Authors: Elizabeth Bowen
Yet the tide might turn. To the marble chimneypiece Jane on one of her visits, had restored a pair of fluted pink cornucopias, into which she sometimes remembered to stick roses; and some other hand had propped up, between the two, a large and lovely unframed photograph—one of Antonia’s studies of Jane in childhood. Lilia, eyeing another space, pictured her amber salad bowl here also, wondered where it had got to, but lost heart. Under a window was a scroll-ended sofa: she took off her hat, lay down, disposed the folds of her dress and began a headache. After some time, Fred opened the door from the dining-room, and said dubiously: ‘We were thinking of having supper.’
‘Do as you please,’ said she.
‘What about you?’
‘Today, you surpassed yourself.’
‘Oh?—sorry.’
‘Abandoning us. I did not know where to look.’
He blinked and said: ‘Antonia just wants cheese. Where does Kathie keep it?’
‘You may well ask.’
‘Or isn’t there any?—
I
thought I’d been timing things about right.’
‘Left there in front of everyone, high and dry. Naturally, if I had been
Antonia—’
‘Shut up,’ he begged, ‘there’s a good girl. Like me to bring you anything—tea?’
‘If you wish. Though what I need is an aspirin.’
‘Or go to bed why not?’
‘Because I would sooner be left in peace.’
Seeing that he and she had for years slept at opposite ends of the house, her remark lacked what could have been one point: as notice to him to go it was so welcome that, out of self-reproach, he stopped there fidgeting in the doorway.
‘Close in here, isn’t it, if you’ve got a headache?’ He advanced, edged his way round the sofa, unbolted the window and pushed the sash up—outside waited the lovers’ evening; in the naive garden within the fence stocks were night-scented sweeter, old blue-pink roses were lusher, headier than in younger Junes. Lilia, a hand pressed over her eyes, lay like a waxen lady with clockwork breathing. ‘Better now,’ he asked hopefully, ‘or not?’
She gave no sign.
Something caught his eye. ‘You know your hat’s down here on the floor?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘That hat of yours—wasn’t it new today?’
‘No; same as last year, but for the flower.’
‘It looked pretty fine on you, I thought.’
She rolled her head away and said: ‘Then don’t step on it.’ Fred got himself clear of the danger zone, scratched one eyebrow, irresolutely looked at her, said: ‘I’ll be back with the tea, then?’
‘Or send Maud.’
‘Right. Later on, I may go out for a turn—can’t lock up, you see, till the girls get back, which mayn’t be for all hours. All hours,’ he pictured fondly, ‘dancing tonight.’ His protruding dark eyes, showing their whites, moved; in a trance he stood there all but hearing the music. ‘Only pity, pity there’s not a moon.’
She cried aloud: ‘Moon—why should they have everything?’
‘Oh, come,’ he said, ‘you were young once.’
‘And if I was?—What’s that to do with
you?’
So he left her, as she seemed to him to want to be left, alone. And so there she still was, awake in the darkness when—after how long?—Jane, back, came wandering through.
Antonia, on her unwilling way to bed, round about midnight looked into the girl’s bedroom. Her nostrils caught a reek of hot wick, as from a candle hastily blown out; but Jane either was sound asleep or chose to seem so—which was the more forbidding. Either way, music was off the air; the day was over; nothing now interposed between Antonia and the grave-lonely night—slopping a trail of drink from her full tumbler, she pitched away down the passage to her own door. Jane waited only to hear that door shut, was wary a minute longer, then sat up again. She relit her candle, drew out the packet of letters from under her pillow, and went on reading.
These letters, all in the same hand, were headed by day-names only— ‘Tuesday’, ‘Saturday’, and so on. They had been removed from their envelopes; nothing showed where they had been written or when posted. The writing-paper varied in kind, and, though not yet so aged as to be discoloured, was soiled at the edges, rubbed at the folds. The rubber band round the packet survived the fall from the trunk only to snap, unresilient, at the first pull from Jane—how many years does it take for rubber to rot? The ink, sharp in the candlelight, had not faded. She could not fail, however, when first she handled them, to connect these letters with that long-settled dust: her sense of their remoteness from her entitled her to feel they belonged to history. Honour therefore allowed her to make free of them.
