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Chapter Fourteen
In Your Stupidity

We can't possibly have made a good impression: Zoo, and none of the animals in pairs.

Timothy ran away from Damaris Gayte's house to come to me, to spend his twenty-first birthday under this roof. It was nice of mother to give up her room. She wouldn't for anyone but Timothy. He showed Damaris that awful snapshot of me, and she said, ‘She looks the typical young enthusiast. You'd better not encourage her, or when you take your leave you'll find her waiting down at the station with her little bundle.’

Forty years old, with coiled black hair and wonderful strong profile. At forty you ought to have a cutting edge.

Timothy's asleep, she thought, turned over in bed so that when he wakes up he'll see the morning hills, and that cemetery. I wish people wouldn't put up dirty broken marble teeth to the memory of their loved ones. Timothy, Timothy… funny name, like something in a nursery rhyme. If he made the slightest movement, even if he were lying awake, I'd know it. But I can send out all my own thought, until it's great sheets of moving colour, blue fans in the air, and it never touches him; not strongly enough to wake him up. Perhaps it makes him dream.

This is what they call asking for it. Nothing else needs to. Dusty moth rains into moonlit flower, his eyes are rubies and his antennæ finest fawn silk. And the shooting star, ablaze from head to foot, leaps into a jet-black sea to quench his thirst, while on a marble floor the dolphins roll around him in soft amaze.

She pulled a coat over her nightgown, and went upstairs. Her father was still moving about in the kitchen, with small weary noises, not larger than a badger would make in its earthen house. He was sitting at the table, in front of him a book which he wasn't reading, and the smoke from his pipe carved for itself a still blue way in the atmosphere, before it turned wispy and faded out in strings of grotesque, bobbling dragons. His eyes were bloodshot-tired.

‘Hullo, Dad.’

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He thought she had come about the tea or the electric light, and glared suspiciously.

‘What are you doing? What do you want?’

‘Can't sleep. Any tea in the pot?’

He drained a few cold yellow drops.

‘I'll put the kettle on again, but shut that door, and for Christ's sake don't wake your mother.’

He made the tea, and came back to stare at Eliza. He remembered her when she was a baby; she had pretty little ears, and once, valiantly, had climbed up and clouted him over the head with her hobby-horse, for pretending to be drunk and frightening ‘Gusta. But long since she had been lost, and had no part in that rich inward life where he strode along the pavements, declaiming speeches, interjecting from the gallery at the House, doubling up his big fists under the noses of the flunkeys who ran to throw him out. In this world, he rose easily from being Tom McGrath's confidant and sympathizer—Tom was his Union Secretary—to saving Tom from mistakes, warning him against pimps, exposing the white-livered curs who were plotting behind his back, sneaks trying to split the Union and crawl to the bosses. He could see the appreciation warm in Tom McGrath's eyes, Tom's hand reached out. ‘If it hadn't been for you, Hannay, Christ knows what would have happened to-night. Oh, yes, the cows were trying to put one over, all right. Now, you and I…’

He saw Tom involved in a street accident, down under the wheels of a car driven by one of the bosses. He heard the hard shout wrenched out of the belly of the crowd—‘Look out!’—and sprang forward to save Tom. Sometimes, among screaming brakes and grinding wheels, he was there just in time, and yanked Tom back to safety, shaking his fist at the white flabby moon-face behind the wheel. Sometimes he died for Tom, and was buried, and the men at the office came soberly to his funeral. Sometimes, however, he failed to save Tom, and made one of the pall-bearers, and afterwards people said curiously, ‘That's Hannay, who was such a pal of McGrath's.’ And a change then, a dark, tall, resolute change had come into his life.

Suddenly through the haze John could see his daughter's feet. They were bare. ‘You'll catch cold,’ he said. ‘Better put these on.’ He kicked off his slippers, revealing a mighty corn on the third left toe. It gave him pain, but satisfaction as well. Having a corn made him more working-class, and drew him into the round lantern-beam of Tom McGrath's approval. ‘I'm rough,’ he thought. ‘Those that don't like me can lump me. Not one of your bloody gentlemen.’ Eliza slid her cold feet into his slippers.

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‘Smelly,’ she said, in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘You're late up, too.’ He began to complain softly.

