The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [97]
"But it does mean something—it means something else."
"You are the only person I'm ever serious with. I'm never serious with all these other people: that's why I simply do what they seem to want me to do... You do know I'm serious with you, don't you, Portia?" he said, coming up and staring into her eyes. In his own eyes, shutters flicked back, exposing for half a second, right back in the dark, the Eddie in there.
Never till now, never since this half-second, had Portia been the first to look away. She looked at the ghostly outline of some cabinet on the paper with its bleaching maroon leaves. "But you said," she said, "up there" (she nodded at the ceiling) "that you need not mean what you say because I am a little girl."
"When I talk through my hat, of course I'm not serious."
"You should not have talked about marriage through your hat."
"But darling, I do think you must be mad. Why should you want to marry anybody?"
"Were you talking through your hat on the beach when you said I ought to be afraid of you?"
"How you do remember!"
"It was yesterday evening."
"Perhaps yesterday evening I was feeling like that."
"But don't you remember?"
"Look here, darling, you must really not exasperate me. How can I keep on feeling something I once felt when there are so many things one can feel? People who say they always feel as they did simply fake themselves up. I may be a crook but I'm not a fake—that is an entirely different thing."
"But I don't see how you can say you are serious if there's no one thing you keep feeling the whole time."
"Well, then I'm not," said Eddie, stamping his cigarette out and laughing, though in an exasperated way. "You will really simply have to get used to me. I must say I thought you were. You had really better not think I'm serious, if the slightest thing is going to make you so upset. What I do remember telling you last evening is that you don't know the half of what I do. I do do what you would absolutely hate. Yes, I see now I was wrong—I did think once that I could tell you, even let you discover, anything I had done, and you wouldn't turn a hair. Because I had hoped there would be one person like that, I must have let myself make an absurd, quite impossible image of you... No, I see now, the fact is, dear darling Portia, you and I have drifted into a thoroughly sickly, not to say mawkish, state. Which is worlds worse for me than a spot of necking with Daphne. And now it comes to this—you start driving me up trees and barking at the bottom like everyone else. Well, come on, let's go down. We've had enough of this house. We'd better lock up and give the key back to Dickie."
He moved decisively to the drawingroom door.
"Oh stop, Eddie: wait! Has this spoilt everything for you? I would rather be dead than a disappointment to you. Please... You are my whole reason to be alive. I promise, please, I promise! I mean, I promise not to hate anything. It is only that I have to get used to things, and I have not got used to quite everything, yet. I'm only stupid when I don't understand."
"But you never will. I can see that."
"But I'm perfectly willing not to. I'll be not stupid without understanding. Please—"
She pulled at his near arm wildly with both hands, making no distinction between the sleeve and the flesh. Not wildly but with the resolution of sorrow, her eyes went round his face. He said: "Look here, shut up: you make me feel such a bully." Freeing his arm, he caught both her hands in his in a bothered but perfectly kindly way, as though they had been a pair of demented kittens. "Such a noise to make," he said. "Can't you let a person lose an illusion without screaming the house down, you little silly, you?"
"But I don't want you to."
"Very well, then. I haven't."
"Promise, Eddie. You swear? I don't mean just because it's about me, but you told me you had so few—illusions, I mean. You do promise? You're not just keeping me quiet?"
"No, no—I mean, yes. I promise. What