‘What is it?’
‘It is Edward’s boxing lessons . . .’
He was surprised and annoyed to find that he himself was not the cause of the trouble.
‘He so terribly doesn’t want to do it.’
‘Why not?’
‘He is afraid of being hurt.’
‘Good God!’ He seemed scandalised.
‘Is that so unnatural?’
‘Unnatural. It seems a very morbid attitude in a little boy. You must have been putting cowardly ideas into his head . . .’
‘Not at all. You obviously think he must be made to do it.’
‘Obviously.’
‘That sinus trouble he had, do you remember . . .?’
‘It wasn’t sinus. I told you at the time. It was simply a catarrhal condition . . .’
‘He was always sniffing.’
‘That was habit.’
‘Oh, doctors infuriate me. Habit indeed!’
‘What is wrong with the boy?’
‘Nothing is wrong.’
‘But you are trying to hit on something to get him out of his boxing. What the devil would Teddy say to all this?’
‘I expect he would agree with you. You already have so much in common.’
‘We quarrel before we know where we are,’ he said. He stood with his elbow on the mantelshelf, examining a scratch on the back of his hand, as we are inclined to concentrate on the smallest detail in a time of crisis, the same despairing effort with which, Tory conjectured, a victim might stare at a mole on the chin of his torturer. ‘And as I stared at the clergyman’s boots when I was married,’ she thought.
‘Why are you smiling?’ he asked, raising his eyes.
‘I was remembering my wedding.’
He lowered his eyes quickly.
‘You look very lovely this evening,’ he murmured in a cross voice and without glancing at her.
She thanked him with the automatic graciousness of one practised in acknowledging compliments. And then, to bring the conversation back to himself, Robert said: ‘I am worried about Beth.’
‘Is she ill?’ Tory asked quickly, prepared to believe only the best.
‘No, she’s not ill: but, either she has guessed about our feelings for one another, has put two and two together as any other woman would have done months ago – either that or she has gone mad.’
‘Which do you think?’
‘Quite honestly, I think she has become a little peculiar. But I’ve no doubt I shall soon find out.’
‘What has she done or said?’
‘This evening she quarrelled with me. She was tart and argumentative, almost abusive. Women often are, I know’ – he gave Tory a brief look – ‘but not Beth. Not ever before in all the years I have known her. And done so coldly, as if she no longer cared for me, rather as if she were enjoying herself. I can’t explain how uncanny it was.’
‘Don’t pick at that scratch! You see, you are making it bleed.’
He put his hand in his pocket and looked up wearily.
‘What do you want me to do?’ Tory asked.
‘I am very worried,’ he repeated.
‘Then I had better make one of those grand renunciations,’ she said haughtily. ‘I will go miles away and hide myself in a little bed-sitting-room and live on my memories. Where I can harm you no more.’ She saw herself lying on a chaise-longue, coughing a little, her hands full of camellias.
‘It was too hackneyed a role for you,’ he said, when she had described this to him. ‘And you would want to get up every evening and go for a drink.’
‘The trouble with renunciation is the giving-up part. All women fancy themselves doing it, but do they enjoy it, I wonder? It is too negative to be really uplifting, except in literature. The gesture is more beautiful than the thing itself, which does so go on and on – the next day and the next, and for ever. In books one just dies.’
She talked, giving him a chance to trample on all her avowals and intentions, but he did not do so. He seemed to wait gravely, looking at her.
‘I harm everyone with whom I come in contact,’ she said recklessly.
‘You don’t harm me, my dear.’ He put out his hand and clasped hers. ‘You throw everything else into shadow, but that is not the fault of your beauty. It is the drabness of the world and the monotony of my life in this place day after day, so, until I die. You lit up every hour for me, made one day different from another, brought me back to life. Each night I have taken you to bed with me. I closed my eyes and folded my arms round you, imagining that you belonged to me, disposing of all the obstacles in one moment, and so fell asleep. You could not harm me . . .’
Tory moved her hand restlessly in his. ‘You speak of me in the past tense,’ she laughed awkwardly.
