Read Online The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen - Free Book Online Page A

This week-end he's at his mother's." "Like I am," said Roderick genially. However, the idea of the elder man made him look anxiously down the length of his own person in Robert's dressing-gown--he had a notion he might have spilled some coffee, but was relieved to find it had no more than left a runnel on his bare chest. He wondered what had made his mother ask, and ask so abruptly, about his commission--a subject she as a rule approached in only the most roundabout way, or hinted at. It had been clear from her manner that she did feel strongly, but about something else: the commission, this time, had been made to act either as a diversion or an unconscious revenge--the saying of something to irk or nettle him because he had, somehow, irked or nettled her. In which case, what? Raising eyes which held, where she was concerned, the brooding intuitiveness of a young animal rather than intelligent speculation, Roderick gazed at Stella--who slightly changed her position at the end of the sofa he had called their boat. The reality of the fancy was better than the unreality of the room. In a boat you were happy to be suspended in nothing but light, air, water, opposite another face. On a sofa you could be surrounded by what was lacking. Though this particular sofa backed on a wall and stood on a carpet, it was without environment; it might have been some derelict piece of furniture exposed on a pavement after an air raid or washed up by a flood on some unknown shore. His return to his mother cried out for something better--as a meeting, this had to struggle for nature, the nature it should have had; no benevolence came to it from surrounding things. It is the music of the familiar that is awaited, on such an occasion, with most hope; love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void--at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak. Even lovers can feel this--how many passions have not been daunted by the hotel room?--and between son and mother the absence of every inanimate thing they had had in common set up an undue strain. Perhaps his fidgeting with the cushions was an attempt to acclimatise at least those. Stella and Roderick both, in their different ways, felt this evening to be beyond the powers of living they now had. They could have wished to live it as it could have been lived. Both felt the greatness inherent in being human and in their being mother and son. His homecoming should have been one more chapter added to an august book, a book on a subject greater than themselves: nothing failed, to make it so, but their vision. It may still have been such a chapter in the vision of God. Where they were concerned, the ban, the check, the caution as to all spending and most of all the expenditure of feeling restricted them. Wariness had driven away poetry: from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could. Was this war's doing? By every day, every night, existence was being further drained--you, yourself, made conscious of what was happening only by some moment, some meeting such as tonight's. Stella and Roderick were too intimate not each to extend to the other that sense of instinctive loss, and their intimacy made them too honest to play a scene. Their trouble, had it been theirs only, could have been written off as minor--the romantic dismay of two natures romantically akin. But it was more than that; it was a sign, in them, of an impoverishment of the world. There was _not__ much left for either of them to say, and in this room in which they sat nothing spoke, either--a mysterious flutter, like that of _a__ fire burning, which used to emanate from the minutes seemed to be at a stop. The actual fire's electric units, like vertical hot set lips, grinned away at the empty end of the room. At half-shadow level, some way above the lamplight, the photographs were two dark unliving squares. Outside the curtain-masked windows, down there in the street running into streets, the silence was black-out