7

As Robert had remarked, there had always been a good deal of running to and fro between Tory’s house and his own, which is often so between friends who live close together, especially when one is as vague a housewife as Beth. Robert had a masculine dislike for all these little errands and messages, the borrowings and gossipings, the shared letters, the little screws of salt and butt-ends of loaves; even the gifts irked him – the tit-bits and samples of Tory’s cooking, pats of cream-cheese and bowls of lemon-curd. His own mother had taken a pride in never finding herself without supplies.

He tried to explain to Beth the usefulness, for instance, of a slate on the kitchen wall on which she might jot down oddments as they dwindled. ‘What a very good idea!’ she had exclaimed, wondering why no one had ever thought of it before. She hung the slate up at once and wrote ‘pearl barley’ upon it. After six weeks Stevie took her slate back and rubbed off ‘pearl barley’ and did a drawing in its place.

‘Prue, darling!’ Beth called suddenly in the middle of her morning writing. ‘Will you pop into Tory’s for a spoonful of mustard?’ Her mind seemed to divide sometimes and run forward along two different tracks, so that now, with her imaginary family sitting round listening to the reading of the will, she could still find herself thinking about lunch. ‘Robert will hate his cold beef without any,’ she went on and as she spoke she wrote the words: ‘When Allegra turned away to the window, the lawyer’s voice became a faint . . .’ She crossed out ‘faint’ and wrote ‘vague’. But a vague what?

‘Isn’t there any?’ Prudence asked in a grumbling tone. ‘And the toilet roll’s finished, too, in the downstairs lav.’

‘Oh dear! Never mind. These things happen in the best regulated houses, so naturally they happen much more often in ours.’

‘Use your brains, dear. There are those paper serviettes with the Union Jacks on we had for Stevie’s party. You really must be a little more resourceful. You have got spoilt by living in the lap of luxury. What do you suppose our soldiers did at the front?’

‘Well, fetch the mustard, dear, and give Tory my love. I will pay it back when the grocery comes.’ She dipped her pen into the ink. ‘Vague what?’ she began to wonder once more. ‘This isn’t writing,’ she thought miserably. ‘It is just fiddling about with words. I’m not a great writer. Whatever I do someone else has always done it before, and better. In ten years’ time no one will remember this book, the libraries will have sold off all their grubby copies of it second-hand and the rest will have fallen to pieces, gone to dust. And, even if I were one of the great ones, who, in the long run, cares? People walk about the streets and it is all the same to them if the novels of Henry James were never written. They could not easily care less. No one asks us to write. If we stop, who will implore us to go on? The only goodness that will ever come out of it is surely this moment now, wondering if “vague” will do better than “faint”, or “faint” than “vague”, and what is to follow; putting one word alongside another, like matching silks, a sort of game.’

‘There is a green hill far away,’ Stevie sang coming in from school, slamming a door. ‘Without a city wall.’

Prudence had knocked on Tory’s door and presently heard her coming very slowly along the passage. She wasn’t in the least prepared for the metamorphosis of Tory, with her hair loose on her shoulders, her mouth colourless. She forgot all about the mustard in her agitation. ‘What is wrong? Why are you in your dressing-gown?’

‘My legs,’ Tory said faintly, and sat down on the hall chair. ‘I scalded them last night.’

Tory began to count to steady herself. Beth was there before she reached thirty.

‘My dear pet, don’t worry. Robert’s here. He is just coming.’ She knelt by Tory and took her hands and began chafing them. ‘You’re frozen. Poor dear Tory!’

Robert came into the hall and saw Tory looking up at him with the strained and anxious expression of a hurt child.

‘Some of the skin came away with my stockings,’ Tory began, and then she retched a little, her hands over her face.

Robert put down his case and lifted her. He carried her into her little sitting-room and put her on the sofa.

‘Beth, would you remove this child,’ he said angrily, for Stevie had come in, and was insinuating herself into a good vantage ground.

‘Yes, I will sit her up at the table and let her begin her lunch or she will be late back to school. I will come back later, Tory. You are in safe hands, my dear. Robert will know more than I what to do. I have put two kettles on,’ she added proudly, feeling like a doctor’s wife in a novel. Stevie went unwillingly, for her father had now lifted Tory’s gown and was peering at the watery, puffy skin.

