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

registered by the hearing. It was imperfect silence, mere resistance to sound--as though the inner tension of London were being struck and struck on without breaking. Heard or unheard, the city at war ticked over--if from this quarter, from these immediate streets, the suction of cars in private movement was gone, there was all the time a jarring at the periphery, an unintermittent pumping of vital traffic through arterial streets into arterial roads. Nor was that quite all: once or twice across the foreground of hearing a taxi careered as though under fire. The room lacked one more thing: apprehension of time. Inside it the senses were cut off from hour and season; nothing spoke but the clock. The day had gone from the moment Stella had drawn down the fitted blinds and drawn across them the deadening curtains: now nothing took its place. Every crack was stopped; not a mote of darkness could enter--the room, sealed up in its artificial light, remained exaggerated and cerebral. In spite of this, something happened--petals detached themselves from a rose in the bowl on the escritoire, to fall, one by one, on to Stella's letters on the pulled-out flap. Roderick watched them; she turned her head to see what he was looking at and watched also. Then she said: "That reminds me--three more letters from Cousin Frankie's lawyers came this week; I must show them to you. I answered them all in one." "It is awful for you me being a minor," said Roderick. "However, time will cure that. Have we come yet," he inquired, rearing up on the sofa, "to anything crucial that can be really signed? I suppose so far there's been no way of knowing when I _do__ enter into possession?" "At this rate, one would imagine when you're about eighty." "Fred's sure the whole thing ought to be simpler.--You haven't been in _all__ day writing letters on my account?" "No, no; I wrote several others--I wrote a long one to you. The only annoying thing is, not knowing you would be coming up I took today as my day off; I shall have to work tomorrow. What shall you do?" "Oh, well, it can't be helped. And it does seem more natural your being at home on Sunday.--So you were writing away when poor Mr. Harrison came?" "Why 'poor'?" "Well, for one thing you don't seem to have given him much to drink; or at any rate I don't see any glasses. Don't you like him, or is he a teetotaller?" "No." "And yet," said Roderick, glancing thoughtfully in the direction of the ashtray on the chimneypiece, "he stayed on and on. He must be fascinated by you, Mother." Stella put down her coffee cup, left the sofa and, saying something about the Mount Morris letters, went to the escritoire. It was imperative that she should overcome, with the unconscious aid of Roderick's presence, her aversion from that part of the room where, forced to listen to Harrison, she had been forced to sit. Even the papers, letters, among which she had rested her elbow, listening to him, seemed to be contaminated; she shrank, even, from phrases in purple type on which, in the course of the listening, her eyes had from time to time lit. She could, further, fancy the papers were disarranged, not quite as she had left them that afternoon--Harrison _had__, no doubt, glanced through them quickly while she was at the telephone. She wanted to burn the lot--sorry for the petals of the roses for having fallen _here__ at the end of their lovely life, she brushed the petals from the flap of the desk with a violence which was enough to make others fall. "Still, I may see you some time tomorrow evening?" she heard Roderick say. Roderick's being for one more night in London would, of course, mean her putting off Robert. She perceived, if there had not been Roderick she might have been casting about her for some other excuse. Before they did meet again she would have to think--and to think seemed of all things beyond her power. She was not, therefore, then, in effect, again to see Robert until she _had__ thought? In that case, she