The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [153]
"Decidedly we send Matchett. Don't you agree, St. Quentin?"
"Oh, by all means—
'We'll send Matchett to fetch her away,
Fetch her away, fetch her away,
We'll send Matchett to fetch her away,
On a cold and frosty—'"
"St. Quentin, for heaven's sake—!"
"Sorry, Anna. I felt quite outside myself. So glad this is all arranged."
"We've still got to think. What are we to tell Matchett? Which of us is to ring up Major Brutt?"
"No one," said Thomas quickly. "This is a coup or nothing. We don't talk; we do the obvious thing."
Anna looked at Thomas: her forehead smoothed out slowly. "Oh, all right," she said. "Then I'll tell her to get her hat."
Matchett said "Yes, madam." She stood waiting till Anna turned back into the diningroom. Then she started heavily up the silent staircase: by the time she came to the second landing she was undoing her apron at the back. She stopped to open the door of Portia'sroom and, in the dusk, take a quick look round. Though the bed was turned down, the nightdress lying across it, the room seemed to expect nobody back. An empty room gets this look towards the end of an evening—as though the day had died alone in here. Matchett, holding tine unfastened straps of her apron together in the small of her back with one hand, switched on the electric fire. Standing up again, she took one look out of the window: steel-green under the sky the tree tops were in their order, the park was not shut yet. Matchett then went on up, to her own room that no one saw but herself.
When she came down in her hat, her dark overcoat, still holding her black suède-finish gloves, with her morocco handbag pressed to her ribs, Thomas was in the hall, holding the door open. He was looking anxiously for her, up the stairs. A taxi ticked outside, so near the step that it seemed to be something in the hall.
"Here's your taxi," Thomas said.
"Thank you, sir."
"I'd better give you some money."
"I carry all I shall need."
"Then all right. Better get in."
Matchett got into the taxi; she shut the door after herself. She sat upright, took one impassive look out of each window, then unfolded her gloves and started putting them on. Through the glass, she watched Thomas give some direction to the driver—then the taxi croaked into gear and lumbered off down the terrace.
Matchett not only buttoned her gloves but stroked the last wrinkle out of them. This occupied her to half way up Baker Street. Then, she electrically started, paused, one thumb over the other, and said, aloud: "Well, to think..." She looked anxiously through the glass at the driver's back. Then she put down her bag beside her, heaved herself forward and began to try to slide open the glass panel—but her gloved fingers only scrabbled on it. The driver twitched his head once or twice. Then the lights went against him; he pulled up, slid open the panel and looked obligingly in. "Ma'am?" he said.
"Here, do you know where you're to go to?"
"Where he just said, don't I?"
"Well, so long as you do know. But don't you come asking me. It's not my business. You've got to know your own way."
"Ho, come," said the driver, nettled. "I didn't start this, did I?"
"None of that, young man. You mind your own business, which is to know what address the gentleman said."
"Ho, so that's what you want to know? Why not ask me out straight?"
"Oh, I don't want to know. I just wanted to know you did."
"Rightie-o, auntie," said the driver. "Then you chance it. Isn't life an adventure?"
Matchett sat back, not saying another word. She did not even attempt to shut the panel: the lights changed and they shot forward again. She picked up her bag from the seat, crossed her hands on it and thereafter sat like an image. She did not even look at a clock, for she could do nothing about time. Crossing the great wasteful glare of Oxford Street, they took a cut through