The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [20]
"Well, here's luck," Major Brutt said, pulling himself together, raising his glass boldly. He looked round at their three interesting faces. Portia replied with her glass of milk-and-soda: he bowed to her, she bowed to him and they drank. "You live here, too?" he said.
"I'm staying here for a year."
"That's a nice long visit. Can your people spare you?"
"Yes," Portia said. "They—I—"
Anna looked at Thomas as much as to say, check this, but Thomas was looking for the cigars. She saw Portia, kneeling down by the fire, look up at Major Brutt with a perfectly open face—her hands were tucked up the elbows of her short-sleeved dress. The picture upset Anna, who thought how much innocence she herself had corrupted in other people—yes, even in Robert: in him perhaps most of all. Meetings that ended with their most annihilating and bitter quarrels had begun with Robert unguarded, eager—like that. Watching Portia she thought, is she a snake, or a rabbit? At all events, she thought, hardening, she has her own fun.
"Thanks very much, no: no, I never smoke them," Major Brutt said, when Thomas at last found the cigars. Having lit his own, Thomas looked at the box suspiciously. "These are going," he said. "I told you they were."
"Then why don't you lock them up? It's Mrs. Wayes, I expect; she has got a man friend and she's ever so good to him."
"Has she been taking your cigarettes?"
"No, not lately: Matchett once caught her at it. Besides, she is far too busy reading my letters."
"Why on earth not sack her?"
"Matchett says she is thorough. And thorough chars don't grow on every bush."
Portia excitedly said: "How funny bushes would look!"
"Ha-ha," said Major Brutt. "Did you ever hear the one about the shoe-tree?"
Anna swung her feet up on the sofa, a little back from the others, and looked removed and tired—she kept touching her hair back. Thomas squinted through his glass of drink at the light: now and then his face went lockjawed with a suppressed yawn. Major Brutt, having drunk two-thirds of his whisky, in his quiet way started dominating the scene. Portia's first animation was in the room somewhere, bobbing up near the ceiling like an escaped balloon. Thomas suddenly said: "You knew Robert Pidgeon, I hear?"
"I should say sol An exceptional chap."
"I never knew him, alas."
"Oh, is he dead?" said Portia.
"Dead?" Major Brutt said. "Oh, Lord, no—at least, I should think that is most unlikely. He had nine lives. I was with him most of the War."
"No, I'm sure he wouldn't be dead," Anna agreed. "But do you know where he is?"
"I last had actual news of him in Colombo, last April—missed him there by about a week, which was bad. We are neither of us much of a hand at letters, but we keep in touch, on the whole, in the most astonishing way. Of course, Pidgeon is full of brain: that man could do anything. At the same time, he is one of those clever fellows who can get on with almost anyone. He is not a chap, of course, that I should ever have met if it hadn't been for the War. We both took it on the Somme, and I got to know him best after that, when we were on leave together."
"Was he badly wounded?" said Portia.
"In the shoulder," said Anna, seeing the pitted scar.
"Now Pidgeon was what you would call versatile. He could play the piano better than a professional—with more go, if you know what I mean. In France, he once smoked a plate and did a portrait of me on it—exactly like me, too; it really was. And then, of course, he wrote a whole lot of stuff. But there was absolutely no sort of side about him. I've never seen a man with so little side."
"Yes," Anna said, "and what I always remember is that he could balance an orange on the rim of a plate."