Джозефина Тэй - To Love and Be Wise

She took pleasure in remarking that, face to face with Walter’s tallness, the newcomer looked nearly short. And his shoes, for all their expensiveness were, from an English point of view, distinctly regrettable.

‘After all, he’s only a photographer,’ she said to herself, and was caught up by her own absurdity.

Was she so impressed by Leslie Searle that she needed protection against him? Surely not.

It was not uncommon to find that morning-of-the-world beauty among northern peoples; nor was it to be wondered at that it made one think of tales of the seal people and their strangeness. The young man was just a good-looking Scandinavian-American with a deplorable taste in shoes and a talent for using the right kind of lens. There was not the slightest need for her to cross herself, or utter charms against him.

Even so, when her mother asked him at dinner whether he had any family in England, she was conscious of a vague surprise that he should be possessed of anything so mundane as relations.

He had a girl cousin, he said; that was all.

‘We don’t like each other. She paints.’

‘Is the painting a non-sequitur?’ Walter asked.

‘Oh, I like her painting well enough – what I’ve seen of it. It’s just that we annoy each other, so we don’t bother with one another.’

Lavinia asked what she painted; was it portraits?

Liz wondered, while they talked, if she had ever painted her cousin. It must be nice to be able to take a brush and a box of paints and put on record for one’s own pleasure and satisfaction a beauty that could otherwise never belong to one. To have it to keep and look at whenever one wanted to until one died.

‘Elizabeth Garrowby!’ she said to herself. ‘In no time at all you will be hanging up actor’s photographs.’

But no; it wasn’t like that at all. It was no more reprehensible than loving a – than admiring a work of Praxiteles. If Praxiteles had ever decided to immortalize a hurdler, the hurdler would have looked just like Leslie Searle. She must ask him sometime where he went to school, and if he had ever run races over hurdles.

She was a little sorry to see that her mother did not like Searle. No one would ever suspect it, of course; but Liz knew her mother very well and could gauge with micrometer accuracy her secret reactions to any given situation. She was aware now of the distrust that seethed and bubbled behind that bland front, as lava seethes and bubbles behind the smiling slopes of Vesuvius.

In that she was, of course, right. When Walter had borne his guest away to show him his room, and Liz had gone to tidy for dinner, Mrs. Garrowby had catechized her sister about this unknown quantity that she had unloaded on the household.

‘How do you know that he ever knew Cooney Wiggin at all?’ she asked.

‘If he didn’t, Walter will soon find out,’ Lavinia said reasonably. ‘Don’t bother me, Em. I’m tired. It was an awful party. Everyone screaming their heads off.’

‘If his little plan is to burgle Trimmings, it will be too late tomorrow morning for Walter to find out that he didn’t know Cooney at all. Anyone could say they knew Cooney. If it comes to that, anyone could say they knew Cooney and get away with it. There was practically no part of Cooney Wiggin’s life that wasn’t public property.’

‘I can’t think why you should be so suspicious about him. We have often had people we didn’t know anything about down here at a moment’s notice–’

‘Indeed we have,’ Emma said grimly.

‘And so far they have always been what they said they were. Why pick on Mr. Searle for your suspicions?’

‘He is much too personable to be wholesome.’

It was typical of Emma to shy at the word ‘beauty,’ and to substitute a bastard compromise like ‘personable.’

Lavinia pointed out that since Mr. Searle was staying only till Monday the amount of unwholesomeness he could manage to disseminate was necessarily small.

‘And if it is burglary you are thinking of, he’s going to have a sad shock when he goes through Trimmings. I can’t think, offhand, of anything that is worth lugging as far as Wickham.’

‘There’s the silver.’

‘Somehow I can’t believe that anyone went to all the trouble of appearing at Cormac’s party, and pretending to know Cooney, and asking for Walter, just to obtain possession of a couple of dozen forks, some spoons, and a salver. Why not just force a lock one dark night?’

Mrs. Garrowby looked unconvinced.

‘It must be very useful to have someone who is dead when you want to be introduced to a family.’

‘Oh, Em,’ Lavinia had said, breaking into laughter as much at the sentence as at the sentiment.

So Mrs. Garrowby sat and brooded darkly behind her gracious exterior. She was not afraid for the Trimmings silver, of course. She was afraid of what she called the young man’s ‘personableness.’ She distrusted it for itself, and hated it as a potential threat to her house.

But Emma did not, as Marta Hallard had prophesied, get the young man out of the house first thing on Monday morning. By Monday morning it was incredible to the inhabitants of Trimmings – all but Emma herself – that on the previous Friday they had never heard of Leslie Searle. There had never been any guest at Trimmings who had merged himself with the household as Searle did. Nor had there ever been anyone who intensified the life of each one of them to the same extent.

He walked round the farm with Walter, admiring the new brick paths, the piggery, and the separator. He had spent his school holidays on a farm, and was knowledgeable as well as receptive. He stood patiently in green lanes while Walter recorded in his little notebook a hedgerow sprout or a bird-note that would do for his broadcast next Friday. He photographed with equal enthusiasm the seventeenth-century honesty of the little farmhouse, and the surrealist irrelevance of Trimmings, and contrived to convey the essential quality of each. Indeed, his photographic comment on Trimmings was so witty that Walter after his involuntary laughter had a moment of discomfort. This amiable young man had more sides to him than were apparent in a discussion on husbandry. He had so taken for granted the boy’s discipleship that it was as disconcerting to look at these photographs as if his shadow had suddenly spoken to him.

But he forgot the moment almost before it had passed. He was not an introspective person.

For the introspective Liz, on the other hand, life had become all of a sudden a sort of fun-fair. A kaleidoscope. A place where no surface ever stayed still or horizontal for more than a few seconds together. Where one was plunged into swift mock danger and whirled about in coloured lights. Liz had been falling in and out of love more or less regularly since the age of seven, but she had never wanted to marry anyone but Walter. Who was Walter, and different. But never in that long progression from the baker’s roundsman to Walter had she been aware of anyone as she was aware of Searle. Even with Tino Tresca, of the yearning eyes and the tenor that dissolved one’s heart like a melting ice, even with Tresca, craziest of all her devotions, it was possible to forget for minutes together that she was in the same room with him. (With Walter, of course, there was nothing remarkable in the fact that they should be sharing the same air: he was just there and it was nice.) But it was never possible to forget that Searle was in a room.

Why? she kept asking herself. Or rather, why not?

It had nothing to do with falling in love, this interest; this excitement. If, on Sunday night, after two days in his company, he had turned to her and said: ‘Come away with me, Liz,’ she would have laughed aloud at so absurd a notion. She had no desire to go away with him.