Eva Trout Read Free Page B

out as one foresaw.—Or had hoped,” he added. “And in that case, no use asking whose fault. A person—though that they were not to know—may actually never have had it in them to make a go of whatever it was that they thought they could. It had been a case of trying the wrong road. All the same, who’s to say it was wrong to try? You can but try … However,” he ended up, “that you and I have reason to know. Eh?”
    “You prefer the garage.”
    He had failed as a fruit farmer. Too much had been against him, beginning and ending with not having enough capital to surmount bad years or buy back mistakes due to inexperience. Always he had wanted to be a fruit farmer, or thought so. He had put his back, together with all he’d got from selling up a small business left him by his father, into the enterprise known as Larkins Orchards. Tremendous unsparing worker, he set out with what had not been unreasonable expectations —or, they were reasonable till Iseult fomented them. She had burned with them from the instant she fell in love. She never foresaw their marriage, its days and nights, other than as embowered by dazzling acres, blossom a snowy blaze and with honeyed stamens, by sun then moonlight, till came later— fruited boughs bowed, voluptuous, to the ground, gumminess oozing from bloomy plums. She had been a D. H. Lawrence reader and was a townswoman. By the end, he was lucky not to have come out worse than he did. They sold off the orchards but kept the house, which the purchaser did not want, a lopsided barn, a half-acre of land. Nor did Eric step off into a void: a garage-proprietor cousin of his in the local town happened to be looking round for a foreman—and Eric, it was to turn out, filled the bill. For this reason: Eric had profited, hands down, by his military service—he came out of three years with a mechanised unit a first-rate mechanic: clearly, he’d been a born one. (And good with men.) Possibly that should have been his line from the start?—from, that was, when he first came out of the Army? He might have had a garage of his own by now, who knows? Anyway, no good thinking … As it was, he nowadays daily caught the 7.30 a.m. bus into town, intercepting it at the crossroads, and usually made it home on the 6.30 p.m. In the Larkins barn sat an old Anglia, bought when they’d sold the van—but if he took that, what was Izzy to do all day?
    Never had she uttered a word about the loneliness. She had her brain, of course? The rate she did those translations at was astonishing, the more so when there she was with the house on her hands, making work, dating back to the Year One. Yes, looking back, that had been a bad patch. “Go back to teaching again, for a while at least?” he had put forward. “ ‘Back’?” she had cried aloud. “ ‘ Back’ !—I never go back !” Dead-white in the face. That had shaken him; he piped down. Later, as things got no better and somewhat worse, some idea of W.E.A. lecturing or some such had come to be entertained. But that meant, out at nights, all over the country. When would they see each other? … Then, just then, Eva had come along.
    “Waiting supper for her?” he now asked.
    “Why?—No.” She began to get out of her chair.
    “No, look—stop a minute!” he interposed. “No such great hurry.” So she settled down again, showing no feeling either way. (Her movements as housewife were those of a marionette: these days they were less frequent, and less compulsive —”help” five mornings a week, and a shining Aga with one of those long-term ovens.) Eric continued: “Speaking of the garage, you do know she’s been on at me about that? She’s got it into her head we could take her on there; and will she take ‘no’ for an answer?—no, she will not.”
    “That was quite unknown to me,” said Iseult calmly. “As you say, it would never do.”
    “No. We don’t want another hand, and we don’t take learners: that I’ve told her