North Face (8 page)

Miss Searle, who had unearthed a remote mutual acquaintance at Oxford, was making the running, when Mrs Kearsey opened the door. She was talking charmingly over her shoulder, and patting her hair.

It may be that in Miss Searle’s subconscious this gesture had formed one of those linked associations which Pavlov demonstrated in connection with dogs’ dinners. Her voice trailed off. Miss Fisher, in whom the association was a fully conscious process, looked up with a smile already forming on her lips. However, the young man who followed Mrs Kearsey in was a stranger to both of them. He was thirty or a little less, fair-haired and buoyant; at the moment he was receiving Mrs Kearsey’s promise of tea with warmly expressed thanks. One had immediately the feeling that servants would do anything for him. Miss Fisher thought he looked attractive and good fun. Miss Searle, used to moving in an unregarded ocean of young men, dissociated him with Oxford by some instinctive process of which she was scarcely aware. She had an open mind about Cambridge, and indeed about everything else. His good looks, which were not insignificant, rang no bell for her. He had not in her view, an interesting face.

He acknowledged Miss Fisher and Miss Searle with graceful courtesy. It could somehow be sensed that he was a success with old ladies, too. Miss Searle did not take this in ill part; she liked good manners, and her work had inured her to deference from people not vastly remote in years. Miss Fisher was less pleased. Neither, however, had time to form conclusions; for the young man’s next acknowledgment had resolved itself into a start of surprise.

“Well, it can’t be! Ellen Shorland! I don’t believe it. Don’t tell me you’re actually staying here?”

“Yes,” said the girl. Her shyness, Miss Searle thought with sympathy, was really quite painful; she had blushed to the roots of her hair. After a pause she added, “Are you?”

“Just this moment arrived.” The young man swung himself with casual ease on to the arm of her chair. “Don’t tell me you’re on the point of leaving, or I shall howl like a dog.”

“No. I came today, too.”

“Of all the coincidences. Well, look here, if you’re not booked solid we simply must organise something. I’m quite non-attached; just came here on impulse, really. Don’t know this part of the world at all.”

“I’ve got quite a good map. Inch to the mile.”

“Oh, good work.” His approval was just a shade too prompt and practical; he added quickly, “I mean, they’re hard to get; I tried everywhere. Can I take a look at yours sometime?”

“I’ve got it here.” Before settling down to it he remembered to smile nicely at Miss Fisher and Miss Searle and to say, “You will excuse us, won’t you?”

“Of course,” said Miss Searle, “I have to go out now, in any case.” It was true that she felt a little cramped after the motorcoach; besides, they were a well-mannered couple and, she thought, deserving of tact. As she withdrew, she felt a little glow of selfless pleasure on their behalf. It must be delightful for them to meet like this, after the damping expectation of a holiday alone. Finding that Miss Fisher had followed her out, she said, smiling, “One of those happy coincidences that often lead to an engagement, don’t you think?”

Miss Fisher gazed at her, momentarily stricken dumb. One had grown used to making allowances for an almost unbelievable naiveté, but really! Of course, she was as blind as a bat without her glasses; but even if she had failed to see the look the young man had given the girl, just too soon, behind them, anyone who was all there would surely have felt it.

She remarked, with meaning, “Quite a surprise for both of them, I’m sure.”

“Oh! But surely not.” It was the tone, not the words, to which Miss Searle replied. She felt, after the first start, both distaste and resentment; she would have liked to point out to Miss Fisher that her calling, noble and indispensable as it was, did make for a one-sided view of life. A friend of Miss Searle’s, who was a welfare worker, often deplored the same tendency in herself; but
she
was decently aware of it.

“I don’t think,” she said, “that we really
need
to assume anything of that kind, do you? They seemed very healthy, natural young people, I thought.”

Miss Fisher was not given to the exact analysis of words: but Miss Searle’s serene and definitive use of these adjectives caused her to suppress a giggle. “I wouldn’t say no to that. The more health, the more nature, as you might say. But they’d better watch their step with Mrs K. She’s very fussy who she has here.”

