Friendly Young Ladies (5 page)

He read this over with approval, and looked out of the window in search of further ideas. The wind was getting up, and a bleak handful of rain rattled the glass, mixed with the sound of a rising sea. “How, I wonder,” he continued, suddenly inspired, “would you like to settle around here? It lacks some of the trimmings, of course—nearest cinema and shopping centre three miles along the sands when exposed, or six by bus when running; water supply pumped by hand from the bottom of the garden, and cooking mostly by oil. But it has a kind of acid charm. Cliffs made of hard edgy volcanic rock, holding in a beautiful but rather evil sea—like a fire-opal with a bad history set in blackened silver—and, perched on top of it all, a surrealist arrangement of bungaloids, made mostly of cast concrete blocks which the local architect, who must have an individual sense of humour, has titivated with stone rabbits, witch-balls, and dear little gnomes.” He considered this with his head on one side, recalling Norah’s penchant for Regent’s Park and the Circus at Bath.

“By the way, I am treating the daughter of this artist for a mild broncho-pneumonia. An interesting case, psychologically I mean, and rather a pitiful one. The child is nearly eighteen, but what with the stone rabbits and the Atlantic and the fact that her parents live like cat and dog and she knows the whole village knows it, she has taken refuge between the covers of a Girls’ Annual and, unless someone snaps the poor little brat out of it, is in a fair way to going through her adult life in a sort of fifth-form daydream. Which would be a pity, as she obviously has the makings of emotion and intelligence, combined with the kind of painful plainness which in a year or two, with sexual animation, might suddenly become attractive, and without it will get more dismal from year to year. I think subconsciously, under a ton or two of inhibition, she dimly realizes this; which makes a fascinating problem of an otherwise humdrum case. It’s a pity you’re not here; you would do her a world of good. Failing you” (he could not help thinking, quite consciously, that this was rather handsome), “I’m doing what I can with her. There is some local story about a disowned elder sister who eloped with I forget who, no doubt a woman of character, of whom she has been taught to be ashamed. I am hoping to draw her out, discreetly, on this as a starting-point. Meanwhile I have got her receptive, which of course is tricky going, but I think I have succeeded in hitting the right note.”

At this point the clock surprised him by striking eight. He had written the last paragraph chiefly for his own amusement, and hastily ran over the letter from the beginning to see if it would do. It was a satisfaction to him (he lit a final cigarette on it) to decide that there was nothing in it which could possibly hurt Norah’s feelings. His dislike of hurting anyone was entirely genuine, as traits which people use for effect often are; and from this it followed that if anyone insisted on being hurt by him, he found the injury hard to forgive.

A smell of frying mushrooms warned him that his supper must be almost ready. Concluding the letter with a prettily phrased but censorable valediction, he slapped the writing-pad shut over his still-wet signature, and went upstairs to wash his hands.

“S
O YOU SEE,” SAID
Peter, “there it is.” He gave a conclusive little smile at the cobalt-blue limits of the sea.

“Yes,” said Elsie. If the waters of the bay had been turned to blood, she would not have known, or, probably, cared. She leaned against her supporting rock, stroking with absent fingers a rosette of yellow lichen, and looked at Peter. So might a twelfth-century mystic have looked at an archangel, manifested on a sunny day out of blue cliff-top air.

“Trust yourself, first and all the time. It’s your life. Hang on to it. Nobody else, however much they care about you, can do it for you.”

“Yes,” said Elsie, “I will.” It was not a declaration, it was a response in a litany. However much they care about you. It came back to her in waves of light from the clouds and grass and the long white lines of the rollers ruled across the beach.

“You’re losing your muffler.” He caught at its blowing end, and, leaning forward where he sat, tucked it snugly in for her. She sat quite still; only her spirit seemed to tremble and shiver at his touch, like an image refracted in the heat of the sun. “Don’t let them throttle you up in woollies for the rest of the year, though. Start getting some light and air into you as soon as it gets warm.”

“Oh, I will.” She wondered how it would be possible to hold more of either than at this moment. It seemed to her that she could have floated from the cliff-edge and balanced, like the gulls, on the upward eddies of the wind.

