Honeycomb · Chapter 10 (1/5)

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Coming home at ten o’clock in the morning, Miriam found the little villa standing quiet and empty in the sunshine. The sound of her coming down the empty tree-lined roadway had brought no face to either of the open windows. She stood on the short fresh grass in the small front garden looking up at the empty quiet windows. During her absence the dark winter villa had changed. It had become home. The little red brick façade glowed as she looked up at it. It belonged to her family. All through the spring weather they had been living behind the small bright house-front. It was they who had set those windows open and left them standing open to the spring air. They had gone out, of course; all of them; to be busy about the weddings. But inside was a place for her; things ready; a bed prepared where she would lie tonight in the darkness. The sun would come up tomorrow and be again on this green grass. She could come out on the grass in the morning.

The sounds of her knocking and ringing echoed through the house with a summery resonance. All the inside doors were standing open. Footsteps came and the door opened upon Mary. She had forgotten Mary and stood looking at her. Mary stood in her lilac print dress and little mob cap, filling the doorway in the full sunlight. She had shone through all the years in the grey basement kitchens at Barnes. Miriam had never before seen her face to face in the sunlight, her tawny red Somersetshire hair; the tawny freckles on the soft rose of her face; the red in her shy warm eyes. They both stood gazing. The strong sweet curve of Mary’s bony chin moved her thoughtful mouth. “How nice you do look, Miss Mirry.” Miriam took her by the arm and trundled her into the house. They moved into the little dining-room filled with a blaze of sunlight and smelling of leather and tobacco and fresh brown paper and string and into the dim small drawing-room at the back. The tiny greenhouse plastered on its hindmost wall was full of growing things. Mary dropped phrases, offering Miriam her share of the things that had happened while she had been away. She listened deferentially, her heart rising high. After all these years she and Mary were confessing their love to each other.

She went down the road with a bale of art muslin over her shoulder and carrying a small bronze table-lamp with a pink silk shade. The bright bunchy green heads of the little lopped acacia trees bobbed against their background of red brick villa as she walked⁠ ⁠… little moving green lampshades for Harriett’s life; they were like Harriett; like her delicate laughter and absurdity. The sounds of the footsteps of passersby made her rejoice more keenly in her burdens. She felt herself a procession of sacred emblems, in the sunshine. The sunshine streamed about her from an immense height of blue sky. The sky had never been so high as it was above Harriett’s green acacias. It had gone soaring up today for them all; their sky.

That eldest Wheeler girl, going off to India, to marry a divorced man. Julia seemed to think it did not matter if she were happy. How could she be happy?⁠ ⁠… Coming home from the “Second Mrs. Tanqueray” Bennett had asked Sarah if she would have married a man with a past⁠ ⁠… it was not only that his studies had kept him straight. It was himself⁠ ⁠… and Gerald too. It was⁠ ⁠… there were two kinds of men. You could tell them at a glance. Life was clean and fresh for Sarah and Harriett.⁠ ⁠… There were two kinds of people. Most of the people who were going about ought to be shut up, somehow, in prison.

Eve came into the little room with her arms full of Japanese anemones. Behind her came a tall man with red-brown hair, a stout fresh face and beautifully cut clothes. Miriam bowed him a greeting without waiting for introduction and went on arranging her festoons of art muslin about the white wooden mantelpiece. He was carrying a trayful of little fluted green glasses each half filled with water. He came into the room on a holiday⁠—a little interval in his man’s life⁠—delighted to be arranging the tray of glasses; half contemptuous and very happy. Pleased and surprised at himself and ready for miracles. He was not married⁠—but he was a marrying man⁠—a ladies’ man⁠—a man of the world⁠—something like Bob Greville⁠—with the same sort of attitude towards women.⁠ ⁠… “The vagaries of the Fair”⁠ ⁠… a special manner for women and a clubby life of his own, with men. Women meant sex to him, the reproduction of the species my dear chap, and his comforts and a little music on Sunday afternoon. He loved his mother, that was certain, Miriam felt, from something in his voice, and respected all mothers; the sort of man who would “look after” a woman properly, but would never know anything about her. And there was something in himself that he knew nothing about. Some woman would live with him in loneliness, maddened, waiting for that something to speak. Secretly he would be half contemptuous, half afraid of her and would keep on always with that mocking, obsequious, patronising manner. Horrible⁠—and so easy to deceive, and yet cruel to deceive. Hit him⁠ ⁠… hit him awake. He put down the tray of glasses near the heap of anemones that Eve had flung on the table and enquired whether they were to put one bloom in each glass.⁠ ⁠… He had a secret, indulgent life of his own. Did he imagine that no one knew?⁠ ⁠… Eve giggled and tittered⁠ ⁠… this new giggling way of Eve’s⁠ ⁠… perhaps it was the way the Greens treated young men; arch and silly, like the girls at the tennis club. He must see through it. He was not in the least like the tennis club young men, most of whom needed to be giggled at before they could be anything but just sneery and silly.