‘I can't sleep. I get shooting pains here, right through the temples. It's like a knife. I can tell you, sometimes it's red-hot. No wonder, working ten hours a day by electric light, and then coming home to be growled at by your mother. Mind you, your mother's a good woman—a very good woman.’

‘Of course she is.’ The ghost of Carly's Johannesburg gentleman twirled his pepper-grey moustache huffily, and stalked out of sight. ‘Anyhow, you're no pacifist on the home front yourself.’

‘Who would be, slaving his guts out and getting nothing for it? I'm not so young as I was.’

‘Why don't you try something else?’

The forlorn eyes of somebody who, having made his bed full of iron lumps and hummocks, is constrained to lie on it because he is afraid of finding No Room at the Inn.

‘Your mother wouldn't hear of it.’

‘What would you like to be, Dad?’

‘I should have been an engineer. Once Bert Quigley and I were going to chuck the job and start an antique shop together, but your mother—’

‘He's an awful little rat. He would have sloped with the cashbox. But an antique shop wouldn't have been a bad idea for you.’ Profile of Nefertiti the Queen, looking down calm and bitter-sweet over John's shoulder. ‘Dad, why don't you run away?’

‘I can't leave you children.’

‘I don't see why not, if you don't like us. We're nearly grown up, except Kitch. If you like the wharfies and hate clerks, why don't you go for your life and be a wharfie? You're only young once. See Timbuctoo and die.’

Eliza, too, was seeing visions. She watched a beaked ship, black and rusty-red, and stowed away somewhere in the creaking inward parts, her father, who wore a black jersey and a criminal-looking cap; white-faced, but mysteriously himself again. Staring over the side of the ship, watching the holes vomit white water.… A sailor fishing for snapper chucked a lump of fat pork overside, and the gulls screamed as if the tops of their heads must come off. The ship quivered. Her father, drawing in his head like a winkle retreating to safety, looked his last at the gorse on the port hills.

‘I did it, Mother. I persuaded Dad to desert us.’

(‘Father,’ said George Washington, ‘I cannot tell a lie. I cut down your cherry-tree with my little hatchet.’)

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He shook his head.

‘I can't make you out at all. You'd better go to bed before you catch cold. You'll wake up your mother, and there'll be another row. You'll get consumption, that's what you'll do, hanging about with next to nothing on.’

‘I wonder if you know a poem—I can't remember who wrote it, or what its name was. The first line is:

‘I cannot sleep—the night is hot and empty,’

‘and then,

‘Outside, the small cicadas,
Complaining of their passions, weak and shrill;
Oh, from what whips! oh, from what secret scourgings,
All Nature's children bend beneath her will!’¹

John had never heard of the poem; it woke in him not the faintest spark of curiosity. ‘You'd better go to bed,’ he repeated.

‘What do you think of Timothy, Dad?’

He had forgotten all about the beautiful young man. He said, ‘Timothy? Timothy? Oh, young Cardew.… He's all right, I suppose. Like all the other young fellows—head full of pleasure, women and racing. They make me sick.’

‘I think he's the perfectly natural man.’

‘Don't make yourself cheap running after him, that's all.’ Eliza's father sounded mechanical and dead tired; he was longing to be left alone with Tom McGrath. She rose, saying, ‘Here are your slippers,’ and kicked them off. A moment later she put her head round the door again.

‘Good night, Dad.’

‘Good night,’ he answered, and went out to the scullery, to kindle again the surprised crocus of gas-flame under the kettle. A little clock in Eliza's heart ticked, ‘Old, old, old, old’; but only for a short time, and then she slept.

Timothy wakened very early, aroused by a thrush which shuffled its stout body among the coprosmas, ate itself into the gripes, and then whined outside his window-pane. He lay in his strange bed, beautifully warm. A sunbeam went white ripple-ripple on the syrup-coloured door panels, and he recognized it. He had seen that sunbeam, none other, when he was a boy of six, sick with diphtheria. He lay in bed then, waiting for the doctor to come and give him antitoxin, and it was such a fine day outside, and his throat hurt. His mother wept bitterly page 155 when the doctor produced the needle. ‘Oh, Doctor, that great thing for his poor little body! Oh, why couldn't it have been me, instead of my baby?’

