A View of the Harbour

by Elizabeth Taylor

  ‘You are lucky to be betrothed to a woman who has all these lovely things,’ she had told Bertram, as she laid her china shepherdess in a bed of cotton-wool.

  ‘I like this little walnut writing-table, certainly,’ he had agreed.

  ‘That was Teddy’s. We brought all our treasures here for safety in the war-time. Teddy is left with all the London rubbish we thought would be bombed.’

  ‘This is worth a pretty penny. But suppose he demands it back?’

  ‘Can you imagine a man doing so when he’s been divorced all this time?’

  ‘I have read in the newspapers of such things happening.’

  ‘Oh, newspapers!’ She laughed merrily. ‘Only freaks get into newspapers. Don’t worry about that. Teddy is not the sort of person who would let himself get into print.’

  ‘I’m not at all sure where we are going with all these costly pieces,’ he began.

  ‘We shall find a little flat in London, I am quite confident,’ she assured him. ‘It will do for the time being.’ And she had taken up the telephone-receiver and put a call through at once to another acquaintance she had suddenly remembered.

  ‘Well, that wasn’t any good, either,’ he said gloomily when she had finished.

  ‘She said she would look about and ask people. It is another iron in the fire.’

  ‘The fire will soon be so full of irons that it will go out,’ he remarked.

  Now she laid a half-wrapped goblet down upon the table and decided to go at once to see Beth before she could change her mind. She had delayed and delayed, from one hour to another, wishing to tell Robert first: but Robert had been busy with Mrs Bracey and with a tiresome confinement and she had not seen him. ‘So Beth shall tell him,’ she decided, letting herself out of her own door. ‘He spared me nothing over Prudence. And I will spare him nothing over this.’

  Beth had nearly finished her novel. She had reached the stage where she felt that it would be a great pity, a waste, if she were killed suddenly in a street accident (but she was not very likely to be in a street). She took great care not to fall asleep in her bath or to run into any kind of danger.

  Yet when Tory came she was pleased to see her and gave her at once all of her attention, even peering into the little bowls and vases along the mantelpiece for cigarettes; but there were none.

  ‘When you are sitting down,’ Tory began, as if she had come merely to give good advice, ‘it is a good idea to twist your skirt round, so that you don’t always sit it out in the same place. When you are alone, I mean, of course.’

  ‘I should only forget to twist it back again.’

  ‘What is this horrid smell in the house?’

  ‘Oh, Prudence is stewing some cow’s udder for the cats. I expect it is that.’

  ‘I expect it is. Well, if you don’t mind, I will shut this door and sit over here by the window. Beth, dear, I am going to be married.’

  ‘Again?’ Beth asked foolishly, her eyes welling up with tears of confusion and sentiment.

  ‘Of course “again”. The next time will have to be that, won’t it?’

  ‘I know who to,’ Beth said, shocked to find herself ending up with a preposition. But she was much thrown out by the surprise of it all.

  ‘Yes, it is Bertram Hemingway,’ Tory said, looking over her shoulder out of the window. Then, turning back to Beth, who did not know what to say, she cried: ‘There is no need to look smug and knowing – like the Mona Lisa – or – or a lavatory-attendant.’

  Beth’s laugh was shaky, tear-laden.

  ‘Now perhaps you won’t go away?’ she asked. ‘Perhaps you will go on staying here?’

  ‘No.’ Tory moved her shoulders impatiently. ‘I want to live in London. As soon as I get a flat I’ll go. The very, very minute.’

  ‘Oh, Tory!’

  ‘I shall often come back.’ (‘I shall never come back,’ she thought, turning away again to the window. ‘I shall never, never come back, once I am gone.’) ‘And you will be coming to London about your books and we can go shopping together.’

  Beth thought: ‘It won’t be the same.’ But she said nothing.

  ‘You are more self-sufficient than me,’ Tory told her. ‘You couldn’t be lonely as I have been. All these years it is I who have come to you . . .’

  ‘I am only lazy . . .’

  ‘You dismiss the possibility of my being passionately in love with Bertram,’ Tory said coldly.

  ‘Yes, I am afraid I do dismiss that,’ Beth replied with all her courage. ‘I know you better than you imagine, and I realise that you love one man and will always love him, and no one else will ever take his place.’