‘Tory, what is the meaning of this?’ he asked presently, his head bent over his case while he snipped at something she could hear, with some little scissors. She tried not to imagine what he was going to do.

‘I didn’t mean that, as you know. But why did you not come in last night?’

‘But as soon as you could? And all this morning. Surely you have deliberately stayed away.’

‘You insist on an answer because you know it is one it will give you pleasure to hear. You want me to tell you I didn’t come because I am in love with you. Only the very words and me saying them will satisfy you. You deserve to be struck off the roll, or whatever it is.’

He shut his case and went out without a word. ‘I am playing merry hell with him,’ she thought complacently, her head a little lightened, empty, with fatigue and nausea. When he came back, though, he looked very calm and not in the least mortified by her words, and was carrying a hot-water bottle which he laid to the soles of her feet.

‘I’ll send Prudence in to make you a cup of tea,’ he said, and he looked very stiff and formal, except that he had one of her shoes in each hand. ‘And I’ll come in this evening after surgery.’

The day seemed pleasantly disorganised to Stevie. As there was no one to spur her on with her dinner she leant back in her chair, her eyelids at half-mast, her head on one side. It sickened her to look at such a quantity of food that must be got inside her, unless by a miracle, by her own craft or the weakness of adults, she might be let off.

When her father came in she squeezed a couple of tears, one from each eye, and forced them down her cheeks.

She put it out and the tears accumulated beautifully and spilt over; she felt them everywhere, in her throat, behind her nose, her breast was full of them, her eyes overflowed.

Robert came round the table and wiped her cheeks. ‘What is it, then, my dear?’

‘I didn’t like. Tory’s legs,’ she sobbed. A voice outside her seemed to whisper to her the right things to say.

She thought she would very much like a chocolate biscuit, but the voice outside warned her against saying so.

‘You can get down, then. Sit quietly in a chair and look at a book until you feel better.’

He carved himself some beef and tipped salad all over his plate. Upstairs in the lavatory Stevie sang loudly:

‘Jesus bids us shine

With a pure clear light

Like a little candle

Burning in the night.’

He could hear her banging her heels against the pedestal and then yards and yards of toilet-paper being unwound.

‘In this world of darkness

So we shall shine

You in your small corner

And I in mine.’

She gave a great kick and then there was a brief silence and the cistern being flushed.

He glanced at the plate of cold rice pudding, knowing he had been fooled. Now she was in the bathroom, running water into the basin. She was muttering to herself, as if engrossed, sometimes singing a snatch of a hymn but in an absent-minded way. ‘Playing with the water,’ he thought; but, deliberately turning his mind away, sat chewing the greyish beef and wondering about Tory’s behaviour and her words. ‘I am a middle-aged doctor. I am a father’ – here Stevie broke loudly into song once more – ‘Crown him! Crown him!’ – and the water went hastening suddenly down the pipe as if drawn by a great parched throat – ‘A father,’ Robert continued to himself, ‘weighed down by a mass of routine and habit and daily duty, never again to be free of it. I am not,’ he thought, reaching for the mustard-pot, ‘some young Shelley, capering about with old-man’s beard in my hair, breaking women’s hearts to left and right.’

Prudence made a cup of tea for Tory as her father had told her, and carried it in on a tray, standing by rather grimly as Tory lifted the cup out of the saucer which was half-full of slopped tea.

‘You are as bad as Beth,’ Tory laughed, holding the cup carefully because of the drips.

Tory put the cup down and looked carefully at Prudence. ‘Are my legs affecting my head, do you think?’ she asked. ‘Am I really hearing you say these things? And if so, what does it mean?’

The young have few weapons against coolness. Prudence became surly and incoherent. Despising herself, getting out of depth, she mumbled: ‘You know what I mean all right.’

But she could not frighten Tory as she had frightened her father. Tory merely looked back at her as if fascinated, a kind of look she kept for people who had views she disliked. She would never fly into a rage with her opponents, but let them state their case in such silence that they would eventually flounder and then notice the dreamy little shake of her head, the eyes, fascinated, smiling, as if she were saying: ‘I would never have believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself,’ incredulous, bemused, with the look of someone gazing at a cage of mandrills. This did not help Prudence to get her mumbling coherent and she snatched up the empty cup and hastened back to the kitchen.