‘I'm twenty-one,’ he thought, suddenly wide awake. ‘Golly, Damaris will be wild.’ He wasn't sorry for Damaris yet. She was like a toothache; she would, and she wouldn't, and of late was always working up scenes, drinking Eisel and eating crocodiles. Then she turned off the lights and played Rachmaninoff's Prelude, a performance which had once made his blood run beautifully cold, but which now left him uninterested, though the gleam of her thick wrists raised in darkness, striking at the piano-keys like angry cobras, still impressed him as majestic.

He put her aside. He was in Eliza's house, Eliza was just over the corridor. He had said good night, liking her eyes so well that almost he postponed saying good night indefinitely; but he could hear all the Hannays did and said upstairs, and supposed that they also weren't deaf. He liked their tribe. ‘Mother could be a Tartar,’ he thought, ‘but that's as it should be.’

He got out of bed, did exercises until he was sick of Bernarr McFadden's young men, and putting on his rainbow dressing-gown, crossed the corridor, to tap on Eliza's door. Since she didn't answer, he opened it in obedience to a command from the genii of the air, and went in. She was asleep, her hair dishevelled. It was a nice little room, simple and green, full of indiscriminate drawings, and very well-meaning books. She wouldn't wake up while he stood smiling at her, so he knelt down and started to kiss her face and arms. That awakened her, and she said in a muffled voice, ‘Who is it?’

‘Tarquinius Superbus. Have you ever been kissed there?’

Eliza sat up, rubbing her shoulder. ‘That's mine when you've finished with it,’ she said, like a schoolboy. ‘Your chin's scrubby, Timothy. You can't have shaved.’

‘Do you mind? May I come in and talk it over?’

‘Not in these, Tarquin. You'll wake mother in a minute.’

‘Would mother care?’

‘Ask her. She thinks bedrooms are unchastity, while as for beds…’

‘But we could explain.’

‘Let well alone,’ said Eliza, with a firmness surprising to herself. ‘Who gave you the dreadful rainbow?’

‘Damaris. It's the most beautiful of my dressing-gowns. Do you mind?’

‘Oh, I forgot. I forgot all about it. I never wished you many happy page 156 returns, and I didn't know it was your birthday till last night, so I haven't a present for you. It seems very niggardly.’

Timothy said, ‘Come for a run with me now. Birthday treat. Hurry and get your clothes on, and don't put up your hair. I like it down. If you're ready in five minutes, I'll forgive you everything.’

‘Then go away.’ Timothy turned his back and screened his eyes.

‘I don't look. I never look when women are dressing, it's too disappointing. One—two—three—twenty—how slow you are! Shall I help with the hooks? Get a move on, Boy.’

‘Ready.’

‘Very apt,’ said Timothy. ‘I like the little pansy-coloured thing. What do you call it?’

‘It's a smoking-jacket. Don't you wear anything yourself?’

‘Much better not. Naked, we absorb the actinic rays…’

‘Remember mother, and dress,’ said Eliza. His voice slid over from the room across the passage.

‘Where shall we tell them we've gone? I know—we went gathering mushrooms for your mother's breakfast. We knew how she liked mushrooms.’

‘Only they're months out of season.’

‘Then we went gathering nuts and may. That was it, nuts and may.’

‘Hurry, idiot,’ said Eliza, and they slipped out of the front door, through the little morass of bright bowing flowers, silken tents encamped in the wind. ‘Poor mother,’ said Eliza. ‘Nothing grows properly here, what with the clay soil and the northerlies.’ In her heart she thought, ‘I'm perfectly happy. Perhaps this will be the happiest day of my life.’

They were on the bush road, curved like a bow; half-way, they turned and struck up over the hills, into a clear crest of morning sultried with yellow gorse. Little breakwind pines grew along the hilltops, their thick yellowish-green pollen flying up in clouds if an arm shook them or a foot unsettled the close grass beneath them. Timothy walked barefoot, his shoes slung round his neck. ‘I get all the virtue from the ground,’ he explained, and persuaded Eliza to try it. But she was a tenderfoot, and limped pitiably until he laughed, and catching her up in his arms carried her a few yards.

‘Put me down, put me down,’ she called. A pine-branch struck Timothy softly across the face, like a lady with a green glove, and he dropped Eliza, but held her close for a moment. Then he released her, with a little laugh. There were prickles of gilt light in his eyes. ‘Heavy lot,’ he said.