Miss Searle decided that the conversation had become definitely unpleasant. (She also thought that it had become lower-middle-class, but did not register this supplementary opinion.) With a marked absence of reply, she walked out into the garden, where the deck-chair of Miss Fisher’s fruitless vigil still remained, looking restful in the late and relenting sun. Settling there comfortably and opening
Henry Esmond,
she entered a state where the wicked ceased from troubling. It was she, therefore, whom Neil greeted with half-absent friendliness as he came back, relaxed and momentarily released, from a day of exploration on the hidden cuffs. He was beginning to associate Miss Searle with the garden, like a summerhouse or a sundial, and to pause beside her as one might form a habit of pausing by a fountain to contemplate the fish.

To Miss Searle he came, quite genuinely, as a welcome surprise. She had been pre-occupied first by the effort to cleanse her mind of Miss Fisher’s innuendoes, and then by the concentration she still gave
Esmond
after however many readings. Now, by a happy prompting of instinct, she removed her glasses as she lowered the book; the effect that they were reading-glasses and unnecessary, even annoying at other times, was quite realistic.

Her wide-brimmed hat masked the premature strain-lines round her eyes, and left to the light a sensitive well-cut mouth. A civilised face, he thought, if a rather sterile one. He asked her what she was reading, and spent a comfortable half-hour with her discussing the novelists of the great age. Having had a strenuous day, he lowered himself on to the grass; Miss Searle considered offering her cushion, but refrained. What she believed herself to think was that it would break the flow of conversation; what she really thought was that, faced with a definite invitation to settle down, he would become restless and go away.

They had worked along to Anthony Hope, and were regretting together that
The Prisoner of Zenda
should have pushed the subtler
King’s Mirror
into undeserved neglect. “The psychology is so entirely convincing,” Miss Searle remarked. “It makes one realise how needless some of these unsavoury modern delvings really are.”

“I agree with you entirely.” He spoke, however, with that slight over-stress sometimes used by courteous people to hide a moment’s lapse of attention. Her work had sensitised her to such lapses; either this instinct, or a simpler one, made her look across the lawn in the same moment that he looked away. Ellen Shorland was standing at the end of the path. She had pulled on a white woollen sweater over her green dress. It was tight—with age and shrinkage, one could see, rather than by design, and indeed what would have been provocative on a woman more maturely formed only gave her slight body a schoolgirl’s look. She had one hand on the garden gate and was swinging it mechanically to and fro. Miss Searle thought her lacking in animation, almost sullen; it was certainly a great pity that want of confidence made her so defensive. The young man had obviously a cheerful open temperament, and few powers of introspection, she should really correct her manner if she wished to attract him, and judging by her blush when they met, Miss Searle felt justified in supposing that she did. He came at this moment out of the house, and ran down the path to join the girl at the gate. He said something in his lively assured voice—the words at that distance were inaudible—and they went out together. At the last moment the girl had returned his smile; but not, Miss Searle thought, with a really attractive spontaneity.

She was recalled by a nearer voice saying “We’ve acquired a honeymoon couple, I see.”

He had been talking, in the minutes before, with what for him was almost animation; she was a little jarred now by the dead emptiness of his tone. Probably he got enough of youthful spirits in termtime; she could sympathise with him in this. She was mainly concerned, however, with the unwelcome memory of Miss Fisher which his misconception had recalled. It lent emphasis to her reply.

“Oh, no. I believe little more than acquaintances. They met here just now, quite unexpectedly it seems. But the surprise was a pleasant one, I think.”

“I expect so.” His brief interest had evidently flagged. She tried, in vain, to remember where they had left the previous conversation; he was a man in whose presence pauses quickly became embarrassing. To bridge this one, she said, “They’ll certainly be late for dinner if they mean to go any distance. But perhaps they’re taking it out.”

“Which reminds me that I’m not. It must be time I thought about cleaning up.”

The same thought had occurred to Miss Searle, and reconciled her to his rather abrupt departure. Fifteen minutes later she paused at her glass and, after a moment’s hesitation, opened her handbag. The sun of the last two days was very trying to the skin. Her lips had become quite dry; she was glad she had remembered to buy a salve for them. This one, for the first time, was slightly tinted; but the assistant, a very helpful girl, had explained that though it was labelled as a lipstick, it was specially made for its soothing properties, in fact for practical purposes a salve; it was the type they called “Natural” and perfectly unobtrusive.