To start with, she had hardly even been curious. Sweeping the muslin eagerly downstairs with her, she brought the letters with it chiefly because, in her hurry to quit the attic, she could not stay to put them back in the trunk. Tossing them aside, she had gone on to make much of the rescued dress—measuring it up to herself, shaking fullness back again into the smothered folds, finally hanging it near her window that the stuff might revive in the night air. Yet in the very course of those thoughtless minutes, apprehension within her gathered into a peak: the inner course of her life was about to change, and the cause was somewhere here in the room. She was tired, though only as one is tired after pleasure when one is young, with a sort of exalted languor—lightheaded, drained by an access of intense being, seeing and feeling, as though she had fasted instead of dancing, Her nerves, tuned up by the hot night, waited, though not in fear. What was to happen? She began to undress, looking around her, partly expectant and partly docile—there
were
the letters, on the top of her desk. She went across and stood weighing them in her hand, distantly wondering—how much had shrivelled to this little? Then the word ‘obelisk’ caught her eye.
Then was it that she gave the tug at the band. When that snapped, down, again, fell the letters, this time altogether spilled out and showering. Vexed by them, gathering them up, she endeavoured to put them into their former order—for that there had
been
an order, and that it was significant, she did not question—but found that could not be done. This datelessness, because the count of time was being kept in some other way, showed the complicity between two people: but what was Jane to make of it? Only by reading all of them was one to come upon their sequence, the ‘sooner’ or ‘later’ giving them sense and story—and from that undertaking Jane shrank, she thought. She had an optic laziness with regard to ‘writing’ at any time; but there was now more to it—she felt a recoil from, a sensuous distaste or disinclination for these husks, left to be nothing more by the evaporation from them of passion. At the same time, they inspired reluctant awe, and some misgiving: if there were anything in them, let it remain contained!
Jane was without emotional curiosity; her lack of it was neither failure nor chance but part of a necessary unconcern. She had grown up amid extreme situations and frantic statements; and, out of her feeling for equilibrium, contrived to ignore them as far as possible. Her time, called hers because she was required to live in it and had no other, was in bad odour, and no wonder. Altogether the world was in a crying state of exasperation, but that was hardly her fault: too much had been going on for too long. Like someone bidden to enter an already overcrowded and overcharged room, she paused for as long as possible on the threshold, waiting for something to subside, for the floor to empty or the air to clear. The passions and politics of her family so much resembled those of the outside world that she made little distinction between the two. It was her hope that this might all die down, from lack of recruits or fuel or, most of all, if more people were to take less notice. She did what she could by adding no further heat.
Continuously reflecting, she seldom thought. She, apart from liking having her fortune told, had no particular attitude to the future, but she had an instinctive aversion from the past; it seemed to her a sort of pompous imposture; as an idea it bored her; it might not be too much to say that she disapproved of it. She enjoyed being: how could it not depress her to realize that the majority of people no longer were? Most of all she mistrusted the past’s activity and its queeringness—she knew no one, apart from her own contemporaries, who did not speak of it either with falsifying piety or with bitterness; she sometimes had had the misfortune to live through hours positively contaminated by its breath. Oh, there lay the root of all evil!—this continuous tedious business of received grievances, not-to-be-settled old scores. Yes, so far as she was against anything she was against the past; and she felt entitled to raid, despoil, rifle, balk or cheat it in any possible way. She gloried in having set free the dress. But the letters—had they not insisted on forcing their own way out?
Jane, in bed, had been deep in the letter holding the word ‘obelisk’ when Antonia’s footstep made her blow out the candle. This was the one to which she at once returned, and which, after some few invaded hours of sleep, she had carried outdoors with her next morning, to re-read under the monument itself.
