Eustace and Hilda (99 page)

“You must have had a birthday,” said Barbara, rising from the table. Jimmy had already gone. “I'm going to leave you in peace now, to enjoy your love letters, but I shall expect you to tell me all about them later on.”

Under the new dispensation Eustace did not wait to see which of the missives exerted the strongest pull on his libido. With itching fingers he undid the parcel. It had been packed by a practised hand and did not give up its secret at once. Then, in a drift of cotton-wool, he saw Miss Fothergill's watch.

At once the flood of memory leapt the barrier he had built against it and bore him back to Venice. He was in Lady Nelly's sitting-room by one of the windows that looked out on the haunted garden and she was saying, “You know, I don't feel I ought to take it—it's so much too pretty.”

But as she spoke her misty eye caught the gleam of gold and seemed to gleam back again and she added, “Wouldn't you miss it very much?”

“Oh no,” said Eustace. “I have two other watches.”

“But are two enough to keep you up to time?” Lady Nelly asked. Eustace assured her they were, and before he knew what was happening, without his realising how the suggestion was made and taken, how the space between them was bridged, or who was the first to move, she had kissed him, for the first and only time.

One of the letters was from her: curiosity and commonsense prompted him to read it, but the old Eustace was now uppermost, whose pleasure ripened with keeping, and he put it aside. Aunt Sarah's should have precedence.

She opened with an apology. A printed card had come for Eustace announcing that a registered package awaited him at the Customs office at Victoria. She had not wished to seem interfering, and it was not very easy for her to get away, but she thought it would save a great deal of delay if she went to Victoria and saw the Customs authorities herself. “They were very understanding,” she said, “and I only had to tell them that the watch was not a purchase: it belonged to you and you had accidentally left it behind. Such an easy thing to do; but I'm afraid it must have put your late hostess to a good deal of trouble and some expense. I don't count my own, and I expect she would have plenty of help; but you always were a little forgetful, and you will remember another time that a small slip often makes a lot of work for other people. Still, you were lucky to get the watch back; in a large house like that, with so many people passing through and perhaps not all of them quite honest by our standards, a thing may easily be mislaid or even fall into the wrong hands. Still, I'm very glad it didn't. Annie gave up her afternoon out so that I should be able to make the journey: wasn't that kind of her?”

Back in his boyhood, Eustace struggled vainly with his conception of himself as someone who was always giving trouble; again the railway-arch spanned his horizon, and the person who was waiting there, now grown to more than life-size, paced up and down, muttering to himself, glancing at his watch, and cursing the rain which was coming down in sheets. Cursing Eustace, too.

There followed inquiries about them all and references to Hilda which Eustace could not but respect, for Aunt Sarah's way of speaking of her took into account all the factors in the case, its broadest human aspects, whereas he, and others, tended to concentrate on the one which made her most manageable to their minds. She had had sympathetic letters from parents and others who had known Hilda at the clinic: would he send her any that he might have?

Eustace had none himself, but several such letters had come for Hilda, and it often fell to his lot to read these tributes aloud to her, sad that the glow of appreciation they expressed should find so little reflection in her fixed, still face. He would ask her leave to send the letters to Aunt Sarah.

He put his thumb under the Oxford postmark with a feeling of relief, for here would be something to restore his self-esteem.

His tutor began by saying that he felt sincerest regret for Eustace's family troubles. But, he went on, he had heard of such cases and they invariably yielded to treatment: medicine had made a tremendous advance in its understanding of nervous complaints. He appreciated Eustace's pious resolve to devote himself to his sister, but he strongly felt that such a sacrifice was unnecessary, and that she herself would not wish it. To miss a term, and possibly more, at this stage of Eustace's studies would be a great mistake. More than most men, he needed direction and supervision in his work. He had a tendency to leave the highways for the byways, to make literary aptitude serve for historical judgement, to describe the scenery of the past rather than probe its geological structure. “As I've told you more than once, we want the bones as well as the flesh, and they take some finding. Of course I shall be glad to suggest to you a course of reading, if you really feel you cannot leave home, but I must warn you that by doing so you are seriously jeopardising, if not throwing away, your chances of a First. Intensive solitary reading is all very well for a thesis, but for Schools you have to cover the ground. By staying down you will put yourself at a great disadvantage; indeed, I feel a little doubtful if my colleagues would agree to it without making further inquiries, which we should be rather unwilling to make. As the holder of emoluments from the College which, as you remember, were a subject of discussion some time back, and which would certainly not be paid you in absentia, you have a special obligation to meet its wishes, and to submit to the discipline of college life, even if it is more irksome to a man of your age than to the ordinary undergraduate. I do not for a moment suggest that you are seeking to evade this discipline; my contention is that you would lose more by not coming up than your sister could possibly gain by the attendance of someone who is not, after all, a professional nurse. And may I add that I personally shall be sorry not to see you.”

