North Face (3 page)

Mrs Kearsey came in with tea, a large plate of bread and butter, and some more scones. She flicked at Miss Searle and Miss Fisher a concealed look which had something of conscience about it. Two minutes later she came in again, with a boiled egg.

“One shouldn’t spoil them,” she said with guilty brightness. “I warned him not to expect it again! But you know what the food is, travelling nowadays. I always do think the rationing comes hard on these tall men.”

Miss Searle said nothing. Years of comparison between the endowments of men’s and women’s colleges had left their mark. Miss Fisher gave a little smile, whether of irony or approval it would have been hard to say, and smoothed the hem of her dress over a stocking knee.

“Now I
shall have to hurry him up,” said Mrs Kearsey, rapidly filling-in Miss Searle’s rather palpable silence. It seemed, from the sound, that she had needed to go no further than the foot of the stairs.

Miss Fisher thrust her needle carefully through a stitch, a little further than one does when about to continue. Miss Searle picked up her cup, and had raised it to her lips before becoming aware of the cold dregs at the bottom. There was a tiny pause, like the moment in a darkening theatre when the rustle of programmes ceases to be heard.

The door opened. They were exposed to the first reactions of a man tired, hungry, unkempt after rejecting the opportunity to be tidy, and not totally lacking in convention, who finds himself confronted with two strange women, to whom he must make conversation while eating alone.

It was not a happy moment for anyone. Neil was awkwardly aware that his face had slipped. His social conditioning had returned with force after a single glance at Miss Searle; he knew he must look as if he had slept out. Miss Searle, who in her early twenties had suffered agonies (now almost hidden from memory) at the dances to which she had dutifully gone, felt the aura of male negativism like a cramp in the back of her neck. Miss Fisher came off best. She had had to encounter many disagreeable and defensive people, and was interested besides. Her first instincts were clinical; she wondered what he was convalescing from. His deep tan, combined with his spareness, had suggested tuberculosis until she noticed that his condition was too hard for this. Provisionally, she decided he might have been a prisoner with the Japanese. There was a certain look about the eyes; and beside … But, the occasion being a social one, she was as careful as Miss Searle not to take a second glance at his hair, in which, flattened by a hasty brushing, the dead yellow-white stripe across the forehead assaulted the eye as violently as a facial scar.

Introductions were exchanged; the visitor acknowledged them with stiff little bows, and apologised for himself; he had been travelling all night, he explained. Miss Searle almost said they had heard as much, but changed her mind; he looked so guarded that even this seemed too personal an intrusion. Aloud, she said that travelling nowadays was nothing short of an ordeal, and that of course they quite understood.

Miss Fisher, with one part of her mind, was thinking. The time he must have been repatriated, they ought to have put more flesh than that on him by now: nursed him in one of these makeshift temporary dumps, perhaps. He had no scarring from boils or jungle-sores, she noticed, and she left the diagnosis open; for her personality hung divided. The voice, the carriage, the travel-stained clothes which carried for her the stamp of a lordly indifference, pulled the secret cords of her imagination. Beyond its façade of washed tile and chromium, a casement opened in a mysteriously intact ivory tower.

Seized by an adolescent shyness, she remembered with comfort her nylon stockings, anchors of self-confidence in an uncertain world. Flexing her ankles becomingly, she extended them a little. Unhappily, it was only Miss Searle’s eye which was caught by the movement. Mr Langton was looking, with an embarrassed formality, from the tea-table to Miss Searle.

“No, no; we finished long ago. That’s yours.”

Feeling uncomfortable and inhibited, Neil dissected one of the scones, which would have been an easy mouthful if he had been alone. He cheered himself by remembering that, except for breakfast and supper, this was the last meal to which he need ever be in. Meanwhile, since he looked like a tramp, he had better make some effort not to eat like one. He resented this social necessity, as he had come to resent most others. Conscientiously, he asked them what the weather had been like in this part of the world.

Relieved, they informed him between them that he had just missed some terrible days, and that the local people predicted a fine spell now. Neil expressed pleasure; he was doing his best, and did not know that he sounded like someone receiving information about Patagonia. Discovering the egg, and at the same time losing all enthusiasm for food (this often happened now) he asked if the place were a good one for walking, just in time to avert an abysmal pause.

