Eva Trout by Elizabeth Bowen Page A

rushed about naked on private beaches—the race experiment having, so far, aborted. So had the one with class: young proletarians made one peevish by being difficult to get hold of—the State was too fussy about them, a real old auntie. One had to keep out of tangles, so far as might be. With that in view, the forewarned Kenneth had also had to look out about education. Once a school was got wind of, down came inspectors— one might not think so, but this was a fact of life. Kenneth was therefore assisted by two B.A.’s with former teaching experience. He’d selected them carefully. This particular two were lucky to find themselves here or indeed anywhere, as he very nicely let them know that he knew. “We’re all re-born here !” he’d assured them, giving one then another a vital hand-clasp and dividing between them one of his famous glances, at once frank and hush-hush. “All the same, steady does it!” … The B.A.’s, whose frantic respectability fortunately fascinated the children, taught routine subjects, the more inspirational being reserved for Kenneth. The children had no objection to anybody’s trying to teach them anything. They drifted amiably into the informal classrooms overlooking the water and sat waiting.
    Of situations going on in the castle, still more of the castle’s itself being a situation, Eva was unaware. She walked through everything, straight ahead, as a ghost is said to walk through walls. Perpetual changes of milieu attendant on being the Trout daughter had left her with no capacity to be homesick —for, sick for where?—and after life with distraught, high-voltage Willy all here seemed calm as the little lake. As for her comrades, she took them with equanimity. She was senior to any of them (in actual age) by a month or two; one of them was taller than she, the rest rather miniature: even the smallest seemed wondrously physically complete to Eva, who had been left unfinished. So these were humans, and this was what it was like being amongst them? Nothing hurt. From being with them, she for the first time began to have some idea what it was to be herself; but that did not hurt, so deep-seated was her acquiescence. She took for granted that these others had the blessing of being “ordinary,” which caused her to study one then another of them, for lengths of time, ruminatively rather than inquiringly, with her cartwheel eyes. She attempted to take in at least something of anything that was said. But one and all they affected her very little. She loved the castle.
    She did not bring out the worst in the other children, who on the whole were nicer to her than nicer children probably might have been. “Trout, are you a hermaphrodite?” one did ask.
    “I don’t know.”
    “Joan of Arc’s supposed to have been.”
    “Never established,” one of the boys put in, “how could it be? Elle fut carbonisee .”
    “Then canonised,” said one of the other girls.
    Eva pondered. “I’d like to be Joan of Arc.”
    “That’s what we’re asking,” said the first speaker. “And she heard Voices.”
    “I don’t hear Voices—do I?”
    “That’s what we’re asking.”
    If Trout was wanting, only look at her father!—imagine sinking one sou in a dump like this! What did he expect to get out of it: uranium? Or was he after The Kettle-drum (Kenneth)? Yet the children themselves found the dump rather simpatico : a novelty, abounding in unsophisticated pleasures, such as being on the roof in the dark harkening to the owls and answering back; or doing a Dracula up from balcony to balcony; or setting an Oedipus-trap for Tusks (one of the B.A.’s; the other was Jones the Milk) by arranging an effigy of his mother in his bed; or insisting on The Kettle-drum’s taking them all to church, twice a Sunday, to a distant edifice known as The Chapel In The Valley, which meant three taxis as overflows for the beach wagon, when he said he felt nearer God in the open air or when contemplating