Eva Trout Read Free

alone did Iseult betray, by dramatic extremes of attitude, the internal tension she felt at all times. Now she sat erect in a spacious fireside chair intended by nature to be leaned back in, just out of the ray projected by an anglepoise lamp. She had done working: her looseleaf notebook, the old French dictionary and the ultra-new French novel were shoved away on the floor, almost out of sight. Translations, one way of making ends meet (or meet more nearly) in the pre-Eva days, had been resumed as an exercise, a diversion—and, too, on the principle of letting nothing go. For, who knew? From day to day, there was no saying …
    To think or not to think—? Iseult, with a gesture more like an exclamation, thrust back her hair, which was dark and springy, from her high white forehead which was strikingly beautiful. By habit, she looked round the room she sat in. Anything she could do to it had been done; what it could do to her seemed without limit. The full-blooded late-Victorian furniture had been Eric’s people’s. Hie carpet had been bought to last, and was lasting. The armchairs and matching settee had been borne home by Eric from an hotel auction during the trauma preceding marriage. The new grate, post-Eva, gave out its advertised glow. So far, the living-room was consistent—Iseult’s own “touches” had been less fortunate: thought-out low white bookcases, now in place, for all their content looked cramped and petty; block-printed linen curtains, skimped by economy, had between them strips of vacuous darkness—as also the room, in the main excluded from the anglepoise’s intellectual orbit, became what it least in the world was: spectral. She would do well to switch on the ceiling light before Eric entered: he liked to see. But the switch was away by the door. Nervosity wired her to her chair.
    To atone, she listened. Along the road, both ways, and throughout the orchards—for how far?—there stretched nothing but a mindless silence.
    Ultimately, his step was to be heard.
    Eric never came straight in; he washed first. That meant three-four minutes. The wife grabbed round for a cigarette, lit it, drew on it twice—tensely. She then cast it into the fire and leaned back.
    He seldom came in saying anything. He saw no need to. On the contrary, he came back into a room as though not conscious of having gone from it. Once he. was there, he was there. He gave but one sign of having been far afield: invariably he brought back the evening paper. Quite often he quite simply sat down and read it. Who would have thought this man had been gone a day?—but that by what had happened, might have arisen, been done or not done during the day away, he was still to a certain extent preoccupied. This evening, however, he said: “Cold out”—for it truly had been. Also this was his way of letting her know that the warmth maintained, in here, made a grateful contrast. He lowered himself into his chair and looked across—she once more wore that terracotta cardigan, reputed to be Italian, still with a button missing. And something other was missing. “Eva?” he asked.
    “Out.”
    “Where’s she gone off to?”
    “I couldn’t tell you.—Anything in the paper?”
    “How am I to say when I haven’t looked?”
    “I thought you sometimes looked at it on the bus.”
    “No, I don’t,” he told her. “Fancy your thinking that.”
    “Then look now.”
    He stated, more than complained: “Not too easy to see.”
    Iseult, twisting round in her chair, readjusted the anglepoise. poise. “Better?”
    Anything but. The concentrated 75 watt glare was directed full upon Eric, transfixing him. From where she sat he looked like a searchlit building. The wide-at-the-top face, brows bent by a light but intent frown, faced her without a flicker—the jaws clamped by partly resistance, partly forbearance. Rusty fleckings stood out on the ash-grey irises of the open eyes. Electricity, making just more than lifelike the general