Authors: Elizabeth Bowen
Virginian creeper camouflaged the wall round the door, an overpainted showering of bronze-green. Leaves and tendrils, caught as they always were by the pushing-inward opening of the door, draped themselves over the orifice in fringes. The door
was
open—as to everything else the creeper demented and drowned sight by giving it no one point to rest on. The Guy who had come in her eye with her round the corner was transfixed first here, then there, then nowhere against the creeper—facelike seemings of faces, but never his, were everywhere on the chequer oflight-and-shade. Not yet, not yet was there quite no one—to
be
gone, a man must have been here! The tearing-out of the centre of the picture still left a quiver of edges torn—she stood in a stupor, some way away down the path. Then Fred came back again through the door: he stared and said: ‘You
are
there, then, after all?’
‘Why?’
‘I was looking for you.’
She marvelled, ‘In the middle of the afternoon?’ laughed, and gave a running totter towards him. He met the totter, catching her by the elbows— ‘Steady,’ he enjoined, as to Jane last night. ‘Look, what’s the matter? You’re as white as a ghost. Why sit in a sun like today,’ he wanted to know, ‘when you’ve just had your hair off?’
‘You noticed, then?’
‘Antonia said that was why you were in Clonmore. But I should have.’
Upheld by him by the elbows, having the sensation that her feet were being washed away from under her, but that she did not need them, Lilia, from nearer to it than she had been to it for years, studied Fred’s chest, numbering the buttons gone from the shirt. She ventured: ‘Why?’
‘It somehow makes you look younger—or anyway you looked different when I saw you.’
‘Saw me?’
‘When I came through the door.’
‘I saw Guy, I thought.’
He gave her a shake and said: ‘Then you have got sunstroke! Come on, come in.’
She groped for the ground with her feet and began to walk; they went through the door, which Fred pulled to with a creak behind them, and along the passage into the yard—Kathie, carrying buckets, passed them. Down on to them fell the blistered shadow of the deserted buildings; up rose Montefort’s unsightly and streaked backview, shutters half-folded, whitish, over the windows of unused rooms. Lilia, by lagging mutely on Fred’s arm, indicated she either did not wish to go in or was not ready to go in yet, so he went on steering their course haphazardly, out across the yard to the carriage archway. All at once she showed will: ‘We’ll sit on that.’ ‘That’ being the mounting-block, they did so; she on the top, he on a step. As she knew, they had never in all their story (if indeed story it could be called) together stopped in the dense green gloom under this particular chestnut tree.
‘Good,’ he said, relieved. ‘—that is, if you’re all right?’ Though for his part he hardly knew what to do with the immobility.
She asked him: ‘Now—what did you want?’
‘I’m not so sure this is quite the moment.’
‘Why not Fred? I mean, after all?’
‘But I mean, after just now. It might only upset you over again.’
‘
I
was not upset,’ she said with a little laugh.
‘Well, I wish I knew,’ he confessed, to himself not her. Sitting where he sat he stretched one leg out, heaved a little over, began to tug something bulky out of a pocket. By the time she looked to see what was happening, the wadge of letters was in his hands, cross-tied with a white satin ribbon, probably Jane’s. ‘My one idea,’ he said, ‘was to get these back to you.’ But as things now were he stayed frowning, weighing them in his hands.
She recoiled. ‘You don’t mean,
those
are the ones?’
‘You ought to know. Aren’t they?’
‘Who says so?’ she asked, in a voice of still greater fear.
‘Maud. Offered them to me for ten bob.’
‘No, I don’t believe you!’
‘Yes, tracked ‘em down to wherever Jane had been keeping them.’
‘And you gave her all that money?’
‘Me? I shook the hell out of her—and that’s
my
kid, the dirty little so-and-so!’
She by habit said: ‘It’s more that she’s mercenary… Nor were they Jane’s, if it comes to that.’
He burst out: ‘Anyway, here they are, so for God’s sake take them!’ He thrust them her way, looking neither at them nor her. ‘D’you suppose I want to carry them round?’
She hung back.
‘You
know they’re mine, from him, then?’
‘Who’m I to know—how should I know?—Why, aren’t they?’
That caused her to snatch at them, as though they, impatiently tendered, might after all at the next instance be withdrawn. Having them, she went on to hold them numbly, viewing the writing quartered by white ribbon with a distant, suspended fascinated mistrust. ‘Well, he wrote them all right,’ she at last gave out.
‘Remember them, then, do you?’
‘I—I don’t know, yet.’
‘Then look again, why not? You can read, can’t you? Go on, untie them!’
‘Fred,’ she pleaded.
‘Well?’
‘Why ever didn’t you burn them?’
He was astounded—either at being asked or, more likely, because he had not thought of it. It was to be doubted if he had thought at all; he had acted, and with precipitation. For the brainstorm set up in him by Maud’s overture, for his inordinate violence to the child (whom actually he had not only shaken but struck, battered at, in wrenching the letters from her) there was no reason he cared or dared to fathom. Though the worst had subsided, passion was still racing through his system—had not Lilia unerringly thrown herself on his breast? No, he had not thought because he had never stopped to; his course had forced
itself on him, which made it still seem right—or if not quite right, right enough: there had not been choice. In an outsize issue, what man ever decides? One is decided for.
Now,
however, she asked him…To gain time he brought out a cigarette, struck a match, but did not at once light up—instead, he contemplated the orange flame, brought into being by him like a soul by God, but unlike a soul in being without a tremor in the stillness of the drought. In-and-out under the archway, the Ford’s old tracks criss-crossed in mud set hard like cement.
‘You set store by them, didn’t you?’ he asked finally.