Peering carefully into the mirror, she put some on.

N
EIL HAD MADE HIMSELF
a rule, which he had never broken, not to take medinal more than one night in three. Tonight was only the second; so at twelve-thirty he switched on the light again, and began work on a Torquemada crossword which he had saved for some such occasion. Without reference-books he would not finish it; but what he would do would take him longer, a compensating advantage.

There were three clues relating to his own subject, which he solved quickly. One from Shakespeare teased him with half-memory; he lay staring at it, and wishing it were the third night instead of the second. His rule was of some standing, and dated from a time when he could afford to stand no nonsense from himself. Now, as far as he was concerned, the box of tablets might as well have been in a safe of which he did not know the combination. He had had influenza in London and the landlady, growing alarmed, had sent for the doctor, who had prescribed the medinal—irrelevantly, Neil had thought, and had said so. When the doctor—an observant student of humanity—had assured him that medinal was not addictive, he had been very rude. The medinal had arrived next day without further comment. He wondered sometimes, though not oftener than he could help, what would have happened if it had not. Lately things had improved a good deal. Until the night before last, he had had none for five days.

He applied himself to Torquemada again. “To lie in cold (eleven letters) and to rot.” Suddenly remembering, he pencilled in “obstruction” and was stone-walled again. He had never been defeated so quickly before, and felt that he was not going full out. It would be useless now to attempt sleep before three. The mechanism that settled these things was like a separate entity of which he had intimate, but quite external knowledge; as if somewhere in his brain lived a petty bureaucrat, a smug devotee of routine, to whose schedule he had to conform because argument was too wearisome to be worth while. At least he had learned how to entertain himself while he stood, so to speak, in the queue; he had a silly feeling that this annoyed the bureaucrat, withholding from him the spectacle of bored frustration which sweetened his sense of power.

His thoughts had begun to fly off at tangents, not in the looseness of coming sleep but with the wound-up busyness he knew too well. He put on his dressing-gown, sat up in bed, lit a cigarette, and set about the puzzle in a more systematic way. The needed effort still withheld itself. It often did. He was passing the time; and one does not, without some inner resistance, adapt oneself in a few months to a process one has despised for thirty years. Besides, it pointed out an inconsistency: if one was willing to kill time piecemeal, why jib at killing it altogether? This logic, since it seemed unanswerable, he let alone.

The few books he had brought were beside him on the table. The two thrillers he had read; the rest were major classics, large parts of which he knew by heart. Looking at them he felt the anticipatory staleness that comes with fatigue. “Very well then,” he said, almost aloud, as one speaks to an exasperating child, “what
do
you want to do? Think? All right, what about? Careful, now.”

He had an answer to this one. He was becoming morbidly self-centred; what he needed was to interest himself in other people. The two spinsters, for instance, the don and Miss What’s-it. They were probably around his own age; the don seemed a little older, the nurse a little younger, but that was largely conditioning, he thought. To start with something concrete, he speculated whether they were virgins. The don, obviously. The nurse, more doubtful; women in professions of this kind lost so many inhibitions, they gave little away. If she had had experience it had probably been below her real standard (she was far from stupid) and she had too much sense to dress it up, but would probably repeat it. The don, now, looked the type to believe in soul-mates. Her imagination would work strictly on the day-shift. As for the rest, she would hope uncomfortably that it was all right if people really loved each other.

At this point, his mind was arrested by an unsought memory of the girl who had come that day, standing and swinging the garden gate. He recalled his own remark about a honeymoon couple, which had sprung from an instant conviction that they were nothing of the kind. Doubt and hesitation, and a decision still ahead, had been written all over her. He did not know why he had said it; to find out what the don would say or out of some casual protective instinct towards the girl, born of a guess that they would have registered under the same name. But, of course, there was this business now about identity cards. It must make things awkward. At this point, something caused him to consult his watch. One-fifteen. Well, he remarked to himself with a rather forced brutality, she probably knew all about it by now. He could not much admire her taste; an obvious type, like an advertisement for shaving cream. A pity to have chosen him for the first attempt; he looked too self-satisfied to take much pains with his routine. It would be too bad if she were let in for any serious dependence on him. She didn’t look very well able to take care of herself.