Doves of Venus Page 4

  After a few hours, Ellie fell into a stupor from which she could barely rouse herself to answer a question. Where Emmy would have said: ‘Oh, shut up, mum, stop bellyaching,’ Ellie sat bleak, bored and silent, oppressed by the weight of her mother’s sense of persecution. When at last she escaped to bed, it seemed to her she had suffered through an age.

  Ellie’s sister, Emmy, shared their mother’s sturdy lack of height. She often said: ‘Men like short girls,’ so Ellie had always felt at a disadvantage as they walked together along the Eastsea promenade. Although men looked at Ellie first, attracted by her colouring, it was on Emmy their eyes lingered. There was no doubt she was the girl for them. And she knew it. As she walked, she would smile into herself with satisfaction as though between her and the passing men there was some secret Ellie could not even guess at.

  Emmy’s success in the Eastsea world and Ellie’s discontent in it had brought a division between the girls, who had been close in childhood, so when on Christmas afternoon they walked along the promenade, they walked together only from lack of anything either might do on her own.

  It was a grey day with a chill and gusty wind. Here and there the flagstones were spattered with sea spray. The gulls cried bleakly as they circled in over the land, and there was no human creature in sight.

  As bride-to-be, bidden that evening to supper with Joe’s parents, Emmy seemed to Ellie more smug and off-hand than ever. Ellie, whose consolations were far away, said suddenly and forcefully: ‘Thank goodness I’ve escaped this place.’

  Emmy, provoked out of her complacency, replied with spirit: ‘What do you mean – escaped? You were born here. Wherever you go, you’ll always belong here.’

  Ellie could see on her sister’s face the same flush that came over her mother’s face at any suggestion of slight. At that moment, as Emmy looked so like their mother, Ellie felt acutely her own unlikeness. It seemed to her she was like no one and nothing here, and she was suddenly exhilarated by her difference. She felt like someone whose stride can take them from mountain to mountain. In this state of rare and intoxicated confidence, she spoke gently: ‘I do not belong, because I do not want to belong. I’m different, because I want to be different.’

  ‘That’s just silly.’ Emmy spoke as though her judgement finished the matter, but when Ellie left it at that, Emmy began talking boastfully about Joe and his cleverness. By some piece of trickery he had acquired the shop in Battle at a bargain price. They were to be married as soon as he had ‘worked it up.’

  ‘Joe’s a downy one, I can tell you,’ said Emmy. ‘He heard his boss was interested in this shop, and he went out and saw it was a snip and signed on the dotted line while the boss was still chewing it over. Joe said, when he told him, the boss looked like a sick hen. Laugh? I could’ve died.’

  ‘Does mother know how Joe got the shop?’

  Emmy looked sharply at Ellie. ‘No, and don’t you tell her.’

  ‘Of course I won’t tell her.’ Ellie understood that this was Emmy’s revolt against the puritanism of their upbringing.

  When they reached the end of the promenade and turned, they saw coming towards them a solitary young man.

  From habit Emmy quoted from a game she and Ellie used to play: ‘I rather fancy him.’

  Ellie said nothing.

  ‘Don’t you fancy him?’ asked Emmy.

  ‘No.’ The certainty of Ellie’s tone made Emmy stare at her, and Ellie blushed in agony at her self-betrayal.

  Emmy looked solemn. They walked some way in silence, then Emmy said: ‘Mum keeps saying she’d like to know what you’re up to in London.’

  ‘What does she mean – “up to”? I’m earning my living.’

  ‘She’s suspicious. She keeps wondering how you got into this studio. It’s a bit of a step from packing furniture in a basement.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Ellie said, understanding too well.

  ‘Oh, you know! She suspects funny business with the boss.’

  ‘What nonsense!’ Ellie blushed more deeply. ‘The boss is a woman. A Mrs Primrose. She doesn’t even like me.’

  ‘Really! Then how did you get the job?’

  ‘I heard there was a vacancy and I marched upstairs with my portfolio. It was just luck. I was on the spot.’

  ‘I suppose they gave you a rise?’

  ‘No, they didn’t, but . . .’

