Authors: Elizabeth Bowen
‘The trunk was up in the attics, ’Jane told her father, as though in justice to him if not to herself she ought to give the entire picture, in the as nearly as possible proper light. ‘And there’s a hat up there, rather like Lady Latterly’s. (I must go back for that; I forgot it!)’
‘Those musty attics,’ Lilia remarked. ‘Everything up there belongs to Antonia.’ She yawned and piercingly rang a hand-bell for Kathie to bring in pudding and change the plates. Jane sat like a statue till this was done, then said:
‘But so does everything is this house.’
‘Somehow, Jane,’ said Antonia, ‘that sounds unfriendly.’
‘I don’t see why.’
‘To start with, I’ve no idea what
is
in the house. Never have I known, and I never want to—by this time, who could know, and however should they? Not I, certainly: God forbid! Yet I can’t help wondering what you’ve unburied—there may be much (I
should think there probably is) that we should all do far better to leave alone.’
Lilia, who seldom addressed her elder daughter, turned her head aside to avoid any air of doing so, while she nonetheless felt called upon to explain: ‘What Antonia means, and she has the right to do so, is, why were you interfering with her things?’
‘Almost that,’ half-agreed Antonia smoothly, ‘though not altogether, perhaps, quite.’ Her eyes and Jane’s met across the table. Up to now Jane’s acting of the chidden and disconcerted favourite had been no more than in the convention, but now there was a tremor—resistance, query, reproach, but above all a sort of disassociation showed in her unswerving long blue gaze. Not she but Antonia had gone too far this time. The moment declared itself, and sharply—Antonia brought out her cigarettes and with nervous egocentricity lit up. (She seldom, at Montefort, smoked till a meal was done.)
Antonia’s eyes were darker than Jane’s in colour, and more human. Their surrounds had a smoky, smudged look which was picturesque, and endemic: she did not use mascara—these were Irish eyes, communicative and often hostile, sunk in a face which had, more or less, by now come to look cosmopolitan. Cheek bones wore rouge like an ingrained tarnish; the hair, from which the effects of expert cutting, tinting and burnishing were at Montefort beginning to wear off, was raked upward, exposing the hardy forehead. The mouth would have been forcible without paint, the jaw had kept its angular outline, and the skin wore well in spite of all—it, too, had the benefit of sporadic care. She had kept up her looks, such as they were; while showing a slapdash disregard for them. Antonia’s face, in spite of its show of indolence, had something energetic about the cast of it—nothing sagged except when she foresaw death: there were hollows, tensions and shadows, but they were speaking ones, kept in play by the contrarieties-of her mood, the many dissonances of her nature. What was in her stayed unresigned, untaught; when she scowled a mutinous heaviness clouded down on her. It was a danger-signal (now to be read) when she chose to imitate impassivity.
She today wore an orange canvas Mediterranean shirt, closely knotted up at the neck with a string of false pearls. Rolled-up sleeves bared her strong forearms, which slendered down when
they came to the wrists and hands.
Reflecting, she stubbed out the cigarette. ‘What a fuss we make! But so little happens.’
Fred, with a touch of contempt, said: ‘What’s happening now?’
‘One would like to know.’
His comment was to grasp the pitcher of custard and measure out dollops on to his plate of fruit. As Jane pushed the sugar bowl his way, he teasingly, with confidence, spent a glance on her—’What ha
vtyou
been up to, that I don’t know of?’ He no more cared than he knew: she was in his sight, she had been his own all the later, greater part of this morning. She removed the pitcher from between him and her, letting it round again to the receptive Maud, then smiled back: ‘Nothing
that
you’d
call anything.’
‘Good enough, then,’ he said to his spoon and fork.
‘Falling in love with a love letter,’ said Antonia.
Maud, even, found this worthy of note; she turned to examine her sister’s profile. Lilia ingested the statement slowly, thought, then began to express surprise. ‘To me it’s rather peculiar that in spite of her chances, all we hear about London, and that keeping on dancing yesterday night, Jane should have to stoop for romance to a musty trunk, belonging to who knows who? Myself I should have been sorry to, but times alter. Are there no men about who are good enough?
