Kind Are Her Answers (2 page)

“Kit,” she murmured, “if you like …”

He moved away, discovering in some hitherto un-guessed corner of himself the capacity for despising her. “I wonder what you take me for. I could be a lot more use to you if you’d trust me now and then.”

“I’m sorry.” She gave her little sigh again. “I know I’ve treated you badly. But you have to make allowances for me, Kit.”

The earnestness of her voice—as if she were revealing to him some new possibility that could never have occurred to him—made him want suddenly to laugh. But instead he kissed her forehead, said, “I love you a lot, Janie,” and went away.

Now, against the blankness of the sky at the open window, this terminal moment took its place against the pattern of the past. Their marriage, which ended in his heart to-night, had ended physically a year ago, when Janet had borne their first and last child, dead, and had nearly died along with it. From the very beginning, something had warned him that she ought not to attempt motherhood. It was pure instinct, a flair his calling had developed in him, for there were no obvious contraindications. But he had been sure, and, because he loved her desperately, had used every persuasion against it, until one day a chance phrase or look had brought him the sudden certainty that it was what, from the first, marriage had meant to her; that he himself had been secondary. He scarcely realized the force of the blow this dealt at him, because he accepted it. He knew little of women, beyond a few tentative adventures in his student years, to which something had kept him from committing himself. To Janet he had committed everything, receiving her values with so complete a faith that he supposed them common to all women as good as she. That she should want a child more than she wanted him seemed to him neither strange nor a matter for reproach, and he protested no further.

When the disaster happened, he cast aside, casually almost and unnoticed, his few half-conscious reservations of himself. The utmost he could offer, he felt, was a small consolation and her due. He was a single-minded person, young for his years and, within the limits imposed by five years in hospital, an idealist.

Because he went on allowing for her convalescence long after it had passed, it only filtered in on him gradually that his acceptance of the blame was taken for granted by her. The discovery was a catastrophic shock to him. His feeling had been sincere; but he had assumed, without thinking about it, an equal sincerity in her, a readiness to confront her own consequences which was the natural complement, in his mind, of his desire to confront them for her. When he found that she met necessity as a stream does rocks, by a progress of avoidances, he taught himself, as with an unwisely loved child, to deflect from her those realities of which she was afraid. She forgave him, very sweetly, for spoiling her life. He remained hopelessly in love with her; to the point, sometimes, of taking himself at her valuation.

Since then, Janet had been “delicate.” She was delicate still. It was now, almost certainly, too late for her to be anything else. She had let the time slip by within which, if at all, they could safely take up married life again. That was a period about which Kit preferred not to think too much. In retrospect even, her gently deprecated martyrdom, the implications about himself which she had not needed to underline, still had the power to make him feel rather cold. Yet he had continued to love her, mostly in a finely drawn silence, for another year.

She had never retracted her unspoken accusations, only added to them as the time passed. He had accepted them silently, because their injustice was irrelevant to the hurt they inflicted—that she should be willing to inflict it was the final thing. To-night, thinking it over, he knew they were only part of her defence against reality, and was glad not to have torn it from her. She was, he understood, insufficient to life without it.

He had perceived, too, the secret fear she had not admitted to herself, that she should go too far and lose him. He felt it in the little crises and stresses, leading nowhere out of nothing, with which she tested him. She had become an artist in evolving and justifying them, seeming to find in them both reassurance and a drug-like stimulation. On Kit the effects, and the effort of concealing them, had often been devastating. He had always been unable to tell her that it was only at such times, in the emotional turmoil they produced, that he sometimes wanted other women. He had done nothing about it, even when, as had happened once or twice in the last few months, they had rather evidently wanted him.

But now, as he leaned in the window, he did not consciously recapitulate these things. They were no more than the background of a mood, and it was the mood which engaged his mind because the rest was weary with custom while this was new. He thought with relief that his real life would never be conditioned by someone else again. It was no way to live: one should rest on one’s own centre.

He must be careful with Janet, he thought. She must never know these discoveries he had made about himself and her. He could be better to her now that he was free of her. He felt possessed suddenly by a great kindness for her. It was really a more elementary emotion, like the diffused pleasure a climber feels after negotiating a difficult traverse; but he was not acutely analytical of himself, and let the kindness go at that. What was it he had thought yesterday of getting her—for her room, was it, or the garden? He would remember in the morning. He discovered that after all he was ready for sleep, and threw his cigarette-end out into the dark.

Janet turned out the rod of light inset at the head of her bed, lay still for a few minutes, and turned it on again. As a rule, it was soothing to look at her green and silver room: she had pretty, elegant taste, and was quick to recognize and imitate originality. But to-night there was little to choose; the darkness seemed printed with the past, the light with the present. At the side of her eau-de-Nil taffeta eiderdown was a squashed depression where Kit had been sitting; she twitched at it with little sharp jerks till it fluffed out again.

The truth, she thought—and the truth should be faced however unwillingly—was that Kit was growing hard. She had felt this several times lately, though never so strongly as to-night. To-night for the first time he had been cold to her. It was the only word. She had met him, as she always tried to, with sympathy and understanding; one must make allowances for men, whose standards were necessarily so different from one’s own; and he had been utterly unresponsive, snubbing her with cold kindness. She asked so little, she thought; only some affection and warmth, and to know that he minded about her. He had always showed that he minded, till to-night.

