Henry Green - Concluding

"I'm only an old fellow who's well passed his bedtime," Mr Rock countered. He had gone far enough. Yet he found that, if one tried, one could forgive this woman, and he wanted to bring the conversation back to himself.

"Oh, I'm tired too, deathly so," she idly agreed.

"I'm older than you. I'm older," he repeated.

She let this pass.

"I'm not much longer for this world," he said, on his dignity.

"Don't talk like that, Mr Rock, please. Tonight of all nights."

He sat, looking straight ahead.

"They will fiddle faddle so about themselves," Miss Edge went on, about the children. "It makes for such a deal of bother. I get no help from Baker, none at all," she ended.

He said no word.

"Strictly in confidence we are not certain of much about Mary yet," she went on, again in a most languid voice. "But we shall be tomorrow. I've had experience. Believe me. They will worry over trifles, but it all comes out in the wash, in the end."

He stayed silent. Contemplating his own death with disinterest, he did not catch what she said.

For her part, she felt so queer she hardly knew what she was doing, but found herself, somehow, committed to the following, as though on top of a hill in a dream on a bicycle with no brakes.

"Mr Rock," she began, then experienced a last titter, or wobble, before it was too late. She threw the cigarette away which had been burning her forefingers. She missed the fireplace. Falling on a State Kidderminster rug it began to glow, unnoticed. "Mr Rock," she said, a second time. For she knew now she could not go back. "You really should have someone to take good care of you. Marry again," she said.

At this she giggled, once. What a desperate expedient to gain possession of a cottage, she laughed to herself, almost completely out of control. She must be mad. But then, oh well, what harm was there? Things would all come out in the wash, be utterly forgotten come daylight.

"Why yes, yes," he said from the vast distance of his final, cold preoccupation, not having taken in the drift.

She dreamily excused herself to herself by thinking that, of course, he would not listen any more than he did now, which was not at all. This only proved, so she thought, that the kindest was to pack him off forthwith to an Academy of Science.

"I don't believe you bother with me," she rallied.

"How is that, then?" he asked, coming back to earth.

"I said, you must marry again." She spoke out with a slow simper which allowed of no misinterpretation. This, he at last saw, was an offer, and unconditional at that. He took it in his stride as entirely understandable; unthinkable of course, but not, in her pitiable circumstances, in the least surprising. He proudly ignored it.

At the same time he wished to let her down lightly, the safer course. He cast about him how to encompass this. And almost at once proceeded to discuss his health.

"I've been quite well the last few years. But there's none can dodge Father Time. Yet I sleep remarkably sound. I take care, naturally. Regular exercise every day, fetching Daisy's swill and so forth. No, it's just anno Domini."

She despised him for not, as she thought, having heard. Or had he? "What age are you really then?" she asked.

"Seventy-six next month."

"You don't look it," she lied. For she considered he looked more. Too old, too old, she admitted, in another part of her head. But now it was up to him, she knew.

"Not bad for an old fellow," he said, pleased. Oh, she must have lost her sanity just then, she thought, realising he did not intend to take her up. She would never, as long as she lived, ever indulge in so many cigarettes again. But was that, could it be, a smell of burning? And what had he meant, when all was said, discussing his health as he had?

"I keep a deal healthier, even, than she does," he remarked of Elizabeth.

"The child looks ever so much better," Edge agreed, dreamily, but with anguish. She still thought he referred to Moira. In a dazed state, she began to imagine larger and longer flames, as that smell came through.

"I am tired. I should go home," he said.

"In that case, goodnight," Edge answered from her deep chair, coldly, more of an enemy than ever. She had finally decided there would be nothing. "Look after yourself," she added with tired venom, while he dragged his body out of the Principal's rightful place, to take leave. She did not, of course, get to her feet when the old man came over. He, for his part, ignored the taste of burning. "Goodbye," she ended, gave him a slack hand. He turned his back to leave.

"Gracious," she remarked, as though to make conversation, having seen the cigarette at last. "Quite a blaze," she said, rose up in no haste, and stamped it well out.

Either he did not catch that, or could not be bothered, but he just stepped outside, closing the door behind him.

In the passage he gave one short, sharp laugh.

She heard.

Elizabeth, her thoughts on Sebastian, waited for Mr Rock outside the Principal's lavatory under a lighted bulb. She was watching a moth dab its own shadow up above. "It kisses," she said inside her.

When the grandfather came along, he remarked, "There you are, my child." Mr Rock's calling her his own as much as the old man allowed himself to show of how surprised and touched he felt that, after all, she should have spared time off to see him home. She gave no answer. She continued to watch the moth while he went past. She was concentrating on Sebastian.

Mr Rock bolted the door, sat on a seat, and laboriously took off those oldfashioned pumps. Then eased his toes. But when he got up to step into rubber boots, he trod right on the torch, which, so that he might not lose it, he had slipped down to a heel in one of the legs at the start of the evening. At once he remembered another time that same thing had occurred, when Julia was still alive and, for a further moment, was sorry for himself, heavy and bleak.

Then the old man sallied out, said "Come," and went to open the front door. It had two catches so that, for some minutes, he fumbled between his torch and door-handles. She did not lift a finger.

When, at last, the sage had it wide, the moon was so full and loud, that stored light he used fell altogether dimmed. What had been a round pat of yellow over brass knobs and keys became oval at his moonlit, shovel feet, but like cream on milk, a skim of one colour over something the same, and so faint he was able to switch the torch off at once. Indeed, he thought he could now see tolerably well, and was almost sorry he'd begged for her company. Not that he had, in actual words, ever asked her to come along, but at least he'd not, once again, denied what she knew perfectly, his age-long fear of the dark. Because, now they had left the house, his relief caused him to forget the pitch black between trees at night, which they were yet to meet in the ride leading to their cottage.

He even turned round to view the hated mansion which the moon, plumb on it, made so tremendous that he spoke out loud the name, "Petra."

Elizabeth followed in silence, struck into herself by the man she had left, deeply promising she would come straight back. She had no eyes for what was lavished from above, nor ears for what her grandfather expressed, astonished at the sight.

Lovesick, she walked as someone will who, in a dream, can find herself on frozen wastes where the frost is bright then black, but will still keep warm with the warmth of bed, although that imagined world outside stayed cold, dead cold.

Her grandfather, again in difficulty on account of the treacherous light, but glad of his escape, waded much as though the moon had flooded each Terrace six inches deep. For the spectacles he used seemed milk lensed goggles; while he cautiously lifted boots one after the other in an attempt to avoid cold lit veins of quartz in the flagstones underfoot because these appeared to him like sunlight that catches in sharp glass beneath an incoming tide, where the ocean foams ringing an Atlantic.