The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [2]
St. Quentin, looking frustrated, started feeling about for his handkerchief. He blew his nose and went on, with iron determination: "Style is the thing that's always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style. Look how much goes to addressing an envelope—for, after all, it's a matter of set-out. And a diary, after all, is written to please oneself—therefore it's bound to be enormously written up. The obligation to write it is all in one's own eye, and look how one is when it's almost always written—upstairs, late, overwrought, alone.... All the same, Anna, it must have interested you."
"It opened at my name."
"So you read straight on from there?"
"No, it opened at the last entry; I read that, then went back and started from the beginning. The latest entry was about dinner the evening before."
"Let's see: had you a party?"
"No, no: much worse than that. It had been simply her and me and Thomas. She must have bolted upstairs and written everything down. Naturally, when I'd read that I went back to the beginning, to see what had got her into that state of mind. I still don't see why she wrote the thing at all."
"Perhaps," said St. Quentin mildly, "she's interested in experience for its own sake."
"How could she be, yet? At her age, look how little she's got. Experience isn't interesting till it begins to repeat itself—in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience."
"Tell me, do you remember the first sentence of all?"
"Indeed I do," Anna said. “‘So I am with them, in London.'"
"With a comma after the 'them'?... The comma is good; that's style.... I should like to have seen it, I must say."
"Still, I'm glad you didn't, St. Quentin. It might make you not come to our house again. Or, if you did still come, it might make you not talk."
"I see," said St. Quentin shortly. Drumming with stiff, gloved fingers on the bridge rail, he frowned down at a swan till it vanished under the bridge. His eyes, like the swan's, were set rather near in. He broke out: "Fancy her watching me! What a little monster she must be. And she looks so aloof. Does she think I try to be clever?"
"She said more about your being always polite. She does not seem to think you are a snake in the grass, though she sees a good deal of grass for a snake to be in. There does not seem to be a single thing that she misses, and there's certainly not a thing that she does not misconstruct. In fact, you would wonder, really—How you do stamp, St. Quentin! Are your feet so cold? You make the bridge shake."
St. Quentin, abstracted and forbidding, suggested: "We might walk on."
"I suppose we ought to go in," Anna admitted, sighing. "Though you see, now, why I'd rather not be at home?"
St. Quentin, stepping out smartly, showed one of his quick distastes for more of the lake scene. The cold was beginning to nip their features, and to strike up through the soles of their feet. Anna looked back at the bridge regretfully: she had not yet done saying what she began there. Leaving the lake behind them, they made for the trees just inside the park fence. The circle of traffic tightens at this hour round Regent's Park; cars hummed past without a break; it was just before lighting-up time—quite soon the All Out whistles would sound. At the far side of the road, dusk set the Regency buildings back at a false distance: against the sky they were colourless silhouettes, insipidly ornate, brittle and cold. The blackness of windows not yet lit or curtained made the houses look hollow inside.... St. Quentin and Anna kept inside the park railings, making towards the corner where she lived. Interrupted in what she had been saying, she swung disconsolately her black muff, walking not quite in step with him.
St. Quentin always walked rather too fast—sometimes as though he did not like where he was, sometimes as though resolved to outdistance any attraction of the hour or scene. His erect, rather forbidding carriage made him look old-fashioned, even military—but this was misleading. He was tall, wore his dark, rather furry hair en brosse,