there in the shadow of the umbrella-stand.
‘It is worse when Edward is here,’ Tory said. ‘I feel much worse.’ When Robert had kissed her, she went on as if nothing had happened. ‘Much, much worse. I don’t think we are going to get much fun out of this,’ she added.
‘Fun!’ Robert echoed, rather taken aback by this novel way of looking at serious passion. ‘My God! I wouldn’t jeopardise the whole of my life, let all my sense of right be overthrown for mere fun.’
‘Oh, I would,’ Tory said.
‘You try to shock me, but I have known you for too long.’
‘Tell me how long you have loved me.’
‘I admired you and disliked you for years, but, you see, my life had settled into a routine – work and home and bed. I thought nothing would shake me out of it. And then little anxieties about the children or about my work seemed to eat away my vitality, so that I was always tired and felt that other people – especially people like you – were too much for me, belonged to another world which I wouldn’t enter any more. You seemed so inaccessible that I never gave you a thought and although you disturbed me a little when I did see you, that was only another reason for avoiding you – for I hated to be disturbed. Your eyes are a deep mauve, you know.’
‘Mauve!’ She edged away from him in amazement. ‘I have violet eyes.’
‘Well, violets are mauve, aren’t they?’
He felt wretchedly at sea and he had wasted time talking, when all he had come for was to experience again that danger and delight of being near her, of drawing her close to him, which he did always with a feeling of throwing himself upon rocks, so little used was he to either the danger or the delight.
‘I am afraid I shall have to go.’
‘Does Beth imagine you are on a case?’
‘Women are so coarse,’ he thought, wincing at her – perhaps – unconscious brutality. He said nothing, but his face darkened, as she could see.
‘Are we never to mention Beth?’ she cried. ‘Are we so sensitive about the sound of her name that we pretend that she’s not there, in case we should feel ourselves cheapened or soiled by what we are doing? Furtive, yet high-minded.’
Since she had abandoned all delicacy of feeling, he felt en-titled to do the same, to make her answer a question he had not yet dared to put to her – scarcely to himself. Even so, he had to get up and walk about the room while he asked her.
‘For years,’ he began, ‘you have been utterly indifferent to me. I’ve walked in and out of rooms without your knowing even, caring still less. You’ve not even raised your eyes or paused in your everlasting women’s chatter with Beth. You came to the house to see her, never once to see me; in fact, you probably left when I arrived because I bored you, or interrupted the gossip and reminiscence. You may say it was the same for me, but I was never indifferent to you. I disliked you, or tried to, as I have said; but I found your beauty exciting just as I found your attitude to life frivolous and shocking. I think I disapproved of you – that was it – but only in the cold, law-making part of my brain. The rest of me, the instinctive side, only awaited one look of recognition from you, one sign, to be completely conquered. But the sign never came. And all the time I was arming myself against such a sign with a catalogue of your faults – how you were selfish and intolerant, often rude to people who had not your advantages, vain, unscrupulous, querulous with Teddy . . . no, let me go on . . . now I have forgotten what I was going to say . . . All this . . . and it surely amount
ed to something, I thought . . . yet to be swept away so immediately by the realisation that something had changed, that I myself had changed as a personality in your imagination, that I was no longer just not there, but that you were definitely aware of me, avoiding me, even. How that knowledge gradually came to me I can’t remember. Day after day I became more certain, until I determined to make sure and would come into the room and try to catch your glance. I never could. And then one day I did. I caught you looking at me, and before you moved your head quickly away I saw everything in your eyes – anguish and horror and despair. Thank you for listening. What it has all led to is this – Why? What changed you? How does a woman suddenly become aware of a man she has known for twenty years? No, let me tell you the answer. Isn’t it because your husband has gone, so that for the first time in your life you are alone and hate it, and must have some man, because your sort of woman does have to? And I am the man, because I am available, the man who never interested you before, who was merely the boring creature your friend had unaccountably -married.’
Tory sat quite still, unhurt by his words. She guessed that he was making a final struggle with pride and conscience in order to say to himself at the end: ‘And yet I truly love her.’
All she said was: ‘You see, we always quarrel. I told you it wouldn’t be much fun.’
‘I have never behaved like this before, or stooped to such petty deceptions – all so lamentably easy because I am trusted, and so much worse because of that.’
‘You imply that I have been at it all my life.’
‘It would never have occurred to me. But you are and always have been more frivolous than I.’
‘Frivolous? Do people still use that word? It sounds so Edwardian.’
‘You are a very Edwardian woman, with your pink and white looks and your preoccupation with fashions and appearances and worldly things. And your utter selfishness and lack of care for others.’
A View of the Harbour Page 14
