14

‘Are you tearing pieces about yourself out of the newspaper?’ Stevie asked reprovingly.

‘Pieces about my book,’ Beth corrected her; for there was a world of difference between the two, it seemed to her.

‘I daresay I shall, dear; for a time, at least. Why not?’ Beth leant over the kitchen table, reading.

‘Fish’s scales,’ Beth said, brushing her hand over the paper; then looking up at her daughter with new interest: ‘Sequins, you mean. Yes, they are like sequins.’ She folded the paper and went at once to her desk in the morning-room. When she had noted down Stevie’s simile, she said to Robert, who sat by the window reading The Lancet: ‘I found a review of my book wrapped round the cod.’

‘Robert.’ She said his name and waited, as if to imply that she would not go on until she had his attention. Annoyingly, he put his forefinger upon a word and looked up. ‘Robert, I shouldn’t say my books were gloomy, would you?’

‘I shouldn’t say they were hell of a gay, either,’ he said, waiting, still looking up.

‘Listen to this!’ Beth’s amazement seemed to increase. ‘ “Macabre,” ’ she read. ‘ “Funereal!” What do they mean?’

‘Well, I suppose “funereal” means “to do with funerals”, and that’s what your books mainly are.’

‘How worrying!’ Beth went on. ‘I only put the funerals in so that they shall not be too frivolous, the novels, I mean.’

Robert’s eyes dropped to the printed page again, and then he lifted his head and sniffed. ‘What an appalling smell of fish!’

‘No, dear. I will put it on the kitchen fire,’ Beth said gently, almost tiptoeing away, as if his irritability were a serious illness.

‘How do I know?’ Beth wondered. She watched the flames reaching up and over the crumpled newspaper and shook her head, smiling. But to herself, she said: ‘I can never know because all behind me there lies a great darkness and over all that I have written. I can see nothing of it. Only what I am going to write to-morrow is clear.’

‘Yes. She told me to go away. She is up in her room sewing hard. She has made the two sleeves already.’

Fearing a crisis, Beth ran up the stairs at once and tapped on her daughter’s bedroom door. Prudence sat near the window in her petticoat, one arm covered with a tacked-together sleeve of sage-green. Her lap was full of the material and her golden hair swung forward over her bare shoulders. Light rained down from the ceiling, reflected from the wideness of sea and sky, and there was no need to go to the windows or to listen for the cries of gulls and water lapping to know that it was a seaside room.

‘I meant, dear, with your hair and your grey eyes. I didn’t know that you could sew.’

How cautiously she trod, as if her daughter were a dangerous lunatic to be smoothed and flattered into tractability. Prudence sewed quickly, with large, slanting stitches, gathering a wide skirt into a narrow bodice – though ‘gathering’ was scarcely the word to describe the wild bunching-up that was going on. Ends of cotton and pieces of material littered the floor. Beth picked up a few, but without any hope of tidying the room.

Prudence stood up, scattering pins from her lap, and held the dress against her, turning slowly before the mirror.

‘Well, you have tacked that together quickly,’ Beth said in a heartening way.

‘I don’t know what you mean by “tacked”. I suppose you are being sarcastic. If I were not so poor, I shouldn’t have to be cobbling up my own clothes out of cheap material. I could go out and buy something new.’

‘My allowance!’ The words seemed to scorch themselves up and fade as soon as she said them. Beth felt scorched, too, as Prudence had intended she should. ‘The same wretched pittance I had when I left school! Can I help it that I’m not allowed to earn anything of my own? Am I to go on for the rest of my life pinching and scraping on eighty pounds a year? I know just what you’re thinking – that it’s vulgar to talk like this, but you shouldn’t come up here worrying me with your sarcastic remarks. I thought . . .’ – and then all desire to hurt, to cut her mother, left her and tears came into her voice. ‘I thought it looked very nice.’ And she held the frock uncertainly in front of her, staring at her reflection.

‘But it does!’ Beth said eagerly. ‘It shows that you have a real cleverness about clothes that I never guessed at – a cleverness like Tory’s, only much cleverer, because you have done it all yourself. I only thought that some of the stitches were a little on the large side, but you know how short-sighted I am and how easily I might be mistaken over such a thing. And as for the money, I daresay something can be arranged, but I wish you had mentioned it when it occurred to you, not in a sudden rush now because all this needlework has unnerved you . . . I had no idea of your difficulties.’