They were both aware, before they had carried this topic far, that the question had only aimed at embarking them on something which would need the minimum of concentration and reply. Most of the running was made by Miss Searle, who tried, by an intelligent impersonal manner, to dissociate herself from Miss Fisher’s hosiery display. She was almost physically embarrassed by women whose manner altered in the presence of men. Owing to the bad weather and her cold, most of her information had been acquired at second-hand, and covered a radius of about three miles. It gradually emerged, from Mr Langton’s civil replies, that his notion of moderate exercise was in the region of twenty. Conversation flagged again.

Suddenly finding her voice, Miss Fisher said, “Do for goodness’ sake make a proper tea. We had our turn making pigs of ourselves, before you came.”

“I’m doing fine,” said Neil, much relieved by her comfortable commonness; he had hoped that all his fellow-guests would be of this unexacting kind. It was past the season for well-to-do holidays. He had placed Miss Searle at once as a schoolmistress, and wondered what she was doing here at the beginning of term.

Miss Searle, who had failed to detect the signs of an even unconventional donnishness, was making the same speculation. She noticed his hands, long, bony, and, she thought, scholarly; failing to notice their rigidly controlled flexibility, and a tensile strength which reflected experience alone does not impart. Pleasantly conscious of the contrast between Miss Fisher’s voice and her own, she said, “One’s really very fortunate if one can get away at this time of year. I was teaching in schools before I came back to Oxford, and I used always to feel very ill-used at being fetched back at the beginning of the September weather. It’s so often the loveliest of the year.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Langton. There was an awkward silence; he stirred his tea. In the manner of a man keeping himself up with difficulty to a resolution, he added flatly, “I’m a schoolmaster myself.”

“Indeed?” Perhaps he was taking a grace-term. “What is your subject?”

“Classics.”

His taciturnity, she thought, verged on the brusque. Having volunteered so much, he must surely expect some kind of comment; perhaps he was merely shy. She checked herself on the verge of asking whether he had been at Oxford; this would lead, inevitably, to dates, and Miss Searle often thought she had aged a good deal less than some of her contemporaries. She waited, expecting him to name his present school; but this he showed no sign of doing.

“I can’t, I suppose, possibly have seen you at Winchester?” she asked, to remind him of this omission. “I’ve a nephew there I visit now and again.”

“No. I think not.”

His face, and his voice, were simply a full-stop.

Not since her own schooldays had Miss Searle felt such a helpless sense of mortification. She opened her bag, and aimlessly looked inside it.

Suddenly he looked up, as if, by some delayed process, he had only just heard himself. With a difficult, painstaking smile he added, “Perhaps I’ve got a double there.”

Forced as the smile had been, it had held something more than recollected manners; an instinctive kindness seemed to move in it faintly, like old habit overlaid. It restored to his mouth for a moment a guarded humour, and still more guarded idealism, which had, perhaps, once been characteristic. But it came too late for Miss Searle, whom the preceding snub had unnerved past all perception. She murmured something, without looking up, about her memory for faces being very poor.

“You won’t have time for much of a holiday, will you, before the schools go back again?”

It was Miss Fisher, rushing blithely in past the warning signs. Her voice, however, had not the note of enquiry so much as of an instinctive solicitude. Perhaps for this reason, it sounded commoner than ever; when she said “the schools,” asphalt playgrounds labelled “Boys” and “Girls” leaped to the mind. Miss Searle, waiting, felt quite sorry for her in advance.

Mr Langton turned round. Relief showed in his face, relaxing the hard downward lines which were like, and unlike, the prematurely ageing lines of work and worry in the very poor.

“Are you in the profession too, Miss—er—I’m sorry …?

“Fisher’s the name.” Her evident pleasure in the question, so clearly a red-herring, faintly amused Miss Searle. “No, I’m not that brainy. I’m a nurse—a ward sister, matter of fact.”

He proceeded, promptly, to draw her out about hospital nationalisation. While he talked, a different personality emerged, like the reviving stuff of routine. He could be imagined dealing competently, but not without some genuine feeling, with the awkwardness of boys at Sunday tea-parties, the fuss of parents, the recurrent feuds of the staff. Even now, when the manner was quite clearly self-protective, it somehow failed to suggest an uncaring exploitation. Miss Fisher gave of her best. She had forgotten her stockings, and had crossed her legs indifferently, at the calf.

