The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [35]
"Was that all Thomas said?"
"I daresay the house felt funny that day for a young fellow like him, quite as though there had been a birth there. It did to us all, really. Then later on, Mrs. Quayne sat down and played the piano to Mr. Thomas."
"Did they look at all pleased?"
"How should I know? They kept on at the piano till it was time for dinner."
"Matchett, if Thomas does like a piano, why haven't they got a piano here?"
"He sold the piano when she died. Oh, she was fair to me, the fifteen years I was with her. You couldn't have had a better employer, as far as the work went: the one thing that put her out was if you made her feel she wasn't considerate. She liked me to feel that she thought the world of me. 'I leave everything in safe charge with you, Matchett,' she'd say to me on the doorstep, times when she went away. I thought of that as I saw her coffin go out. No, she'd never lift her voice and she always had a kind word. But I couldn't care for her: she had no nature. I've often felt her give me a funny look. She liked what I did, but she never liked how I did it. I couldn't count how often I've heard her say to her friends, 'Treat servants nicely, take an interest in them, and they'll do anything for you.' That was the way she saw it. Well, I liked the work in that house, I liked that work from the first: what she couldn't forgive me was that I liked the work for its own sake. When I had been the morning polishing in my drawingroom, or getting my marbles nice with a brush and soft soap, she would come to me and she'd say. 'Oh. it does all look nice! I am so pleased,
I am really.' Oh, she meant well, in her own way. But with work it's not what you show, it's what you put into it. You'd never get right work from a girl who worked to please you: she'd only work to show. But she would never see that. Now, when Mr. Quayne would come on me working in his smokingroom, or working in any place that he wanted to be, though he was so sweet-tempered, he'd give me a black look as though to say 'You get out!' He'd know well I was against him, working in his smokingroom where he wanted to be. If he found a thing left different he used to bellow, because my having my way had put him out. But then, Mr. Quayne was all nature. He left you to go your own way, except when it started to put him out. But she couldn't allow a thing that she hadn't her part or share in. All those snowdrops and that piano playing—to make out she'd had her share in your being born.
"The day she died, though I wasn't up in her room, I could feel her watching how I'd take it. 'Well,' I said to myself, 'it's no good—I can't play the piano.' Oh, I did feel upset, with death in the house and all that change coming. But that was the most I felt. I didn't feel a thing here." With a dry unflinching movement, Matchett pressed a cuffed hand under her bust.
She sat sideways on the bed, her knees towards Portia's pillow, her dark skirts flowing into the dark round, only her apron showing. Her top part loomed against the tawny square of sky in uncertain silhouette; her face, eroded by darkness like a statue's face by the weather, shone out now and then when a car fanned light on it. Up to now, she had sat erect, partly judicial, partly as though her body were a vaseful of memory that must not be spilt—but now, as though to shift the weight of the past, she put a hand on the bed, the far side of Portia's body, and leant heavily on it so that she made an arch.
Through this living arch, the foot of the bed in fluctuations of half-darkness was seen. Musky warmth from her armpit came to the