  Tory got up and now she, too, began to peer along the mantelpiece for a cigarette. She looked helplessly round and then sat down again.

  ‘Teddy, you mean?’ she said in a small voice.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Yes, it was a pity I got so high-handed with him and didn’t realise until too late, for in many ways our marriage went on being good fun. The thing I liked best was sitting up in bed playing cards with him. We used to play this special kind of whist we invented every night and gamble and cheat one another until the early hours. Often I lost the whole month’s housekeeping allowance in one night. Then I used to lie down with my back to him and not be on speaking terms . . .’ She laughed at the memory, but Beth looked puzzled at this picture of wedded bliss. ‘I wonder,’ Tory went on, ‘if he plays that game with Dorothy. It’s strange, but if he does, I mind it more than the other things. Much more.’

  Prudence opened the door. She was looking for her cats, for the feast was ready. She picked them up from their basket and went out without a word.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Beth apologised. ‘I simply can’t imagine . . .’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry. We were much the same at her age. Surely you remember?’

  ‘No, I certainly can’t. I was a married woman and expecting a baby.’

  ‘She has let in that awful smell again,’ Tory complained, waving her hand in the air. ‘Well, at twenty I was just as foolish as could be. Standing outside stage-doors after matinées . . .’

  ‘Still writing to actors?’ Beth asked drily.

  ‘ “Dear Madam, Sir John Martin-Harvey begs me to convey to you . . .” and so on.’

  ‘You’ve always been a worry to me.’

  Prudence opened the door again. ‘I think I can hear the telephone ringing in your house,’ she said icily to Tory.

  ‘Oh, thank you. Beth, dear, I’ll be back in a minute, but I think this may be one of the irons I have in the fire.’

  When she had gone Beth went back to her writing, for she could always do that, she told herself.

  Bertram was giving a little talk on mangroves at Mrs Bracey’s bedside. He sat on an uncomfortable chair, his hands spread on his knees, and the talk drifted slowly, winding like a river, like, in fact, the Amazon which he described. Mrs Bracey appeared to be asleep, but if he stopped speaking she moved her hand and said: ‘Please, go on.’ Maisie sometimes came in, pausing anxiously at the door; but her anxiety was for Bertram, who sacrificed himself so gallantly, she thought; a stranger, too, who had no ties, no kinship. Standing there with the empty medicine glass in her hand, she would watch her mother and listen to her breathing, thinking how for weeks it might go on in this way.

  Bertram talked to a vaster audience than Mrs Bracey. ‘I’ve heard worse than this on the wireless,’ he marvelled to himself. ‘The snag is having to write it all down beforehand.’ He knew that as soon as he took up pen and paper it would fade entirely.

  In reality he had no audience at all, for Mrs Bracey merely used the drifting sound of his voice as an accompaniment to her own thoughts, the fleeting thoughts of her childhood. Against Bertram’s voice going gently on, she remembered one scene after another – the house in Lower Harbour Street where she was born; then the shrieking and rushing on the asphalted school playground, the outbursts of wildness in children too rigidly confined; going e
rrands on Saturday mornings, going errands for Father (a pint and a half of porter in a quart jug, hopeful of good measure), ‘Rose goes with Bert’ chalked on the wall behind the Library; Sunday School, to be out of the way while Father snored in his chair, flushed with beer, bad-tempered from over-eating; on Monday evenings helping to fold the newly-washed sheets, sprinkling water over the coarse nightshirts, the frilled pinafores, and her mother turning the iron up to her hot face or spitting on it and the little silvery blobs slanting off. At the end of this series of memories was a picture of Christmas Eve, of herself as a little girl standing in a dimly-lit shop waiting to buy an incandescent mantle for the gas and the shop smelling of paraffin, of tarred firewood and candles; suddenly, turning the milled coin round in her fingers, a sense of complete happiness came over her, a happiness so pure that Christmas Day itself could only diminish it, could never hope to enhance what was perfect bliss. ‘It lasted a lifetime,’ she thought, ‘when I think of being a child I think of being myself in that shop that late afternoon, with dusk coming on fast and a jet of gas like a fish’s tail, or a flower – an iris – flickering, warbling overhead. It has lasted a lifetime, but that is as long as it can last. When I die it dies also, and then it might never have been.’