‘Where are we going?’

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‘To a hole in the ground, a quarry. I nearly broke my neck there once, running in a thick mist. You'd never have met me. I threw stones down, and it sounded most uncanny, rattle and splash.’

They found the quarry, slant-edged, with a bright cut of furze bushes, all in blossom on a hillside which but for the occasional burrowing of rabbits and the patches of dried dung dropped by wandering cattle might never have been touched at all; a curve lifted out of the world, into space. But the quarry was deep and desolate, and a sickly smell streaked up. Not far away stood the shell of a deserted farmhouse, all its windows smashed, staring and blinded. ‘Somebody died there,’ whispered Eliza. They looked at one another like guilty children. Then Timothy said, ‘Yes, it was a cow, and there are the old girl's bones,’ pointing to remains in a quarry. They both laughed. ‘But I liked the pine trees better,’ said Eliza.

‘I know another place. Give me your hand, Boy.’

‘Oh, I can't,’ she thought, a few moments later, ‘I can't keep this up. Tim, let me go, you're hurting, Tim; I've got a stitch in my side.’ But she was too breathless to get the words out until he had pulled up by the stile, and then it was too late. Timothy swung her over into a world of unkempt ribbon grass and neglected trees, natives treading on the gnarled roots of exotics.

‘This was a garden once. Now it has run wild, beautifully wild. Isn't it lovely? Doesn't it smell of leaves and freshness and dew, all cleanly things? Look, here's a crab-apple, but the wasps have been at it. I'd like to make a clay statuette of you—Girl with Crab-Apple. Kneel down, and tilt your chin. No, come farther along; there's a pool I want you to see.’

‘I can see smoke. Isn't there a cottage somewhere?’

Only the caretaker's. He's very old and Scotch, and he calls the plants by their Latin names. If you're a good girl I'll introduce you, and he'll give you damper scones cooked in a camp oven. Women can't cook.’

The pool was brown and stagnant, the irises around it still tightly furled, their purple hard in spikes; but the feel of the roughened turf, delicately harsh, and the streaks of green and yellow in patterns of osier leaves, were ease enough. They drew aside into the ways of the trees. Long ago, somebody had kept bees, and the white hives stood. there, half-decaying but full of their people, black bodies and thin wings clotted against combs oozing dark gold honey. The bees had taken to the tree-tops for a living, bringing home the essence of manuka and rata, native honeys mixed with the sweet they sucked from the veins of cold pink belladonna lilies, standing in surprised colonies page 158 on the edge of the pool. When Eliza saw them she could only say, ‘Wild pink lilies,’ and draw her hand across her eyes, as if she halfwanted to shut out the sight of them. And she did, for there is something dangerous in such a perfection, and the cold statelihood of nature's things, reverted to their types, seemed to her best left alone. But she had no more than a moment to think of anything, for the sun beams shot blanching through the boughs, riding little cock-horses of supplejack and lancewood, and Timothy's eyes had the gilt prickles in them as he pulled her down, murmuring, ‘Sit there. The light comes through the branches.’ He picked up her hair and smothered it over her face, one strand after another; then pressed her back to the ground, so that she could feel the brittle bits of twig and old leaves tangled, and raised her hands to comb them out. Timothy caught her hands and put them aside.

‘Leave it. That is how I love your hair.’

He put his arms around her, and Eliza felt her bones making themselves small and light, shrinking away like little slaves that cannot intrude into a scene written all for softness. A fantail ran out, starclawed on the wet earth; saw them, gave a peep of distress and warning to his mate, and flew off among the bushes, waggling his black-and-grey fan.

Everything I knew in darkness, but wrongly, foolishly, painfully… all the broken pieces of love I ever threw over my shoulder or dropped into the rubbish-heap… are somehow gathered into the one place. I know.…

She said the last two words aloud,‘I know.’ Timothy looked at her.

‘What do you know?’

She felt as though the sunlight had drugged her beyond answering. It hung in long dazzling ropes, pliant snakes dazzling from the trees, dropping their gold liquid heads into the grass, forking their golden tongues. She repeated, ‘I know.’

Suddenly Timothy kissed her on the mouth, and said, ‘I'm going now.’

