Eva Trout Read Free Page A

ruddiness of the colouring, struck infinitesimal copper glints from stubble faintly beginning on cheeks and chin—clean-shaven, he was less so by the end of a day. The shape of the skull, hair flattened flatter than ever by just-now’s wash up, was cut out sharply, with an extra solidity, against the dimensionless dusk behind.
    So, for a minute. He then took evasive action, canting across the right-hand arm of his chair. “Try and not monkey with that lamp,” he advised her, not for the first time. “It does no good.” He got up, went to the switch at the door and bathed the room in normal illumination. Coming back, he asked: “Ought we not to know, though—rightly? Or at any rate, oughtn’t you?”
    “What are we talking about?”
    “Where Eva’s gone to.”
    “Oh,” she said, looking up at the ceiling.
    He went on: “That was the understanding, I understood.”
    “What understanding?” said she—still to the ceiling.
    “When we took her on: that we were to keep an eye on her. What else are we taking all this money for? Already there’s been that muddle about that marriage, and it would be only natural if that unsettled her. Just now, does she seem to you quite herself?”
    “ ‘Herself? That would be difficult to say. One thing one can be sure of: she’s at the Danceys’—or with them: where else would she be, these days? … What is the matter all of a sudden, Eric?”
    “Not so all of a sudden,” he remarked—though as though to himself, or at least absently. He scooped up the newspaper, squinted along the headlines, then let it drop: instead, he perused his wife, across their hearth, at once warily and resignedly—the habituated manner, it might be said, of one who has yet to find the right answer. “This,” he went on, “has for some time been on my mind; but you and I seem to have never a chance to talk—I mean, as things are. She has the right to be with us; but there it is. There she is .”
    “You are telling me,” said Iseult.
    “And yet when she’s not, there’s come to be quite a gap.”
    “We are never alone—you realise?—except in bed.”
    “That’s putting it strongly! And for that matter, Izzy, what are we now?”
    “Waiting,” said Iseult, “for her to come back.”
    “Then we’d better step on the gas and get this said. The Danceys—you mean at the vicarage? They’re all right; they like her. But where’s she going to turn to after the holidays? Those kids are going to have to go back to school; and if you ask me, they’re the attraction.”
    “Horrid little Henry?”
    Yes, he’s sharp for his age.—The Reverend and Mrs. Dancey are busy people.”
    “You understate that, Eric; they are all but demented, from what I’ve seen of them—which is not much.” (Iseult, geographically a parishioner of Mr. Dancey’s, was not a churchgoer. He had called, but it had not been a success.) “He always has such a blinding cold that he’s really rather a menace on the roads, darting about in that vapoured-up little car; and she’s muddle-headed and bleats like a worried sheep. Still, any port in a storm.”
    “What d’you mean exactly by that ?” he asked, with a genuine deepening of the frown. “There’s no storm here.”
    “Storm or not,” said Iseult, “Eva’d rather go anywhere than be here—now.”
    “So out she goes. So what are you grumbling for?”
    “I am not, Eric. You’re the one who’s been grumbling—’a gap,’ you say.”
    “I’m sorry I spoke,” he said. “But yet in point of fact, Izzy, I don’t believe you. I can’t believe you. The sun rises and sets on you, where Eva’s concerned; always did, and surely it always will? She asked no better than to be under this roof. And you, you liked her—you must have done, or why did you interfere with her at the outset? There was some reason.”
    She looked along the books on a chair-side shelf, sighing: “Yes, I suppose so.”
    “Not,” said Eric, “that a thing always works