  ‘Oh, that accounts for it. They’re getting an artist on the cheap.’

  Ellie felt again the power of her family to place her at a disadvantage. Wildly, she attempted to defend herself: ‘But I don’t really work as an artist. I’m not experienced enough, yet. I put on gold-leaf and varnish things.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ And Emmy, having reduced Ellie again to inferior status, returned to her talk of Joe.

  Ellie comforted herself with the thought of Quintin, reviewing in her mind the morning when she had first seen him. Mrs Primrose had brought him down to the basement where Ellie worked as a packer. Their voices had preceded them and, as they turned the curve of the stairs, Ellie, looking up at the visitors, met Quintin’s large, heavy-lidded, light green eyes and thought: ‘This is the man I have always wanted.’ Quintin turned to look at her. It seemed to Ellie that their understanding had been like a flash of light between them, yet she could not believe it. It was not possible. She could not be so fortunate.

  Mrs Primrose, descending the stairs ahead of him, was aware of none of this. In her very low, small voice, she was saying: ‘I knew you would never forgive me if I did not show it first to you.’ She walked over to a commode of painted satinwood.

  Quintin gave Ellie a half-smile of recognition before he followed Mrs Primrose to the far end of the basement.

  Ellie whispered to Dahlia, with whom she worked: ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Shareholder,’ said Dahlia. ‘He’s been down before.’

  ‘Isn’t he lovely!’

  ‘Not my cup of tea.’

  ‘But mine,’ thought Ellie, ‘exactly mine,’ yet her reason rejected hope until a few evenings later, when she came up from her basement into the sad, autumnal twilight of the mews behind the workrooms and saw Quintin move out from a doorway. At once the sadness passed from the rose-smoky air. She paused, feeling no surprise, as he came towards her.

  ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘you are the young lady whom I saw the other day bandaging table legs with brown paper?’

  ‘How clever of you to recognise me.’

  For a moment he was disconcerted, then he burst out laughing and took her arm: ‘Come along,’ he said. ‘This will be fun. Let’s find a taxi and have supper somewhere.’

  It seemed they had stepped at once into intimacy; into a relationship that would last for ever. That evening they had laughed more than they had ever done since. Everything she said had entertained him, and she had been inspired by her own power to entertain.

  He said: ‘What a charming child you are! So fresh and intelligent! What are you doing in that dreary basement? How ever did you get there?’

  She had taken the job, she explained, merely to get to London. She had come up on an excursion and gone at once to the Great Marlborough Street labour exchange and said: ‘I will take any job you’ve got,’ and this was the first one offered. She had booked a room in a church hostel and returned home to collect her possessions.

  ‘What enterprise!’ he said, gazing at her with an admiration that, together with the wine, made her feel more than human.

  ‘But I’m really an artist,’ she cried, so that the people at the next table turned to smile. She dropped her voice: ‘A painter.’

  ‘Indeed? Then we must get you into the studio. I’ll speak to Gem Primrose.’

  ‘Do you mean it?’

  ‘Why not? I’m sure there’s a vacancy.’

  ‘How wonderful! Oh, how wonderful!’ Her hands trembled; she had to look down at her plate. When she could control her voice, she said: ‘I’ve been to art classes; evening classes at the Eastsea Technical School. They
were a bit silly. What do you think they wanted me to do on my first evening? Paint a piece of white paper with the corner turned up. Just think of it! Me, who’d got the drawing prize every year at school!’

  ‘Ludicrous!’ Quintin shook with laughter. ‘And did they explain this unreasonable request?’

  ‘No. Not a word. They were all too busy getting the full-time students through their exams . . .’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘There was a woman painting a still-life – a fan and a green ginger-jar with cape gooseberries in it – and I said: “Do you mind if I share?” and she said “No.” She’d been going there three years and she said mine was better than hers.’

  ‘Good for you.’

  ‘And then, I went into the Life Class. I just marched in.’

  ‘No! Really! Didn’t the master object?’

  ‘I don’t think he even noticed. That place was chaos. The whole time I was there he only spoke to me once.’

  ‘What did he say?’ Quintin encouraged her delightedly.