‘Don’t make fun of me!’
‘All right. But I am not much good at love scenes, especially when they are so sad. I am much more inclined to the lusts of the flesh. And now you are crushing my hand.’
He thought he would waste no more time on words and began to kiss her, seeming to imply that if it were the lusts of the flesh she contemplated, he did not himself disdain them. Shutting his eyes he felt at first hollowed, and then as if he were filled with music, the smooth, warm sound sweeping through the corridors of his mind, until he stood quite alone with Tory, the rest of the world obliterated.
But the rest of the world is not so easily effaced, and the further we escape the more ruthless our dragging back and the greater the vehemence which will splinter upon us, like the smashing of vast sheets of ice upon our loosened will. So it was no ordinary bell ringing which made their eyes fly open, their mouths whiten.
‘What was that?’ Robert cried.
Tory was the first to recover. ‘I expect it is Prudence to fetch you away,’ she said coldly, glancing in the mirror. ‘Perhaps Mrs Bracey wishes to come downstairs again.’
It was in fact Prudence.
‘Well!’ Tory exclaimed. ‘What a pretty frock!’
She appeared very smooth and controlled, with all her wits about her once again.
‘Come in, my dear.’
In the hall she snapped off some odd bits of cotton from the hem and moved Prudence slowly round, turning her by the shoulders, enraging the girl.
‘I want my father in a hurry.’
‘Your father? Yes, of course, dear. Robert! Robert! Here is Prudence!’ And still, as if absorbed, she pulled and tweaked at the new frock. It was as if she would not let Prudence go into that room, as if the passion which they had suffered there had been so tangible that it might hang still in the air.
Robert came into the hall.
‘Mrs Bracey has sent for you,’ Prudence began at once.
Tory’s eyes seemed to dance as she looked at Robert.
‘What the hell for? Does she think I am for ever at her beck and call?’ he asked.
‘Her daughter came and she said it was urgent and that her mother cannot breathe.’
‘Then she must be dead by now,’ Tory said with a satisfied air.
‘Did your mother send you?’
‘No. I was just going out and I met the girl on the steps.’ Prudence looked very levelly at her father, as if to say: ‘It was as well for you that I did.’
‘Excuse me, Tory,’ he began; and then as he reached the door, had not the courage merely to go, but turned and made matters worse by saying: ‘I will think it over about Edward’s catarrh and let you know.’
‘Edward’s catarrh!’ Prudence said lightly as soon as he had gone.
Tory did not make the same kind of mistakes as Robert, and she said nothing.
‘There’s one thing I’ve made up my mind about,’ Prudence went on. ‘If ever I get married I won’t live next door to my dearest friend.’
‘Yes, it is a good idea not to,’ Tory said in a careless tone.
‘You see, I know all about you and Father.’
‘Do you?’
‘And I think you’re hateful. I had alwa
ys heard of people doing vile and dreadful things, but not people I knew, not my own father.’
Her emotion came up shakily and broke like waves upon the rock of Tory’s assumed indifference.
‘Then that makes your readiness to conjecture all the more odd,’ Tory said, and added: ‘Especially, as you say, about your own father.’
‘Nothing you say is any use.’
‘No, I don’t think it is.’
Tory’s pretty little clock struck nine, the notes floating towards them down the hall.
‘Oh, damn you!’ Prudence suddenly said, dashing tears away with the back of her hand and groping for the doorknob.
Tory took a folded handkerchief from her cuff and held it out.
‘I don’t think it would do for you to rush out into the street weeping,’ she said, playing for time because she felt that Prudence, propelled on a surge of self-pity, might fly to her mother, or make a scene elsewhere. But Prudence, having smeared her tears across her cheeks, threw the handkerchief down upon the hall-table and seemed not to be able to go quickly enough.
When at last she had managed to open the door, Tory said: ‘The frock, by the way, is quite a success, but those dingy little coral bracelets ruin the effect.’