As soon as she had gone Tory stopped smiling and sat very still, frowning at her bandaged legs.

Maisie Bracey had no high-flown ideas about life as her sister had. She laughed always at Iris’s make-believe, teased her during her bouts of hero-worship – that man in the concert party, to begin with, with his straw hat, his face smooth, unreal, with number nine grease-paint; then, later, Ronald Colman; now Laurence Olivier. Maisie had never pinned up photographs of film stars on the bedroom wall or woven dreams (how John Gielgud, coming out of the stage-door one night suddenly raised his hat and said: ‘I am sorry, but I have to speak to you,’ and the lines from his nostrils to his down-curving lips seemed more nervously beautiful than could be borne). For Maisie, what her mother said insincerely was really true, everyday life was good enough for her. She did not care for any devastating romance and knew that she would do her own hair till the day she died, and her own housework as well; that no one would wait upon her unless she were ill, and perhaps not then; that she would grow to be an old woman and say ‘I didn’t go to stay at Claridge’s after all,’ and not care in the least, as Iris would. She knew what she wanted and in the end it was only two things. She wanted to get married and she wanted her mother to die. When Eddie Flitcroft, whom Iris despised, had asked her to go to the cinema one afternoon, her mother had become fretful and importunate.

‘Why should you want to go to the pictures? I haven’t known you go for years.’

‘So I stand in your way, do I? Perhaps I’d be better dead. Isn’t it bad enough for me to be lying here year after year without you forever rubbing it in that I’m a nuisance to you?’

As the argument had gone beyond reasonable discussion Maisie said nothing. Her mother’s hands trembled on the counterpane. Deep inside her a little voice told her to let the girl go, that she had been a good daughter and had done nothing to provoke the vicious lashing of her tongue. And it was words merely, her suggestion that she should be better dead, for her egotism told her that she was still indispensable, that the world and all that is therein would fall to pieces any day that Rose Bracey failed to draw a breath. Yet she hushed the little voice of reason, or overrode it, and her words reared and plunged away like a wild horse.

‘It’s that Eddie. We were all right until he came. What does he want with you? You’re old enough to be his mother, anyway.’

‘Don’t be disgusting. You’ll let this business slide. I know. And then come grizzling to me when there’s no more left to live on. I didn’t work my fingers to the bone building up a nice little connection just for you to throw it all away on boys. All my hard work all these years and you’d let it go without a murmur. Without a murmur. And I must lie here helpless and watch you do it.’

‘I only wanted to go to the pictures. I’d have been back by half-past five.’

‘Time’s nothing to you. It’s only those in pain know how heavily even a minute goes by. I can’t manage any more,’ she added, pushing aside her dinner-plate with a few fish-bones left upon it.

Maisie took the plate and went on eating her own meal calmly, but the tears were deep down in her breast.

‘All right, go then,’ her mother said presently, in a different, broken voice. ‘You can tell me all about it when you come back. It will be something for me to look forward to all the afternoon.’

‘Yes, you go, girl. I don’t mind. You’re quite right, just because I can’t have any pleasures myself I mustn’t stand in the way of yours.’

‘Some people just say to themselves: “I’ll go to the pictures” and then go,’ Maisie marvelled to herself, but she said nothing.

‘Oh, if you’re going to sulk and be a martyr. Your father used to be just the same. You can’t expect happiness in this life if you’re not prepared to make a little effort. Everything’s too much trouble.’

Maisie took the plate out into the scullery and stood gazing at the pot of maiden-hair fern. She took up a jug and poured some water into the muddy saucer, but she did it like a sleep-walker. ‘I wish she’d die,’ she thought. ‘I wish she’d die.’ The idea was at home with her now and could not shock her as it once did. She let it come bubbling up easily to the surface of her mind.

When Eddie came in and raised his eyebrows at her, she shook her head. He frowned quickly in annoyance, but she could only shrug her shoulders.

‘This is a lovely cup of tea, Maisie,’ her mother said, having had her own way.

