Authors: Elizabeth Bowen
Antonia, drily and out of solitude, said: ‘You, Jane? Why, any day—tomorrow!’
‘—It is going,’
breathed Maud,
‘to be Nine O’clock.’
Fanatical, Maud was crouched in the corner, one knee kneeling before the wireless. Her clutch was upon the knob, her stare close to the premonitory silence. Now, dogmatically and beautifully, the chimes began, completed their quarters, ended—Maud gnawed her lip and increased the volume. At the full, the first of the whanging blows struck down upon quivering ether, the echo swelling as it uprose. Repetition, fall of stroke after stroke where stroke after stroke had already fallen, could do no more than had been done: once was enough. From the first, the room was a struck ship—hither, thither slithered the thoughts and senses; the windows, like port-holes careened over, appearing actually to fill up. The sound of Time, inexorably coming as it did, at once was absolute and fatal. Passionless Big Ben.
The reminder, after so long, came with an accumulation of all force, and eloquence more than could be borne, demanding finally the reckoning. One was hearkening to an ultimatum. The term had been set, and the term extended, again, again and again, while useless the fate of nations went on preparing; and for what culmination, and for what? Rubbed-weary passions had had their say, leaving nothing said. But now came Now—the imperative, the dividing moment, the spell-breaker—all else was thrown behind, disappeared from reality, was over. Time swooped as it struck—and Antonia, hearing each felling blow, flinched once: who can flinch nine times? Turning, she sought with her eyes for Jane, as though there were something she was forced to confess—to Jane, who should be and still was standing where she had last stood; though, telepathically awed, at bay for no reason that she knew, the girl had backed back into a window-curtain. Together braving the sound, while it continued to not cease, the two looked almost humbly away from each other. And I
shall
never see Antonia again, Jane thought. Something has happened. Somehow she’s gone.—She’s old.
‘That was loud, surely?’ Jane said to Maud in a tone of shock, upon the expiration of the last stroke.
The child crouched lower, heard out the final echo, then switched off—disdaining to answer, disdaining, as ever, to hear the news. The room righted its balance, causing objects to seem to be slipping back into what had been their position: on the avenue could be heard at a crawl the Ford, the two in it eking out their return—Jane the more hurriedly left the window. Coming behind Antonia, knowing the proscription to be suspended, she slid her arms into a clasp round the pearl-choked neck and, pressing the embrace closer, leaned round and brought her lips to the tarnished cheekbone. Under that dwelling kiss, at once comforting and beseeching, Antonia eased back her head on to Jane’s breast. The girl then sighed, the woman said nothing. Simultaneously, both looked at the head of the table. As ever, it was after Guy had gone that he most nearly was to be seen. Gone for good, he had never appeared more clearly than he did at this last.
Heard to swerve, the Ford went through the arch to the back. Maud, reseated, took more cake. Kathie, in turn alerted by the activities in the yard, made no less haste to come in with the tray of tea. ‘In any event,’ she said, ‘they’ll be wanting this,’ and plumped it down on the sideboard. ‘Shouldn’t I bring the lamp?’ The fact that she spoke went with some other alteration in her mien: she was tuned right up again, newly-adorned in some way, and above all conscious, daringly conscious, of this herself—but she’d vanished before one could pin the impression down. Antonia, who had instinctively risen when the car’s engine stopped, sat down again; Jane, retrospectively blushing, reclined again, sideways, in her place opposite. All acquiescently waited. Lilia’s entrance, accompanied by Fred, was thus robbed of none of its due effect.
She, Lilia, unwound the chiffon scarf from her hair, hardly less languorously observing that she’d no notion what time it was. She, though without petulance, rang the hand-bell. ‘Close it feels in here, after that air!’ Drawing the biscuits towards herself, she smiled and began to nibble at one. ‘There’s a difference, however—you said so, didn’t you Fred?’
He pronounced: ‘Yes. The sky’s coming over.’ He walked to the head of the table and sat down. ‘Hello?’ he said idly, perceiving Jane.
She asked: ‘Not
clouding
over?’
‘There’ll be a change for rain.—Tea, is there?’
Jane brought the teapot, saying: ‘Oh dear. Tomorrow?’
‘I said a change, not rain.’ Fred, stirring his tea, was struck by another thought, looked along at Maud, gave an outright guffaw. Sobering down again, he went on: ‘Though we’re stuck if there’s not, dam’ soon.’ He eyed Jane, asking: ‘Any objection?’