But it was fascinating, like something in a novel come true; the latest tableau in all the wedding tableaux; their own. Bennett and Gerald had swept the lonely Henderson family into this. One was going to be a sister-in-law for certain, tomorrow.⁠ ⁠… Held up by this dignity Miriam concentrated on her folds and loops, adjusting and pinning with her back to the room, listening to the sparring and giggling, the sounds of the tinkling glasses⁠—the scissors snipping and dropping with a rattle on to the table, the soft flurring of shifted blossoms. The moment was coming. The man was being impudently patronising to Eve, but really talking at her, trying to make her turn round. She did not want him. There was something⁠ ⁠… some quality in men that this kind of man did not possess⁠ ⁠… something she knew⁠ ⁠… who? It was somewhere, but not in him. Still, his being there gave an edge to her freedom and happiness. She owed him some kind of truth⁠ ⁠… some blow or shock. Holding her last festoon in place she consulted some jumbled memory and found a phrase: “Will you people leave off squabbling and just see if this is all right before I nail it up?” She spoke in a cool even tone that filled the room. It startled her, making her feel sad, small and guilty. Still with her back to the room she waited during the moment of silence that followed her words. “It’s simply lovely, Mirry,” said Eve. Had she been more vulgar than Eve? She knew her decoration was all right and did not want an opinion. She wanted to crush the man’s behaviour, trample on it and fling it out of the room. Eve was sweeter and more lovable than she. Mother said it was natural and right to laugh and joke with young men. No⁠ ⁠… no⁠ ⁠… no.⁠ ⁠…

She glanced, asking Eve to hold the corner while she went for the hammer and nails. Eve came eagerly forward. The man was standing upright and motionless by the table, looking quietly at her as she stood back for Eve to substitute a supporting hand. “Er⁠—let me do that,” he said gravely⁠—“or go for the hammer.” He was at the door: “Oh⁠—thanks,” said Miriam, in a hard tone; “you will find it in the kitchen.”

Eve remained holding the muslin with downcast face and conscious lips. Seizing a vase of anemones Miriam put it on the marble, bunching up the muslin to hide the vase.

“This is their smoking-room,” she said, her voice praying for tolerance. Eve beamed sadly and gladly. “Yes⁠—isn’t it jolly?” Joining hands they waltzed about the room. Eve did not really mind; she fought, but there was something in her that did not mind.

Through the French windows of the new drawing-room Miriam saw a group of figures moving towards the end of the garden. In a moment they would have reached the low brick wall at the end of the garden. They might stand talking there with their heads outlined against the green painted trellis-work that ran along the top of the wall or they might walk back towards the house and see her at the window.

She hid herself from view. The room closed round her. She could not sit down on one of the new chairs. The room was too full. Things were speaking to her. Their challenge had sent her to the window when she came into the room. It had made her feel like a trespasser. Now she was caught. She stood breathing in curious odours; faint odours of new wood and fresh upholstery, and the strange strong subdued emanation coming from the black grand piano, a mingling of the smell of aromatic wood with the hard raw bitter tang of metal and the muffled woolly pungency of new felting.

The whole of the floor space up to the edge of the skirting was filled by a soft thick rich carpet of clear green with a border and centrepiece of large soft fresh pink full-blown roses. Standing about on it were a set of little delicate shiny black chairs, with seats covered with silken stripings of pink and green, two great padded easy-chairs, deep cushioned and low-seated, and three little polished black tables of different shapes. A black overmantel with shelves and side brackets, holding fluted white bowls framed a long strip of deeply bevelled mirror. The wooden mantelpiece was draped at the sides like the high French windows with soft straight hanging green silk curtains. At the windows long creamy net curtains hung, pulled in narrow straight folds just within the silk ones.

