The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [135]
However, there was no one. The room, unaired and chilly, smelled of this morning's breakfast, last night's smoke. He put the two letters (one was "By Hand", with no stamp) down on the centre table, threw open a window, knelt to light the gas fire.
With the crane-like steps of an overwrought person, Portia kept going round and round the room, looking hard at everything—the two armchairs with crushed springs, the greyish mirror, the divan with its scratchy butcher-blue spread, pillows untidily clipped into butcher-blue slips, the foreign books overcrowded, thrust with brutality into the deal shelves. She had been here before; she had twice come to see Eddie. But she gave the impression of being someone who, having lost his way in a book or mistaken its whole import, has to go back and start from the beginning again.
Only a subtler mind, with stores of notes to refer to, could have learned much from Eddie's interior. If this interior showed any affectation, it was in keeping the bleakness of college rooms—the unadult taste, the lack of tactile feeling bred by large stark objects, tables and cupboards, that one does not possess. The concave seats of the chairs, the lumpy divan suggested that comfort was a rather brutal affair. Eddie's work of presenting himself to the world did not, in fact, stop when he came back here, for he often had company—but he chose by all kinds of negligence to imply that it did. Whatever manias might possess him in solitude, making some haunted landscape in which cupboards and tables looked like cliffs or opaque bottomless pools, the effect (at least to a woman) coming in here was, that this was how this fundamentally plain and rather old-fashioned fellow lived when en pantoufles. On the smoky buff walls and unpolished woodwork neurosis, of course, could not write a trace. To be received by Eddie in such frowsty surroundings could be taken as either confiding or insolent. If he had stuffed a bunch of flowers (never very nice flowers) into his one art vase, the concession always seemed touching. This was not all that was touching: the smells of carpet and ash, of dust inside the books and of stagnant tea had a sort of unhopeful acquiescence about them. This was not all phony—Eddie did need to be mothered; he was not aesthetic; he had a contempt for natty contrivances, and he did sincerely associate pretty living with being richer than he could hope to be. In the hideous hired furniture and the stuffiness he did (with a kind of arrogance) acquiesce. Thus he kept the right, which he used, to look round his friends' room—at the taste, the freshness, the ingenuity—with a cold marvelling alien ironic eye. Had he had a good deal of money, his interior probably would have had the classy red Gallic darkness of a man-about-town's in a Bourget novel—draperies, cut-glass lamps, teetering bronzes, mirrors, a pianola, a seductive day-bed and waxy demi-monde flowers in jardinieres. Like the taste of many people whose extraction is humble, what taste he had lagged some decades back in time, and had an exciting, anti-moral colour. His animal suspiciousness, his bleakness, the underlying morality of his class, his expectation of some appalling contretemps which should make him have to decamp from everything suddenly were not catered for in his few expensive dreams—for there is a narrowness about fantasy: it figures only the voulu part of the self. Happily he had to keep what taste he had to himself. For as things were, this room of his became a tour de force—not simply the living here (which he more or less had to do) but the getting away with it, even making it pay. He was able to make this room (which was not even an attic) a special factor, even the key factor, in his relations with fastidious people....