The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [84]
"She's just going to lay, dear. May I move your paper? Daphne, what are you doing after lunch?"
"Well, a lot of us thought we might go for a short walk. Then we're all going round to Evelyn's to badminton. Do you mean you'd like me to take Portia along?"
"That might be nice, dear. You'd like that, wouldn't you, Portia? In that case I may just take a little rest. Last night was so successful that we were rather late."
The walking party—Daphne, Portia, Evelyn (the fine girl who had worn orange last night), Cecil (who did not seem to have been asked) and two other young men called Charlie and Wallace—deployed slowly along the top of the sea wall in the direction of Southstone. The young men wore plus fours, pullovers, felt hats precisely dinted in at the top, and ribbed stockings that made their calves look massive. Daphne and Evelyn wore berets, scarves with dogs' heads and natty check overcoats. Evelyn had brought her dog with her.
The road on top of the wall was as deserted as ever: at the foot of the wall the sea, this afternoon mackerel blue, swelled sleekly between the breakwaters. Here and there a gull on a far-out post would be floated off by the swell, looking rather silly. There was a breakwater smell—a smell of sea-pickled planks, of slimy green boards being sucked by the tides. The immense spring sky arched from the inland woods to the marine horizon. The wall made a high causeway on which the walkers walked between sea and land: here you smelled not only the sea but a land breath—from the market gardens, the woods in clefts of the chalk hills, the gorse budding in its spiney darkness up there on the links where Dickie and Clara were. The crests of two airy tides, the sea's and the land's, breaking against each other above the asphalt, made a nervous elation, so that you spun, inwardly, in the blue-whiteness of the quiet and thrilling day.
Daphne's party walked in a Sundayish dogged manner, using without sensation their deep lungs. They knew every inch of the sea wall; they looked ahead to Southstone, where the dome of the Splendide was bright gold. The sense of exposure this airy bareness gave them made them, with one another, at once sidelong and bold. On the whole, they walked abreast, but as far apart as they could; at times they converged so close that they jogged elbows; if they split up into twos, the twos called across to each other—this was daylight: there were no tête-à-têtes. At the end of a mile and a half they reached the old lifeboat station, where without a word they all wheeled round to return. The girls fell into a three; the three young men kept pace exactly behind them. They faced west.
With the first touch of evening, the first dazzle, a vague poeticness invaded them. Yawnfuls of ozone stopped the desultory talk. Evelyn took Daphne's arm; Cecil veered out alone to the edge of the esplanade and began to kick a lonely pebble along. A lovely brigantine appeared on the Channel, pink with light.
Portia drew a breath, then suddenly said to Daphne: "A friend of mine—could he ever come and stay here?"
Brought out with a bang like this, it sounded quite all right.
Daphne veered thoughtfully round, hands in her pockets, chin deep in the folds of her doggy scarf, and Evelyn peered across Daphne, holding on to her arm. "What say?" Daphne said. "A boy friend, do you mean?"
Evelyn said: "That's what she's been in such a study about."
"Could he how much?" said Daphne.
"Ever come and stay here?"
"Come and stay here when?"
"For a week-end."
"Well, if you have a boy friend. I don't see why not. Do you see why not, Evelyn?"
"I should have thought it depended."
"Yes, it depends, naturally. Have you really got a friend, though?"
"Just fancy, her," added Evelyn. "Still, I don't see why not."
Daphne said swiftly: "Friend of your sister-in-law?"
"Oh yes. She, he, they—"
"He'll be a bit ritzy for us, then, won't he? However,"