Then she closed the door very quietly and went directly to the windows overlooking the front. She was just in time to see Prudence before she disappeared. She was running, almost, in the direction of Mrs Bracey’s house. When she was quite out of sight Tory still stood there, conscious of a dreadful foreboding of disaster.
‘I am sorry I am late,’ Prudence said breathlessly.
In the churchyard the air was warm and steady and scented with the lime trees in flower. Geoffrey put his book in his pocket, but he could scarcely have been reading, for the light was slowly retreating and had already taken the green from Prudence’s frock, and the blossom on the trees was a shape, not a colour, against the sky.
‘Will you be warm enough if we sit here and talk?’ he asked.
‘Yes, thank you,’ Prudence said, shivering.
She sat down beside him, fidgeting with the coral bracelets on her white wrists. ‘How peaceful it is!’
The gravestones were sunk in the deep turf, a marble angel implored them to hush, holding up its hand warningly, as if it were a fitful sleep only down there below the bed of granite chippings. The sea was hushed, too, so that only Geoffrey could hear it, not Prudence.
‘I have been reading Donne as I sat here waiting,’ said Geoffrey.
‘Oh, have you?’ Prudence murmured warily. A dreadful fear that he was going to read some poetry aloud beset her, confused her, and she could think of nothing to stave him off. ‘But it is too dark,’ she decided. ‘Unless he has a torch. Or’ (and this was so much worse) ‘knows it by heart.’ ‘I don’t like poetry,’ she said roughly.
Geoffrey chuckled appreciatively, as if she had made a little joke.
‘But I don’t!’ she insisted.
‘Don’t you, darling? I love you in your grey frock, but I am sure you are cold.’
‘It isn’t grey. It’s green.’
‘It is grey at the moment, so therefore it is grey. Colour can only be what it appears to be.’
‘I think it can be what it is.’
‘Put my jacket round you!’
‘No. It doesn’t matter.’
‘Let us share it, then.’
‘Oh, no, thank you.’
‘I like the bracelets, too, and the way they fall over the back of your hands and make your wrists seem thin. “A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,” ’ he added. He felt at home among the graves with her beauty close to him and made more moving when it lay side by side in his mind with the grim and the corrupt and the melancholy.
‘My mother gave them to me,’ Prudence said, ignoring his last remark which scanned too much for her liking and was, she feared, the beginning of some poetry.
‘I love your mother very dearly,’ Geoffrey said quietly.
Prudence drew herself up, very taut and shivering, her face – but it was nearly dark now – puzzled, and her lips parted.
‘Yes, I love her very dearly, and revere her,’ Geoffrey went on.
Prudence relaxed. ‘Oh, I see,’ she said easily. ‘I am so glad.’
‘There is an innocence about her I delight in,’ he went on condescendingly. ‘And she has passed it on to you.’
As Prudence did not answer he said: ‘Oh, it is no use you telling me otherwise, implying this and that, as you did the other night. I still believe you are as clear as crystal, but like all innocent people you rather veer towards ideas of romantic guilt: as if to be good is not to be interesting. You are shivering, Prudence. I shall have to take you home. Why didn’t you wear a coat?’
‘I had no time . . . There was a fuss, an upset as I set out. In the end I just ran away – without thinking.’
‘Ran away from what?’
Prudence thought for a moment and then she said: ‘From Tory Foyle.’
‘What was she doing?’
‘I couldn’t tell you, I’m afraid.’
‘You quarrelled with her? Why? Please don’t be stubborn with me!’ He took her hands and held them, shaking them gently. ‘I am glad you quarrelled with her,’ he went on. ‘There is something unkind about the woman. Insolent, and even cruel.’
His hands slid up her cold arms and into her sleeves.
‘Come into my coat, there’s a dear girl.’
He bunched her up to him and kissed her. ‘Please don’t move your head away. I love you very dearly, Prudence.’
‘Do you revere me, too?’ she asked with sarcasm.
‘No. I can’t say I do. I wish you loved me the very slightest . . .’