The walls swept up dimly striped with rose and green, the green misty and changeful, glossy or dull as you moved. And on the widest spaced wall dreadful presences⁠ ⁠… two long narrow dark-framed pictures, safe and far-off and dreamy in shop windows, but now, shut in here, suddenly full of sad heavy dreadful meaning. A girl, listening to the words she had waited for, not seeing the youth who is gazing at her, not even thinking of him, but seeing suddenly everything opening far far away, and leaving him, going on alone, to things he will never see, joining the lonely women of the past, feeling her old self still there, wanting everyone to know that she was still there, and cut off, forever. There was something ahead; but she could not take him with her. He would see it now and again, in her face, but would never understand. And the other picture; the girl grown into a woman; just married, her face veiled forever, her eyes closed; sinking into the tide, his strong frame near her the only reality; blindly trying to get back to him across the tide of separation.

Their child will come⁠—throwing even the support of him off and away, making her monstrous⁠ ⁠… and then born into life between them, forever, “drawing them together,” showing they were separate; between them, forever. There was no getting away from that.

The strange strong crude odours breathing quietly out from the open lid of the new piano seemed to support them, to make them more mockingly inexorable.

The smell of the piano would go on being there while inexorable things happened.

Voices were sounding in the garden.⁠ ⁠…

Hanging on either side of the mantelpiece were two more pictures⁠—square green garden scenes.⁠ ⁠… There was relief in the deeps of the gardens and in under the huge spreading trees that nearly filled the sky. There were tiresome people fussing in the foreground⁠ ⁠… Marcus Stone people⁠—having scenes⁠—not noticing the garden; getting in the way of the garden. But the garden was there, blazing, filled with some particular time of day, always being filled with different times of day.

There would be in-between times for Harriett⁠—her own times. Times when she would be at peace in this room near the garden. Away from the kitchen and strange-eyed servants, and from the stern brown and yellow pigskin dining-room. In here she would have fragrant little teas; and talk as if none of those other things existed. There were figures standing at the French window.

She opened the window upon Harriett and Gerald. Standing a little aloof from them was a man. As Harriett spoke to her Miriam met his strange eyes wide and dark, unseeing; no, glaring at things that did not interest him⁠ ⁠… desperate, playing a part. His thin squarish frame hung loosely, whipped and beaten, within his dark clothes.

His eyes passed expressionlessly from her face to Harriett.

A great gust of laughter sounded from the open kitchen window away to the left, screened by a trellis over which the lavish trailings of a creeper made a bright green curtain. It was Bennett’s voice. He had just accomplished something or other.

“Ullo,” said Harriett. The strange man was holding his lower lip in with his teeth, as if in horror or pain.⁠ ⁠… They stood in a row on the gravel.

“Let me introduce Mr. Grove,” said Harriett, with a shy movement of her head and shoulders, keeping her hands clasped. Her face was all broken up. She could either laugh or cry. But there was something, a sort of light, chiselling it, holding everything back.

Miriam bowed. “What’s Bennett doing?” she said hurriedly.

“The last time I saw him he was standing on the kitchen table fighting with the gas bracket,” said Gerald.

The sallow man drew in his breath sharply and stood aside, staring down the garden. Miriam glanced at him, wondering. He was not criticising Gerald. It was something else.

“I say, Mirry, what did you do to old Tremayne this morning?” went on Gerald.

“What do you mean?” said Miriam interested. This was the novel going on.⁠ ⁠…

She must read it through even at this strange moment⁠ ⁠… this moment was the right setting to read through Gerald that little exciting faraway finished thing of the morning, to know that it had been right. She felt decked. Gerald stood confronting her and spoke low, fingering the anemones in her belt. The others were talking. Harriett in high short laughing sentences, the man gasping and moaning his replies, making jerky movements. He was not considering his words, but looking for the right, appropriate things to say. Miriam rejoiced over him as she smiled encouragingly at Gerald.

“Well, my dear, he wanted to know⁠—who you were; and he swears he’s going to be engaged to you before the year is out.”

“What abominable cheek,” said Miriam, flushing with delight. Then she had taken the right line. How easy. This was how things happened.

“No, my dear, he didn’t mean to be cheeky.”

“I call it the most abominable cheek.”

“No you don’t”; Gerald was looking at her with fatherly solicitude. “That’s what he said anyhow⁠—and he meant it. Ask Harry.”

“Frivolous young man.”

“Well, he’s an awful flirt, I warn you; but he’s struck this time⁠—all of a heap⁠ ⁠… came and raved about you the minute he’d seen you, and when he heard you were Harry’s sister that’s what he said.”

“I’m sure I’m awfully obliged to his majesty.”