Authors: Elizabeth Bowen
The servants locked the door below and went out to a wedding. Then there was silence: in the long pause like a frozen gesture, in which not a petal fell, an arc of emptiness spanned Cecilia’s horizon: she was so seldom alone. One of those small waves of country silence broke over London: she heard no traffic down in the Abbey Road. As though on a bare high hill from which for miles all round you can see no one approaching, she awaited herself with that constant question: what to do next?
The telephone’s positive silence, the mirrors reflecting her pacing and pausing figure, began to oppress Cecilia, who left the drawing-room and went upstairs. She looked into Emmeline’s room, which, with counterpane drawn up over the pillow, looked shrouded, as though no one slept here now. A friend’s room with its air of guarding a final secret is like a death-chamber; here, still unknown, the sleeper seems many times to have died. Did Emmeline still see trains rushing across the ceiling, or was there a face now? Did colourless restless wishes touch the edge of her consciousness? Women are too like each other and far too different. Cecilia, not going in, leant against the doorway trying to read the name of a book by the bed, and thought: “She is not my lover; she’s not my child.”
Though the idea of parting from Emmeline could seem intolerable there was not much more, it occurred to Cecilia, than the idea of company in her company. Saying: “I live with Emmeline,” she might paint for ignorant eyes, arid even dazzle herself for a moment with a tempting picture of intimacy. But she lent herself to a fiction in which she did not believe; for she lived with nobody.
Nobody waited for her at the door of her own bedroom. Cecilia went in, changed a necklace and turned to face Henry’s photograph. He had never seen Oudenarde Road; he and she from their end of London had not explored this neighbourhood slipping downhill: he had not known when he died that this house existed and that a shadowy part of his life would continue here. His ignorance made, for the moment, the room ghostly. Propped up in a frame on a mantelpiece against which he had never leaned, over a hearth before which he had not reflected—for like Emmeline Henry had been a great stander and leaner—he looked across at a bed in which he had never slept. Yet into these pillows Cecilia—her emotions becoming with solitude and the years ever more pointed and self-regarding—shed those tears of chagrin Henry had known so well. Before this looking-glass framed in its lights Cecilia, expectant, now hooked her own dress for parties with no one to touch a rufHe or smile at her in the glass. She nightly returned to this mirror, these pillows, her sense of being a far too general gift to the world: a rose in the public gardens, a novel for any subscriber to take out.
She wished it were midnight, but it was four o’clock. Nothing else paused; elsewhere London was humming. She thought: “I will not telephone; I will not look to see if the post has come.” Her life became visible in the hour like water poured into a glass; momentarily no one cast a shadow, momentarily not a bell rang. Slipping off her rings one by one, she heard each clink on the table-top. The glass-topped table, flounced like a shepherdess, with tapering stoppered bottles, attendants to vanity, and Venetian powder bowl, was in itself pretty: she exclaimed in thought: Mine, but nothing replied: Cecilia. In the cupboards her dresses hung bosom to bosom coldly, as though they had never been worn. She ran down like a clock whose hands falter and point for too long at one hour and minute: the clock stops dead. She dissolved like breath on a mirror and trailed away like an echo when nobody speaks again… . She thought of Henry, of Julian.
The telephone rang.
Cecilia plugged in her bedside telephone but did not immediately answer: she stood listening. The usual music became discordant—at once she felt how precious had been her solitude, that silence throughout her house with its archways and cool twisting stairs. She thought of her gay calm drawing-room with leisure written all over it, of those books to invite her leisure; how her bed and Emmeline’s had only a wall between. She felt herself torn from something… . Meanwhile, the stranger clamoured.
“Yes?” said Cecilia. “Oh, yes? … Do you? … ami? … how nice… . Shall we really? Very well, Tuesday week, eight o’clock. No, I’m alone, so happy: you know I am always happy alone.”
