The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [40]
Matchett sat with the captured letter in the trough of her lap. Meanwhile, her spatulate fingers bent and injured, with unknowing sensuous cruelty, like a child's, the corners of the blue envelope. She pinched at the letter inside's fullness, but did not take it out. "You'd be wrong to trust him," she said.
Safe for the minute, sealed down under her eyelids, Portia lay and saw herself with Eddie. She saw a continent in the late sunset, in rolls and ridges of shadow like the sea. Light that was dark yellow lay on trees, and penetrated their dark hearts. Like a struck glass, the continent rang with silence. The country, with its slow tense dusk-drowned ripple, rose to their feet where they sat: she and Eddie sat in the door of a hut. She felt the hut, with its content of dark, behind them. The unearthly level light streamed in their faces; she saw it touch his cheekbones, the tips of his eyelashes, while he turned her way his eyeballs blind with gold. She saw his hands hanging down between his knees, and her hands hanging down peacefully beside him as they sat together on the step of the hut. She felt the touch of calmness and similarity: he and she were one without any touch but this. What was in the hut behind she did not know: this light was eternal; they would be here for ever.
Then she heard Matchett open the envelope. Her eyes sprang open; she cried: "Don't touch that!"
"I'd not have thought this of you."
"My father would understand."
Matchett shook. "You don't care what you say."
"You're not fair, Matchett. You don't know."
"I know that Eddie's never not up to something. And he makes free. You don't know."
"I do know when I'm happy. I know that."
VII
MAJOR BRUTT found it simple to pay the call: everything seemed to point to his doing that. To begin with, he found that an excellent bus, a 74, took him from Cromwell Road the whole way to Regent's Park. He was not a man. to ring up; he simply rang a door bell. To telephone first would have seemed to him self-important, but he knew how to enter a house unassumingly. He had lived in parts of the world where you drop in: there seemed to him nothing complex about that. His impression of Windsor Terrace had been a warm and bright one; he looked forward today to seeing the drawingroom floor. Almost unremitting solitude in his hotel had, since his last visit, made 2 Windsor Terrace the clearinghouse for his dreams: these reverted to kind Anna and to that dear little kid with fervent, tender, quite sexless desire. A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different faces. Today, he came to recover that visionary place, round which all the rest of London was a desert. That last night, the Quaynes, seeing him out, had smiled and said heartily: "Come again." He took it that people meant what they said—so here he was, coming again. Thomas's having added "Ring up first" had made no impression on him whatever. They have given him carte blanche, so here he was, dropping in. He judged that Saturday should be a good day.
This Saturday afternoon Thomas, home from the office, sat at his study table, drawing cats on the blotter, waiting for Anna to come back from a lunch. He was disappointed with her for lunching out on a Saturday and for staying so late. When he heard the bell ring he looked up forbiddingly (though there was just a chance Anna might have forgotten her key), listened, frowned, put whiskers on to a cat, then looked up again. If it had been her, she would ring two or three times. The ring, however, did not repeat itself—though it lingered on uneasily in the air. Saturday made it unlikely that this could be a parcel. Telegrams were almost always telephoned through. That it could be a caller did not, at his worst moment, enter Thomas's head. Callers were unheard of at Windsor Terrace. They had been eliminated; they