“You’ve had a tough break. I know, if anyone does, what it means to hang on alone.” His eyes seemed to be sharing a secret with the horizon. He was remembering, not without satisfaction, certain stimulating encounters with more rigid and less enlightened minds. To Elsie, this transient vista of a splendid loneliness was almost too much for her heart to hold. She could not speak. It was not, in any case, required of her. Peter returned to earth, and propped himself more comfortably on his elbow against the sea-pinks and the rough grass. “It’s too bad,” he said, looking at her thoughtfully, “that you’re an only child.”

Elsie dug her fingers into the flake of lichen, with such force that it came away in her fingers.

“I’m glad you said that.” She felt so breathless that it seemed strange to hear the words coming, while her lungs were empty. “It’s what I was going to tell you. It’s the other thing that I said there was. You see. …” He reached out his hand and put it over hers. With a little rushing gasp she finished, “You see—I’m not.”

“What aren’t you?” He moved his fingers gently over the back of her hand.

“An only child. I had an elder sister, you see.”

“Poor little Elsie.” He turned her hand palm upwards, and stroked it again. “How long has she been dead?”

“She isn’t dead. She—went away. No one talks about her.”

“Don’t they?” said Peter softly. “Don’t they, indeed? Well, it seems about time you and I did, doesn’t it?”

“I wanted to. I thought it would seem—less awful, if we did.”

“I think so too.” He smiled at her; but she was looking down at his hand covering hers. This was already miracle enough. “And they never told you what it was, this awful thing that no one talks about?”

“No. At least, not …”

“But you think you know, don’t you?”

Elsie looked down at the broken flake of lichen. “Yes,” she said.

She knew that he was looking at her. She raised her eyes, quickly, ready to look away again. He held them with his own.

“Everything has a name, my dear. And some things have several. Don’t you think, knowing your parents as you do, that perhaps the reason they don’t talk about her is that they haven’t got a word for love?”

Elsie said nothing. She did not think of speaking; one does not answer the morning star. The word had never been spoken, until his voice clothed it. She thought that she would hear it every moment, now, for the rest of her life.

Peter saw her face, like a face stilled by incantation. It did not much perturb him. The word transference floated, with the comfortable assurance of text-book and experiment, across his mind. Rather more briskly, since time was getting short, he said,

“Do you remember your sister well?”

“Yes. Quite well.” Elsie’s face stirred, as if the sound of her own voice had waked it. “I was nine when she went away. She wasn’t really—at all like that, I thought.”

Peter smiled at her benignly. “My dear, you’re not nine now. Everyone’s like that. You are. I am.”

Elsie’s heart stopped dead, and then raced so that it seemed to be shaking her body.

The sun was growing warmer; an outcrop of rock sheltered them from the wind. Peter stretched himself pleasantly on the grass. It was going well, he thought.

“There are people who refuse life, and people who accept it. That’s all. Your sister would understand what I mean. So will you when the time comes, unless you run away from it. Don’t do that; you’re much too nice a person.” His eyes, bluer from the reflection of the sky, smiled into hers.

Elsie took a breath, trying to speak. She wanted to say that she would not run away, though terror and beauty should destroy her; but only a little breath came back again from between her lips.

“You trust me, don’t you.” It was an encouraging statement, not a question; he did not waste time by exacting a reply. “You don’t think I’m something that ought to be shoved into the cupboard under the stairs and never mentioned? Well … I’m twenty-eight, you know: and I haven’t spent the last ten years in a monastery. And I’m not ashamed of it. Like your sister. Does that make you wish you hadn’t come here to talk to me?”

Elsie spoke at last. “No,” she said, in a voice that cracked into a whisper.

“You see. I look just like anyone else. And I am just like anyone else. I’ve enjoyed life more than your parents, perhaps, because I believe in life, that’s all. Your sister believed in life too. If you were to meet her, you’d feel that in her just as you feel it in me. You
should
meet her. Where is she now?”

“I don’t know,” said Elsie, speaking as people do in their sleep.

“Haven’t you ever tried to find out?”