EMMELINE MET MARKIE AT CROYDON: he was so very late she feared he would miss the plane. In her thin grey coat and skirt she sat waiting under the skylight on that sexagonal seat round the little pharos of clocks. A huge blue June day filled the aerodrome and reflected itself in the hall: she heard a great hum from the waiting plane hungry for flight. Such an exalting idea of speed possessed Emmeline that she could hardly sit still and longed to pace to and fro—but that would annoy Markie who did not like to be made to feel late. At about twenty to one he fell out of a taxi and hurried towards her with papers under his arm.
At the plane tilted up on its tail in a vast cement space like a dancing-floor, Markie, who had not yet flown, glanced a trifle suspiciously: blown sideways by the propellers Emmeline gaily swung herself in ahead. Walking uphill into the front car they became encased in a roaring hum, a vibration that shook the ear-drums and, for some minutes while he arranged himself grimly, curdled his every thought: that summer, planes were not silent. Emmeline, intimating by gestures that for purposes of discomfort she had no stomach, took the place opposite him, facing back to the wings: they had a little table between. She was touched to discover that Markie had brought
The Tatler
, and wondered why.
The roar intensified, there was an acceleration of movement about the aerodrome as though they were about to be shot out of a gun; blocks were pulled clear and they taxied forward at high speed, apparently to the coast. For Markie the earth was good enough, he could have asked no better; he observed, however, from Emmeline’s face of delight that something had happened: earth had slipped from their wheels that, spinning, rushed up the air. They were off. Dipping, balancing, with a complete lack of impetus and a modest assurance the plane returned to her element over the unconcerned earth: an immense sense of ordinariness established itself in the car and Markie, having compelled the waiter to understand they would want two brandies, opened a rather dull report.
Her eyes kept imploring him to look down and enjoy Surrey. Surrey and Kent looked flatter and, like something with which one has ceased to have any relationship, noticeably less interesting—he had never liked either much. The grass, lawns and meadows, poorer in texture than he expected, looked like a rubbed billiard cloth. But to Emmeline some quite new plan of life, forgotten between flight and flight, seemed once more to reveal itself: she sat gazing down with intensity at the layout of gardens. No noise, no glass, no upholstery boxed her up from the extraordinary: as they smoothly mounted and throbbed through the shining element she watched trees and fields in the blue June haze take on that immaterial loveliness, that foreign and clear intensity one expects of the sky.
Markie looked up at her from the report a shade sternly; she pulled
The Tatler
towards her and looked at actresses. It was, however, impossible to stay stern with Emmeline, though she might sit among rows of indifferent business men looking rapt and silly. Her hat off, her hair caught light from the sky all round; her face with its glow of childish delight softened to tenderness when she looked his way. His senses recovering from a numbness that had spread from the ear-drums began to take in pleasure; some idea of adventure asserted itself through his waking faculties: she was lovely and opposite him, they were flying to Paris. He began to discount hearing, to be aware of noise as sensible, visible, inimical only when one attempted speech, as vibration whenever the fingertips touched an object, vibration of shadows and fringes of the silk curtains against the shining air. Inside, incredibly shadowy in a world of light, catching the full summer sun on its wings and fuselage and where the propellers made colourless discs of speed, the plane evenly passed to the coast, Kent drawn liquidly under it like a river.
Emmeline gave up the earth, but Markie, looking up two or three times from the report, found that though leaning back she was still smiling. Distracted, he pulled
The Tatler
towards him and wrote on the margin: “
What is the matter
?”
Taking the pencil, Emmeline wrote back: “
Happy
,” and twisted
The Tatler
round. Markie implied that, if that had been all it was, so, for the matter of that, was he. A few minutes later he was once more interrupted by Emmeline’s pushing towards him, with a faintly anxious expression, another page of
The Tatler
, with: “
What is the French for ‘interplay
’?” He jotted down some alternatives: she considered them. Evidently the Serbs had begun, if not to oppress her, at least to take up the foreground; which was enough to make Markie put the report down, pick up the pencil and wonder what to write next. Close in the strong light and distant in roaring silence her face appeared transparent; watching the thoughts come up like shadows behind it he thought of the Scottish queen’s ill-fated delicate throat, down which, says a chronicler, red wine was seen to run as she drank.
