North Face (21 page)

“It’s all right,” she said. “There’s a peace on. Things like this are happening all over England.”

She spoke quite naturally; and, remembering how easily her shyness came to the surface as a rule, he guessed she must have been preparing this effort for some time. “We’ve broken our third plate, anyhow,” he said. “And Crown Derby at that.” It was an excuse to smile. Almost any other would have done.

“Well,” said Ellen briskly, “we swore to be rough about it, however embarrassing it was. The first step is to admit it embarrassing, I suppose.”

“You’re telling me.” They had both, however, relaxed in their chairs. The kitten, dimly aware of some change in its resting-place, shot out its prickly claws and sheathed them again.

“I suppose,” she said, “it’s definite now that we’ll have to put up somewhere here?”

“I don’t see what else. It wouldn’t be so bad if Mrs K were on the phone. The fact that she’ll probably sit up for us till midnight, voicing her fears aloud, is going to give us a build-up we could do without for a start.”

Ellen stroked a finger down the kitten’s spine; an electric ripple of fur ended in a twitch of its pointed tail. “After all, we’re never likely to meet any of them again.”

Neil forbore to tell her that this was one of humanity’s less reliable bits of wishful thinking. Her determined cheerfulness had stirred something in his mind. It was incredible he should have forgotten; but there had been so much else to think about. There had been, besides, something about the transient Mr Phillips easy to forget, a certain essential inconsequence. It was unlikely, though, that anyone else at Wier View would see it in that light.
“Two
men, my dear, in one week …” He looked up, refusing, for a moment, to accept the fact that there was nothing one could say. Their eyes met.

“Look here,” she said, “please don’t worry about this. It doesn’t matter. It never really matters what people think.”

“I’ll look after all that. I’ve had a certain amount of practise in making people see sense.”

“Of course it’s all right. I’m not bothering about it at all. What’s really on my mind is that I’ve hardly got any money with me. Can you lend me some?”

“Well, good lord,” he began, “seeing this was all my fault …” and stopped; of course he couldn’t settle her hotel bill for her. There must be any number of people, he supposed, who would carry all this off without batting an eyelid. He felt an intimate, secret pleasure in the fact that she wasn’t one of them. “We’ll fight that out later on,” he said, and gave her a couple of pounds; at which point they both became aware of the barmen, watching the transaction with interest. Suddenly, helplessly, they both began to laugh. The kitten looked resentful, and bicycled with its claws.

“I can’t help it,” said Ellen presently, and then, “I wonder what happens if you meet a gipsy and
don’t
buy any lace?”

“God knows. It’s too good to be true, isn’t it?” What he really meant was the diabolic perfection of the timing; they were neither one thing nor the other, and too much could be understood between them, but not enough. It was, for a moment, purely exasperating that he couldn’t remark on this point to her.

“By the way,” he said, “I’d better order dinner.” He did so, and came back with a couple of sherries. He had forgotten all about Templeton by this time, and only remembered when he started his drink and found that it didn’t feel like the first of the evening.

Ellen, looking doubtfully at her own, said, “No, but this makes three. You left me with one, and I had another while you were gone because the barman looked as if he thought I should.”

“Good. Let’s drink to the gipsy. We haven’t tried that yet.”

“I feel much better already,” said Ellen presently.

“So do I. If we’d had any sense, we’d have got down to this sooner.”

They smiled at each other; the half-amused private smile of people who are aware of being a little lit-up, but not too much and in company so trustworthy that it cannot matter. The exchange of this confidence made them finish their drinks absently, and evolve a number of small jokes in order to smile again. It was not for some time that Ellen remembered she had not been to the desk yet about a room.

“I fixed that for you.” Once again he felt the unreality of explanations. “That was all right, because I’m not staying here myself. I meant to have told you. I’m waiting for a divorce, and—well, the law needs a long spoon, like the devil. It’s better to give it a bit of a margin.”

She had been playing with the kitten, which now curled round her hand, all teeth and claws, to point out that it was being neglected. She let it worry her fingers as if she did not feel it.

“And you’ve spent all this time,” she said, “bothering about me.”

