The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [95]
The jumping light from Dickie's lighter showed the canyon below their row of knees. It caught the chromium clasp of Daphne's handbag, and Wallace's wrist watch at the end of the row. It rounded the taut blond silk of Daphne's calf and glittered on some tinfoil dropped on the floor. Those who wanted to smoke were smoking: no one wanted a light. But Dickie, still with the flame jumping, still held the lighter out in a watching pause—a pause so marked that Portia, as though Dickie had sharply pushed her head round, looked to see where he looked. The light, with malicious accuracy, ran round a rim of cuff, a steel bangle, and made a thumb nail flash.
Not deep enough in the cleft between their fauteuils Eddie and Daphne were, with emphasis, holding hands. Eddie's fingers kept up a kneading movement: her thumb alertly twitched at the joint.
VI
THE empty lodging house rustled with sea noises, as though years of echoes of waves and sea sucking shingle lived in its chimneys, its half open cupboards. The stairs creaked as Portia and Eddie went up, and the banisters, pulled loose in their sockets, shook under their hands. Warped by sea damp, the doors were all stuck ajar, and ends of torn wallpaper could be heard fluttering in draughts in the rooms. The front room ceilings glared with sea reflections; the back windows stared north over salt fields. Mr. Bunstable's junior partner Mr. Sheldon had inadvertently left the key of this house at Waikiki the other night, when he had come in to cards. The key bore the label 5 Winslow Terrace: Dickie had found it; Eddie had had it from Dickie, and now Eddie and Portia let themselves in. There is nothing like exploring an empty house.
It was Sunday morning, just before eleven: the church bells from uphill came through the shut windows into the rooms. But Mrs. Heccomb had gone to church alone. Dickie had gone off to see a man about something; Daphne had stayed reading the Sunday Pictorial in a chaise longue in the sun porch—though there was no sun. She had set her hair a new way, in a bang over her forehead, and she had not so much as batted an eyelid as Eddie, steering Portia by one elbow, walked away fromWaikiki down the esplanade.
The front top bedrooms here were like convent cells, with outside shutters hooked back. Their walls were mouldy blue like a dead sky, and looking at the crisscross cracks in the ceiling one thought of holiday people waking up. A stale charred smell came from the grates—Waikiki seemed miles away. These rooms, many flights up, were a dead end: the emptiness, the feeling of dissolution came upstairs behind one, blocking the way down. Portia felt she had climbed to the very top of a tree pursued by something that could follow. She remembered the threatening height of this house at the back, and how it had frightened her that first afternoon when she was in the taxi with Mrs. Heccomb. Today when they turned the key and pushed open the stuck door boldly, they had heard papers rustle in the hall. But it was not only here that she dreaded to be with Eddie.
He lighted a cigarette and leaned on the mantelpiece. He seemed to measure the small room with his eye, swinging the key from his finger on its loop of string. Portia went to the window, and looked out. "All these windows here have got double glass," she said.
"A fat lot of good that would do if the house blew down."
"Do you think it might really?... The bells have stopped."
"Yes, you ought to be in church."
"I went last Sunday—but it doesn't really matter."
"Then why go last Sunday, you little crook?"
Portia did not reply.
"I say, darling, you are funny this morning. Why are you being so funny with me?"
"Am I?"
"You know you are: don't be so silly. Why?"
Her back turned, she mutely pulled