Free The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen Page A

on interests he did seem inclined to form. If he was what Harrison claimed to be, without vanity, that only made him more passive in his relations with people. If his willingness to be told a quite new story wore the deceptive guise of a new friendship, the deceived one, rather than Roderick, was to blame. He coupled a liking for, a curiosity as to, what was going on with a reluctance that it should involve him--more, a positive disbelief that it ever could. In general, he was in favour of what was happening, but preferred what _had__ happened as being more complete: so far, his heart had never moved from its place, for it had felt no pull from a moving thing. His attention, as an entirety, was yet perhaps to be daunting, to be reckoned with: up to now it had never been wholly given. His motives were too direct to be called ulterior: he liked going out to tea with families who had a brook through their garden, hypothetical snakes in their uncut grass, collections of any kind in cabinets, a haunted room, a model railway, a funny uncle, a desk with a secret drawer. He attached himself to the children of such families in a flattering, obstinate, reserved way--you still could not, somehow, accuse him of cupboard love. Stella could not fairly reproach in Roderick anything that savoured of only-childishness: was it not she who had left him an only child? In, _as__ a child, preferring objects or myths to people he probably had resembled most other children: her unformed worry began when he failed to grow out of this. Having once seemed old he now seemed young for his age. Her anxiety mingled with self-reproach--how if he came to set too much store by a world of which she, both as herself and as an instrument of her century, had deprived him? He would have esteemed, for instance, organic family life: she had not only lost his father for him but estranged herself (and him with her) from all his father's relations. She could perceive, too, that Roderick was ready to entertain a high, if abstract, idea of society--when he had been a baby she had amused him by opening and shutting a painted fan, and of that _beau monde__ of figures, grouped and placed and linked by gestures or garlands, he never had, she suspected, lost interior sight. The fan on its fragile ivory spokes now remained closed: she felt him most happy when they could recreate its illusion in their talk. Yes, what he liked about people was the order in which they could be arranged. Such idealisation of pattern, these days, also alarmed his mother. She had supposed for some time that adolescence might make him more difficult but less odd--it had not yet done so when he went into the Army. Before that, she had watched him being confronted by people not only patternlessly doing what they liked but, still more preposterous from his point of view, expecting to be liked for their own sakes.... Since she felt, or believed she felt, that Roderick ought to change, how foolish to dread lest the Army change him! "Well, it's your leave, darling," she said. "Do as you like." Roderick was loth to remind his mother that she had so far done nothing about the blankets--however, nature spoke for him: he sneezed twice. At this she started up. He unfolded his arms in order to delve about, underneath himself in the cushions, then down the cracks of the sofa, for a handkerchief. Nothing, however, came of this.--"Wait," he said, "or possibly in this pocket?" He dived his hand into the slippery pocket of the dressing-gown; in which, audibly, it came upon at least _something__. Stella and he both heard the tired crackle of paper--paper long ago folded, pulped by age in its folds, limp from being in silk near a body's warmth. The sound from that pocket of Robert's made Stella start: her eyes, with an uncontrollable vehemence, interrogated her son's. "Correspondence?" Roderick vaguely said: he fished out the paper, lay holding and staring at it, noncommittally twiddled it round and round. "It's not