The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [18]
Anna had been askance. The forecast shadow of Portia, even, had started altering things—that incident of the mirror had marked an unheard-of tendency in Matchett, to put in her own oar. She said, more defensively than she intended to: "I've got her a dead white evening dress, and a black velvet one."
"Oh, then Miss Portia is to dine downstairs?"
"Surely. She's got to learn to. Besides, where else could she eat?"
Matchett's ideas must date from the family house, where the young ladies, with bows on flowing horsetails of hair, supped upstairs with their governess, making toast, telling stories, telling each other's fortunes with apple peel. In the home of today there is no place for the miss: she has got to sink or swim. But Matchett, upstairs and down with her solid impassive tread, did not recognise that some tracts no longer exist. She seemed, instead, to detect some lack of life in the house, some organic failure in its propriety. Lack in the Quaynes' life of family custom seemed not only to disorientate Matchett but to rouse her contempt—family custom, partly kind, partly cruel, that has long been rationalised away. In this airy vivacious house, all mirrors and polish, there was no place where shadows lodged, no point where feeling could thicken. The rooms were set for strangers' intimacy, or else for exhausted solitary retreat.
The Marx Brothers, that evening at the Empire, had no success with Portia. The screen threw its tricky light on her unrelaxed profile: she sat almost appalled. Anna took her eyes from the screen to complain once or twice to Thomas: "She doesn't think this is funny." Thomas, who had been giving unwilling snorts, relapsed into gloom, and said: "Well, they are a lowering lot." Anna leaned across him: "You liked Sandy Macpherson, didn't you, Portia?—Thomas, do kick her and ask if she liked Sandy Macpherson?" The organist still loudly and firmly playing had gone down with his organ, through floodlit mimosa, into a bottomless pit, from which Parle Moi d'Amour kept on faintly coming up till someone down there shut a lid on him. Portia had no right to say that people were less brave now.... Now the Marx Brothers were over, the three Quaynes dived for their belongings and filed silently out—they missed the News in order to miss the Rush.
Anna and Portia, glum for opposing reasons, waited in the foyer while Thomas went for a taxi. For those minutes, in the mirror-refracted glare, they looked like workers with tomorrow ahead. Then someone looked hard at Anna, looked back, looked again, registered indecision, raised his hat and returned, extending a large anxious delighted hand. "Miss Fellowes!"
"Major Brutt! How extraordinary this is!"
"To think of my running into you. It's extraordinary!"
"Especially as I am not even Miss Fellowes, now—I mean, I am Mrs. Quayne."
"Do excuse me—"
"How could you possibly know?... I'm so glad we've met again."
"It must be nine years plus. What a great evening we had—you and Pidgeon and I—" He stopped quickly: a look of doubt came into his eyes.
Portia stood by, meanwhile. "You must meet my sister-in-law," said Anna at once: "Major Brutt—Miss Quayne." She went on, not with quite so much assurance: "I hope you enjoyed the Marx Brothers?"
"Well, to tell you the truth—I knew this place in the old days; I'd never heard of these chaps, but I thought I would drop in. I can't say I—"
"Oh, you find them lowering, too?"
"I daresay they're up to date, but they're not what I call funny."
"Yes," Anna said, "they are up to date for a bit." Major Brutt's eyes travelled from Anna's smiling and talking mouth, via the camellia fastened under her chin, to the upturned brim of Portia's hat—where it stayed. "I hope," he said to Portia, "you have enjoyed yourself." Anna said: "No, I don't think she did, much—Oh, look, my husband has got a taxi. Do come back with us: we must all have a drink.... Oh, Thomas, this is Major Brutt."... As they walked out two-and-two to the taxi, Anna said to Thomas out of the side of her mouth: "Friend of Pidgeon's—we once