The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [143]
"Oh, one forgets, you know. One can always patch oneself up."
"No. Is this being grown up?"
"Nonsense! This is no time to say so, and you'll bite my head off, but you'll do better without that young man. Oh, I know I've got no business to chip bits off him, but—"
"But it isn't just Eddie," she said, looking amazed. "The thing was, he was the person I knew. Because of him, I felt safer with all the others. I did not think things could really be so bad. There was Matchett, but she got cold with me about Eddie; she liked me more when she and I were alone: now she and I are not the same as we were. I did not mean to be wrong, but she was always so angry; she wanted me to be angry. But Eddie and I weren't angry: we soothed each other. But I find now, he was with them the whole time, and they knew. I can't go back there now I know."
"One's feelings get hurt; one cannot avoid that. One really can't make a war out of that, you know. A girl like you, Portia, a really good girl, ought not to get her back to the wall. When people seem to give you a bad deal, you've got to ask what sort of deal they may have once got themselves, but you are still young enough
"I don't see what age has to do with it."
He swivelled round on his chair, as wretchedly as a schoolboy, to look, in glum, dumb, nonplussed communication at his own rubbed ebony hairbrushes, his stud-box, his nail-scissors—as though these objects, which had travelled with him, witnessed to his power somehow to get through life, to reach a point when one says, It doesn't really much matter. Unhappy on his bed, in this temporary little stale room, Portia seemed to belong nowhere, not even here. Stripped of that pleasant home that had seemed part of her figure, stripped, too, of his own wishes and hopes, she looked at once harsh and beaten, a refugee—frightening, rebuffing all pity that has fear at the root. He tried: "Or look at it this way—" then spoilt this by a pause. He saw what a fiction was common-sense.
However he had meant to finish, she would hardly have listened. She had turned to grasp his bed-end, to bend her forehead down on her tight knuckles. Her body tensely twisted in this position; her legs, like disjointed legs, hung down: her thin lines, her concavities, her unconsciousness made her a picture of premature grief. Happy that few of us are aware of the world until we are already in league with it. Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from the world but the world from the power of innocence. Major Brutt said: "Well, cheer up; we're in the same boat."
She said, to her knuckles: "When I thought I'd be older, I thought Eddie'd be the person I would marry.
I saw I'd have to be different when that happened, but not more different than I could be. But he says he knew I thought that; it is that that he does not like."
"When one's in love—"
"Was I? How do you know? Have you been?"
"In my time," declared Major Brutt, with assertive cheerfulness. "Though it may seem funny to you, and for one or another reason I never cut much ice. For the time being, of course, that queers everything. But here I am, after all. Aren't I?" he said, leaning forward, creaking the cane chair.
Portia almost gave him a look, then turned her head to lay the other cheek on her knuckles. "Yes, you are," she said. "But today he said I must go. So what am I to do now, Major Brutt?"
"Well, it may seem tough, but I still don't see why you can't go home, after all. We've all got to live somewhere, whatever happens. There's breakfast, dinner, so on. After all, they're your people. Blood's thicker—"
"No, it isn't; not mine and Anna's. It, it isn't all right there any more: we feel ashamed with each other. You see, she has read my diary and found something out. She does not like that, but she laughs about it with Eddie: they laugh about him and me."
This made Major