Prudence sat down to her sewing again. ‘No, I don’t think you had,’ she said calmly. ‘I don’t think you have the slightest idea of what goes on under your nose. Not the slightest.’

‘I cannot be expected to read your thoughts,’ Beth agreed. She went over to the window and looked down at the harbour. Stevie was wandering along the quayside with a bunch of gulls’ feathers in her hand. Dreamily she seemed to walk, her brows drawn thoughtfully together, her lips moving. Sometimes she stooped to pick up another feather. ‘I know the world she walks in,’ Beth thought. ‘The lovely world of her own choosing. She has sunk into it, as I sink into my Allegra’s world, a world that is small and enclosed like a rock-pool, as safe as the womb, a world where grief is never dull, as it is in real life, nor joy clouded always by feelings of guilt or anxiety, where one does not suffer continually from frustration or from stubbing one’s toes against unexpected sharp edges.’ (She thought of Prudence’s moodiness, and her furious, unaccountable sewing.)

Now Stevie stroked her cheeks with the feathers and smiled to herself. Beth watched her as she came towards the house, her rather moon-like face, her pale, straight hair and her enormous eyes, the sort of little girl who might one day be a beautiful woman, or might not be. The fine features were there, but they awaited some illumination from within or, later, some cleverness from without.

Just as she came to the door, and as if Beth had called out, Stevie lifted her head and looked straight up at her mother, and her face seemed to clear, all her pretending thrown back like a veil. She smiled and held up her bunch of feathers, and Beth waved.

‘It was Stevie. What a lovely day it is!’ For the sea danced and glittered with little points of light, as if composed of minute strokes of colour.

‘I will give you my coral bracelets,’ Beth said suddenly, turning round. ‘They will look well with that silvery-green, and I shall never wear them again myself. Bracelets are for young wrists.’

Prudence did not feel inclined to mourn her mother’s lost youth for her. ‘Thank you,’ she said, but rather grudgingly, and without looking up.

Little blobs and clots of colour lay isolated over the canvas. This puzzled Bertram. The sea was composed of little strokes of colour, he had decided, and he had told himself that he had only to take things calmly, go slowly at it, and he could translate it to his canvas . . . (‘a dazzling little marine study by Bertram Hemingway’) . . . but it was as if there were mocking devils between him and his canvas, and the paint, which should have drenched the scene with light, had the congealed appearance of sealing wax. Each little blob was separate, meaningless. ‘It has no prevailing light,’ he thought; but would go on. ‘For it will have to do,’ he decided. ‘I promised a picture and they shall have a picture. After all, it’s better than that other effort in the bar. Far better. All the same, I won’t sign it.’ (Though he had scarcely meant to creep away at the end of his stay, meek and anonymous.)

Above the speckled water he was now painting in the scabrous, flaking walls of the Fun Fair, violet shadows, picturesque, if hackneyed, upon the white; shutters mouldy, an acid green like the patina on bronze.

‘It does not quite come off,’ he thought, painting recklessly, for all his self-admonishing. ‘Never mind; it is, after all, a new medium to me. Better luck next time.’ The thought occurred to him then, as he painted-in their building, that the Fun Fair people had never come. After hearing so much about them. No visitors either. One or two elderly people, that was all. Like being in a dead world. ‘And now!’ (he laid a bar of shadow at Mrs Bracey’s window, representing Mrs Bracey herself), ‘time to knock off for a pipe.’

‘It is for you,’ Stevie said, coming to lean against Robert’s knees as he read. ‘It is a shaver.’ She laid the bunch of soiled gulls’ feathers upon Robert’s waistcoat. They were loosely bound with coloured wools.

Then he picked up the feathers and examined them. When he had thanked her he glanced across at Beth, and they smiled gently at the thought of him dipping these grubby feathers into lather and painting his cheeks with them. Amusement and affection linked them together for a moment.

‘You see how soft it is!’ Stevie said, entranced by her own generosity and the loveliness of the gift.

‘It is very soft indeed,’ Robert agreed, flinching away. (‘What the devil do I do in the morning when I shave?’ he wondered.) ‘Next you should make a hat for your mother,’ he said, his eyes challenging Beth’s. ‘A nice feather hat for her to wear when she goes to London.’