—
Maud,
I thought I said no more custard!’
‘No, you forgot to.’
‘And after how many eggs, with your blood upset?’
‘—Oh don’t nag her; dose her, for heaven’s sake!’ burst out Fred, with a sudden twitch of the forehead. Maud, not in need of a partisan, drew herself away and became remote; the women at table stared. There ensued an astounded pause, in the course of which he flicked a glance at his wrist-watch—as for Jane, she never might have been there. He thrust his chair back and stood up: ‘If you’ll all excuse me, got to be off.’
‘Why, what’s the rush?’ inquired Antonia, while Lilia languidly pointed out: ‘You won’t be getting the men back under their hour.’
‘Want to look at the tractor.’
‘Heavens, trouble again?’
‘It seemed to be going all right this morning,’ Jane said in a low
and concerned tone, ‘at least,
I
thought so.’
He flatly told her: ‘This morning isn’t this afternoon.’
‘How true that is,’ said Antonia, ‘and how often sad.’
Lilia, lolling her eyes down at her folded arms, remarked from a distance: I cannot help whatever it is that has now upset you.’
‘“Upset”?’ he cried, knocking the word away. ‘But if you’d like to know why I’ve had enough, it’s this everlasting maunder about those attics.—You, Antonia, it must be twenty times I’ve asked you to get that stuff at the top cleared out—burned, junked, sold, shifted: I don’t care what. I’ve offered you the pack of men for the job. I need that space, I tell you! I’m short of storage.’
‘What would you like to put up there—oats?’
‘I won’t have those dragged upstairs,’ put in Lilia firmly, ‘bringing in rats.’
Fred rolled his eyes, ‘Whoever said I said oats?’
‘Antonia did.’
‘Well, listen to what I’m saying!’
‘Why should I, when you’re seldom addressing me?’ Lilia paused, told Maud she might now be excused from the table (the child, however, chose to stay where she was) then added: ‘Although I must say, Fred, your objection to those attics is very sudden: it’s been my nerves they’ve been always upon—everything not only dirty but so inflammable day and night up there over our heads, with Kathie and who knows who going through with candles.’
Maude stated: ‘Kathie is too scared.’
‘It’s not especially Kathie I’m referring to—though I’ve heard
you
prancing up there, from time to time, Maud, with your hobgoblin.’
‘No, I am the one,’ Jane easily said. ‘But if I’d started a fire, you’d know by now.’
‘We think we do,’ said Antonia. ‘That’s what’s the matter. We think we can smell burning; or at any rate the beginning of burning, smouldering. What have you done? You have an igniting touch—wouldn’t you, now, say so?’ she threw at Fred. Not yet gone, unable to go, he stood leaning heavily on his hands which gripped and shifted along the chair-back, tilting the chair up. Jane, at the instant, turned to her father also, with an air of waiting upon his verdict. He frowned; his eyes were not to be met; he told her: ‘Tell ‘em to go to blazes,’ which sounded
less like advice than a sort of plea.
Antonia smiled: ‘Oh, Jane would never do that.’
‘Yes, I would. Do go to blazes, Antonia.’
‘But tell us—who are the letters from?’
‘“From”?’ echoed Lilia, then had to think again: this was hard to formulate. ‘How can they be “from” when they’re not
to
her?’
‘Still, come on, Jane. Otherwise one might guess.’
Jane, by one of her miracles, had recovered nerve, effrontery or whatever the moment took. She first put down her spoonful of gooseberries, as a sort of concession to their anxiety, then drew her fingers slowly across her forehead, as it were as a dragnet for her thoughts. That having failed, she regretfully shook her head, till all at once she grew bright with the perfect answer. ‘They are simply signed with a squirl.’
Antonia, stone-still while Jane deliberated, jumped as though something had struck the table: ostentatiously, however, she still said nothing, merely nodding across at Jane once or twice. In what had become an all-round hush Maud said grace loudly, then left the dining-room—in the stone passage outside she was to be heard scuffling and sparring with her familiar, Gay David, wrongly referred to by Lilia as a hobgoblin, who was not admitted by her to family meals. Smells of old oil from the incubator outside the kitchen for the first time travelled in through the open door: all the senses were sharpened. Fred raised his eyebrows, whistled a silent bar, let go the chair-back and followed Maud out. He was to be felt gone. Lilia it was who now, in a stony voice declared: ‘In that case, those letters are mine.’
