The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen Read Free Book Online Page A

with that extensive view.
    Thomas liked from the first her smiling, offhand melancholy, her good head, her good nature, an energy he detected under her indolence. Though ash blonde she had, in some way, the personality more of a dark woman. She was, in fact, the first blonde woman who had attracted Thomas: for one thing, he had always detested pinkness, but Anna had an opaque magnolia skin. Her well-built not very slender body moved with deliberation, well in her control. He was affected by the smoothness and unity of her manner, which just was not hard. Her clothes, as part of her style, also pleased and affected him.
    Before they met, his few loves had been married women, and the suspicion, later the certainty, that Anna had already had a lover only made her seem kinder, less far from himself. He did not do well with young girls; he was put off by their candid expectancy. He dreaded (to be exact, he dreaded at that time) to be loved with any great gush of the heart. There was some nerve in his feeling he did not want touched: he protected it without knowing where it was. Already, when he met Anna, he had been thinking of marriage; his means would by now allow it; he did not like the stresses of an affair. Back in London from Dorset, he and Anna met often, alone or at the houses of mutual friends: they dropped into an idiom of sentimental teasing or of intimate sharpness with one another. When they agreed to marry Thomas was happy enough, and Anna perfectly willing. Then they married: Thomas discovered himself the prey of a passion for her, inside marriage, that nothing in their language could be allowed to express, that nothing could satisfy.
    Using capital transferred to him by his mother, Thomas had bought himself into, and now controlled  with his partner, an advertising agency: Quayne and Merrett. The business did very well. Anything opportunist or flashy about the venture (of which old Mrs. Quayne had not liked the idea, at first) was discounted by Thomas’s solid, sub-imperial presence at his official desk. He got back the confidence of his father’s associates—this business with no past soon took on, for the old men, an almost dusty prestige. Flair might be suspect, but they saluted ability: Thomas was a chip of better quality than the old block had been. Quayne and Merrett held their ground, then got more ground; Thomas showed weight, his partner, Merrett, acumen. The vivacious young men they needed were recruited by Merrett. From the business, and from interest on the residue of his mother’s capital, Thomas derived, at present, an income of about two thousand five hundred a year. Anna, upon the death of her father, had succeeded to five hundred a year.
    The Quaynes had expected to have two or three children: in the early years of their marriage Anna had two miscarriages. These exposures to false hopes, then to her friends’ pity, had turned her back on herself: she did not want children now. She pursued what had been her interests before marriage in a leisurely, rather defended way. As for Thomas, the longer he lived, the less he cared for the world. He turned his face away from it, in on Anna. Now he was thirty-six, he could think of nothing with which he could have wished to endow a child.
    When his father died, and then finally when Irene died, Thomas had felt himself disembarrassed. His mother had made a point of keeping Mr. Quayne’s photographs where they had always been, all over the Dorset house, as though the old gentleman were no more than away on some rather silly holiday. She spoke constantly, naturally, of “Your father.” When she died, he discontinued his visits to the couple abroad, telling himself (and no doubt rightly) that these visits were not less embarrassing to Mr. Quayne and Irene than they were to him. In those sunless hotel rooms, those chilly flats, his father’s disintegration, his laugh so anxious or sheepish, his uneasiness with Irene in Thomas’s presence, had filled