‘Dear Mother,’ (Tory read, walking back along the hall from the front door),

‘I am sorry this is such a short letter. Please send a 100 what bulb and flex also battery. Please send at once. Father’s wife sent me a book about ghouls that drink blood out of a corpse. It has been taken away. I am sorry this is such a short letter. I am a bit off colour. Please send things urgently. I hope you are quite fit.

Kind regards – EDWARD

P.S. If you send a note saying I have got masstoid I don’t have to learn boxing. I don’t want to learn boxing you might get hurt. Yours – EDWARD FOYLE.’

Tory wandered into the kitchen. As this letter worried her in almost every possible way, she sat down upon a chair, trying to be calm.

Lily climbed the street to the Library. As she reached the crest of the hill, the landscape seemed to spill and flow away inland like a broken wave, bearing on its crest the stricken trees, their branches streaming before them, the scattered stone cottages, the solitary macrocarpas: below, like a great coral reef, lay the white buildings of the New Town.

The Institute was railinged off and set among bleached coarse barley-grass and convolvulus. The narrow Gothic windows excluded sunshine, the fusty smell was sharp as the slash of a knife as Lily pushed open the door and entered, coldness, darkness falling over her.

The Librarian was counting out coins from an old Oxo tin. He had a habit of running his tongue between his lips so that they were perpetually moist between his moustache and beard. He looked up at Lily and nodded and then went on counting. The room was empty. Lily hesitated. She was always at a loss before these shelves of books, especially standing as she was now, in a strange no-man’s-land with fiction behind her (‘For real life is far better,’ Bertram had said), and non-fiction such an unknown conglomeration, from books on etiquette to Buddhism or Backyard Poultry-keeping.

‘Clinical Survey of the Manic-Depressive,’ she read at the heading of a page and she slipped the book back into its place and chose another: The History of Newby by some old-time vicar. She turned the book sideways, looking at the engraved plates – the pictures of boats on the open sea, sails bellying out, gravid as the clouds above, which were like thumb-bruises on the sky: a little shawled woman came out of the Cazabons’ house, her mittened hand steadying her bonnet; Mrs Bracey’s shop looked like a warehouse, with a front of clap-boarding: Lily’s own house was a pub, leering, tottering like a palsied thing, a lamp stuck out over the flight of steps at the side, and the name – The Pilot Boat Inn – painted between two upstairs windows: the lighthouse, the Cazabons’ house, the Anchor, were the same; bare-footed children played along the foreshore; a woman with a fish-basket on her head lifted her skirts crossing a great stretch of puddles at the foot of the steps leading down to Lower Harbour Street.

‘Bad times, evil tunes,’ the Librarian said over Lily’s shoulder. She started, even dropped the book, which he picked up and opened again, glancing through the pages. ‘Every fifth house a public house and gin a penny a measure. Your nerves are in a state, Mrs Wilson. I apologise for making you start. Yes . . .’ he glanced back at the little picture . . . ‘children without shoes, filth and squalor everywhere. And vice . . .’ he said this word lingeringly . . . ‘vice indescribable. It goes with poverty, hand-in-hand, the pawn-shop and the brothel.’

Lily blushed at this. She had been brought up so rigidly that only since the war had she known that the word did not mean a soup-kitchen, and still in the midst of her confusion saw the picture of a painted harlot in a swansdown-bordered negligee ladling soup from a large tureen and handing it to the poor.

‘And now if you have selected your book I am afraid I must lock up. It’s past closing-time,’ the old man was saying, and she noticed then a large key dangling from a piece of string on his fingers.

‘Yes, I will take this,’ she said, receiving the book from his warm hands, in a panic at the thought of being shut in alone with him, with his talk of vice and brothels.

He followed her to the door, lifted his hat from a peg, and they went out together.

‘Perhaps I might accompany you down the hill,’ he suggested. ‘Such a beautiful evening.’

It was like emerging from a cave to come out into the sunlight. Down below them the sea was encrusted with silver.

‘That little yacht!’ he said, and pointed with his walking-stick. ‘A picturesque sight. I’ve noticed it several times of late.’