  A great desire to communicate to Bertram something of that moment, which seemed to her now the very essence of her life, made her open her eyes and turn her head painfully towards him.

  He stopped in the middle of a sentence and was at once solicitous, taking her hand, bending towards her.

  ‘Christmas,’ she began, ‘that’s a wonderful time for children . . .’

  He half-glanced at the hot day outside, but quickly said: ‘It’s part of the magic we lose as we grow older. I remember it as if it were yesterday, the excitement of it all . . . undoing the presents, pudding ablaze, Christmas carols . . . nuts,’ he added lamely.

  But Mrs Bracey closed her eyes. His recollections were of such banality that she could not lay hers alongside them. She did not know what she had experienced, could not describe it, nor impart its magic to another, and: ‘in the things that really matter to us,’ she thought, ‘we are entirely alone. Especially alone dying!’

  Then it seemed as if she were going to cough. Terrified, she waited, and the pain came tearing up through her lungs and throat and there were no more memories, only the struggle to breathe, to keep head above water. She fought furiously, alone.

  At last she was quiet and a great peace invaded her, the lulled peace which follows pain . . . She lay for a long time, taking rapid, shallow breaths. When she opened her eyes Bertram had gone and Dr Cazabon stood beside her, his fingers on her wrist.

  ‘Where have you been?’ asked Tory.

  Not waiting for an answer, she held out a little piece of paper and Bertram took it and read it, but without appearing to understand.

  ‘A flat,’ Tory said impatiently. ‘One of the irons in the fire has come up to scratch. I am going to take you to see it to-morrow.’

  ‘To-morrow?’

  His way of walking up and down the room with his hands clasped behind him was becoming familiar to her now. At the window he stopped and contemplated the harbour.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she asked again.

  ‘Sitting with Mrs Bracey. She is dying.’

  ‘Well, I know,’ Tory said crossly, for the idea of death affronted her. ‘But why should you? A stranger almost. Surely her own family . . . those two girls . . .’

  ‘I take my turn with them.’

  ‘But why should you?’

  ‘She likes me to talk to her about places I’ve been to. She could have been a great explorer if she had been a man – if class and sex and health had not all been against her . . . the intelligence is there, the curiosity, the desire to see round the next corner . . .’

  ‘Oh, nonsense. She’s a prying old gossip with a very spiteful tongue.’

  ‘No human being is ever quite so simple as that. There is always something else as well . . . her curiosity was dammed up by circumstance and ran into unworthy channels . . .’

  ‘Well, I wish you wouldn’t go in there. You might catch something.’

  ‘Pneumonia is not catching.’

  He turned to look at her and she suddenly felt ashamed, as he intended that she should.

  ‘Tory, understand me in this,’ he began. ‘It is the first import-ant thing between us . . .’

  ‘How could Mrs Bracey be that to either of us?’ she said incredulously.

  (‘For once I am going to see someone through to the end,’ he thought, beginning to walk up and down again. ‘For once I am not going to slip away. Then I shall be able to look back and say: “I saw her through to the end, and for as long as she needed me I was there.” ’)

  Perhaps Teddy had taught Tory a lesson in worldly wisdom, for she suddenly said in a rather meek voice: ‘Very well, Bertram. If you feel that you cannot come to-morrow, I will go alone.’ And she smiled, and to hide her sense of self-abasement suggested a drink. But as she poured it out she suddenly brightened and undid all her meekness, saying: ‘But perhaps she will die before to-morrow morning. The train is not till nine-thirteen.’

  In winter the dusk settles down over the earth like a fine powder, solidifying, making the air opaque, until houses are buried in it, mounded over as if with snow, and all the pastel colours deepen into darkness.

  But now, in summer, the twilight was fluid, luminous, sharpening the outlines of things standing against it, the -silhouettes of buildings, of the telegraph poles along the railway-cutting, emphasising stillness, and as it grew later and lamps were lit, the light fell as if through the petals of a dark flower.

  Seen from afar, the lighthouse merely struck deft blows at the darkness, but to anyone standing under the shelter of its white-washed walls a deeper sense of mystery was invoked: the light remained longer, it seemed, and spread wider, indicating greater ranges of darkness and deeper wonders hidden in that darkness.