She did not think she had heard him aright, not when without a word he rose from the brown-and-green earth, not when she heard him running, a sound dulled instantly on the turf leading back to the stile. He was gone, but that was a flat contradiction of what all the rest said, the thin glazed wings of the bees, the colonies of the belladonna lilies, the birds that presently came out and spoke loudly, intimately, over her head. For a long time she was sure Timothy was still there, or would come back in a moment; and when she sat up, at first she could only notice things which had no connection with herself, page 159 and might have been seen, impartially, by an old man or an idiot in any part of the world. They weren't hers, though they clung to her sight and touch. One of the bee-hives was defaced by a scummy green moss, and the wood was full of skeleton leaves, flowers too, which had parted with their picture-writing of colour for this more delicate calligraphy, crabbed and brittle. Her fingers crushed a cluster of these fleshless things, and she thought, ‘It's a whole head of hydrangeas, every petal reduced to bone, not a single one missing. Flower-bones. I've never seen anything like it before. If I were still at school, it would be worth taking to the museum.’

Her throat hurt her, but she could not cry. Now the pink lilies looked too remote. A judgment had been passed on them, sentencing them all to exile in this beautiful wild loneliness, where no one saw or gathered but the bees. But the spikes of iris were too hard. She broke off one stalk, but when the white sap oozed, as if trying to staunch the wound with a cobweb of its own making, she slid it down into the brown edge of the pool, and left it standing there. Presently she said, ‘My hair… my hair…’ and started to comb out fragments of leaf and stick. Then she walked up the turf pathway. A bend of the track brought her in sight of the caretaker's cottage and its plume of smoke. An old collie dog lay there in the sunshine, and rhubarb spread great branches of red behind him. He barked as she approached, but when he came up, pointing about with his narrow golden-brown head, she saw that his eyes were opaque with pearly cataract. He was blind, and had no idea who passed over the stile

When the Hannays were all at the breakfast-table, Carly ready for work, Sandra in the navy-blue gym. costume which Eliza had worn a year ago, she said, ‘Timothy had to go and get his books. I walked with him part of the way.’

‘Fine time of the morning for it,’ said her mother. ‘Hurry now, and eat.’ The room smelt of frying, comfortable, warm, rather dirty, with the dirtiness of appetite's arrogance when you are sick, and everybody else clashes things across the table.

‘Don't you let him go making a fool of you, my girl,’ said her mother. John came out, his clothes half-fastened, and stood blinking in the light.

‘I can't find those damned and blasted braces. I can't put a thing down in this house without somebody—’

‘Go and look for your braces in the top drawer, the proper place for them. You can't leave your litter about all over the house. And don't come out like that before your own daughters.’

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Behold the days of man are like unto the grass of the field, which to-day is…

Sweet creatures, humans; pink lilies sighing out their souls in exile, because nobody stands over them talking bacon and braces. And they think I want marriage first: Timothy, Timothy, fool, how can you think I want this?

‘The wonder to me is that you've got a job at all, if you sit about mooning in your office as you do at home.’

‘I don't want my job. I'm sick of it. I'd just as soon let it rip.’

Carly said, ‘That's wicked. There are hundreds of girls who'd do anything for a good job.’

‘Then let them. I don't see why people should have daughters if they don't want to keep them.’

‘A nice temper your Timothy Cardew's left you in this morning, I must say. I thought he looked too good to be true. If that's the effect he has on your ambition, the less you see of him the better. And the sooner your father forbids him the house again, the more trouble he'll spare himself and everyone else.’

Eliza thought, ‘Now I can slam the door. Now it's just a family row—something to shout about.’

‘Shut up about my job. I'll live my life in my own way, and if you interfere with me, I'll clear out.’

Pink lilies, pink lilies, pink lilies… mornings are something to run through like mad, like a sped arrow from a bow; so that you won't miss your tram.