‘Yes,’ said Lily, wondering how she could be rid of him. His manner of speaking was so lofty, yet the words themselves were rooted in . . . She paused to wonder what. ‘In filth and squalor,’ she decided, going down the hill beside him. ‘In filth and squalor.’

The sunlight filled the room as if it were wine in a glass, flashed on the knives and forks, showed up the smeary windows. The meat was tough, so conversation was spasmodic. Red-currant jelly gradually subsided into hot gravy and was lost, the cauliflower was stifled beneath a heavy sauce with a hard skin on it.

No one answered. Robert chewed and chewed, and Prudence, reaching forward for bread, split her new frock under the arm.

‘What was the trouble with Stevie?’ Robert asked presently. ‘I heard her screaming long before I turned the corner.’

‘She wanted me to read another chapter, but I had said only one as she was in disgrace.’

‘For rudeness. I told her to get out of the bath and she refused. And then she looked at me and said: “You can put that in your pipe and smoke it.” She gets those stupid little sayings from school . . .’

‘It would be nice,’ Robert said, ‘to find a mother whose child originated some of these rude words and phrases. I have never met one yet. And what did you do when she screamed? Gave in, I suppose.’

‘Not exactly. I said I would read a little more on the strict understanding that she would be very good to-morrow.’

‘Oh, my God! Prudence, when you have finished tying up your frock with bits of cotton, would you pass the cauliflower? You really spoil Stevie, Beth. Of course she screams. It pays her to. She’s no fool and obviously everyone does what is to their advantage. Next time she’ll try it on still more.’

‘Not a thing. No, she’s quite pampered. When I was a boy, if I’d behaved as she behaves, I’d have been thrashed. I was never read to at bedtime or any other time . . .’

‘Well, I was,’ Beth said. ‘And I was spoilt, and had my own way. And look at me now. Every bit as nice a person as you are, Robert. So it seems as if all your misery was wasted.’

‘Then perhaps you exhausted your politeness when you were young, for you’re very often rude now.’

Both Robert and Prudence looked up in amazement, but Beth went on calmly trying to cut her meat and at last put some of it into her mouth and began to chew. Since she apparently had no intention of saying any more, Robert asked in a voice that was like the snapping-off of icicles: ‘Perhaps you will tell me in what way I am rude.’

‘Of course,’ Beth replied, in the tone of one who does not bear malice. ‘Firstly, you often speak very roughly and inconsiderately to me . . .’

‘And secondly, it seems to me that although I don’t care in the least for etiquette or meaningless gestures such as your standing up when I enter the room, or walking on one side of the pavement rather than the other, sometimes I do carry very heavy trays and you never move to help me, and I run to and fro fetching things, and rather wait on you, like a . . . servant.’ She smiled calmly and pleasantly as if she had been praising him. ‘And thirdly,’ she continued, ‘your patronising airs, as if only men’s work is important, and my writing an irritating and rather shameful habit . . . “If we ignore it, she will grow out of it,” you seem to imply.’ She laid her knife and fork neatly together and looked up.

‘I see,’ Robert said and tried to weight with meaning these meaningless words – a grim sarcasm, perhaps, or the -implication that he said merely that because he could not trust himself to say more. But it was obvious to the three of them that he said no more because he was too confounded to think of anything.

‘There is nothing else to eat,’ Beth said, and stood up with an air of triumph. ‘The junket has not set and there is no cheese.’

She left them and went out to make the coffee. ‘People who are outspoken all the time,’ she was thinking, ‘must grow dulled to the excitement of seeing people shocked, the jaws dropping, the incredulous eyes. So stimulating.’ Very light-heartedly she stirred the coffee.

‘Well, I’m damned!’ Robert said when she had gone and still at a loss for words. He was very much put out, for it seemed to him that he had jogged along for years, unobserved, uncriticised. Now it appeared that Beth had been observing him all the time with meticulous concentration, and criticising him, too – dispassionately. The thought connected with others and left him profoundly disturbed. ‘I must go and tell Tory,’ he told himself, wondering how he could slip away.

Prudence had now split her frock under the other arm and ran frantically upstairs to mend it.

The sun was slowly drained from the room as wine is drained from a glass, leaving a faint flush only to show that it was ever there.

