The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [151]
"What proof have you," said Thomas, breaking in for the first time "that much nicer people do really exist?"
"Suppose that they did, and you were those much nicer people, you would not be bothered with her—what I mean is, you would not be so concerned. As it is, you are both unnaturally conscious of her: anybody would think she held the clue to the crime.... Your mother, for instance, Thomas, must have been a nice person living in the country."
"So, as a matter of fact, was my father, until he fell in love. All there is to nice easy people, St. Quentin, is, that they are fairly impermeable. But not impermeable the whole way through. Yes, I know just the sort of people you've got in mind—you're a novelist and you've always lived in town—but my experience is that they've all got a breaking point. And my conviction is that a thorough girl like Portia would be bound to come to it in them pretty soon. No, the fact is that nobody can afford to have a girl as thorough as that about." Thomas re-filled his glass with brandy and went on: "I don't say we might not have kept the surface on things longer if we had lived in some place where we could give her a bicycle. But, even so, could she keep on bicycling round for ever? She'd be bound, sooner or later, to notice something was up. Anna and I live the only way we can, and it quite likely may not stand up to examination. Look at this conversation we're having now, for instance: it seems to me the apogee of bad taste. If we were nice easy people living in the country we should not for a moment tolerate you, St. Quentin. In fact, we should detest intimacies, and no doubt we should be right. Oh, no doubt we should be a good deal jollier than we are. But we might not do Portia better in the long run. For one thing, we should make her feel pretty shady."
"Which she is," said Anna. "Throwing herself at Eddie."
"Well, what did you do, at not much more than her age?"
"Why always bring that up?"
"Why always have it in mind?... No, she is growing up in such a preposterous world that it's quite natural that that little scab Eddie should seem as natural to her as anyone else. If you, Anna, and I had come up to scratch, she might not—"
"Yes, she always would. She wanted to pity him."
"Victimised," said St. Quentin. "She sees the victimised character. She sees one long set of attacks on him. She would never take account of the self-inflicted wrong—the chap who breaks his own arm to avoid going back to school, then says some big bully has done it for him, the chap who lashes himself to his bedroom chair so as not to have to have to go and cope with the burglar—oh, she'd think he was Prometheus. There's something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it's a grandiose form of funk. It takes nerve to make a fuss in a big way, and our Eddie certainly has got nerve. But it takes guts not to, and guts he hasn't got. If he had, he'd stop Anna having him on. Oh, he won't stop baying the moon while he's got someone to listen and Portia'11 listen as long as anyone bays the moon."
"How right you must be. All the same, you are so brutal. Does one really get far with brutality?"
"Clearly not," said St. Quentin. "Look where we all three are. Utterly disabused, and yet we can't deride anything. This evening the pure in heart have simply got us on toast. And look at the fun she has—she lives in a world of heroes. Who are we to be sure they're as phony as we all think? If the world's really a stage, there must be some big parts. All she asks is to walk on at the same time. And how right she is really—failing the big character, better (at least, arguably) the big flop than the small neat man who has more or less come off. Not that there is, really, one neat unhaunted man. I swear that each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant—impossible socially, but full-scale—and that it's