‘I’m going, I think, to Shannon.’
‘Nothing to stop you.’
‘Unless,’ pleaded the girl, across to Antonia, ‘unless we’re going away?’
‘I’m not going anywhere if it rains.—But how can it?’ Antonia added.
‘Fred deserves rain,’ Lilia replied, casting the ceiling a provocative glance. Yet the idea of an end to this golden spell made an unwilling shiver run up her arms. ‘It’s been too hot, you’ll admit,’ she said somewhat loudly. No one assented—upon which she felt herself ringed around by conspirators. ‘What have you all been doing,’ she challenged them, ‘sitting here in the dark?’
‘Kathie’s,’ said Maud, noncommittal, ‘bringing the lamp in.’
‘Simpler to put the blinds up, I should have thought.’
‘Why, yes; I suppose so,’ agreed Antonia. Jane was busy; she was bringing her father the dish of brawn. Her movements were swift and accomplished; she did not look at him.
‘Shannon, did I hear you say?’ asked Antonia.
‘Vesta’s van’s got to go there.’
In came the lamp, steadied by Kathie. She, bending to set it down, let be seen a brightly-white satin perked atop of her hair, which in crisps fell over the snood. Around the table breaths one by one were drawn, but to be held—not even Maud spoke. The maid at length stole a look at Jane. ‘I saved it,’ she said, aside. ‘No harm?’
‘None.’
Satisfied, Kathie centred the lamp, moving a dish here or a plate there. The glare from the globe, placed as it was, hit Fred directly upon the forehead, making him seem likely to frown: otherwise, he seemed to have no complaint. Lilia’s expression, however, became more mystified: the cause was known only when Kathie’d left them. ‘And yet,’ she said, ‘she objects to wearing a cap.’
‘Why’s Vesta’s van going to Shannon?’ resumed Antonia. Jane said, looking startled: ‘To meet someone.’ ‘That should be very nice. Vesta going?’ ‘Oh no. Vesta is going racing.’
‘That
will be very nice.’
‘You do think it will?’ asked the girl, anxious. ‘It will be a change.’
‘I suppose it will.—But suppose it rains?’
The film over the sky had been there since morning, dull as a ceiling. Not a cloud formed in it; it was cloud itself.
One had woken to find the sun gone, earth greener in the abated light—while into the air as it cooled off an almost rank smell rose from the grass and nettle-dark woods, already moist by anticipation. Everything on the plateau around Montefort, to which the mountains, ink-blue, had drawn nearer, stood out meaningly—one was aware of trees as each a great individual thirsting plant, and of white-grey rocks breaking the surface as porous limestone. And the limestone gave out into the sunlessness a glare, left behind by yesterday. The obelisk on its rise looked like the enlarged photograph of a monument.
Gone from all things was the mirage-like shimmer, the blond hue. One saw the darker constituents of the landscape and, where mountains were not, measured its flow into distances which were no less distinct. The clearness was hypnotic, as was the stillness—which, that of the change, was more intent than that of the heat. The uncanny imminence of rain hushed almost every other sensation. Today seemed not yet to be reality: one had so far no more than passed or been sent on out of one deep dream into another—more oppressive, more lucid, more near perhaps to the waking hour.
The morning was spent waiting either for rain to fall or the van to come—the latter was not actually due until two o’clock, but long before could be felt impending. The postman, making one of his rare calls, aware that he delivered nothing important, also looked speculatively at the sky. In the main, the departure of the fine spell, so far followed by nothing else, gave this beginning of the day an atmosphere at once unsettled and negative, tense and neutral. Jane, knowing that she was sooner or later to go away, spent time in her room going through her things—she took down and dusted a suitcase, and re-whitened her sandals to go to Shannon. Putting the sandals outside her window to dry, she saw her mother out there in the garden: Lilia had come come down late, still wore a wistaria crepe kimono, and was slowly taking a look around. ‘So,’ she remarked, hearing Jane above her, ‘your father
was
right. Still, it may hold off.’
The girl said oh yes, she thought it should.
‘Heat more often terminates in a thunderstorm,’ said Lilia.
‘We’re being let off light, then!’
‘Still, I should take a coat.—It struck me to wonder if Maud could go.’
Jane all but knocked a sandal off the window-ledge. ‘Oh!’ she protested.
‘I don’t,’ her mother explained, ‘you see, intend taking her to London. So she’d enjoy this.—Whom are you to meet?’