‘I am afraid I am unable to say that you have mastoid, as this clearly is not so. I cannot think of any way out of it and I am sure your father would say that it would be good for you to learn boxing . . .’

(‘He is so in my power,’ she thought, her chin resting on her wrist, her mouth drooping.)

‘Dear Mr Bancroft,’ she began again, drawing another sheet of paper towards her, ‘I should be grateful if Edward might be excused boxing lessons for the time being, as he has occasionally been troubled by slight . . .’

‘You must help me,’ she said, leading him back into the room. ‘I am torn in two.’

He was surprised and annoyed to find that he himself was not the cause of the trouble.

‘Unnatural. It seems a very morbid attitude in a little boy. You must have been putting cowardly ideas into his head . . .’

‘It wasn’t sinus. I told you at the time. It was simply a catarrhal condition . . .’

‘But you are trying to hit on something to get him out of his boxing. What the devil would Teddy say to all this?’

‘We quarrel before we know where we are,’ he said. He stood with his elbow on the mantelshelf, examining a scratch on the back of his hand, as we are inclined to concentrate on the smallest detail in a time of crisis, the same despairing effort with which, Tory conjectured, a victim might stare at a mole on the chin of his torturer. ‘And as I stared at the clergyman’s boots when I was married,’ she thought.

‘You look very lovely this evening,’ he murmured in a cross voice and without glancing at her.

She thanked him with the automatic graciousness of one practised in acknowledging compliments. And then, to bring the conversation back to himself, Robert said: ‘I am worried about Beth.’

‘No, she’s not ill: but, either she has guessed about our feelings for one another, has put two and two together as any other woman would have done months ago – either that or she has gone mad.’

‘Quite honestly, I think she has become a little peculiar. But I’ve no doubt I shall soon find out.’

‘This evening she quarrelled with me. She was tart and argumentative, almost abusive. Women often are, I know’ – he gave Tory a brief look – ‘but not Beth. Not ever before in all the years I have known her. And done so coldly, as if she no longer cared for me, rather as if she were enjoying herself. I can’t explain how uncanny it was.’

‘Then I had better make one of those grand renunciations,’ she said haughtily. ‘I will go miles away and hide myself in a little bed-sitting-room and live on my memories. Where I can harm you no more.’ She saw herself lying on a chaise-longue, coughing a little, her hands full of camellias.

‘It was too hackneyed a role for you,’ he said, when she had described this to him. ‘And you would want to get up every evening and go for a drink.’

‘The trouble with renunciation is the giving-up part. All women fancy themselves doing it, but do they enjoy it, I wonder? It is too negative to be really uplifting, except in literature. The gesture is more beautiful than the thing itself, which does so go on and on – the next day and the next, and for ever. In books one just dies.’

She talked, giving him a chance to trample on all her avowals and intentions, but he did not do so. He seemed to wait gravely, looking at her.

‘You don’t harm me, my dear.’ He put out his hand and clasped hers. ‘You throw everything else into shadow, but that is not the fault of your beauty. It is the drabness of the world and the monotony of my life in this place day after day, so, until I die. You lit up every hour for me, made one day different from another, brought me back to life. Each night I have taken you to bed with me. I closed my eyes and folded my arms round you, imagining that you belonged to me, disposing of all the obstacles in one moment, and so fell asleep. You could not harm me . . .’

Tory moved her hand restlessly in his. ‘You speak of me in the past tense,’ she laughed awkwardly.

‘All right. But I am not much good at love scenes, especially when they are so sad. I am much more inclined to the lusts of the flesh. And now you are crushing my hand.’

He thought he would waste no more time on words and began to kiss her, seeming to imply that if it were the lusts of the flesh she contemplated, he did not himself disdain them. Shutting his eyes he felt at first hollowed, and then as if he were filled with music, the smooth, warm sound sweeping through the corridors of his mind, until he stood quite alone with Tory, the rest of the world obliterated.

But the rest of the world is not so easily effaced, and the further we escape the more ruthless our dragging back and the greater the vehemence which will splinter upon us, like the smashing of vast sheets of ice upon our loosened will. So it was no ordinary bell ringing which made their eyes fly open, their mouths whiten.

Tory was the first to recover. ‘I expect it is Prudence to fetch you away,’ she said coldly, glancing in the mirror. ‘Perhaps Mrs Bracey wishes to come downstairs again.’