She laughed and wrote suddenly: “
The Marseillaise makes Cecilia weep
.” He jotted with emphasis at the edge of a column: “
Extreme sensibility
.”
“
Nice
.”
“
In its place
.”
Emmeline seemed to think this lacked point; instead of replying she picked up
The Tatler
and began to look through, with an earnestness that was annoying, some Ascot groups which delighted her: she kept pointing willowy lacy ladies out with her thumb. Leaving her with the paper he tore a leaf from his pocket-book, bit his pencil and for a moment paused.
“
Can’t be true
“, he wrote. “
Can’t believe we’re together 2 whole days. You ARE nice to me
.”
Emmeline looked up from the paper, expression saying so much that there seemed little to add. She wrote back, however, “
There are those 2 Serbs
.”
Markie, smiling, crumpled one leaf and tore out another. The manner of this correspondence began to appeal to him: deliberation unknown in speaking, boldness quite unrebuked by its own vibrations and, free of that veil of uncertainty and oblivion that falls on the posted letter, the repercussions upon her of all he said. The indiscretions of letter-writing, the intimacies of speech were at once his.
While he pondered, while he sat writing idly and slowly, a bright white wave broke on their window: they cut through a cloud. Emmeline once more looked down; the serrated gold coast-line and creeping line of the sea were verifying the atlas. An intenser green-blue, opaque with its own colour, showed far down in a sparkling glassiness their tiny cruciform shadow: they were over the sea. Very white cumulus clouds afloat like unperilous ice-bergs along a line of blue ether were their companions: over France more glittered, aerial dazzling cliffs. Like islands, each indented and charactered by their crumbling shadows, the clouds round the plane invited the mounting foot, and though the plane still held among all these distracting companions her forward course, one had the sensation less of direct and purposeful transit than of a pleasure-cruise through this archipelago of the cloud-line, over shadowless depths.
Enchanted, returning her eyes for a moment, Emmeline found his note.
“
Or aren’t you? These two days must be intolerable or perfect. You must know what I want: all I want. If I could marry, it would be you. I don’t know if you know what this means. I didn’t think this could happen. For God’s sake, be kind to me. Understand
?”
When at last, raising her eyes from the paper she looked his way, he was no longer waiting. Turned sideways, he looked at the air as though the note were forgotten. Perhaps he hoped little, perhaps he was certain of her. Understanding more sharply all she had understood weeks ago, uncertain less what than how to reply, she bent her head and began to draw patterns vaguely on the back of his note. Feeling of all kinds had stolen from her in this cold new reality of the cloudscape; conscious of the remoteness and uneagerness of his attitude she felt he, too, had written what he had written not on impulse, in urgency, but in a momentary coldness and clearness of feeling that was showing him where they stood. Stayed by this feeling of unimmediacy she reviewed one by one the incidents of their friendship, each distinct from the other as cloud from cloud but linked by her sense of something increasing and mounting and, like the clouds, bearing in on her by their succession and changing nature how fast and strongly, though never whither, they moved. She was embarked, they were embarked together, no stop was possible; she could now turn back only by some unforeseen and violent deflection—by which her exact idea of personal honour became imperilled—from their set course. She could not see at what point the issue became apparent, from what point she was committed: committed, however, she felt.
Markie started, took back the paper and added hurriedly, cross-wise: “
We could not marry
!’ Returning the note he paused, so clearly waiting for her to answer that with an odd smile she wrote: “
Let us talk in Paris
.”
“
No more to say
.”
They looked at each other, and though their eyes never met without, on her part, a quick start of something more than emotion, the length and serious quality of this look—in which consideration, on her side gentle, on his searching, still played more part than feeling—pointed a pause in which both felt something gained or lost, though neither, perhaps, knew which. The aeroplane, mounting a little, crossed the pale French coast of dunes stained by shadows and forests; far off they saw the hazy mouth of an estuary, a river spanned further up by a bridge or shadow. Soon France was mapped out in pink fields, in pale and dark green fields; unlike England, more reasonable and distinct.