The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [64]
"Would you like to go up, dear?"
"Not specially, thank you."
"Not even to your room?"
"I don't really mind."
Mrs. Heccomb, for some reason, looked relieved. When Doris brought in tea she said in a low voice: "Now, Doris, the matting...."
Mrs. Heccomb took off her hat for tea, and Portia saw that her hair, like part of an artichoke, seemed to have an up-growing tendency: it was pinned down firmly to the top of her head in a flat bun. This, for some reason, added to Mrs. Heccomb's expression of surprise. At the same time, her personality was most reassuring. She talked so freely to Portia, telling her so much that Portia, used to the tactics of Windsor Terrace, wondered whether this really were wise. And what would be left to say by the end of the first week? She had yet to learn how often intimacies between women go backwards, beginning with revelations and ending up in small talk without loss of esteem. Mrs. Heccomb told stories of Anna's youth at Richmond, which she invested with a pathetic prettiness. Then she said how sad it would always be about those two little babies Anna had almost had. Portia ate doughnuts, shortbread and Dundee cake and gazed past Mrs. Heccomb at the vanishing sea. She thought how gay this room, with its lights on, must look from the esplanade, thought how dark it was out there, and came to envy herself.
But then Mrs. Heccomb got up and drew the curtains. "You never know," she said. "It does not quite do." (She referred to being looked in at.) Then she gave Portia another cup of tea and told her how much she must miss her mother. But she said how very lucky she was to have Thomas and Anna. For years and years, as Miss Yardes, she had had to be tactful and optimistic, trying to make young people see things the right way. This may have exaggerated her feeling manner. Now independence gave her a slight authority: when she said a thing was so, it became so forthwith. She looked at the mahogany clock that ticked loudly over the fire and said how nice it was that Daphne would soon be home. This Portia could not, of course, dispute. But she said: "I think I will go up and brush my hair, then."
While she was up in her room combing her hair back, hearing the tissue paper in her suitcase rustle, watching draughts bulge the new matting strip, she heard the bang that meant Daphne was in. Waikiki, she was to learn, was a sounding box: you knew where everyone was, what everyone did—except when the noise they made was drowned by a loud wind. She heard Daphne loudly asking something, then Mrs. Heccomb must have put up a warning hand, for the rest of Daphne's question got bitten off. Portia thought, I do hope Daphne won't mind me.... In her room, the electric light, from its porcelain shade, poured down with a frankness unknown at Windsor Terrace. The light swayed slightly in that seaside draught, and Portia felt a new life had begun. Downstairs, Daphne switched the wireless on full blast, then started bawling across it at Mrs. Heccomb: "I say, when is Dickie going to mend that bell?"
II
WHEN Portia ventured to come down, she found Daphne pottering round the tea table, biting pieces out of a macaroon, while Mrs. Heccomb, busy painting the lamp shade, shouted above the music that she would spoil her supper. Mrs. Heccomb's shouting had acquired, after years of evenings with Daphne and the music, the mild equability of her speaking voice: she could shout without strain. There was, in fact, an air of unconscious deportment about everything that she carried through, and as she worked at the lamp shade, peering close at the detail, then leaning back to get the general effect, she looked like someone painting a lamp shade in a play.
As Portia came round the curtain Daphne did not look at her, but with unnerving politeness switched the wireless off. It snapped off at the height of a roar, and Mrs. Heccomb looked up. Daphne