The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [144]
"Oh, he's not just her lover; it's something worse than that.... Are you still Anna's friend?"
"I can't get over the fact that she's been very good to me. I don't think I want to discuss that.... But look, if you feel, if you did feel there was anything wrong athome, you should surely stick by your brother?"
"He's ashamed with me, too: he's ashamed because of our father. And he's afraid the whole time that 1 shall be sorry for him. Whenever I speak he gives me a sort of look as much as to say, 'Don't say that!' Oh, he doesn't want me to stick. You don't know him at all.... You think I exaggerate."
"At the moment—"
"Well, this sort of moment never really stops.... I'm not going home, Major Brutt."
He said, very reasonably: "Then what do you want to do?"
"Stay here—" She stopped short, as though she felt she had said, too soon, something enough important to need care. Deliberately, with her lips tight shut, she got off the bed to come and stand by him—so that, she standing, he sitting, she could tower up a least a little way. She looked him all over, as though she meant to tug at him, to jerk him awake, and was only not certain where to catch hold of him. Her arms stayed at her sides, but looked rigid, at every moment, with their intention to move in unfeeling desperation. She was not able, or else did not wish, to inform herself with pleading grace; her sexlessness made her deliver a stern summons: he felt her knocking through him like another heart outside his own ribs. "Stay here with you," she said. "You do like me," she added. "You write to me; you send me puzzles; you say you think about me. Anna says you are sentimental, but that is what she says when people don't feel nothing. I could do things for you: we could have a home; we would not have to live in a hotel. Tell Thomas you want to keep me and he could send you my money. I could cook; my mother cooked when she lived in Nottinghill Gate. Why could you not marry me? I could cheer you up. I would not get in your way, and we should not be half so lonely. Why should you be dumbfounded, Major Brutt?"
"Because I suppose I am," was all he could say.
"I told Eddie you were a person I made happy."
"Good God, yes. But don't you see—"
"Do think it over, please," she said calmly. "I'll wait."
"It's no good beginning to think, my dear."
"I'd like to wait, all the same."
"You're shivering," he said vaguely.
"Yes, I am cold." With a quite new, matter-of-fact air of possessing his room, she made small arrangements for comfort—peeled off his eiderdown, kicked her shoes off, lay down with her head into his pillow and pulled the eiderdown snugly up to her chin. By this series of acts she seemed at once to shelter, to plant here and to obliterate herself—most of all that last. Like a sick person, or someone who has decided by not getting up to take no part in a day, she at once seemed to inhabit a different world. Noncommittal, she sometimes shut her eyes, sometimes looked at the ceiling that took the slope of the roof. "I suppose," she said, after some minutes, "you don't know what to do."
Major Brutt said nothing. Portia moved her head on the pillow; her eyes roved placidly round the room, examined things on the washstand. "All sorts of pads and polishes," she said. "Do you clean your own shoes?"
"Yes. I've always been rather fussy. They can't do everything here."
She looked at the row of shoes, all on their trees. "No wonder they look so nice: they look like chestnuts.... That's another thing I could do."
"For some reason, women are never so good at it."
"Well, I'm certain I could cook. Mother told me about the things she used to make. As I say, there'd be no reason for you and me to always live in hotels."
The preposterous happy mirage of something one does not even for one moment desire must not be allowed to last. Had nothing in Major Brutt responded to it. he would have gone on