‘Whatever makes you think that?’
‘The way you go on Antonia.
And
what Jane said.’
‘Poor Jane’s said practically nothing.’
Lilia said: ‘It’s been more than enough.’
‘I only do wish,’ said the girl, ‘that I had said absolutely nothing. Then there need never have been this. From now on I shall; I mean I shall not. But of course it’s been you, Antonia, who have done the talking; because you I imagine know more than I do, or may think you care very much more. I feel rather foolish—do you mind if I go?’ She deferentially sat, awaiting the word from one or another of the transfixed women. Not a sign having come, she seemed forced to add: ‘So, I suppose it
is
Cousin
Guy? I wondered, but I’d never have thought one could tie up a “G” into such a knot.’
‘It could be done,’ said Antonia, ‘and it was.’
‘The rest of the writing’s not really difficult, once you come to know it.’
‘How
dared
you, poking and prying?’ cried out Lilia.
Antonia, at nervous work with her thumb-nail dislodging a gooseberry seed from her lower teeth, broke off to say: ‘Lilia, I shouldn’t brood.’
‘And why should I not?’
‘I could hardly tell you.—Who
are
they to?’ Antonia asked off-hand, still giving attention to the seed.
‘They have no beginnings,’ Jane answered, weighing the question calmly. ‘I mean to say, they simply begin. So I cannot help. And I shall not show them; I cannot see why I should.’
‘Why indeed?’ asked Antonia, so agreeably as to make this all go flat. She could not even be bothered to speak again till she had finished tightening her pearl slip-knot and twisting her neck to see if she had choked herself. ‘Naturally, finding’s keeping,’ she then announced. Lilia’s failure to see things in that light was marked by an absolute absence of all expression—reaching round her, she began to stack plates on plates, dishes on dishes. But sweat broke out on her forehead and upper lip: it was afternoon, most brutal phase of the day, which had leapt upon and was demolishing the poor snow-woman. She forgot the plates and began to pluck at the deep V neck of her cotton dress, desperately trying to fan air down it; until the humidity starting up even in the insides of her elbows made her unjoint and drop her arms like a doll’s. She leaned back in her chair to gasp, and her back adhered like a stamp to the curved mahogany. Lilia’s being so humblingly overcome worked upon the others as nothing else could—Antonia writhed inside her own body; Jane turned away to contemplate a darkened oil-painting of hilly forests.
Lilia said: ‘I’m in no state to argue.
‘Then don’t worry.’
‘But it seems to me, private letters are private letters.’
‘That’s how it apparently seems to Jane.’
The girl remarked: ‘There’s a stag in that picture I never saw.’
‘They never, never were
to
her,’ Lilia averred, in a voice of not yet exhausted scorn.
Antonia shrugged. ‘She likes to feel that they are.’
That brought Jane back slowly from the painting, with something of its phantasmagoric and distant oddness still in her eyes. ‘Thank you for explaining for me,’ she said, without irony though also without the ironic love for Antonia she had seldom not shown. ‘You so nearly understand so well.’ In the act of getting up from her chair, she hesitated for a chivalrous moment towards Lilia, but after all could think of nothing to say, or at least of nothing not better left unsaid. So she quitted them, taking her plate and her father’s away with her and into the kitchen, where Kathie was sitting over her dinner.
Out through the kitchen back door, into the yard. The slate roofs sent shimmers up; the red doors, ajar, all seemed caught by a spell in the act of opening; white outbuildings tottered there in the glare. Grass which had seeded between the cobbles parched and, dying, deadened her steps: a visible silence filled the place—long it was since anyone had been here. Slime had greenly caked in the empty trough, and the unprecedented loneliness of the afternoon looked out, as through eyelets cut in a mask, from the archways of the forsaken dovecote. Not a straw stirred, or was there to stir, in the kennel; and above her something other than clouds was missing from the uninhabited sky. Nothing was to be known. One was on the verge, however, possibly, of more.