The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [19]
"Did we? I don't—When?"
"Not you and I, silly: I and Pidgeon. Years ago. But he really must have a drink."
"Naturally," said Thomas. Putting on no expression, he steered her by one elbow through the crowd at the door—for whenever you come out, you never avoid the Rush. In the taxi, infected by Major Brutt, Thomas sat bolt upright, looking hard at everything through the window in a military way. Whereas, Major Brutt, beside him, kept glancing most timidly at the ladies' faces flowering on fur collars in the dark of the cab. He remarked once or twice: "I must say, this is an amazing coincidence." Portia sat twisted sideways, so that her knees should not annoy Thomas. Oh, the charm of this accident, this meeting in a sumptuous place—this was one of those polished encounters she and Irene spied on when they had peeped into a Palace Hotel. As the taxi crawled into Windsor Terrace, she exclaimed, all lit up: "Oh, thank you for taking me!"
Thomas only said: "Pity you didn't like it."
"Oh, but I did like being there."
Major Brutt said firmly: "Those four chaps were a blot—This where we stop? Good."
"Yes, we stop here," Anna said, resignedly getting out.
The afternoon mist had frozen away to nothing: their house, footlit by terrace lamps, ran its pilasters up into glassy black night air. Portia shivered all down and put up her hands to her collar; Major Brutt's smart clatter struck a ring from the pavement; he slapped his coat, saying: "Freezing like billy-o."
"We can slide tomorrow," said Thomas. "That will be jolly." He scooped out a handful of silver, stared at it, paid the taxi and felt round for his key. As though he heard himself challenged, or heard an echo, he looked sharply over his shoulder down the terrace—empty, stagey, E-shaped, with frigid pillars cut out on black shadow: a façade with no back. "We're wonderfully quiet up here," he told Major Brutt.
"Really more like the country."
"For God's sake, let us in!" Anna exclaimed—Major Brutt looked at her with solicitude.
It was admirably hot and bright in the study—all the same, indoors the thing became too far-fetched. Major Brutt looked about unassumingly, as though he would like to say "What a nice place you've got here," but was not sure if he knew them well enough. Anna switched lamps on and off with a strung-up air, while Thomas, having said: "Scotch, Irish or brandy?" filled up the glasses on the tray. Anna could not speak—she thought of her closed years: seeing Robert Pidgeon, now, as a big fly in the amber of this decent man's memory. Her own memory was all blurs and seams. She started dreading the voice in which she could only say: "Do you hear anything of him? How much do you see him, these days?" Or else, "Where is he now, do you know?" Magnetism to that long-ago evening—on which Robert and she must have been perfect lovers—had made her bring back this man, this born third, to her home. Now Thomas, by removing himself to a different plane, made her feel she had done a thoroughly awkward thing. The pause was too long: it smote her to see Major Brutt look, uncertain, into his whisky, clearly feeling ought he not, then, to drink this? Ought he not to be here?
Otherwise, he could wish for nothing better. The Quaynes had both seen how happy he was to come. He was the man from back somewhere, out of touch with London, dying to go on somewhere after a show. He would be glad to go on almost anywhere. But London, these nights, has a provincial meanness bright lights only expose. After dark, she is like a governess gone to the bad, in a Woolworth tiara, tarted up all wrong. But a glamour she may have had lives on in exiles' imaginations. Major Brutt was the sort of man who, like a ghost with no beat, hesitates round the West End about midnight—not wanting to buy a girl, not wanting to drink alone, not wanting to go back to Kensington, hoping something may happen. It grows less likely to happen—sooner or later he must be getting back. If he misses the last tube, he will have to run to a taxi; the taxi lightens his pocket and torments