From time to time Puddle would write from Morton, and then Anna would say, recognizing the writing: “Is everything all right?”
And Stephen would answer: “Yes, Mother, Puddle says everything’s all right.” As indeed it was—at Morton.
But from Scotland news seemed to come very slowly. Stephen’s letters would quite often go unanswered; and what answers she received were unsatisfactory, for Angela’s caution was a very strict censor. Stephen herself must write with great care, she discovered, in order to pacify that censor.
Twice daily she visited the hotel porter, a kind, red-faced man with a sympathy for lovers.
“Any letters for me?” she would ask, trying hard to appear rather bored at the mere thought of letters.
“No, miss.”
“There’s another post in at seven?”
“Yes, miss.”
“Well—thank you.”
She would wander away, leaving the porter to think to himself: “She don’t look like a girl as would have a young man, but you never can tell. Anyhow she seems anxious—I do hope it’s all right for the poor young lady.” He grew to take a real interest in Stephen, and would sometimes talk to his wife about her: “Have you noticed her, Alice? A queer-looking girl, very tall, wears a collar and tie—you know, mannish. And she seems just to change her suit of an evening—puts on a dark one—never wears evening dress. The mother’s still a beautiful woman; but the girl—I dunno, there’s something about her—anyhow I’m surprised she’s got a young man; though she must have, the way she watches the posts, I sometimes feel sorry for her.”
But her calls at his office were not always fruitless: “Any letters for me?”
“Yes, miss, there’s just one.”
He would look at her with a paternal expression, glad enough to think that her young man had written; and Stephen, divining his thoughts from his face, would feel embarrassed and angry. Snatching her letter she would hurry to the beach, where the rocks provided a merciful shelter, and where no one seemed likely to look paternal, unless it should be an occasional seagull.
But as she read, her heart would feel empty; something sharp like a physical pain would go through her: “Dear Stephen. I’m sorry I’ve not written before, but Ralph and I have been fearfully busy. We’re having a positive social orgy up here, I’m so glad he took this large shoot. …” That was the sort of thing Angela wrote these days—perhaps because of her caution.
However, one morning an unusually long letter arrived, telling all about Angela’s doings: “By the way, we’ve met the Antrim boy, Roger. He’s been staying with some people that Ralph knows quite well, the Peacocks, they’ve got a wonderful old castle; I think I must have told you about them.” Here followed an elaborate description of the castle, together with the ancestral tree of the Peacocks. Then: “Roger has talked quite a lot about you; he says he used to tease you when you were children. He says that you wanted to fight him one day—that made me laugh awfully, it’s so like you, Stephen! He’s a good-looking person and rather a nice one. He tells me that his regiment’s stationed at Worcester, so I’ve asked him to come over to The Grange when he likes. It must be pretty dreary, I imagine, in Worcester. …”
Stephen finished the letter and sat staring at the sea for a moment, after which she got up abruptly. Slipping the letter into her pocket she buttoned her jacket; she was feeling cold. What she needed was a walk, a really long walk. She set out briskly in the direction of Newquay.
II
During those long, anxious weeks in Cornwall, it was borne in on Stephen as never before how wide was the gulf between her and her mother, how completely they two must always stand divided. Yet looking at Anna’s quiet ageing face, the girl would be struck afresh by its beauty, a beauty that seemed to have mollified the years, to have risen triumphant over time and grief. And now as in the days of her childhood, that beauty would fill her with a kind of wonder; so calm it was, so assured, so complete—then her mother’s deep eyes, blue like distant mountains, and now with that faraway look in their blueness, as though they were gazing into the distance. Stephen’s heart would suddenly tighten a little; a sense of great loss would descend upon her, together with the sense of not fully understanding just what she had lost or why she had lost it—she would stare at Anna as a thirsty traveller in the desert will stare at a mirage of water.
And one evening there came a preposterous impulse—the impulse to confide in this woman within whose most gracious and perfect body her own anxious body had lain and quickened. She wanted to speak to that motherhood, to implore, nay, compel its understanding. To say: “Mother, I need you. I’ve lost my way—give me your hand to hold in the darkness.” But good God, the folly, the madness of it! The base betrayal of such a confession! Angela delivered over, betrayed—the unthinkable folly, the madness of it.
Yet sometimes as Anna and she sat together looking out at the misty Cornish coastline, hearing the dull, heavy throb of the sea and the calling of seagulls the one to the other—as they sat there together it would seem to Stephen that her heart was so full of Angela Crossby, all the bitterness, all the sweetness of her, that the mother-heart beating close by her own must surely, in its turn, be stirred to beat faster, for had she not once sheltered under that heart? And so extreme was her need becoming, that now she must often find Anna’s cool hand and hold it a moment or two in her own, trying to draw from it some consolation.
But the touch of that cool, pure hand would distress her, causing her spirit to ache with longing