“Well, naturally. My part’s purely technical. Besides …” What he had been about to say he was not sure, but this was not the moment to say it. He unhooked the kitten from her hand instead. “I fixed up at some bed-and-breakfast place I passed on the way here. It seemed rather an idiotic-looking manoeuvre to leave unaccounted for. I was going to tell you, though, in any case.”

Ellen stroked the kitten, which was too young for a soothing technique and resented it; she seemed a little insensitive to its reactions. “It must be hateful, feeling you’re living under suspicion as if … How perfectly disgusting it is, the whole principle of this thing.”

“I suppose it is. It hasn’t arisen much with me. But the thing’s almost through now; and apart from me, it would be a bit hard on my wife if it came unstuck.” Finding it didn’t matter now, he went on, “They want to get married before the baby’s born.”

“Oh, I see.” He could feel her struggling desperately with her own inadequacy, and was unhappy not to be able to help. Presently she said, “You haven’t any children?”

“Not now.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t think about it much. One has to cut free of things when what’s left is mainly destructive. It’s like surgery, I suppose.”

She said, half to herself, “If one can”; and it was then that he noticed for the first time today (probably because it was the first time he had looked for it) the chain he had seen round her neck on the beach, just showing inside her collar.

Not hearing till too late the hardening in his own voice, he said, “Even a limb becomes destructive, you know, after it’s dead.”

For a moment something showed in her face which was not far from anger; but almost at once it changed to gentleness and remorse. Wanting neither to accept it nor to hurt her by rejecting it, he found a resource in the kitten. It was getting fractious, by now, from too much notice and sitting up past its bedtime, and responded to his advances by darting up Ellen’s arm and scrambling about precariously on the back of her neck. They laughed, the tension broken; Ellen fumbled after it, wincing as its claws caught in her hair.

“He’ll scratch you. Here, let me.”

He came behind her chair, and got hold of the creature round the middle. Its little body was soft and wiry, helpless and furiously vital. Her hair tangled itself round his fingers; its human texture, set against the feel of fur, an oddly exciting contrast different from any separate touch. When he had disentangled it, managing not to pull, she said, “Thank you. How strong they are for their size,” and took it from him. It squirmed crossly, impatient at being suspended so long in their meeting hands.

“We’d better do something about this meal,” he said, “before everything eatable’s gone.”

He ladled the kitten into the chair he had left. It stretched on the warmed cushion, closed its hazy blue eyes, sighed through its nose, and poured itself into the benign slumber of infancy. Neil gave it a grateful stroke as they went.

In the dining-room they ate submissively what there was, talked a great deal about things of no importance, and had some lager, the house having run out of almost everything else. It was light, but added a certain gentle persuasiveness to what they had had already. The waiter, a sociable soul whose life was on the whole a dull one, became noticeably attentive to their table; and, getting a little above themselves, they played exhibitionistically up to him. During one of his enforced absences Neil said suddenly, “Good God. What on earth are we eating?”

Ellen concentrated dimly. “Pink blancmange, I think, with something mixed in. Semolina, is it? And bits of cake.”

“But the taste.”

“It’s not exactly a taste. More like a smell that gets in your mouth. Perhaps they used bath-salts to colour it with.”

“Where’s the menu gone? I collect the names they think up for things like this. I hope it’s in French.”

“Chariot Russ,” said a helpful voice over his shoulder. “You shouldn’t have sat about out there till the pruins was off. I was wondering how soon you’d become alive to it, as they say.” Studying Ellen’s face, Neil suspected that the waiter had given her a benevolent wink before departing.

Over the coffee, Neil was visited with an inspiration. “What about the castle? After all, it’s what we came to do. There’s a moon up, now.”

“It will be locked up,” said Ellen; and then, “still, the outside would look nice by moonlight, I expect.”

The little town was almost asleep already. In the square a few decorous couples were virtualistically walking-out. A cat shot across a road in the agarophobic way of cats, becoming leisured and graceful in the shadow of a wall. It was growing cool; Ellen, when she went up to her room, had put her white sweater on. Her hair was freshly brushed; in the colourless light she looked very virginal, slight and young.