‘No, but I never wanted them,’ she cried out, though restlessly testing at the ribbon. ‘How could I ever bear to read them again; even if I did ever read them before? No, you’re only driving me mad, Fred, waiting to watch me! What d’you want to know—whether they
are
to me? How am
I
to know after all these years, or indeed care? Yes, I said “care”, Fred. From what Jane gives out, these are love letters—well, what if they are? What’s it all about? What he’s saying here well might not make sense to me any longer, whether it
was
to me or to who knows else. No, Fred, thanks: give them back to Jane.’
‘O.K., then,’ Fred said. ‘Then I needn’t have worried.’
She at once glanced downward at the top of his head. ‘Though that’s not to say,’ she added, ‘in spite of all, that I’ve so altogether forgotten what love was.’
He gave one of his yawns, mechanically heaved himself off the step, stood clear of the mounting-block, stretched all over. ‘Ought to be going.’ From where she sat on the top, Lilia’s legs hung crossed at the ankles, heels eased clear of her shoes: one of the dangling white shoes now fell off, whereupon he strolled round and picked it up for her. Soiled, it had once been pretty; and as it was it partly fretted and partly humoured him. ‘Come on, then, give it here,’ he suggested, meaning for her to stretch the foot out to have the shoe put back on again, which was done. ‘But you still have to go?’ she said.
‘I said I ought to; and so I ought.’ He let his cigarette drop and stamped it out, as one might the temptation to linger, but none the less went on to study his wife, one could not be certain how retrospectively. In the taut blue lap of her frock remained the letters; he whistled a bar, then asked: ‘What made you say you saw him?’
‘Thought I did.’
‘But what made you tell me?’
She turned her eyes upon him. ‘What makes you ask?’
‘I naturally wondered.’ He was looking away, at a crack high up near where the keystone was, in the facial stucco of the archway: about to whistle a bar more, he seemed to stop to debate whether he should.
‘You took me,’ she told him, ‘quite by surprise.’
‘You made
me
jump, I don’t mind telling you—standing there! I hardly believed my eyes.’
‘Neither could I.’
‘Hardly knew who I was?’
She first lowered then shook her head: ‘I saw
you.
That was the shock.’
He jibed: ‘What, never saw me before?’
‘Go on—laugh!’
‘No; you just had a touch of the sun.’ He looked behind at the exposed nape of her neck, then clapped a hand on his own, instructively—’There’s where it gets you, there, if you don’t watch out.’
Lilia said : ‘All I know is, someone
was
in that garden, and for a reason known to me. How am I to tell you for how long; well do I remember how it felt—each knowing the other to be there. And there was more to it than that, Fred. What
was
about to take place I shall often wonder—all I did was stop sewing and watch the bird watch me. You know I was never one to imagine; and who was I to imagine it could be you? As we now are, anything seemed more likely. Guy seemed more likely, dead as he is.’
‘What d’you mean,’ he said, ‘ “as we now are”?’
‘You know you know. What’s the use of asking?’
He gave a frown.
She put her hands to her face and added: ‘As we have come to be.’
He came and stood closer by where she sat, leaning, putting pressure against her shoulder. ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘I was looking for you.’
‘You didn’t look far. There I was, only there on that seat.’
‘Must be years since I’ve been into that garden. It’s all gone to seed, or something—gives me the creeps.’
‘We used to go in there when we first got married.’
‘That creeper’s getting to choke the door.’
‘Well, all you had to do was to give a shout.’
‘You make me laugh,’ he declared. ‘Shout, for you? And what would I get for that?— “What is it now, Fred?… Oh, my poor head: can I never be left in peace!… Why can’t you ever leave me alone?”—That’s how you go on,’ he said, bending a sideways look at her.
‘Well, I never know, Fred.’
‘What don’t you know?’
‘It’s more that I know too well. You mean all right; you intend to be good to me. But it’s always that, and that’s what gets on my nerves.’
‘Yes, I get on your nerves all right. I feel sorry for you.’
She drew away from his shoulder. Pick pick, pluck her fingers went at the ribbon bow on the letters, till, furious, she swept the packet aside, to burst out: ‘Oh Fred, what a thing to say!’
‘I don’t see why. It must be tough to have nerves, apart from having anyone on them. You’ve had bad luck all along, and I’m part of it. You had a bad come-down, after all you’d been, in the first place, led on to expect and hope for. You never should have had to put up with me, but there it was: that was how things worked out. There we were, and in the consequence here we are. When I feel you don’t make the best of a bad job, I always try to consider how bad the job is—that’s to say, from your point of view. Nothing much to take your mind off anything, is there? Stuck here, I mean, with the money short and most of the time no one, all these long winters. Year in, year out.’
‘There’s year in, year out been you.’
‘That’s been the trouble.’
‘Why, do you think, Fred?
Are
we so unsuited?’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ he pondered. ‘I should not have said so—that is, at one time. We made out all right, once, in our own way. You know when that was.’
‘Yes,’ she said. Again a shoe fell off, this time to be left to lie on the ground.
‘I’ve never quite understood,’ he went on. ‘Maybe there could have been something more for us, that we missed; if so, I probably bungled things. Nothing came out of our making love, and I’d no way to show you anything more. I was never Guy.’
‘I did not expect you to be.’
‘That was just it. For my not being what he was, you had it in on me.’
‘You said we’d been once happy.’
‘We made out, till the thing started galling me.’
‘If you’d only …’
‘Oh well, why talk?’ he asked.
‘With that idea in your head, what was I to do?’
‘What you did do—barely put up with me.’
‘You went off.’
‘And if I did? I go where I’m wanted.’
‘Still, Fred?’
He shrugged his shoulders.
She said: ‘You never gave me a chance.’