Stevie had her own world, down among the skirts, the trousers of the grown-ups. These skirts, these trousers constantly impeded her. She dodged among them, avoiding the glances of the eyes above her, the faces swimming moon-like overhead having less meaning to her often than all the inanimate things she encountered on her own level – doorknobs, railings, flowers. She was acquisitive. She liked picking flowers and collecting old envelopes and wearing her jewellery – she had a gold cross threaded on a piece of wool, a string of corals and various brooches and rings which Tory had worn in plays when she was a girl. There were arguments in the house about her jewellery, because she liked to wear it to school and Beth would not let her, was quite shocked at the idea. ‘She’s only five,’ Robert would say. ‘Bless her heart, let her get it out of her system while she is young.’ And, although Stevie hated the look of distaste on her mother’s face at the diamond and emerald brooch pinned in the middle of her Viyella smock, she could not resist the glory of it.

At school she fell into violent adorations of bigger girls and mistresses, even cherishing their defects; stammering a little like one girl; blinking like another; closing her eyes while she talked, as Miss Simpson closed hers. As soon as she reached the school gates and said good-bye to her father she unwrapped a piece of wire from her handkerchief and fitted it across her front teeth, in imitation of a girl in the Second Form. She desperately desired to wear spectacles but too deeply to be able to speak about it. She also told lies – about dresses she did not possess or deeds she had never done; how she had been a bridesmaid at a wedding, was recently vaccinated, was learning to play the violin. She also had a baby sister called Rosie who cut teeth when she was a few days old, but after that did not seem to progress. Miss Simpson forgave her her lies, even the one about being cruelly treated at home, because her mother was a writer, and where there is bad blood, as they say, it will out. ‘Well, that is a lovely story!’ she would exclaim in her bright, sane way, having listened to a description of Robert’s and Beth’s wedding, with Stevie one of the bridesmaids in red silk and pearls.

Prudence, at school, had been quite different; a little backward, kind people might have said, when she was still trying to matriculate at the age of eighteen, and not managing it. Slow she had been, with a strange lack of co-ordination, Miss Simpson explained in her reports, between brain and hand, reason and action, a girl who made neither friends nor enemies, always standing a little outside the edge of the crowd, not yet quite alive.

Nothing ruffled Miss Simpson. She could deal with everything – new girls who sobbed for a week, children who used bad language or kicked her on the shins, little girls who told lies. ‘She is going through a funny little phase,’ she would say, smiling calmly. Even children who passed from one funny phase to a funnier, could not disturb her. ‘We can cope,’ she would tell the mothers. ‘We can cope.’ Then the mothers who could not cope, who sometimes at home gave a sharp slap instead, felt ashamed, as if they must seem tawdry and hysterical in her eyes. They did not realise that she could even cope with mothers.

When Robert returned to the house at six o’clock he found a great scene going on and Stevie passing through a very funny little phase indeed, clinging to the banister rails and howling.

‘What is this?’ he cried, striding forward in great urgency, for it was time for surgery.

‘She won’t come to bed,’ Prue said, and as fast as she uncurled the little fingers from the banisters they gripped it again.

Tory seemed to have upset his day in every way she was able. He sat down beside Stevie on the stairs.

‘It’s all nonsense,’ Prudence put in quickly. ‘She doesn’t have homework at her age.’

‘I said a rude word,’ Stevie improvised, not realising that Robert was leading her up the stairs.

‘I saw a new baby to-day.’ He was tired or he would have known that this was a useless change of tactics. At once, Stevie, sensing the red herring, began to howl and clung to the banisters again.

Robert straightened up suddenly. He resented the way Beth came hastening to her child as if he had been treating her brutally.

‘I know I am overtired. She has exhausted Prudence and me. Perhaps, coming freshly to it, you will have more success.’

‘Of course, darling one,’ cooed Beth. ‘We shall do it together when you are in bed. You shall sit up and we’ll pin some drawing paper to the pastry-board and do a nice lot of geometry.’

‘Well, I could have got out of it that way,’ Robert thought, going into the surgery and tipping the cats off his chair. ‘The child is thoroughly spoilt, I suppose.’

This evening Mrs Bracey was in a good humour. She even did a little mending for Maisie, but her geniality was tentative and spasmodic, like the approaches of a child who has been naughty and is not sure of being forgiven. Eddie had gone out in a huff; Iris was at work. The little room was brightly stuffy, in contrast to the chilly darkness of the shop with its rows of hanging clothes, the lighthouse beam glancing there on a paste buckle in a pile of old shoes or on the moonlike bowl of water Maisie had set on the floor to absorb the smell of paint.

