The Death of the Heart Read Free Page B

Thomas’s father lost his head completely. He didn’t go back to Dorset for ten days, and by the end of that time—as it came out later—he and Irene had already been very wicked. I often think of those dawns in Notting Hill Gate, with Irene leaking tears and looking for hairpins, and Mr. Quayne sitting up denouncing himself. His wife was much too nice to have pretty ways, but I daresay Irene had plenty—if that is how you like them. I’ve no doubt she made the most fussy capitulations; she would make him feel she had never fallen before—and I should think it’s likely she never had. She would not be everyone’s money. You may be sure that she let Mr. Quayne know that her little life was from now on entirely in his hands. By the end of those ten days he cannot have known, himself, whether he was a big brute or St. George.
    “At all events, he arrived back in Dorset at once pensive and bouncing. He started in digging a lily pond, but at the end of a fortnight said something about a tailor, and went dashing off back to London again. This went on, apparently, all through that summer—he and Irene had met in May. When Thomas got back in June he noticed at once, he remembers, that his home was not what it was, but his mother never said anything. Thomas went abroad with a friend; when he got back in September his father was black depressed—it stood out a mile. He didn’t once go to London while Thomas was home, but the little person had started writing him letters.
    “Just before poor Thomas went back to Oxford, the bomb went off. Mr. Quayne woke Thomas’s mother up at two in the morning and told her the whole thing. What had happened I’m quite sure you can guess—Irene had started Portia. She had done nothing more about this, beyond letting him know; she had gone on sitting in Notting Hill Gate, wondering what was going to happen next. Mrs. Quayne was quite as splendid as ever: she stopped Mr. Quayne crying, then went straight down to the kitchen and made tea. Thomas, who slept on the same landing, woke to feel something abnormal—he opened his door, found the landing lights on, then saw his mother go past with a tray of tea, in her dressing-gown, looking, he says, just like a hospital nurse. She gave Thomas a smile and did not say anything: it occurred to him that his father might be sick, but not that he had been committing adultery. Mr. Quayne, apparently, made a night of it: he stood knocking his knuckles on the end of the big bed, repeating: ‘She is such a staunch little thing!’ Then he routed out Irene’s letters and three photographs of her, and passed Mrs. Quayne the lot. When she had done with the letters and been nice about the photos, she told him that now he would have to marry Irene. When he took that in, and realised that it meant the sack, he burst into tears again.
    “From the first, he did not like the idea at all. To get anywhere near the root of the matter, one has got to see just how dumb Mr. Quayne was. He had not got a mind that joins one thing and another up. He had got knit up with Irene in a sort of a dream wood, but the last thing he wanted was to stay in that wood for ever. In his waking life he liked to be plain and solid; to be plain and solid was to be married to Mrs. Quayne. I don’t suppose he knew, in his own feeling, where sentimentality stopped and want began—and who could tell, with an old buffer like that? In any event, he had not foreseen ever having to put his shirt on either. He loved his home like a child. That night, he sat on the edge of the big bed, wrapped up in the eiderdown, and cried till he had no breath left to denounce himself. But Mrs. Quayne was, of course, implacable: in fact, by next day she had got quite ecstatic. She might have been saving up for this^moment for years—in fact, I daresay she had been, without knowing. Mr. Quayne’s last hope was that if he curled up and went to sleep now, in the morning he might find that nothing had really