The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [118]
The water was animated: light ran off blades of oars or struck through the coloured or white sails that shivered passing the islands. Bending rowers crossed the mirroring view. The etherealisation of the early morning had lifted from the long narrow wooded islands, upon which nobody was allowed to land, and which showed swans' nests at the edge of their mystery. Light struck into the islands' unvisited hearts; the silvery willow branches just shifted apart to let light glitter through. Reflections of trees, of sails made the water coloured and deep, and water birds lanced it with long ripples.
People approaching each other, beside the lake or on the oblique walks, looked into each other's faces boldly, as though they felt they should know each other. Thin hems of women's dresses fluttered under their coats. Children shuttled about, or made conspiracies that broke up in shouts. But this vivid evening, no grown-up people walked fast: the park was full of straying fancies and leisure.
Thomas and Portia turned their alike profiles in the direction from which the breeze came. Portia thought how inland the air smelled. Looking unmoved up at the turquoise sky above the trees burning thinly yellow-green, Thomas said he felt the weather would change.
"I hope not before these tulips are out. These are the tulips Father told me about."
"Tulips—what do you mean? When did he see them?"
"The day he walked past your house."
"Did he walk past our house? When?"
"One day, once. He said it had been painted; it looked like marble, he said. He was very glad you lived there."
Thomas's face went slowly set and heavy, as though he felt the weight of his father's solitary years as well as his own. He looked at Portia, at their father's eyebrows marking, here, a more delicate line. His look made it clear he would not speak. Across the lake, only the parapet and the upper windows of Windsor Terrace showed over the trees: the silhouette of the stucco, now not newly painted, looked shabby and frail. "We paint every four years," he said.
In the traffic, half way across the road, Portia suddenly looked up at the drawingroom window, and waved. "Look out!" Thomas said sharply, gripping her elbow—a car swerved past them like a great fish. "What's the matter?"
"There was Anna, up there. She's gone now."
"If you don't take better care in the traffic, I don't think you ought to go out alone."
II
HAVING been seen at the window, having been waved to, made Anna step back instinctively. She knew how foolish a person looking out of a window appears from the outside of a house—as though waiting for something that does not happen, as though wanting something from the outside world. A face at a window for no reason is a face that should have a thumb in its mouth: there is something only-childish about it. Or, if the face is not foolish it is threatening—blotted white by the darkness inside the room it suggests a malignant indoor power. Would Portia and Thomas think she had been spying on them?
Also, she had been seen holding a letter—not a letter that she had got today. It was to escape from thoughts out of the letter that she had gone to the window to look out. Now she went back to her escritoire which, in a shadowed corner of this large light room, was not suitable to write more than notes at. In the pigeonholes she kept her engagement pad, her account books; the drawers under the flap were useful because they locked. At present, a drawer stood open, showing packets of letters; and more letters, creased from folding, exhaling an old smell, lay about among slipped-off rubber bands. Hearing Thomas's latchkey, the hall door opening, Portia's confident voice, Anna swept the letters into the drawer quickly, then knelt down to lock everything up. But this sad little triumph of being ready in time came to nothing, for the two Quaynes went straight into the study; they did not come upstairs.
They did not come up to join her, though they knew where she was. Looking at the desk key on the palm of her hand, Anna felt much more cut off from the