  ‘He said: “You know nothing about anatomy or perspective, you can’t even draw, but you’ve an original view-point and these days sheer audacity can take you far”.’ Ellie repeated this statement with considerable pride, but added: ‘I suppose he was being rude.’

  ‘Perhaps a little rude.’ Quintin leant his head back against the crimson plush of the banquette and laughed helplessly. He was holding her hand down on the seat out of sight. He squeezed it ecstatically.

  ‘You are delicious,’ he said. ‘Delicious.’ Then he asked: ‘But why did you stay at this school where you learnt nothing?’

  ‘Oh, but it was fun. We all understood one another. We weren’t like other people. We all wanted to get away from Eastsea. We were artists.’

  ‘I see. I see,’ said Quintin, and he really did see. He had understood at once what Emily and Mrs Parsons and her friends could not understand at all – the wonder of doing the thing that meant most to one.

  Remembering this as she walked with Emmy along the Eastsea promenade, Ellie laughed with pleasure to herself. Emmy, who had been observing her, perhaps for some time, said with emphasis: ‘I don’t know what you’ve been up to, duckie, but you take my tip – be careful!’

  They had tea in the drawing-room, where the fire was lit only on Sundays and holidays. Emmy ate in a hurry. She wanted to change before leaving for Joe’s house. Mrs Parsons was helping at a party, given by the church, for lonely old people. While the girls were out walking, she had been making cakes. When Ellie looked at the boxes of cakes, she thought: ‘How generous she is, yet she cannot be generous to me.’

  She said: ‘Did Mr Ripley tell you I met him one night in London?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Parsons with sudden anger. ‘That was a nice hour for you to be out alone! I don’t know what he thought. He’s told several people he thinks it shameful, your leaving home like that.’

  ‘But don’t you see – it’s just that that I can’t stand.’

  ‘What can’t you stand, I’d like to know?’

  ‘Being criticised by people like Mr Ripley and Miss Bird. I won’t have people interfering with my life.’

  ‘Oh, won’t you? You’re mighty independent, I must say. Don’t forget they’re your elders and they know more about the world than you do.’

  ‘They don’t.’ Ellie too was angry, as she could be only with her mother. ‘They don’t know anything. They think everything outside their little circle is fake and phoney, but it isn’t. It isn’t. You said the French on menus wasn’t real. It is real. It’s just that you and Mr Ripley and Miss Bird don’t understand things.’

  ‘And you do?’ Mrs Parsons enquired with ominous politeness.

  ‘Perhaps not, but I’m willing to understand.’

  A few months ago Mrs Parsons would have slapped Ellie’s face. Now she looked as though she were about to slap it, but she did not do so. She collected together her cake boxes and said: ‘You can wash the dishes.’

  It was a triumph for Ellie, but a triumph that made her wretched. She realised now that her mother and sister resented not so much her escape as her wish to escape what to them seemed the common lot. They had accepted it; why should not she?

  Ellie had the house to herself. When she had washed the dishes, she went up to the bedroom she shared with Emmy and opened her desk. It was a small school-desk. She had annoyed Emmy by keeping it locked during her absence; now she knew she must give it up. Her departure was final.

  Inside the desk were the thick ‘Page-a-Day’ diaries she had kept between the ages of twelve and seventeen. The first was filled by a large, childish hand.

  She opened one, written when she was fourteen, and a phrase caught her eyes: ‘The strangest day I have ever lived through.’ As she read the page and re-lived that summer afternoon at Vezey Park, she felt in herself the excitement of a prophecy. She and Emmy had gone with a school outing to Vezey, a Palladian house, home of a poet who had died young. The teacher said: ‘It has been kept just as he left it; as a memorial; you might say, as a shrine.’ This had awed the girls into silence for a while, then someone started giggling and the jokes began. Ellie fell back to the end of the crocodile, slipped down a passageway and wandered off on her own. It was, it still was, the strangest day she had lived through. She felt the lie of the house as though she had known it before. She entered alone into the long withdrawing-room and could have described before she looked at it the view from the six long windows. When she heard the others approaching, she ran from them and made her way up a stair that led to the top room in a hexagonal tower. She had not known where she was going until she arrived. When she arrived, it seemed she had known all the time. Here was the poet’s bed, canopied in crimson velvet and roped off from the public. In a window alcove overhanging a lake was his writing-table and a book he had left open there a century and a half before. Opposite the bed was a tall-boy. On top of the tall-boy a looking-glass.