Miss Searle’s cold, which had only begun last night, began to advance into its second stage with the quickened tempo often observed in the evening hours. Her skin crept and winced, her back ached, a feeling of sodden thickness spread from her face to her brain. She had to get out her handkerchief, whose size embarrassed her. It was chilly upstairs, and her hurt pride flinched from open retreat. If she had been staying with Muriel, she would have had a bedroom fire and tray.

“What our boys are worrying about,” Miss Fisher was saying, “isn’t their pay and hours and all that. What have they got to lose? They’re working round the clock for pocket-money, as it is. It’s the way these Civil Service types gum everything up. It’s bad enough now, waiting three months for a permit to build a new sluice, before they start on the patients. You can’t fit an emergency into a buff form; and some of these forlorn-hope treatments, that
may
come off, are off the track and may be expensive. By the time it’s been pushed through a few in-trays and out-trays and passed-to-you-please, where’s the case going to be? Fixed up tidily after the postmortem, waiting for the flowers to arrive.”

“I suppose so. Excuse me; I have to unpack.”

The door closed quietly. Miss Fisher, who had not nearly finished, was drawing breath for the next sentence before she was well aware that he was gone. The displaced air of the room seemed to snap together behind him, as if at the contact of some hidden violence not expressed in sound.

Presently Miss Searle said, “What an extraordinary man.” She spoke with emphatic disapproval, and at once felt obscurely that she had put herself at a disadvantage.

“Not what you might call forthcoming,” said Miss Fisher. Her feelings had been not less wounded than Miss Searle’s before; the fact that, unlike Miss Searle, she partly blamed herself (for the professional feeling had persisted) made her feel no better. Suddenly the room enclosed a confidential warmth of female understanding.

“Your cold
has
come on heavy. You ought not to be up.” Miss Fisher felt that Miss Searle, who had established common ground only to have it kicked rudely from under her, was the more deeply injured party. Her voice expressed this, and she felt that it was not resented. “Why don’t you pop into bed? I know how it is with landladies, you don’t like to put on them; but I’ll ask her for a tray and just run up with your supper myself. It’s no trouble, truly.”

“Oh, but on your holiday. I couldn’t think of it.” But she mopped her nose, encouraging further persuasion. The thought of facing at supper both a headache and Mr Langton’s aggressive reticence, was too much. She yielded. Miss Fisher, who said she never used her hottie unless it got much colder, than this, promised to fill it and bring it along.

She had intended to do this immediately, but paused to pick up the book which lay, forgotten, at the foot of Miss Searle’s chair. She could bring it along with the bottle; but, seeing the title, she was fascinated by its bulk. Dimly recollecting a selected textbook at school, she had conceived
THE CANTERBURY TALES
as a thin feuilleton. The archaisms within made her see Miss Searle with new eyes. A brain like that was enough to choke off any man; Miss Fisher’s envy was for the first time mixed with a protective feeling.

Idly she continued to thumb the pages, finding odd passages which spelling and inflection did not wholly disguise, and feeling pleased with herself for getting some sense out of it. This one,
The Miller’s Tale,
seemed homely stuff enough. Presently she paused, startled; turned up a glossary she had discovered at the end; and read, incredulously, the passage again.

Well,
said Miss Fisher to herself. Doesn’t that show you? I’ve met
that
sort before. Sit talking to the Vicar all through visiting hours, but when they’re coming round from the anaesthetic, you have to keep the junior pro out of the room. And then she has the nerve … It won’t hurt her to let her know I had a look inside. In hospital, I’d be running round on duty with a cold no worse than hers. Better take her temperature, though, I suppose.

Miss Searle, whom she found pottering in a dressing-gown, received the bottle cordially and got into bed. Waiting for the thermometer to register, Miss Fisher noticed the fineness of her white silk nightgown and bed-jacket; also their complete opacity and lack of moulded cut. They combined, mysteriously, the utmost fastidiousness with complete absence of allure. There was a faint scent of eau de cologne in the room.