When next she saw Timothy, only a few hours later, for he turned up at supper quite unperturbed, with a book of Bernard Shaw's for her to study, she was surprised at the ease with which she could keep the little coloured balls of conversation bouncing over the table. Verbal ping-pong.… The Hannays were all good at it, except John, who was too grandiloquent, and roared if he thought his children were making fun of him. Everybody joined in, few points missed, no quarter given or taken. John, with invincible valour, always stuck to the wrong side of the argument. Even Timothy was against him, laughingly, with a friendly, look-here-old-chap manner. John would like that about as much as arsenic. Old Chap eventually went off growling to his room. Augusta did the ironing, and Eliza had the drawing-room for entertaining Timothy—the inalienable privilege of any female Hannay with a youth in tow. She played Moonmoths on the piano; the sweet, sticky little driblets of music ebbed between her fingers. She had put perfume on her reddish bush of hair, and to Timothy she seemed page 161 childish. A full moon beat with chilly outspread wings on the windows, but nobody let it in.

‘I think you all treat your father rather disrespectfully.’

‘Tum-te-tum, tum-te-tum.… Isn't this a juicy thing. I suppose we do. He asks for it.’

‘After all, he's your father.’

‘Sometimes he says not. Anyhow, we understand one another, better than anybody outside.’

‘Am I an outsider?’

‘You're certainly not a Hannay. Thank your stars for it.’

‘This morning I didn't feel much of a stranger. I had to run away from you. Do you know why?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘I was afraid I might make love to you.’

‘Wouldn't that have been dreadful? Poor Tim.… Did you go straight to Damaris and confess? And did she say, “Hold your nose and swallow down the brimstone neat, my lad, there's nothing else for it when it's spring again"?’

‘Do you really think I'd do that?’

‘Why not? It wasn't important, and you looked so funny, running away.’

‘You sound experienced.’

‘Oh, I've known heaps of men. Dad fishes them up from the vasty deeps, you know—some of them would make you laugh, real old toughs. The others come from the office.’

‘Were you ever in love, Eliza?’

‘Off and on, nearly always. It's temperament. If you like I'll play you Spring Song. I fumble a bar or two, but it goes well with love.’

‘What do you think of love?’

‘Much more important to be friends.’

‘It's half life,’ said Timothy. ‘It's a sweet white poison. It's Hell and it's Heaven.’ The room was too shadowy for Eliza to see his face, but his head was bent down, and she wanted to cry, ‘No, no, it's only pink lilies in a lonely garden.’ But that would be to give the show away, and she struck out the bars of Spring Song, softly and dimly.

‘I like it,’ said Timothy, like a child. They heard the gate-latch click.

‘Carly,’ said Eliza. A man's low voice murmured, down by the coprosmas. ‘And Trevor Sinjohn, Carly's young man.’

‘Is he pleasant?’

‘He's a louse.’

‘What I like about your opinions is that they're definite,’ said Timothy. Carly came in, her little penny-round face full and blind page 162 with moonlight, as if she walked in her sleep. When she saw them, she smiled and said, ‘Hullo,’ gently; but the daze didn't go out of her eyes. Sometimes the boys took their girls up on the hills, in such evenings, to little hollows in the grasses, where hedgehogs moved about and they could watch the harbour lights, and feel the delicate, brittle chill of the air, a touch to be shut out by their, nearness to one another. But when it came starlight, it was time for the respectable ones to go home, and nobody could say Carly wasn't respectable.

‘Let's go outside,’ said Timothy. The silver had escaped from Carly's eyes and into his heart. When he had Eliza out in the little blowing garden, he slipped an arm around her waist, and they started to walk quietly down the path, down the half-dozen ungainly steps, up into the silvery darkness. Eliza thought, ‘Once for the day should be enough; don't be a fool, a mad fool.’ Timothy, if he thought at all, said nothing, until full under the round white disc of a street-lamp he stopped and turned her face upwards. Then he kissed her again and again, with quiet lips that were almost cold, still lips bent down in a dream.

‘I swore this morning I'd never do that again.’

‘Why not? Why not?’

‘Because it isn't right. You're so young. I do love you, as much as I can love any girl.’

‘But that isn't very much? Well, I don't know that love can be measured by quantities.’

‘I have to go to London, you see. I want to study, to travel and live. I'd give anything even to live as you do, by writing. I think creative work is the way of the soul. I can't see why you don't work at it harder, having the chance.’

‘Other things to do.’

‘It's just the tiger-vitality lacking, isn't it? And the incentive. But I've got to prowl over Europe, and sleep out with fuzzy tramps, and steal turnips, and live as Jack London lived. If I don't do that, I might as well not have been born.’

‘I can come too.’