The family spent that morning mostly apart—except that Jane, at about eleven o’clock, made her way out to the haymaking and her father. No topic therefore was raised until they gathered for midday dinner, which found Antonia in a public mood.
Jane, back again into gingham showing her limbs, slid into her seat at table all fresh serenity. Fred, pleased with life, came in as far as the doorway still absently towelling his neck; Lilia ladled out stew at arm’s length, leaning away to avoid steam, and Maud, having seized the occasion to ask a blessing, now eyed the hot pot, wondering what would come of it. She and Jane faced across at Antonia, who, not wearing sunglasses, had her back to the light. Blinds were down over the open windows, the door through to the passage was propped ajar, and the wallpaper was of a smoky crimson which absorbed some of the glare from outdoors—the dining-room was tolerable enough. The table, no worse for being too large, was spread with a starchless damask cloth, and two or three pieces of Sheffield plate—biscuit box, mustard pot, trolley for pickle-jars—adorned it for the benefit of Antonia. The dinner plates, patterned with blue roses, were chipped at the rims; their glaze was fissured and browned from having often baked too long in the oven.
Fred slung the towel out through the door to Kathie, sleeked his hair, unrolled his shirt-sleeves and slumped into his place at the top of the table—he nodded good morning to Antonia and began to eat, in his methodical, rapid, abstracted way. Lilia fanned at herself and the stew with a paper napkin; Antonia reached for the water jug; Jane and Maud side-by-side sat silent and clean. The inappropriateness of the fuming dish to the torrid day was noted, but only as one more stroke of fate: Antonia, for one, did not bat an eyelid. Her indifference to all food other than really good made her slow to distinguish between the bad and the worse—if she felt queasy she did not appear at all; at other times she ate enough to pass. On the whole she showed the best of her character, or at any rate its negative better side, at meals: seldom in her destructive life had she criticized what laid itself open, nor could she be bothered taking it out of anyone, particularly Lilia, in the smaller ways. Her attitude to what was set before her was therefore gentlemanly or rational—had one hoped to eat well, one should not have put Lilia here. She now, having drunk water, put down her glass and took up her fork. ‘And how are we all, after all that?’ she genially asked, looking round the table.— ‘You for instance,’ turning to him, ‘Fred?’
He blinked at having been singled out, swallowed, and asked her: ‘After all what?’
‘Our gaiety.’
‘What, yesterday?’ He was forced to empty his mouth.
‘By the look of it, they should have taken in money—record, I should wonder.’
‘Any idea how much?’
‘Four hundred and ninety-eight pounds, sixteen and five-pence,’ Maud volunteered.
‘Who asked
you?’
asked her mother. ‘And gross or net?’
‘Time will show,’ said the child, looking down her nose.
Antonia mused: ‘The country’s rotten with money, if one could touch it. Why not a Fête to promote us, here?’
Lilia, in a discouraging tone, said: ‘And what would they do here?—all jump off the rock?’
‘So,’ Antonia went on, this time to Jane, ‘you ended by haymaking?’
‘Yes I did.—What about my pay?’ the girl demanded radiantly of her father, who replied: ‘Not for less than a day’s work.’
‘She works in her way,’ said Antonia. ‘She’s always company, Fred.—Naturally she’ll have told you about her letter?’ ‘Had you a letter?’ he asked Jane.
‘Dear Fred, it’s been the talk of this morning!’
‘Antonia, don’t be hateful,’ said Jane calmly.
‘There happened to
be
nothing for Jane this morning,’ Lilia still more crushingly interposed. ‘I know, as I took in the post myself—what was for you Antonia, I sent up.’
‘Yes, thank you: bills, as no doubt you saw.—No, Jane’s didn’t come by the postman; nothing so boring. She helped herself to it, out of a trunk—we are inclined to think it was not to her.’
‘Of course it was not: how could it be? I told you,’Jane said, beginning to colour up, ‘it, they, fell out when I took the dress.’
‘You’re far too quick to assume that people are dead.’