‘Oh, love!’ she said impatiently. Then, looking down at her bracelets, remembering her mother, she put up her hands and covered her face.
‘What is it, Prudence, my angel?’
‘I don’t like it here. All these graves. I want to go home. I’m cold.’
He wrapped his jacket over her shoulders. She felt the warm lining of it on her arms and was comforted. After a while she said with a stagey sort of bitterness: ‘I daresay I expected too much.’
‘Of what?’ he asked gently.
‘Of love. I always imagined it would be a sort of increasing excitement . . .’
‘And it is so dull?’
She thought hard. ‘Yes, I think it is dull as well,’ she said.
‘As well as what?’
‘As well as frightening.’
‘I wouldn’t frighten you for the world.’
‘You?’ Then she laughed. ‘Oh, I wasn’t thinking of you.’
‘Then of whom?’
‘Of Tory Foyle and my father.’
Her teeth were chattering and he drew her closer to him. She began to cough. ‘Oh, I see,’ he said thoughtfully. It was as if a strange landscape were suddenly unrolled before him and he looked at it through her eyes.
When she had stopped coughing she said in a husky voice: ‘I thought of love being like a flower, a rose . . .’ She cupped her hands together in her lap and her fingers spread slowly apart . . . ‘and I thought of it opening, unfolding, one petal after another, something new each day . . . but now I shall always know that this horrible thing may come crawling out of its heart . . . an excuse for every sort of treachery, and grubby deceit, and meanness . . .’
‘If they love one another . . .’
‘But he is supposed to love my mother!’
‘Supposed!’ Geoffrey echoed, and laughed in a worldly-wise fashion; but he was a little shaken all the same. Through their young eyes they surveyed Tory’s and Robert’s guilt and felt, in contrast, a quality of superiority about themselves, uplifted, triumphant, in the dark graveyard.
Tory went to bed early and had a good cry. Into the middle of the weeping came the sound of tapping on the street door. She put a wrap over her shoulders and went to the window. Down below stood Robert and he lifted his face
and called to her in a low voice: ‘I do wish you’d come down, Tory. I must speak to you.’
Filled with dread, unconscious for once of her appearance, she ran downstairs and opened the door. Coldness hung about his clothes as he entered the hall.
‘What happened to Prudence after I left?’ he began at once.
‘She went, too . . . I thought she must be going after you . . . it was in that direction.’
‘She didn’t say?’
‘No.’
‘Did she say anything?’
Tory sat down on the only chair. ‘Yes, she did. She knows, and told me so and was rather hysterical . . .’
‘Oh, my God! You see, she’s gone. I can’t find her.’
‘What time is it?’
‘About eleven . . .’
‘Well . . .’
‘But where would she go?’
‘I don’t know.’ (‘I shouldn’t have taunted her about the bracelets,’ Tory thought. ‘It was wicked of me.’) ‘She’ll come back,’ she said, unconvincingly.
‘I don’t know where to look now. I’ve walked all along under the cliff straining my eyes into the darkness. Why have you been crying?’
‘Yes, I must look a pretty sight – oh, I’ve been crying because of going away from here, from you, and . . . but don’t worry. I shall go. Very quickly, I promise.’
‘If it isn’t too late,’ he said cruelly. ‘Suppose she doesn’t come back?’
‘She will. She’s just trying to punish us, to frighten us.’
‘And she’s succeeding.’
‘What about – Beth?’
‘She is sitting there writing and saying how naughty of Prudence to stay out without letting us know.’
‘Where does she think you have been?’
‘Mrs Bracey has pleurisy. She thinks I have been there all the time . . . or rather, as far as she has any ideas about what’s been going on, those are the ideas she has.’
‘What was that noise?’
‘I thought it sounded like our front door.’
‘Perhaps it is Prudence.’
‘Yes, I must go at once.’
‘If it is not, come back and I will go out with you to search.’
‘Yes. Good night, Tory.’
‘Good night, Robert, dear. And I am – so sorry.’
‘If only it is all right,’ he began.
A View of the Harbour Page 22