She appeared very smooth and controlled, with all her wits about her once again.

In the hall she snapped off some odd bits of cotton from the hem and moved Prudence slowly round, turning her by the shoulders, enraging the girl.

‘Your father? Yes, of course, dear. Robert! Robert! Here is Prudence!’ And still, as if absorbed, she pulled and tweaked at the new frock. It was as if she would not let Prudence go into that room, as if the passion which they had suffered there had been so tangible that it might hang still in the air.

‘What the hell for? Does she think I am for ever at her beck and call?’ he asked.

‘Her daughter came and she said it was urgent and that her mother cannot breathe.’

‘No. I was just going out and I met the girl on the steps.’ Prudence looked very levelly at her father, as if to say: ‘It was as well for you that I did.’

‘Excuse me, Tory,’ he began; and then as he reached the door, had not the courage merely to go, but turned and made matters worse by saying: ‘I will think it over about Edward’s catarrh and let you know.’

‘There’s one thing I’ve made up my mind about,’ Prudence went on. ‘If ever I get married I won’t live next door to my dearest friend.’

‘And I think you’re hateful. I had always heard of people doing vile and dreadful things, but not people I knew, not my own father.’

Her emotion came up shakily and broke like waves upon the rock of Tory’s assumed indifference.

‘Then that makes your readiness to conjecture all the more odd,’ Tory said, and added: ‘Especially, as you say, about your own father.’

Tory’s pretty little clock struck nine, the notes floating towards them down the hall.

‘Oh, damn you!’ Prudence suddenly said, dashing tears away with the back of her hand and groping for the doorknob.

‘I don’t think it would do for you to rush out into the street weeping,’ she said, playing for time because she felt that Prudence, propelled on a surge of self-pity, might fly to her mother, or make a scene elsewhere. But Prudence, having smeared her tears across her cheeks, threw the handkerchief down upon the hall-table and seemed not to be able to go quickly enough.

When at last she had managed to open the door, Tory said: ‘The frock, by the way, is quite a success, but those dingy little coral bracelets ruin the effect.’

Then she closed the door very quietly and went directly to the windows overlooking the front. She was just in time to see Prudence before she disappeared. She was running, almost, in the direction of Mrs Bracey’s house. When she was quite out of sight Tory still stood there, conscious of a dreadful foreboding of disaster.

In the churchyard the air was warm and steady and scented with the lime trees in flower. Geoffrey put his book in his pocket, but he could scarcely have been reading, for the light was slowly retreating and had already taken the green from Prudence’s frock, and the blossom on the trees was a shape, not a colour, against the sky.

She sat down beside him, fidgeting with the coral bracelets on her white wrists. ‘How peaceful it is!’

The gravestones were sunk in the deep turf, a marble angel implored them to hush, holding up its hand warningly, as if it were a fitful sleep only down there below the bed of granite chippings. The sea was hushed, too, so that only Geoffrey could hear it, not Prudence.

‘Oh, have you?’ Prudence murmured warily. A dreadful fear that he was going to read some poetry aloud beset her, confused her, and she could think of nothing to stave him off. ‘But it is too dark,’ she decided. ‘Unless he has a torch. Or’ (and this was so much worse) ‘knows it by heart.’ ‘I don’t like poetry,’ she said roughly.

‘Don’t you, darling? I love you in your grey frock, but I am sure you are cold.’

‘It is grey at the moment, so therefore it is grey. Colour can only be what it appears to be.’

‘I like the bracelets, too, and the way they fall over the back of your hands and make your wrists seem thin. “A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,” ’ he added. He felt at home among the graves with her beauty close to him and made more moving when it lay side by side in his mind with the grim and the corrupt and the melancholy.

‘My mother gave them to me,’ Prudence said, ignoring his last remark which scanned too much for her liking and was, she feared, the beginning of some poetry.

Prudence drew herself up, very taut and shivering, her face – but it was nearly dark now – puzzled, and her lips parted.

‘There is an innocence about her I delight in,’ he went on condescendingly. ‘And she has passed it on to you.’

As Prudence did not answer he said: ‘Oh, it is no use you telling me otherwise, implying this and that, as you did the other night. I still believe you are as clear as crystal, but like all innocent people you rather veer towards ideas of romantic guilt: as if to be good is not to be interesting. You are shivering, Prudence. I shall have to take you home. Why didn’t you wear a coat?’

