The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [36]
"Oh, I felt bad," she said, "because I couldn't forgive her. Not about Mr. Quayne—I could never forgive her that. When the nurse sent down word Mrs. Quayne was going, cook said maybe we should go up. She said, having sent word they'd expect us to do something. (Cook meant, she'd expect us to do something.) So cook and I went up and stood on the landing: the others were too nervous; they stayed below. Cook was a Catholic, so started saying her prayers. Mr. and Mrs. Thomas were there in the room with her. We knew it was over when Mrs. Thomas came out, quite white, and said to me, 'Oh Matchett.' But Mr. Thomas went by without a word. I had had his whisky put out in the diningroom and quite soon I heard them both in there. Mr. and Mrs. Thomas were different to Mrs. Quayne: they had their own ways of passing a thing off."
"But Matchett, she meant to do good."
"No, she meant to do right."
Tentatively sighing and turning over, Portia put on Matchett's knee, in the dark, fingers that by being urgently living tried to plead for the dead. But the very feel of the apron, of the starch over that solid warm big knee, told her that Matchett was still inexorable.
"You know what she did, but how can you know what she felt? Fancy being left with somebody gone. Perhaps what was right was all she had left to do. To have to stay alone might be worse than dying."
"She stayed there where she wanted, go who might. No, he had done her wrong, and she had to do herself right. Oh, she was like iron. Worse than dying? For your father, going away was that. He loved his home like a child. Go?—He was sent. He liked his place in the world; he liked using his hands. That stream wasn't the only thing he'd made. For a gentleman like him, abroad was no proper place. I don't know how she dared look at that garden after what she had done."
"But if I had to be born?"
"He was sent away, as cook or I might have been—but oh no, we suited her too well. She stood by while Mr. Thomas put him into the car and drove him off as if he had been a child. What a thing to make Mr. Thomas do to his own father! And then look at the way your father and mother lived, with no place in the world and nobody to respect them. He had been respected wherever he was. Who put him down to that?"
"But Mother explained to me that she and Father had once done what was cruel to Mrs. Quayne."
"And what did she do to them? Look how they lived, without a stick of their own. You were not born to know better, but he did."
"But he liked keeping moving on. It was Mother wanted a house, but Father never would."
"You don't break a person's nature for nothing."
Portia said in a panic: "But we were happy, Matchett. We had each other; he had Mother and me—Oh, don't be so angry: you make me feel it was my fault for having had to be born."
"And who had the right to quarrel with you for that? If you had to be, then you had to be. I thought that day you were born, as I went on with my linen, Well, that's one more thing happened: no doubt it is for a purpose."
"That's what they all feel; that's why they're all always watching. They would forgive me if I were something special. But I don't know what I was meant to be."
"Now then," said Matchett sharply, "don't you get upset."
Portia had unconsciously pushed, while she spoke, at the knee under Matchett's apron, as though she were trying to push away a wall. Nothing, in fact, moved. Letting her hand fall back on to her face in the dark, she gave an instinctive shiver that shook the bed. She ground the back of her hand into her mouth—the abandoned movement was cautious, checked by awe at some monstrous approach. She began to weep, shedding tears humbly, without protest, without at all full feeling, like a child actress mesmerized for a part. She might have been miming sorrow—in fact, this immediate,