‘If you don’t mind being left for three seconds I’ll slip along to the café for a bit of fish,’ Maisie said coldly.

‘I could fancy a nice piece of skate,’ her mother agreed, instead of grumbling in the usual way that she’d had fish for her dinner and soon would be looking like a fish, with fish-bones sticking out of her bodice and a bloody fine fish’s thirst in her throat.

So Maisie unlocked the shop door and stepped out on to the pavement and went along to the café, where a dim, yellowish light lay over the tiled tables and Bertram was eating a plate of sprats the size of safety-pins.

Stevie sat up in bed, drawing circles round egg-cups, which was Beth’s notion of geometry. She covered a great many sheets of typing-paper in this way, then suddenly tired, she climbed down out of bed and padded across to the window.

‘I am only on my pot,’ Stevie shouted, standing by the window and looking out at the sea beyond the low parapet – for her bedroom was tucked high up under the roof. Between the tiles grew little plants like stiff rosettes, and gulls had left long chalky splashes on the slate. It was almost dark, and the sea looked taut and smooth, like silk stretched in a frame. Looking out at the lighthouse, she murmured: ‘Please send me a nice dream about new-born babies and me being a nurse. Or if I can’t be a nurse, let me be a lady. And have corsets. Amen.’ She stood quite still by the window, shivering, and when at last the lighthouse threw its hurried beam over the water, she could feel that her prayer had been noted, and trotted back to her bed.

‘Your surgery was over quickly,’ Beth said, pouring out coffee in her own reckless way. Prudence looked at the swimming saucers and then at her mother with anxious, searching eyes.

‘Yes, but I have one of my characters in bed with pneumonia, and it is always dull writing about illness. It has been done so much before. This evening, thank heaven, we are through with the crisis.’

‘Oh, badly, thank you. How long before I can let her die, do you suppose? Two or three days?’

‘There is no need for anyone to die of pneumonia these days,’ Robert said in a rather high-handed and unhelpful way.

‘The average expectation of life in your novels can’t be high. In fact, the death-roll is quite alarming.’

‘You might as well let her get it over,’ Prudence said, flicking over the pages of a rather dull medical journal and then throwing it on one side. ‘What’s her name?’

‘I should never dare to give a name like that to a child. It is too much of a challenge,’ Robert said. ‘She would be almost sure to grow up fat and flat-footed and terribly Andante.’

‘Yes, like a girl at school called Honor Collins, who was an awful liar and told tales,’ Beth said. ‘Are you going to see Tory to-night?’

‘No. Tell her I’ll look in directly after breakfast. Geoffrey Lloyd said he’d bring some of his verse to read to me this evening.’

‘I have some mending to do. It doesn’t matter. But you’ll be here, dear, won’t you?’

‘Good heavens, no. I loathe poetry. Especially the sort people have written.’

‘Where are you going, then?’ Robert asked sharply. ‘I don’t want you out of doors after dark, you know.’

‘Well, my dear, I am only a wretched novelist,’ Beth said proudly. ‘I don’t understand about poetry.’

‘I must go,’ Robert said. ‘Funny how inferior novelists feel – from Jane Austen down.’

Prudence had the idea that his mind proffered one set of words and his tongue another. She watched him as he leant forward to kiss her mother’s brow, just as Beth bent forward suddenly for the coffee-pot. Nothing came of the kiss; it scarcely happened and certainly Beth was oblivious of the attempt. ‘If there’s anything Tory wants . . .’ she was saying.

‘Teddy would foam at the mouth if he were to see us drinking this,’ Tory laughed.

‘There’s one advantage in being the one who is left. It means a great loss of face for the other to go round gathering up possessions. I did quite well out of Teddy. All his things were here at the house when he was bewitched and he never could get them away – not with any dignity, that is. I gave a lovely Harris tweed suit to my young brother and sold the rest of his clothes to old Mrs Bracey. He must have found that the course of true love never does run smooth.’ She paused. ‘Which it does not,’ she added quietly.

He found unnerving the way in which women can drop from nonsense into a passionate seriousness. ‘What can I say to her?’ he wondered. ‘How can I begin to talk?’

‘Done with her? Do you imagine I’ve hacked her to pieces with a meat-cleaver?’

‘She’s in there’ – he made an impatient gesture in the direction of the wall – ‘with this young man, listening to him reading his poetry.’