  She skirted the glass, afraid to see in it her own inadequate face. Yet – if she believed in herself, she must face herself. She crossed the room. In the old, mottled, silvered glass she looked at herself through a silver cloud. She was almost as beautiful as she would have chosen to be. She felt in herself an inheritance no one could take from her, and she whispered: ‘What am I? What will I become?’

  She had written that in the diary: ‘What am I? What will I become?’

  It seemed to her, as she put this diary with the rest, that she had always been thrusting past the claims of her everyday life to reach some wonder that awaited her. Now she was upon the perimeter of the great heart of existence – and what awaited her?

  She went to bed in a glow of anticipation, so happy she was filled with tenderness towards every living creature.

  Lying in bed, she thought of the life her mother had lived for years in this congested little house, ambitious to make the restaurant pay, then to keep up the standard of food and service that had first brought success – these small ambitions made Ellie feel as though something were squeezing her heart. She thought of the house crowded about by the buildings of Eastsea; of Eastsea itself, only one small town among all the cities of this island, an island that was so tiny on the globe. As the word ‘globe’ came into her mind, the ball of earth shrank to a minim in her imagination and she could see swarming about it the multitudinous stars of the Milky Way that moved like a shoal of silver fish through the black reaches of infinity.

  As it touched this point, her consciousness retreated, reducing its scope to smaller and smaller confines until it returned at last to the pin-point of space occupied by this house. She felt it a prison – worse than a prison, an oubliette – and she was beset by an intolerable pity for her mother. No human spirit should be forced to endure such confinement. Her eyes filled with tears.

  Next morning, when she went downstairs, Ellie put her arms round her mother to console her. She had forgiven her mother, but her mother had not forgiven her.

&nb
sp; ‘That’s all very well,’ Mrs Parsons said, moving away from her daughter’s embrace, ‘but if you want to please me, you’ll come back home where you belong.’

  ‘You know I can’t.’

  ‘What do you mean? – I know you can’t! If I had an accident, if I got ill or broke my leg, you’d have to come back. You’d just have to.’

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ Ellie said under her breath, but she was horribly possessed by a vision of her mother falling down the steep, dark and narrow stair of the house and lying helpless for days, unconscious perhaps, breathing heavily; the restaurant not opened, the milk accumulating on the doorstep, suspicion growing, the police breaking in . . . Emmy would be a married woman and beyond reproach. The disapproval, as usual, would be all for Ellie.

  Then she thought this was all nonsense. Her mother employed a girl who came every day. She would give the alarm at once if no one answered the door.

  Ellie, believing herself beset every minute she was here, afraid that she might, by some trickery, be constrained to stay, began to feel a panic need to get away. She said: ‘I’ll have to leave at tea-time.’

  Mrs Parsons stared at her as though asking was there to be no limit to her suffering. ‘What’s the hurry?’ she asked. ‘You don’t start work till tomorrow morning.’

  ‘I know, but I have things to do in London.’ Ellie, conscious of the untruth, mumbled miserably.

  Mrs Parsons looked threatening, but all she said was: ‘Very well, my girl. You do what you like, but we’ll see. We’ll see.’

  When Ellie brought down her suitcase and put on her hat and coat, Mrs Parsons sourly watched her preparations for departure. On an impulse, Ellie flung her arms round her mother’s neck and said: ‘Don’t be so cross, Mum. Don’t you want me to be happy?’

  ‘Happy! What’s in London to make you happy?’ Yet, for a moment, Mrs Parsons’s face softened, and Ellie said:

  ‘When I get a rise, I’ll send you some money.’

  ‘It’s not the money I want. What I want is for you . . .’

  ‘I must hurry. Must go now.’ Ellie sped her departure and reached Eastsea station with twenty minutes to spare.