Authors: Elizabeth Bowen
The two were now at a pause while semolina, which Fred was believed to like, awaited its turn to be weighed out. Jane, bracing her stomach against the counter, went on: ‘I imagine she meant it kindly.’
‘You saw how upset I was.’
‘Antonia has sudden thoughts.’
‘She has deep-laid plans.’
‘I wonder…’ pondered the girl, studying seed cake under a clouded glass bell.
‘I
know,’ said her mother.
Jane raised the bell from the cake, let a fly out from under and put it down again. She said in a low voice: ‘Weren’t you engaged in London?’
‘Engaged in what?’
‘To Guy.’
Lilia, dropping her voice lower than Jane’s, to what could have sounded a furtive pitch, said: ‘We became engaged at Staines; that’s not London.’
All but accusingly Jane faced round, all eyes. ‘But you
were
there together. Fearfully happy—weren’t you?’
Her mother replied with a dead smile. ‘That was the London of the past.’
‘But it must be that to somebody all the time.’
Lilia appeared to count three before demanding: ‘And why should that
mzkt you
scarlet in the face?’
‘I didn’t know I - ‘
‘“Guy”, indeed! He was older than your father.’
‘But not then.’
‘—Quiet!
—
here comes the man!’
It was Mr Lonergan, no less—till now detained at the other end of the shop, he came squeezing past his assistants behind the counter to accord at last to the ladies their meed of notice. Personally he brought them the semolina—’I hurried this on for you,’ he said. He balanced the bag down on the tins of salad, polished his right palm on his thigh and shook hands with both of them. Lilia, who never grew used to this, made an inharmonious jab back at him with the pound note. She paid cash with dudgeon: seldom gone from her memory was the unfortunate winter when Mr Lonergan—owing, he later said, to some small kind of passing misunderstanding—had stopped the Montefort credit. She would have transferred her custom but for the fact that the whole of Clonmore would have known why. Upon him, of course, nothing had left a ruffle: he was now complimenting her on, by every sign, standing up very well indeed to this wicked heat. He would go so far as to say this was heathen weather, in which but for God who was to predict what might happen next? They were demented with it, he had heard, in England—as for here, we were hardly to know ourselves. The advantage of having the hay saved early was less when you looked at cattle about to go mad with thirst—he hoped matters were not that way at Montefort? Through it all, however, and come what might, concluded Mr Lonergan—taking in Jane, Lilia and, in the doorway, Maud in the act of kicking a dog which had been trying to lift its leg—it was a great thing to be a united family. ‘The poor little girl,’ he added. ‘Shall we see if there aren’t any sweeties for her?’
‘No, thank you: that will be all today.’
Mr Lonergan’s eyebrow did not go up: he said gently, ‘More like a little present.’ Having briefed an assistant, who unstop-pered ajar, he filled a pause by making a brushing gesture in the air over a cut ham. ‘Flies get very bold,’ he remarked in a general way.
‘My daughter’s just let one out from over your cake.’
‘Ah well, it would be a pity to let him suffocate.’ He seized the occasion to turn to Jane, as he had from the start been waiting to do. ‘Was it gay enough for you last night at the castle? I suppose you’d never know whom you’d find; still, they went to all lengths for you, sending the motor twice. And it makes for variety.—Had she the salmon?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Jerry got it for her.’
‘Oh, poached, then?’ flashed out the untutored girl. Mr Lonergan looked at her austerely. ‘From time to time,’ he replied, ‘she gives custom locally.—So you sat down one under the number? Who was it, I wonder, never turned up?’
‘I don’t remember. It was a lovely party.’
‘They say her ladyship has a great go.’ He deemed it right once more to address the mother. ‘Well, she’s launched, it seems,’ he said, referring to Jane. ‘At this rate, who is to say that before we know we may not hear of her moving among the crowned heads?’
‘There are practically none left,’ said Lilia stuffily.
‘Thank you all the same, Mr Lonergan,’ said the debutante, holding out her hand for the sweets for Maud.
‘All that singsong about an immoral house,’ Lilia complained as they left the shop. ‘These people do nothing but nose out money. And as I’ve always said to you, spies everywhere. No, I never shall trust this country.’
‘You don’t think that could be what Antonia—?’
“I’ve long ago given up thinking, thank you.’
There on the kerb outside Lonergan’s, Lilia braced her shoulders as though facing reality—looking up then down the Clonmore straight wide main street at the alternately dun and painted houses, cars parked askew, straying ass-carts and fallen bicycles. Dung baked on the pavements since yesterday morning’s fair; shop after shop had insanely similar doorways, strung with boots and kettles and stacked with calicoes—in eternal windows goods faded out. Many and sour were the pubs. Overexposed, the town was shadeless—never a tree, never an awning. Ice cream on sale, but never a cafe. Clonmore not only provided no place to be, it provided no reason
to
be, at all. So, but for the heat, was the place at all times—but the glare today stripped it of even its frowsty mystery, flattened it out, deadly glazed into a picture postcard such as one might receive from Hell. Gone was third dimension; nothing stood behind anything—opposite Lilia, a hillful of holy buildings appeared to weight down the slated street roofs below. And worst, wherever she turned her eyes movement could be seen to expire slowly—a bus, it was true, came punting in, but only to be at once deserted: why and how again should it ever start? She could have pitied the bus. But, like all else, it was absolute in its indifference to her.
‘You know, Jane, this is a place where one could not even be run over.’
‘Well, it
was
nicer in the garden.’
‘Here I am, however.’
‘And while we are, do let’s—’
‘—You don’t understand.’ Accumulated, the panic of twenty years broke in a wave over Lilia. ‘Where else,
now,
is there? For me, nowhere!’