‘You can't, a woman couldn't.’

‘I'm not a woman; not for ordinary purposes.’

Timothy laughed; ‘Can you turn your hair up under a cap?’

‘I can do anything.’

‘Then I'll take you. You can be my cabin-boy, and steal turnips for me. Look down there, past the bluegums. I always loved this place. The lights in the water whisper “London,” to me, and I hold my breath.’

‘The trees are very dark. I love the smell of bluegums, next best to page 163 pines, I think. The old pines are best, they are so friendly. You're the complete godwit, aren't you, Timothy?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The one who has to fly north, whether he wants to or not. But I understand, I've been one myself, and sometimes still am. What can I be to you, Timothy?’

He said, ‘Mistress,’ lightly, daringly and proudly, his face tilted back in the vague light; as if there were something of special glamour about the word, not obloquy. For a moment Eliza felt sorrow for her mother. ‘Now is the moment,’ she thought, ‘when according to everybody I have to keep my head and play my cards right. But I don't play at cards.’

‘I could make you happy, Eliza, quite easily. I'm always making women and girls happy. But with you, I don't want to be the complete hedonist. I want to make you think.’

‘Thinking won't get you far.’

‘You're a sensualist, aren't you, Eliza?’

‘Yes. I like the pine-needles underneath my hands, too. And lots of things. But I don't think I can be your mistress. Supposing there were a baby?’

‘Then I'd—’ He was going to say ‘marry you,’ and stopped himself. ‘I'd take you away and live with you. I wouldn't leave you.’

‘Because you've got to go to London, travel and study?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sensualists… Aren't you fond of Rupert Brooke's “Blanket's rough kiss… cool comfort of the sheets.…” Remember?’

‘That's all right. It's another one of his that makes me think of you. I don't know if I can remember it. Yes, I can:

‘In your stupidity I found
The sweet hush after a sweet sound,
And when you spoke, it seemed to me
Infinitely and like a sea
About the slight world you had known
Your vast incertitude was thrown.’²

‘I'm not so very stupid, Timothy. Only young, and rather inarticulate.’

‘There's a lovely stupidity. But some day I'll have to kill you, you know. The Emperor always does. For being unfaithful… will you ever look at another man? Or for corning in at the wrong time.…’

‘Now's the time, too,’ she thought, ‘when I ought to laugh out loud and sweep it all away with my hands. If I go on, whatever happens I'll page 164 have to pay for it. He'll go away to places and leave me. He'll make love to people, and I'll pretend I don't care, and begin to mind when I stop being a novelty. I'll introduce him to Simone, and he'll make love to her, and the only comfort I'll have is the cold, grubby comfort of knowing he'll walk out on her. He won't understand, he'll make love seem servile, he'll accept all the price-tickets—you're cheap, you haven't any pride, no self-respecting woman would do as you're doing, so on and so forth. If he goes now, right away, it'll hurt for a while and then somebody else will come.’

‘Take me to England with you, Timothy. Promise me.’

‘I promise.’ The moon made two little silver pennies and placed them on his eyelids, so that his face had a deathly look, its mouth and nostrils soft slants of darkness. Above in an intricate pattern of curves the bluegum leaves moved faintly, their sickles shearing the wind. The full moon put off her robes, and moved across the harbour. The night and all things in it stared and breathed, conscious only of silver.

‘We must go home,’ said Timothy, ‘mother will be worried.’ His smile had a sudden boy-sweetness. He was part of the nature world which gave no quarter, but he was twenty-one, and Eliza's mother, whom he liked, mustn't be worried.

They shook the leaves off. On the way down the hill they met a hedgehog, and Timothy carried him to their gate, arguing that he had no right to be abroad without a tail-light. In the garden he told it, ‘Oh, go peddle your papers,’ and the hedgehog dug its nose into darkness and scuttled, freezing every few inches into a most noticeable, ball of prickles, which it thought exactly like a stone or a little thorn-bush. Bawder's cart went rumbling by, Bawder's red lantern shone on the driver's seat, as he cracked a slow whip over his sway-backed nag. Timothy wasn't sleeping at the house of Hannay. He was away again, most probably to Damaris Gayte's house. The last Eliza heard of him wasn't any word at all, but a whistle, like a blackbird startled untimely beneath the hedge.