“My father liked this room best,” she says. She does not know if it is true, or why she said it; it is she who likes it, her father does not bother about liking things, not things like rooms, anyway. “It was — is — his favourite,” she says loudly, as if expecting to be contradicted, “his favourite room, this one, in all the house.”
Benny nods, glancing about, seeming calmly pleased with all that his eye lights on. He has an air of waiting, in calm anticipation, for something of mild interest that he has been assured will take place in due course. He is peculiarly undemanding. He does not seem to mind that she has so little to say to him — he has not much to say to her, either — and all he has asked for is a drink, and although he has had to ask for it more than once he betrays not the slightest hint of impatience. It is Ivy Blount at last who ventures up from the kitchen bearing on a small brass tray a misted glass of water. The water, the surface of which trembles almost imperceptibly, is clouded and looks like recently melted ice — there is always air in the pipes here at Arden — but Benny drinks it off without hesitation and even smacks his lips. Ivy takes the empty glass on to her tray like a nurse receiving a specimen and goes out hurriedly and shuts the door behind her with exaggerated care, making not a sound save for the tiniest click, as of a tongue. Benny again looks around the room, nodding to himself. The sun shining in at one of the windows makes a delicate and complicated cage of light that leans at an angle down from the sill. Petra fixes on one of the buttons in the front of Benny’s white shirt; how strange a thing, she thinks, a button, waxy white like bone, with those two tiny gimlet holes punched side by side in the middle. She is sure Ivy is listening outside the door. It is a thing Ivy does. She reads people’s letters, too. No doubt she is dying to know who Benny Grace is and what he has come here for. Duffy also is curious, it seems, for there he goes, sauntering casually past outside on the gravel, but not so casually that he does not manage to take a quick glance in through the window at the interloper. In fact, it is not Duffy but I, in Duffy’s form — I think I may say I have by now perfected the cowman’s defiant slouch. I must find any ruse I can to keep an eye on Benny, fat and full of himself in his shiny suit with the sweat-stains under the armpits, and his filmed-over soiled white skin and that little squiggle of a nose. He shall not disturb the house any more than I can help.
Petra starts at a brazen crash from the hall — Ivy in her agitation dropping the tray, of course — and she excuses herself in a mumble and walks swiftly from the room, trying not to seem to be running away, like timid Ivy. She hears herself breathing. Outside the door she catches a glimpse of Ivy’s heels and her bent back as she ducks down the steps to the kitchen. The house around her has a hushed air, as if there are many ears listening for every slightest sound. Why has it been left to her to deal with this fellow? She still does not know who he is or what he is doing here, except what he said, that he has come to see her father. She follows Ivy down the stairway, hearing the hollow knocking her own feet make on the wooden steps; she feels like an actress who has forgotten her lines making a mortified exit through a trapdoor down from the stage. She thinks of her brother’s wife and scowls inwardly.
Her brother is in the kitchen, sitting at the table tinkering with a radio set. He has taken off the back panel and is poking delicately in the innards with a long, slender screwdriver. His shirt sleeves are rolled. His forearms, each one as big as a small ham, are pink and palely furred. The radio is an ancient model with a cloth grille over the speaker and brown bakelite tuning knobs and a rectangular glass window with the names printed on it of places she has never heard of — Hilversum, for instance, where can Hilversum be? La calls it a wireless, even though, as Petra can plainly see, it is packed inside with wires, coils and coils of them, all different colours.
Ivy Blount is nowhere to be seen. She must have scuttled out by the back door.
Adam is frowning heavily in concentration, his upper lip hooked over the lower one like the tip of a little fat pink thumb, and a slick of hair hangs down across his forehead. He is good at fixing things. This is another reason for his sister to admire him, and to envy and resent him, too. When she comes down the steps he goes on working as if she were not there. She watches him for a moment; how deft he is, despite those big hands, their stubby fingers. He plies the screwdriver as if it were a stiletto. “What’s the matter with Ivy?” he asks without looking up. “She ran through here as though she had seen a ghost.”
She tells him about the arrival of the stranger. “He’s come to see Pa,” she says. “I didn’t know what to say to him.”
He leans more intently forward, probing the blade of the screwdriver deeper among the coloured coils. “What’s his name?” She sees how the back of his neck has gone red as it always does when he is uncertain or upset. The stranger’s coming is making everyone uneasy, first Ivy, now Adam; she is reassured by this, knowing she is not alone.
“I don’t know,” she says. “He told me but I didn’t hear — he talks like Popeye.”
“—the sailor man.”
“What?”
“Popeye the sailor man. I yam what I yam.”
He laughs briefly into the back of the radio. She stands at his shoulder and gazes down at the nape of his neck where the redness has not faded yet. His hair at the nape gathers to a point in a little, coiled curl. He turns up his face to look at her. “What does he want with Pa?” She bites her lip and does not answer. “Did he say he knows him?” She does her shrug, jerking her left arm stiffly out from her side and raising her right shoulder and inclining her cheek to meet it. Adam slowly shakes his head. “Didn’t you ask him anything?” Still she will not answer, and only gazes back at him, dull and sullen. “You’re hopeless.” He turns away from her and takes up the back panel — also bakelite, is it? — and fits it into its slot in the rear of the set and begins to screw it home.
“What’s wrong with it?” she asks.
“What?”
“That”—she points—“radio, wireless, whatever you call it — what’s wrong with it?”
He puts aside the screwdriver and rises from the table, kneading a stiffened shoulder with one of those meaty hands. “Honestly, Pete,” he says. But still he avoids her eye. It is plain he is as nervous as she is before the prospect of Benny Grace. But why should he be unnerved? He lives in the world as she does not; he should be used to unexpected occurrences, things going wrong, people turning up out of the blue.