‘I always hated him. I’ve just this moment realised how much. I’ll certainly not drink his brandy.’

‘The most sensible thing to do to people you hate is to drink their brandy.’

‘And is Prudence sitting at her mother’s footstool, breathing in this fine literary air?’ Tory inquired.

‘I worry about Prudence . . . Everything has turned out so differently from what I planned. I’m no feminist, but I do believe in girls having lives of their own. I’ve always disliked the idea of their wasting time while they wait to be married-off. But she is even less fortunate than those girls used to be . . .’

‘She has the worst of two worlds. In a place like this what is there for her?’

‘Good evening,’ Prudence said to Geoffrey Lloyd, passing him in the hall on her way out.

‘Bronchitis!’ Robert exclaimed. ‘That’s merely an excuse for something I daren’t put into words, even to myself.’

‘You know it already. She could never do a job because her mind is empty. She moves through normal life and seems normal herself; but inside her there is nothing.’

‘It’s the same sort of thing as earning one’s living. Where it all went wrong for her, I don’t know, or when it was I began to see that she was being left behind. Neither Beth nor I are complete fools . . .’

‘Of course. Literary people always do suffer from an aversion to mathematics. The sight of figures upsets them. Notice how often they write a number rather than make the figure . . . But I was good at maths when I was young.’

‘So you had it planned that all your mathematical cells, or whatever they are, would coincide with Beth’s literary ones in equal proportions and produce a fine all-round sort of child . . .’

‘It looks as though Beth’s mathematical cells have coincided with my literary ones . . .’ he admitted. ‘The result is nothing, as it was bound to be.’

‘Stevie has her wits about her. And I think you are wrong about Prudence. If you are not going to drink that brandy, please hand it over to me. Carefully!’

‘Because she has intuition and perception, perhaps all the keener because her head is not a rag-bag of bits of knowledge.’

‘Beth?’ He walked up and down. ‘Don’t ask me what goes on in Beth’s head.’

‘She was already a writer when you married her, you know,’ Tory said accusingly.

‘I didn’t count on it going on so long – not having books published, for instance. I thought when she had children . . . but even then she used to sit up in bed scribbling. A confinement is a fine chance to finish off a novel, she thinks. When she was feeding poor Prue she wasn’t thinking about her. It’s a disease, a madness.’

‘Perhaps in the end it is what she was intended for . . . perhaps her writing is the Beth-ish thing. Not the children.’

‘Oh, nonsense!’ he said, tiredly. ‘It’s a disease all right. I ought to have cured it, but I could not.’

‘She is about the only happy person I know. Don’t you see how she is to be envied? Nothing people do can ever break her.’

‘Writers can be broken just like everybody else. Look at Keats and Chatterton and . . . Oscar Wilde. And all the others who were beheaded and locked up and shot.’

‘What I mean is that the thing that is precious to them, that they are staked upon, is always safe inside, can’t be got at or violated – only by themselves.’

‘I didn’t come here to talk about what writers are or are not,’ he thought.

‘Am I trying to tell him that whatever he and I do to Beth we cannot really destroy her?’ Tory wondered.

‘Right up to the moment when he kisses me there is still time to go back,’ Tory thought in a panic. ‘Let us not!’ she said aloud.

‘Too late,’ he said calmly, and took her head between his hands and turned it a little sideways so that he could kiss her. She shut her eyes and felt that she was dropping backwards through endless space, that hard though he might kiss her, he would never be able to follow her to the end or catch her up.

Geoffrey Lloyd sat down, holding his folder of manuscript, and waited. He had looked forward to this evening for, apart from loving the sound of his own voice, he liked the titillation of what he thought of as spiritual relationships with older women, liked the safe excitement.

Although this was not what he had planned, he could not dissent. Beth glanced round for her work-box and he jumped up and fetched it for her. When she had swung her feet up on the sofa and he had made her comfortable with a cushion at her back he shuffled with the manuscript and paused.

‘The Zones of Pleasure,’ he presently announced. He read calmly and with confidence. After a moment or two Yvette and Guilbert got up and stretched and walked contemptuously to the door, where they stood waiting.

‘Oh, dear,’ said Beth, beginning to gather together her wools and cotton-reels, but Geoffrey sprang to the door and took the poor creatures and threw them somewhat violently into the hall.

