The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [39]
"Don't be angry—oh, don't be! You're quite enough, Matchett!"
"Now don't you work yourself up again!"
"But don't, don't keep going off—" began Portia, desperate. Stopping, she put both arms out, with a rustle of sheet falling away. Matchett, reluctantly softening, inch by inch, unlocked her arms, leaned across the bed again, leaned right down—in the mysterious darkness over the pillow their faces approached, their eyes met but could not see. Something steadily stood between them: they never kissed—so that now there followed a pause at once pressing and null. Matchett, after the moment, released herself and drew a judicial breath. "Well, I'm hasty, I daresay." But Portia's hand, with its charge of nervous emotion, still crept on the firm broad neck, the strong spine. Matchett's embrace had made felt a sort of measured resistance, as though she were determined to will, not simply to suffer, the power of the dividing wall. Darkness hid any change her face might allow itself. She said finally: "I'll turn your pillow now."
Portia at once stiffened. "No, don't. I like it this way—No, don't."
"Why ever not?"
"Because I like it this way."
But Matchett's hand pushed underneath the pillow, to turn it. Under there, going wooden, her hand stopped. "What's this you've got under here? Now, what have you got?"
"That's only just a letter."
"What have you got it here for?"
"I must just have put it there."
"Or maybe it walked," said Matchett. "And who's been writing you letters, may I ask?"
As gently as possible, Portia tried saying nothing. She let Matchett turn the pillow, then settled with her cheek on the new, cool side. For nearly a minute, propitiatingly, she acted someone grateful going to sleep. Then, with infinite stealth, she felt round under the pillow—to find the letter gone. "Oh, please, Matchett!" she cried.
"The proper place for your letters is in your desk. What else did Mrs. Thomas give you a desk for?"
"I like having a letter here when it's just come."
"That's no place for letters at your age—it's not nice. You didn't ought to be getting letters like that."
"It's not a letter like that."
"And who wrote it, may I ask?" said Matchett, her voice rising.
"Only that friend of Anna's—only Eddie."
"Ah! So he did?"
"Only because I got him his hat."
"Wasn't he civil!"
"Yes," Portia said firmly. "He knows I like getting letters. I haven't had any letter for three weeks."
"Oh, he does, does he—he knows you like getting letters?"
"Well, Matchett, I do."
"So he saw fit to thank you kindly for getting his hat? It's the first manners he's shown here, popping in and out like a weasel. Manners? He's no class. Another time, you leave Phyllis get him his hat, else let him get it himself—he's here often enough to know where it should be.... Yes, you mind what I'm saying: I know what I say."
Matchett's voice, so laden and unemphatic, clicked along like a slow tape, with a stop at the last word. Portia lay in a sort of coffin of silence, one hand under the pillow where the letter had been. Outside the room there sounded a vacuum of momentarily arrested London traffic: she turned her eyes to the window and looked at the glassdark sky with its red sheen. Matchett's hand in the cuff darted out like an angry bird, knocked once against the pleated shade of the bed lamp, then got the light switched on. Immediately, Portia shut her eyes, set
her mouth and lay stiff on the pillow, as though so much light dug into a deep wound. She felt it must be very late, past midnight: that point where the river of night flows underneath time, that point at which occurs the mysterious birth of tomorrow. The very sudden, anaesthetic white