‘A cast-off lover of Vesta’s. Why?’
‘Then why object to having Maud in the van?’
‘She bumps about so,’ said Jane vaguely.
‘And what a position for you! You may find you are far from sorry to have Maud.’
‘I’ll have Harris.’
‘Well, we shall have to see,’ Lilia declared, with an air of dealing with forces beyond control. Again she gazed round. ‘Only look at those mountains
—
those
mean rain, if you like! And Antonia has rheumatism this morning.—I suppose I ought to slip on a frock.’
‘What a pity; you look like a Geisha Girl.’
‘What, do I?’ mused Lilia. Jane left the window.
Sounds were magnified by the listening air—a bird in the woods, the creak of a yard door, a dog barking away in a distant farm. The girl pulled from her wardrobe the muslin dress, shook it out, contemplated the stained hems, wondered. She asked herself why she had cut the sleeves out—they were the beautiful thing about it, she now knew; sunshiney, softly flopping while she’d made play with a letter beside the obelisk. What had she mutilated? And now to the muslin the smell of banishment had returned—the pastness from which Antonia’d shrunk, the dregs of aroma from the exhausted sachet. Jane crushed up to her face the defeated stuff, desired to wetten it with a tear, but could not: bundling the dress up she thrust it into the bottom of the wardrobe. She took from a hanger a candy-striped blazer, not worn yet, and tried it on. The cool day possibly could turn cold.
‘Anything I could do before we go?’ she was standing asking, some minutes later, at Antonia’s bedside. The other, tweed cape over her shoulders, sat half-up, rapidly writing on a pad. ‘Go?’ she said. ‘I haven’t made any plans. Yes, we might as well—I suppose?’
‘I supposed we were,’ said the girl patiently.
Antonia dashed down a few words more, then put the pad aside, face down. Aloud she reflected: ‘It’s cheaper here.’
‘I know, Antonia; but you get bored.’
‘What you mean is, I drink more?—If it weren’t for money, we could get off to Spain: what I need is sun.’
In view of all, Jane could not help smiling.
‘Or almost anywhere, really,’ went on Antonia, grandly rearranging the cape.
‘I was to work,’ pointed out the girl.
‘Oh, it may not come to that!’
‘Haven’t
you
got anything to do, Antonia? Anything that you must do and get money for, I mean to say, like you used to have?’
‘Of course I have,’ said the other angrily. ‘What d’you imagine? So much too much, in point of fact, that what I need to do is think. Which I was doing,’ she added, ‘when you came in.
You’ll
dislike work; you’ve no idea what it is.’
‘Well, I’ve been educated; that’s bad enough.—And after all, Antonia’—Jane indicated the outside world easily, almost eagerly— ‘summer’s over!’
‘Don’t you be too sure,’ advised the other, eyeing the blazer. ‘Now, go.—When do you start?’
‘At about two.’
Antonia, again alone, tore the sheet off the pad and wrote no more. She groaned and looked blankly out of a window. Where to go, how to get there, and why? London? Tenants were in her flat. As to work, what next? She had refused commissions: ideas, where were they? Had she run right out? She thought, I was better when I was miserable. What’s killed misery?—what will kill me: age. Sometimes now in the nights in her vitals a cold hand felt about for the weak spot; death could be waiting to find its way in. Waiting for her to crack, or to lose nerve.
To do her justice, she had tried most things. It was her former husband to whom she’d been writing when interrupted. So soon over, so long ago had been the try at marriage that it was not a substantial memory. Antonia’s ever having been married seemed so unlikely, so out of character, that few who knew her believed that story. Lilia, as she herself remarked, would not have done so had she not known the facts: what she certainly did not wonder at was the failure—this she would tend to revert to, from time to time, when in danger of being put upon by Antonia, in a manner which continued to be galling. Apart from that, there had not been loss of face—on either side, one was glad to be sure. Alex had been (indeed, still was) his name. He never thought less amiably of Antonia, would have been happy to lend her money, and had, last time they’d happened to meet, offered her the use of his flat in Paris—that was, when he should not be in it. So this morning she’d woken with the idea of writing—and why not?—to ask him whether the flat was empty: it might suit her. Or,
was
that the reason she woke with the idea of writing? My heavens, she thought, have I come to this?—she reached around in a panic for the half-written sheet and contemptuously crunched it into a ball. In a minute or two it rolled off the bed.