‘I am rather bad at saying “How nice”, or “How nasty”, after each poem,’ she said artfully as he turned a page. ‘So I will just listen and say nothing, and you can read without interruption.’ ‘I wonder where Prue is?’ she thought uneasily. ‘And what can have upset her. I plan a pleasant little evening for her and she just disappears.’

The verse was of a kind she found embarrassing to listen to. It was a great deal about sex and revolution, and the atmosphere in the room seemed to become sultry. An almost overpowering desire to laugh swept through her. ‘Don’t let me!’ she prayed to no one in particular, weaving grey wool in and out of Robert’s socks. ‘Don’t let me! Please don’t let me!’

‘Loving this world and for its sake

The hymen of the future we shall break,’

Geoffrey read, and Beth cut off her wool with a little snap and blushed. His hand flicked over the page and he began again.

She was safe now. The moment of hysteria had passed and she felt she would not laugh. She darned peacefully, not listening. She composed a kind and critical little speech for the end and then fell to scheming about her book; sorting out snippets of dialogue, planning death-beds. She rolled up Robert’s socks into neat balls, very pleased with her work, and then took up a frock of Stevie’s she was lengthening. The button-box fell with a crash. ‘Geoffrey, I am so sorry. How very rude and clumsy.’

They were on their hands and knees on the floor, gathering up needles and buttons and buckles and many other oddments, when the door opened and Robert came in.

‘Curse, sod, damn, and worse,’ said Geoffrey to himself, standing up and shaking hands.

Maisie washed at the sink in the scullery before going to bed. The curtain was drawn over the small window; the only light was from a small oil lamp. She stood in her petticoat and her hair was pinned to the top of her head. Leaning over the bowl of water she soaped her arms. In the kitchen Mrs Bracey snored.

The door from the yard opened and Eddie came in. Furiously, dripping wet, she snatched at the towel.

‘Sorry!’ He shut the door and stared at her. Then, as he went towards the kitchen door, he suddenly put out his hand and stroked her polished-looking shoulder, touched her soapy arm. He hesitated and came back to her, his face changed, darkened.

‘My life isn’t ruined just because I don’t go to the pictures with you,’ she said proudly, and tried to escape from his exploring hands.

She shook her head. He took her arms and drew her closer. ‘Please, don’t!’

Mrs Bracey turned in her sleep, groaning, and Maisie put her fingers to her lips warningly. ‘I must go to bed. She might wake.’

Without a word she put her blouse round her shoulders and lifted the latch. Eddie, who was frightened of her mother, scarcely breathed as he followed her through the kitchen, creaking up the stairs. ‘Damn Iris!’ he whispered as she reached her bedroom door. He ran his hand down her thigh, detaining her.

Her arms felt stiff with dried soap. She hurried to bed, lay beside her sister, her thigh, her breasts, still with his touch upon them.

‘All young men show off, unless there’s something wrong with them. I’ve seen you making up to him yourself.’

‘If only I could sleep alone!’ Maisie thought. ‘If only I could keep my secrets to myself!’

‘Passion seems to be in the air to-night,’ Iris said sarcastically. ‘That old fool Hemingway and Lily Wilson. He took her home again. It must be the spring. I shall have to see what I can do for myself; perhaps old Pallister . . .’

When he had taken Lily home Bertram went for a walk along the waterfront. A soft wind blew in from the sea, waves swirled in and broke in great swathes beneath the lighthouse. Lamplight, lights from the windows, fell over the uneven cobblestones. He walked along past Tory’s house, which alone was in darkness, and beyond the Cazabons’ house to where the cliff rose up, thrusting itself out into the open sea. The path here, at high tide, was wet with spray. He walked slowly, reluctant to go in. Below him, as he paused to lean on the railings, the waves flogged the sea-wall, flecked with long trailing foam, floating seaweed. Above him was a smell of dusty trees, an atmosphere of great darkness, and the faint crepitations of dead leaves.

Also leaning over the railings a little farther on was Prudence, with her hair tucked into her upturned collar, and her hands thrust up her wide sleeves for warmth.

‘You’re a strange girl. A very strange girl. So beautiful, too, and not to have a young man!’

‘Beautiful!’ she echoed in a startled way. Then she laughed, dismissing the idea. ‘I’m not beautiful.’