A last band of tarnished gilt still hung in the west, so that the dim oil-light in the houses below it looked like the sky shining through. It was a still evening; scents of hidden roses and of box hung about the gardens in motionless clouds; one walked through edges of scent as one walks through the edge of shadows.

They were silent at first. This was partly because the fresh air had been rather revealing, and they were going through private tests to be sure that they were sober enough for nothing to show. The outward aspect of this enquiry, at least, gave satisfactory answers. (“I can stand well enough,” thought Neil, hazily recalling Cassio on a like theme, “and I can speak well enough. This is my right hand and this is my left.”) The moon did not seem, like the sunset, too good to be true; it was what one had a right to expect, indeed obvious and inevitable. It was the past, not good enough to be true, which was receding into fantasy. (“God’s above all … For my own part, no offence to the General, or any man of quality, I hope to be saved.”) The tree-roofed lane to the castle opened before them like a cave.

It became evident, when they were inside, why the courting couples in the square had been so circumspect and prim. The others were here. They lined the track, in an avenue as regular as that of the trees, invisible against the hedges till one was within a yard or two; motionless, and so silent that the rare murmur of a monosyllable sounded overt. But the lane, like the square, stood for a definite gradation in the progress of love, all the interlocked shadows were vertical. In this small quiet town there were none of the makeshifts which, in city spaces, contrive to look at the same time furtive and defiant. For those who wanted it, the dark countryside offered the same shelter as to the foxes and the birds; the lane had a prestige.

Ellen, picking her way over unseen ruts which the dry weather had hardened, wondered whether when two couples met coming or going they acknowledged one another, or preserved the convention of solitude which was clearly the rule of the place. Tonight, though, strangers were present; something indefinable, like interruptions in an electric current, made her aware that as they passed all the regular members broke off their silent concerns and, in deeper silence, stared. When she found that this caused her no real discomfort, she knew that she shouldn’t have had the lager, but didn’t care.

Her foot turned on a sharp edge of hardened mud; she gave a startled gasp as she got her balance again.

“Careful,” said Neil softly, and slid his hand under her arm.

This was not only more comfortable, but, as she at once discovered, much more decorous and correct. She no longer felt conspicuous when they passed the next radar-beam from the hedge. It seemed natural too, that his voice had dropped to just the same pitch as the infrequent voices between the trees.

The track widened; there was a smell of wood-smoke; against a gap in the trees a block of shadow showed, the roof of the caravan. From inside it came suddenly the thin crying of a baby, and a blurred murmur; then both died away. Involuntarily Ellen faltered in a step, and hung back.

“It’s all right. They’ve turned in.”

He had whispered—not to wake them, perhaps—and had tightened her arm in his, pulling her against his side. When, presently, they met the first ambulant couple returning down the lane, the silent circumnavigation, the convention that they had not seen each other, followed exactly the etiquette that she had imagined.

The walk had become rather forgetful of its destination, and it was with a sense of abruptness and surprise that, rounding a bend, they found themselves at the wooden gates of the castle grounds. The lane led nowhere else; hence its popularity. Beside the gates was the cottage lodge where the caretaker lived. Ellen, feeling shy again, slid away to try the catch of the doors.

They were locked, of course. There was an interval of uncertain pause. To accept defeat at once meant a clear choice between walking back again, and adopting with no more pretence the ritual of the lane.

On Neil’s side, this was complicated by something more positive. Not to put too fine a point on it, he wanted to show off. He had not altogether stood out today for practical efficiency; now, under the influence of the lane, the moonlight, emotion and several drinks, he wanted to compensate for this, not by being practically efficient but by some lawless defiance of circumstance and fate. Pushing self-criticism overboard, he ran an eye, calculatingly, along the shadowy line of the wall.

Though it was high, it looked like child’s play. Most of it was simply the old outer rampart of the castle, the broken upper courses filled in with dry-walling. The old wall (they had begun by silent consent to prowl along it) went in many places right to the top. Its stones were massy, often the size of boulders, and roughly joined.