The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [91]
"Oh—an important letter?"
"It had to get there tonight. It was to someone I put off by telegram."
"I really do thank you for coming, Eddie!"
Eddie smiled in a brilliant but rather automatic and worried way. "I invented all sorts of things. It had to get there tonight. You don't know how touchy people are."
"Couldn't we post it now?"
"The postmark.... However, everyone hates me already. Anyway, London seems beautifully far away. Where's the next post box, darling?"
At the idea of this desperate simplification, Eddie's face cleared. He no longer frowned at the letter but, crossing the road, plunged it cheerfully into the corner letter box. Portia, watching him from across the road, had a moment in which to realise he would be back beside her; in fact, they were together again. Eddie came back and said: "Oh, you've tied your hair ribbon in a bow at the top. And you are still wearing your woolly gloves." Taking her hand in his, he scrunched the fingers inside her glove together. "Sweet," he said. "Like a nest of little weak mice."
They lagged along, all down the turning road. Eddie read aloud the names on the white gates of all the villas—these gates were streaked with green drips from trees; the houses behind them looked out through evergreens. The sea was, for the moment, out of view: a powerful inland silence, tinted grey by the hour, filled the station road. Seale was out of sight behind the line of the hill: its smoke went up behind garden conifers. Later, they heard a stream in a sort of gulch. All this combined to make Eddie exclaim: "Darling, I do call this an unreal place!"
"Wait till we get back to tea."
"But where on earth is Waikiki?"
"Oh, Eddie, I told you—it's by the sea."
"Is Mrs. Heccomb really very excited?"
"Yes, very excited—though I must say, it does not take much to excite her. But even Dickie said this morning at breakfast that he supposed he would bump into you tonight."
"And Daphne—is she excited?"
"I'm sure she really is. But she's afraid you're ritzy. You must show her you're not."
"I'm so glad I came," said Eddie, quickening his step.
At Waikiki, Mrs. Heccomb's deportment was not, for the first minute, equal to the occasion. She looked twice at Eddie and said: "Oh..." Then she rallied and said how pleased to see him she was. Holding her hand out, she nervously circumscribed the tea table,' still fixing her eyes on the silhouette of Eddie as though trying to focus an apparition. When they all sat down to tea, her own back was to the light and she had Eddie in less deceptive view. Each time he spoke, her eyes went to his forehead, to the point where his hair sprang back in its fine spirited waves. In^pauses that could but occur in the talk, Portia could almost hear Mrs. Heccomb's ideas, like chairs before a party, being rolled about and rapidly rearranged. The tea was bountiful, but so completely distracted was Mrs. Heccomb that Portia had to circulate the cakes. It occurred to her to wonder who would pay for them, and whether she had done wrong, on account of Eddie, in tempting Waikiki to this extra expense.
She wondered, even, whether Mrs. Heccomb might not pause to wonder. Having lived in hotels where one's bills wait weekly at the foot of the stairs, and no "extra" is ever overlooked, she had had it borne in on her that wherever anyone is they are costing somebody something, and that the cost must be met. She understood that by living at Windsor Terrace, eating what she ate, sleeping between sheets that had to be washed, by even so much as breathing the warmed air, she became a charge on Thomas and Anna. Their keeping on paying up, whatever they felt, had to be glossed over by family feeling—and she had learned to have, with regard to them, that callousness one has towards relatives. Now she could only hope they were paying largely enough for her own board at Waikiki to meet the cost of the cake Eddie mighteat. But uncertainty made her limit