  17

  But when Bertram called early in the morning Mrs Bracey had rallied, as Maisie said; her voice had gained strength, she had tried to stage a little death-bed scene (a sure sign of recovery, Iris felt); had accused them of drinking the whisky she had reserved for the bearers at her funeral; had called for the bottle to be shown to her; said this was proof indeed; and, finally, would not be convinced that the girls were not hiding Eddie Flitcroft downstairs in the kitchen.

  So Tory went to London alone.

  The day wore on and the fishing-fleet came in. Prudence knelt at her bedroom window, her elbows on the warm stone sill, and she watched the harbour slowly filling with the rusty and dirty trawlers, while overhead the gulls circled deliriously. As time went on day-trippers from the New Town arrived and straggled along the waterfront, trying the empty slot-machines, glancing with regret at the shuttered façade of the Fun Fair and, when they emerged from the Waxworks, blinking crossly at the sudden brilliance of sunshine. Then Prudence saw Mrs Flitcroft come out on to the step below. She dealt the wall a blow with the doormat and a fountain of golden dust-motes rose and fell about her as she paused and looked out at the boats in the harbour, her elbow crooked on her brow to shade her eyes.

  At lunch it seemed that Robert would rather discuss his patients than have Tory’s name mentioned, and when Beth inquired after Mrs Bracey he seemed relieved to have the subject introduced and said that she would surely die.

  ‘I didn’t know she was seriously ill,’ Beth said slyly.

  ‘But I told you she had pneumonia.’

  ‘You also told me not so very long ago that no one need die of pneumonia nowadays,’ Beth reminded him, and she looked blissfully content as if she had wondered if this moment would ever come, and now it had.

  Mrs Bracey’s sudden improvement did not mislead Robert as it had misled her daughters, and he failed to be impressed by Maisie’s report. ‘She is very ill,’ he said at the end, and began to go upstairs.

  Maisie followed, rolling her
hands in her apron, feeling suddenly overwrought and agitated.

  As Robert climbed the stairs he was aware of a continuous droning sound, and, opening the bedroom door, saw Bertram sitting at the bedside, his hands on his widespread knees, light striking the bald patch on his bent head, and his voice continued placidly as if he were oblivious of everything that surrounded him.

  Robert stood at the door and waited. When at last Bertram glanced up, Maisie began to throw their names at one another across the general awkwardness, in order to cover up the silence and because this was her notion of an introduction.

  Bertram, feeling creased and dishevelled, at least said how-do-you-do; but Robert only glanced out of the window.

  ‘Come back!’ Mrs Bracey murmured pettishly in a slurred voice as if she were drunk. Her teeth had been taken away and her cheeks and lips fell in weakly.

  ‘I will wait downstairs,’ Bertram assured her. ‘I shall always be about when you want me.’ He straightened his shoulders, adjusted the handkerchief in his breast-pocket and, with an air of great nobility, walked past Robert and down the stairs.

  ‘What is he doing here?’ Robert asked Maisie, as he opened his case.

  ‘He has been such a good friend . . .’ Maisie began, her eyes brimming with tears, she was so tired.

  ‘He must have a genius for insinuating himself,’ Robert said. He went across the room to Maisie and looked at her kindly, drawing down her lower eyelid, tilting her face to the light. Before he moved back to the bed, he patted her shoulder, and she thought that he seemed to say to her that it would not be much longer. She had no defence against his sympathy, and put her apron to her eyes, turning briefly away.

  ‘Where’s he gone?’ Mrs Bracey asked thickly. ‘We was just having a nice chat. I tell him he’ll rue the day he marries that bitch, but he’s so wilful . . .’

  ‘All right, Mother,’ Maisie said. ‘Lay still, I should.’ She had not the heart to reprove her on her death-bed, for such, from Robert’s seriousness, she now took it to be. Robert stood very still, checking her pulse, seeming remote from her, interested, in a dispassionate way, in the roses on the wallpaper, not interested at all in what his patient had to say. Between them they let her ramble on until Robert calmly laid her arm back across the sheet and said: ‘I will look in again, this evening perhaps,’ and then he too, like Bertram, put back his shoulders and straightened himself.