Eva Trout by Elizabeth Bowen Read Free Book Online Page B

drawer. He had searced for but failed to find a thermometer. There had ended his doctoring, but for “Keep warm!” She believed herself to be doing so. A once-hot rubber hot water bottle drew comfort from her Viyella thigh. The window was bolted. An electric heater gave forth a smell of scorched dust and ate up oxygen. Over her pyjama-jacket she wore an anorak.
    The window looked north. Some time ago, the distances of the country had been thinly painted by sunshine, but that was over; earth and sky had now the same unluminous greyness— which must be daylight, for it was waning. Indoors, Larkins mustered its evening shadows. The triumphing calm of its emptiness could be felt: no person troubled that calm by seeing or hearing, thinking or knowing. Only the kitchen would be giving ear to the tip-tap of the drip from the sink tap hitting the upturned plastic bowl. Only the living-room knew of the slow combustion going on inside the banked-down fire. The motherly chair by the hearth would be rejoicing in having no unmotherly occupant. Nobody was down there—nobody to object, nobody to wince. All day, there had been no one to suffer whitely. Up here, one could have been going all out on one’s transistor, full blast. Or one could have roller-skated … One lay in languor.
    The bedroom—which, though called Eva’s, continued to be like a spare-room, generally empty, in which an overnight bag has been unpacked hastily—began to darken. Round her, her belongings faded from sight. She owned a couple of hairbrushes with her father’s monogram; a miniature model of a ship’s compass; a jugful of coloured pencils; the claw of a greater eagle mounted in silver; a still-inviolate Elizabeth Arden Christmas casket (from Constantine); a clay cat and donkey, examples of Dancey art, and the transistor, cased in apparent ivory. This last, with a gleam like a forehead’s, stood by her bed—at a moment, she was constrained to reach out and touch it. She received a shock: ice-cold, the thing had become! Angrily ice-cold, colder than anger. Eva drew back her frightened, rejected hand, rolled over and lay on top of it, to console it. The tide of the day turned, against it and her; down once again on her came the enormous sadness which had no origin that she knew of. She cowered away from it under tangled blankets.
    What are you doing, Eva, lying in the dark?
    Lying in the dark.
    Supposing somebody came in softly, saying, “How is my darling?” She had heard somebody saying, “How is my darling?”—but when? where? Some other child had been present, a very sick one: “Darling.” Eva searched through her store of broken pieces of time, each one cut out more sharply by fever, looking for an answer. The voice had come in as a door opened—but what door? where?

    That Eva had been to two schools was little known. She so seldom spoke of the first that she could be taken to have forgotten it. Even Iseult (then Smith) had, during the great research, uncovered practically nothing on that subject—she had perhaps not probed deeply enough? Before being sent to Lumleigh, where Miss Smith was, the girl had, for just less than a term, been one of the twenty guinea-pigs at the lakeside castle.
    At that establishment, she was to be pointed out as the donor’s daughter. Her father had bought the castle to give to Constantine, whose heart had then been set on founding an experimentary school in which to install a friend of his as headmaster. The considerable cost of the enterprise had seemed slight to Willy, should this serve to keep Kenneth elsewhere. Inspirational Kenneth of the unclouded brow and Parthenon torso was on the way to becoming Willy’s nightmare: two hundred miles out of town would be just the place for him. Kenneth together with Constantine had envisaged the school as in Surrey; but nothing doing. “Take it or leave it,” said Willy (whose, after all, was the cheque book). “Castle, or nothing.” Vainly Constantine froze.