“Not properly.” She looked down at the grass.

“But your people know, don’t they?”

“I don’t know.” She hung her head. Her fears and avoidances burned her, as if they had been of him. From among them, memories shaped themselves together. “Sometimes,” she said, “I’ve thought that Mother knows.”

“Well, it’s up to you. Find her.” That, he thought, would be a good note to finish on. It would leave her with something to think about; it was time, after all, to carry the process of transference on to the next stage. “And whatever you find, don’t run away.”

“I’ll try.” She looked down into the peacock-green sea two hundred feet below, as if he had bidden her climb down and search there, and she were measuring the depth.

“Good. And write and tell me all about it.” For good measure, he talked for ten minutes more, decorating and underlining; quoting (and toning down with some tact to her level) Bertrand Russell and Havelock Ellis, and illustrating them with little stories about the more amusing of his friends, reduced delicately to implications, for she must not be startled or over-hurried yet. He went on longer than he had meant, loth to cease his labours in so promising a soil, where even as one watched, the good corn struck root and the green shoots appeared. He had had one or two disappointments in the last few months; a case like this, he felt, made up for them all. He was a little sad within himself, because he would not be there to observe results. One so seldom was. But he felt that an otherwise trite and trivial month had been justified. He did his best, as he talked, to keep the main headings of the discourse in mind, because Norah would be interested to hear about it. Norah was always interested, bless her.

“I’ll have to go in a minute,” he said at length. “I’ve got a lot of straightening-up to do.” He had let the panel cards get behindhand, and Sloane had had a persnickety regard for them. “You won’t forget me, will you?”

“No.” Since it pleased him to ask questions without a meaning, she gave with a dreaming smile the meaningless answer.

“Because I shan’t forget you. You’re the only worthwhile thing that’s happened to me down here. We’ll meet again, you know. Hang on to yourself; and remember all we’ve said. And don’t run away.”

He got to his feet. She followed; not pursuing any purpose, but as water follows the moon. He took her hands in his, looking down at her rapt face with affection and a certain pardonable pride. “Good-bye, Elsie dear.” He drew her forward gently, and kissed her on the brow.

She was still standing like a tree, rooted, blind and trembling, when he vanished round the dip of the cliff. She heard him, in the receding distance, whistling “Bobby Shaftoe” as he went.

That day and the morning after she got through the mechanics of living with the somnambulist’s luck. In the afternoon she went on the cliffs again, not in the hope of meeting him, for he had said that he was busy; only to re-create more clearly, against every detail of stone and flower and grass, each moment they had spent. Hope had no place in a heart too full to give it lodging. Some time, she supposed—perhaps not for years, as he had seemed to imply, what did it matter?—she and Peter would be married. It was like a sun still below the level of the horizon, whose brightness one does not fear because it will come softly, after the long cool stillness of dawn. She did not think much about it; the guilty curiosity of the schoolroom had disintegrated; instead, misting the outlines of things, there was only a cloud of shyness, like mild vapour touched with light.

It was the following morning when, walking a little further than she had been allowed till now, she saw, outside the village post-office, the familiar car. She retreated immediately, for she had never met him in the presence of strangers and the prospect confused her. But, even while she turned, the bell on the shop door tinkled, the door opened and slammed. It was Dr. Sloane, with his old-fashioned black bag, his stethoscope peeping out of his overcoat pocket. Smiling his plump rosy smile, he raised his hat to her, and asked her if she were taking good care of herself.

She answered something; dazed, while she spoke, only by the sudden shock of having expected to meet Peter unprepared. It was only after he had driven off that she stood still in the white dust of the village street, knowing what it meant.

Perhaps she had missed him by coming here, perhaps he was searching the cliffs for her at this moment. She was nearly through the village when she remembered the stamps she had come to buy for her mother. If she returned without them, she would be asked why. It would not be easy to lie well, after saying good-bye to Peter. The few minutes could make no difference; on the cliffs she would see him for a long way off. She turned back, tinkled the little bell, and stood among the jars of boiled sweets, the picture postcards and cards of combs and headache powders, looking through the little brass grill.