‘I’m going back now. Are you coming?’ he asked her. Without answering, she began to pace along beside him. They went slowly, their heads bent, a wide space between them.

‘You’re unhappy,’ he said, and he remembered what Tory Foyle had said about the girl’s lonely, dull life. ‘What about this young man?’

She was agitated. She even stopped walking for a second, and then moved on more briskly than before, wringing her hands.

‘Why do you say that?’ he asked gently, as gently as he could above the noise of the water and the buffeting wind.

‘Because . . .’ She lifted her white face and looked briefly at the sky as if for help. ‘Because . . .’ She gave up; she shrugged. ‘I hate love,’ she said in a quicker, different way. ‘I don’t ever want to fall in love or for anyone to fall in love with me. Surely there is more in the world than that?’

‘I have never found it so disagreeable that I wished for much more,’ he said.

‘Yes, young people always imagine they’ve said something one can laugh at. Oh, my dear, I’m sorry. Why am I rude to you? And what has happened to you, I wonder, that you talk in this way.’ He thought: ‘I suppose she has been jilted.’

‘Nothing has happened to me,’ she said, and he noted the hesitation at, the stress upon the last word.

‘You don’t want to go home, do you?’ he asked, for her step slackened as she came near the house. ‘Are you in some trouble there?’

‘Well . . .’ He hesitated. Obviously something more seemed to be demanded of him. ‘Don’t let yourself be distressed about a young man who doesn’t even exist.’

Still staring at him, she drew her coat collar up to her chin and shivered. ‘I wish . . .’ she began.

But young people feel they have the right to begin sentences and never finish them, to leave their listeners stinging with curiosity.

‘Good night.’ So little sound came from her moving lips. A great pressure of fear lay over her, he thought. If she had not been beautiful, he would have felt exasperation and impatience at the annoyance of becoming involved in her troubles, whatever they were, even when he was involved only to the extent of curiosity or pity. ‘Bed-ridden old women,’ he thought (having spent an hour with Mrs Bracey early in the evening discussing some of the more disreputable kinds of behaviour in remote parts of Africa), ‘young women who are frightened of waxworks, girls who are frightened of God knows what, themselves possibly.’

But he said ‘Good night, my dear,’ in his gentlest voice and walked on past Tory’s house. ‘Now there’s a woman,’ he decided, glancing up at the dark windows, ‘a woman who is frightened of nothing, who needs nobody’s help, who can take a blow on the chin’ (he liked this manly figure of speech) ‘without flinching.’

The lighthouse now interrupted the run of his thoughts with its fleeting gesture, and in his mind’s eye, his painter’s eye, he saw the two men sitting in the little building which crouched in the shadow of the tower; there they were, in shirt-sleeves, fans of greasy cards in their hands. In silence they eyed one another, one card went down, then the next, and so the night wore on.

He turned in at the Anchor. ‘What is that child frightened of?’ he wondered. ‘If I were a young man I would have taken her into my arms and kissed away all her misery.’ He had always had great confidence with women and a tendency to kiss them better, as he called it; only when he had gone, their fears, their anxieties returned, a little intensified, perhaps, but he, of course, would not know of that, and remained buoyed up by his own goodness.

As usual, Bertram began to refuse and then, ‘Yes, I will. I think I will,’ he said and came and waited by the dying fire, spreading his hands out over the dull coals, his mind haunted by the girl’s white face, the bewildered, frightened eyes.

‘That doctor’s girl,’ he began, taking his drink from Mr Pallister. ‘A queer girl, that, walking along by the sea-wall just now. All alone.’

‘Yes, a queer girl,’ Ned Pallister agreed. ‘And them dratted cats of hers. Unnatural devils. She thinks the world of them, you know.’

Bertram drained his glass. ‘Well . . . I feel like bed. Getting old.’ He laughed.

But Bertram had not spoken seriously. He knew he had nothing in common with this dim, grey man, who had probably looked the same age for years and years. He climbed the steep staircase, with its walls covered with pictures of boxers, of ships in full sail, photographs of choir-outings, of bowling clubs, all undusted, unobserved for many a long year. As he opened his bedroom door the curtains seemed to be sucked backwards towards him; there was a great rush of sea air and, when he stood still to listen, the interminable turning over of the waves far out to sea.