‘I had no time . . . There was a fuss, an upset as I set out. In the end I just ran away – without thinking.’

‘You quarrelled with her? Why? Please don’t be stubborn with me!’ He took her hands and held them, shaking them gently. ‘I am glad you quarrelled with her,’ he went on. ‘There is something unkind about the woman. Insolent, and even cruel.’

He bunched her up to him and kissed her. ‘Please don’t move your head away. I love you very dearly, Prudence.’

‘Oh, love!’ she said impatiently. Then, looking down at her bracelets, remembering her mother, she put up her hands and covered her face.

He wrapped his jacket over her shoulders. She felt the warm lining of it on her arms and was comforted. After a while she said with a stagey sort of bitterness: ‘I daresay I expected too much.’

‘Of love. I always imagined it would be a sort of increasing excitement . . .’

Her teeth were chattering and he drew her closer to him. She began to cough. ‘Oh, I see,’ he said thoughtfully. It was as if a strange landscape were suddenly unrolled before him and he looked at it through her eyes.

When she had stopped coughing she said in a husky voice: ‘I thought of love being like a flower, a rose . . .’ She cupped her hands together in her lap and her fingers spread slowly apart . . . ‘and I thought of it opening, unfolding, one petal after another, something new each day . . . but now I shall always know that this horrible thing may come crawling out of its heart . . . an excuse for every sort of treachery, and grubby deceit, and meanness . . .’

‘Supposed!’ Geoffrey echoed, and laughed in a worldly-wise fashion; but he was a little shaken all the same. Through their young eyes they surveyed Tory’s and Robert’s guilt and felt, in contrast, a quality of superiority about themselves, uplifted, triumphant, in the dark graveyard.

Tory went to bed early and had a good cry. Into the middle of the weeping came the sound of tapping on the street door. She put a wrap over her shoulders and went to the window. Down below stood Robert and he lifted his face and called to her in a low voice: ‘I do wish you’d come down, Tory. I must speak to you.’

Filled with dread, unconscious for once of her appearance, she ran downstairs and opened the door. Coldness hung about his clothes as he entered the hall.

‘She went, too . . . I thought she must be going after you . . . it was in that direction.’

Tory sat down on the only chair. ‘Yes, she did. She knows, and told me so and was rather hysterical . . .’

‘I don’t know.’ (‘I shouldn’t have taunted her about the bracelets,’ Tory thought. ‘It was wicked of me.’) ‘She’ll come back,’ she said, unconvincingly.

‘I don’t know where to look now. I’ve walked all along under the cliff straining my eyes into the darkness. Why have you been crying?’

‘Yes, I must look a pretty sight – oh, I’ve been crying because of going away from here, from you, and . . . but don’t worry. I shall go. Very quickly, I promise.’

‘If it isn’t too late,’ he said cruelly. ‘Suppose she doesn’t come back?’

‘She is sitting there writing and saying how naughty of Prudence to stay out without letting us know.’

‘Mrs Bracey has pleurisy. She thinks I have been there all the time . . . or rather, as far as she has any ideas about what’s been going on, those are the ideas she has.’

When he had gone, she went to the bathroom and bathed her eyes. ‘It will be all right,’ she promised herself, but with a sinking heart.

Prudence was at the foot of the stairs, coughing, her head bent, her hand grasping the newel of the staircase. Her -forehead reddened and whitened and a great twisting vein divided it.

‘Tory tells me you have imagined a lot of nonsense about – about Tory and me.’

‘Neither do I. I only want to say that almost nothing you imagine is true, and the rest – won’t be true any longer.’

‘Drink this up!’ He handed her the glass and she drank, making a wry face. ‘And don’t go out in the damp night again,’ he added, trying to regain normality.

‘Good night, dear!’ Beth called out from the morning-room, but in the muffled voice which meant she had not raised her head from her desk.

‘She has come back safely,’ Robert thought. ‘But not to me. Not ever to me again.’

Prudence lay in bed with her cats in her arms. She was in no hurry to go to sleep. ‘To-morrow!’ she thought. ‘And tomorrow. And so on, perhaps, for always.’