The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [27]
Outdoors, the pattern was less involuted, very much simplified. She enjoyed being in the streets—unguarded smiles from strangers, the permitted frown of someone walking alone, lovers' looks, as though they had solved something, and the unsolitary air with which the old or the wretched seemed to carry sorrow made her feel people that at least knew each other, if they did not yet know her, if she did not yet know them. The closeness she felt to Eddie, since this morning (that closeness one most often feels in a dream) was a closeness to life she had only felt, so far, when she got a smile from a stranger across a bus. It seemed to her that while people were very happy, individual persons were surely damned. So, she shrank from that specious mystery the individual throws about himself, from Anna's smiles, from Lilian's tomorrows, from the shut-in room, the turned-in heart.
Portia turned over records and re-wound the gramophone on the shut seat, and Stravinsky filled the bathroom while Lilian shampooed her hair. Lilian turbaned herself in a bath towel, and Portia carried the gramophone back to the fire again. Before Lilian's cascade of hair, turned inside out and scented in the heat, was quite dry, it had struck seven; Portia said she would have to be going home.
"Oh, they won't bother. You rang up Matchett, didn't you?"
"You said I could, but somehow I never did."
As Portia let herself into Windsor Terrace, she heard Anna's voice in the study, explaining something to Thomas. There came a pause while they listened to her step, then the voices went on. She stole over that white stone floor, with the chill always off, and made for the basement staircase. "Matchett?" she called down, in a tense low voice. The door at the foot of the stairs was open: Matchett came out of the little room by the pantry and stood looking up at Portia, shading her eyes. She said: "Oh, it's you!"
"I hope you didn't wonder."
"I had your tea for you."
"Lilian made me go back with her."
"Well, that was nice for you," said Matchett didactically. "You haven't had your tea there for some time."
"But part of the time I was miserable. I might have been having tea with you."
"'Miserable!'" Matchett echoed, with her hardest inflection. "That Lilian is someone your own age. However, you did ought to have telephoned. She's that one with the head of hair?"
"Yes. She was washing it."
"I like to see a head of hair, these days."
"But what I wanted was, to make toast with you."
"Well, you can't do everything, can you?"
"Are they out for dinner? Could you talk to me while I have my supper, Matchett?"
"I shall have to see."
Portia turned and went up. A little later, she heard Anna's bath running, and smelled bath essence coming upstairs. After Portia had shut her door, she heard the reluctant step of Thomas turn, across the landing, into his dressing room: he had got to put on a white tie.
V
EDDIE'S present position, in Quayne and Merrett's, made his frequentation of Anna less possible. She saw this clearly—when Thomas, more or less at her instance, got Merrett to agree to take Eddie on, she had put it to Eddie, as nicely as possible, that in future they would be seeing less of each other. For one thing—and leave it at that, why not?—Eddie would be quite busy: the firm expected work. However, this did not dispose of him. He felt grateful (at first) to Thomas, but not to Anna. No doubt she was kind, and no doubt he needed a job—badly needed a job: he had been on his beam ends—but in popping him like this into Quayne and Merrett's was she using the firm as an oubliette? Suspiciousness made him send her frequent bunches of flowers, and post her, during his first few weeks at work, a series of little letters that seemed blameless, but at the same time parodied what he ought to feel. He wrote that this new start had made a new man of him, that no one would ever know how down he had been, that no one would ever know how he now felt, etc.
For some years, a number of people had known how Eddie felt. Before Anna had ever met