‘Oh, damn Antonia!’ said Jane, really concerned. She relieved her mother of several parcels, dropped one or two of them, then said: ‘I’m sorry I mentioned Guy.’
‘As you say, the morning began so well.—And now, where for instance has Maud gone off to?’
‘I
thought, while we’re waiting, let’s have an ice?’
‘I sometimes ask myself why I do wait for Maud.’
‘Oh, but I meant your hair appointment!’
Once more Lilia was rallied by that thought. ‘Well, I don’t mind—but that there’s no place I care to have ices in. Also, spoiling our dinners.’
‘Mother, one can’t spoil rhubarb.’
If Miss Francie’s
salon
possessed, alone in Clonmore, the art of reviving the life-illusion, one had only to know it to see why. It was up a flight of pink-linoed stairs. A breath of perfumed singeing emerged to meet one; triple net blinds shimmered over the outlook, and magazines, on a gilded wicker table, from time to time lavishly were renewed. Jane, her elbow sociably hitching back the curtain of the cubicle filled by Lilia, sat leafing through one of the magazines. Activity for the moment was at a stop—the sole drawback to Miss Francie was her elusiveness: heart-whole applications of zeal and charm were interspersed by mysterious total vanishings.
In medias res
she had a way of flitting right off her premises, leaving a lady clamped down under a drier, steaming into a towel, or half-shorn (which was Lilia’s predicament). Nor did another step in to take her place, Miss Maeve, her reputed partner, being never not known to be either indisposed or away on holiday. The
salon
ran therefore behind schedule: happily,
however, time did not press—who could wish to hurry to quit this magic oasis of tinted mirror, enamel and bakelite? And Miss Francie never failed to return in still better spirits for having been away. Her smiling non-explanations were somehow flattering, and her goings, though inconvenient, left not a wound.
Lilia, in a peach bib, half her hair on the floor, sat in a trance opposite her own reflection; which had become depersonalized by being so long regarded. So had that of her daughter, away behind her. No other clients were in the
salon.
She at length said: ‘Already I half feel different.’
Jane raised her eyes, pronouncing: ‘Half of you looks different.’
‘You know my hair was once the colour of yours?’
‘How nice,’ the girl said absently, kindly.
‘Yes; I felt I took quite a step when I had it off.’
‘Once, it hung all the way down your back?’
‘Yes—once.’
‘Do you remember yourself?’
‘How do you mean?’ asked Lilia, giving the bib a tug to loosen it slightly at the throat.
‘Do you remember feeling lovely?’
‘Yours,
of course, was cut from the very start. But they still say a woman loses something.’
‘When was yours cut?’
‘Shortly after the Armistice.’
‘By then, you did not care what you lost?’
‘That was when bobbing came in, then shingling.’
‘Oh,’ accepted Jane. Her eyes drifted with polite slowness back to the magazine. Lilia slid her hand through the uncut side of her hair, comfortably savouring the discomfort. ‘I now do wonder how I so long endured this!.. .Jane?’
‘Yes?’
‘I wonder whatever’s keeping her?’
‘One could more imagine if one knew why she’d gone.’
‘You do sometimes talk like Antonia,’ Lilia remarked, though altogether idly, unacrimoniously. ‘You could hardly not, I suppose, being so much with her.’ She turned and reached out a hand for a magazine—’I might just as well glance at one. Which have you got?’
‘Woman and Beauty.” ,
‘Give me a different one then.’
Jane supplied her with
Woman.
But after all, Lilia did nothing more than contemplate, with her head aslant, prototype Woman on the cover. Half back into her trance, she remotely said: ‘I suppose they’ll have had the sense to begin dinner?’
‘Father’ll have to.—Your hair looks sad on the floor, waiting just to be swept away!’
‘Well, it’s only litter, isn’t it? Though I gave Guy a piece once.’
‘A piece the colour of mine?’
‘Then, it
was
something of myself! He wrapped it round his finger into a ring, then laughed and slipped it into his pocket book. So I suppose it went back with him to the Front.’
‘Aren’t you certain?’
‘Well, it must have. He never turned out that pocket book; it was perpetually crammed with this and that.’
‘What did he laugh at?’
‘Laugh at when, do you mean?’
‘When you said; when he ringed your hair round his finger.’
‘He regarded almost everything as a joke. I remember his train going out with them all singing. That train at the end of the last leave he ever had. What a dreadful station that was, full of nothing but draught and darkness and echoes—Charing Cross. He said, “Why on earth did you come?” There’s nothing so much in a goodbye, Jane—to my mind he seemed to be gone already. Some of those women went white as sheets; some of their faces gave me a shock—that was, after the train had gone. All I could do was stand and look at the clock; where to go next was what I could not imagine—he always had had some idea ready. The clock started me counting the hours back to how long ago it was since we’d both been dancing.—Did you know there once was a waltz called “Destiny”?’
‘I’ve danced to that!’
‘But he and I
had
no destiny, in reality. No, none. I wonder why we had ever to meet at all.’
‘But you wouldn’t have met Antonia, married father, had me, if— ‘
‘He and I, I said. What did it come to? Nothing.’
‘But you
had
that time!’
‘And where is it all gone
now? He
knew, of course—and so, how he did enjoy himself! My sister always said he was not serious.’
‘Mother, what
was
he like?’ ‘You keep on asking me, yet you think you know.’
‘Still, tell me!’
‘I only knew what he was with me.’
‘What was he, with you?’
‘Why, in love.’
Jane got up, put down her magazine and chose another—or rather, stood at the gilded table absently turning the others over. ‘I’m sure you’re wrong,’ she asserted, ‘about having had no destiny. Couldn’t it be a destiny to be someone something had once happened to?’
‘But more has happened to me than that.’
‘Oh—has there?’
‘For one thing, there was your father.’