Confusion spread so rapidly in Eustace's mind as he was reading this letter that he found himself half-way through the next without being aware that he had taken it from its envelope.

Eustace read this letter, and the two that remained to be read, several times over, then he returned them to their envelopes and automatically put them in his coat pocket. Here, after a moment's cogitation, the letter from his tutor joined them, leaving Aunt Sarah's lying on the table, unloving and unloved. He took Miss Fothergill's watch from its bed of cotton-wool (it had stopped at exactly twelve o'clock, perhaps from the shock of the midday gun), and slipped it into the waistcoat pocket consecrated to its use. On his way to the window (for he felt the need of a wider view) he passed a looking-glass. There, except for the moustache, now quite a formidable adornment, stood the old Eustace, his pockets bulging with precious testimonials. With those at his side, and the appreciation they displayed, he could face any situation. The Eustace who peacocked in those letters was a glorious, free creature, not the poor drudge who pushed his sister's bath-chair. Soon they would be joined by other destiny-defying amulets: the extra handkerchiefs, keys, matches, the fistful of money, the brandy flask, and electric torch, perhaps even a revolver, since it was not safe to walk at nights with a helpless cripple alone on the cliffs.

Sliding back into his former self was a sensation as grateful as putting on an old suit of clothes; he suddenly realised what a strain his new deportment had put on all his moral muscles. He looked out, and it seemed to him that the slate pinnacles of Palmerston Parade now climbed into the sky with something of their ancient majesty, and there was mystery again among the black-boughed laburnums and wind-shredded lilacs in the walled garden across the square. He felt the old contraction of the heart that the strangeness in the outward forms of things once gave him; the tingling sense of fear, the nimbus of danger surrounding the unknown which had harassed his imagination but enriched its life, which was the medium, the condition, of his seeing, bereft of which his vision was empty—far emptier, indeed, than that of people who had never known the stimulus of fear. He would go now, while this mood was on him, and the sun was shining, down on to the sands and feel the old magic rising from the rocks where he and Hilda played.

At a sound he turned, and Minney was there with her shining morning face. “Good gracious,” she said, “you are taking a long time over your breakfast. I've nearly forgotten mine. What was I going to say? Oh, Miss Hilda would like you to put your head in before you get started on your work.”

“Tell her I'll come in a minute,” said Eustace stupidly.

“Well, don't be long, because she seems a bit fidgety this morning.”

Eustace turned away from the window, no more a magic casement, and halted in front of the mirror. What a wretched silhouette this old one was, bulging and straining with the weight of the lumber he had collected—almost a monstrosity. Taking the four fat letters from his pocket, he tore them up one by one, and threw the pieces into the waste-paper basket. Now only Aunt Sarah's was left, and he could read that as often as he liked without doing himself harm. He looked again at his reflection. The line of his hip was so sheer as to be almost concave: it would do credit to an athlete.

But just as he was leaving the room to go up to Hilda's, he remembered that in his frenzy of destruction he had torn up Jasper Bentwich's address. This address, or direction, as Jasper styled it, included a four-figure number like a London telephone number which Eustace could never recollect. The house was technically a palace; but Jasper, who maintained rather pedantically that ‘palazzo' was a word that only came into use in the eighteenth century, preferred the number to be used.

Eustace would have to answer his letter, so there would be nothing unrealistic in searching for the fragment, and he must do so now, or the daily maid might suddenly decide to empty the basket—another very real danger. One must be practical but not impulsive.

Gradually he pieced together the fragments of Jasper's spidery, perpendicular handwriting, but the bit with the address on, with the malice of inanimate objects, eluded him. When he found it the letter was more than half complete. It would do him no harm just to glance at it again.