For Kit to grow hard seemed so
wrong.
It didn’t suit him. He was egotistic, of course, as all men were: it was something to do with sex that made them so, and women, being more perceptive, learned to make sacrifices quietly and to expect no thanks. But he had never been hard. That was what she had liked about him when they first met, a freshness, something romantic and unspoiled. He had had such beautiful thoughts about her. She had been careful of his illusions, taking pains always to be gracious in his presence, to be soignée, avoiding anything undisciplined or crude. But it had gone for nothing. Well, men were more physical; one learned not to expect too much.

She put out the light again, but began to be sure now that she would not sleep. She wondered whether to go across to his room and ask him to give her something from the dispensary after all. Perhaps he would guess then that he had upset her, without being told. He would be in bed, she supposed, by now. She had a sudden vivid picture of him, switching on the light half in his sleep as he did when a night call came, and sitting up with his fair hair silkily tangled and his pyjamas falling off—he was not an obviously restless sleeper, but always contrived partly to detach himself from his clothes. She remembered how his grey eyes darkened with sleep; his brows and lashes were a kind of tarnished-gilt colour, almost brown and did not disappear against his skin like those of most fair men. She had noticed them again to-night, while he was writing out the name of the book. Reaching again for the lightswitch she picked up the pad and looked at it; large round letters, not like his, as if he had been writing for a child. But she had always complained about his writing; illegibility, she maintained, was a form of bad manners.

It would be tragic, she thought, for Kit to become coarsened and spoiled, as, if she lost her influence on him, he might. This was the first time she had thought explicitly that she might not hold him; he had always been so unalienably there. But to-night there had been a moment as he stood over her—tall, flexible like a boy with the kind of grace that is just over the border from awkwardness, smelling familiarly of Pears soap and toothpaste—when she had newly, piercingly imagined life without the certainty of him; the cold, dull reflection of herself that everything would give back without the interposition of his love; the dreadful narrowing of herself if he ceased to be an extension of her. She had wanted, for a moment, at any cost to keep him there, to find out what he was thinking about that made him so unlike himself, so sufficient and self-contained. But he had not understood, and that of course was best. Men ceased to respect you if you abandoned your reserve. She had always been careful about that.

She sat up and turned her pillow, which felt hot and tumbled, and put out the light again. But she still found herself remembering his hair, soft and shining under her fingers, against her shoulder, and his sleepy weight for which, when she woke him, he would apologize. Perhaps last year, if she had pretended a little … but when she knew it could not give her a child she had hated it all. And he had said it should make no difference to his loving her. He had promised.

What could have changed him? A suspicion began to grow on her that this deterioration was due to the influence of some one else. She had never cared very much, for instance, for his friend McKinnon. He belonged to the Left Book Club and was always bringing over their bleak, frightening books, which she hated, for Kit to read. He looked at her too in a way which made her feel sure he was cynical about women, no doubt because he knew the wrong ones. Did he ever introduce them to Kit? Kit was so simple about women, so naïvely generous in his judgements. He didn’t see through people.

The hall clock struck twelve. She had been lying awake for more than half an hour. She wished she had not told Kit that she was sleeping better. Kit was forgetting, among McKinnon and his friends, how sensitive she was, how acutely she felt small coldnesses and failures in response that most women would never even notice. He had been so sympathetic when she was ill, sitting on the edge of the bed when she couldn’t sleep and talking and holding her hand. Perhaps if she were to be ill again—as she easily might be, with the cold weather ahead and all this worry—he might realize. She noticed, now, that her head was beginning to ache.

Yes, it really was aching. She felt cold, too. She must not let herself be ill again, for Kit’s sake. She would ask him for the tablet after all. He would hardly be asleep yet. Or, if he were, he was so used to being called up that he would soon drop off again; how lucky men were to have no nerves!

She put on the light, and bent for her quilted green satin slippers.

O
N THURSDAY MORNINGS, AS
near twelve o’clock as possible—for she liked regularity—Kit used to visit Miss Heath. He noted the day with a certain pleasure; calling on Miss Heath was rather like re-entering one’s childhood as a grown-up visitor. Miss Heath, her maid, Pedlow, and her cook, lived in six of the twenty-six rooms of Laurel Dene. It was a smallish Victorian-Gothic castle, walled away at the end of a cul-de-sac in what had been, sixty years before, the best part of the town. Now the Keble-ish houses on each side of the road had all been turned into offices or maisonettes; but behind the wrought-iron gates and spiked brick wall of Laurel Dene nothing had altered much, except that little Amy Heath, with her fluffed fringe and button-boots and pinafore and round cheeks like a worshipping child in
The Peep of Day,
had grown into Miss Heath, a very deaf old lady with chronic heart trouble. Amy’s kind Nannie had died about thirty years before, and been rewarded with an up-pointing marble angel and “Blessed is that servant whom the Lord when he cometh”; but her place had been taken at once by Pedlow, the still-room maid, whose functions by now were almost exactly the same.

Kit, as he turned into the mossy drive, thought how implacably hideous the grounds must have been in their youth, when the gravel and geraniums and lobelia were paint-fresh. Now the flower-beds held only lush tangled perennials, the month-high lawns were powdered with daisies, and the white paint was flaking from the conservatory and the garden seats. To-day, the leaves of the poplars were beginning to fall wetly in a mild damp wind and to settle, with faint sounds, in the clumps of Michaelmas daisies. There must be a gardener somewhere whose almost invisible efforts just kept the place from becoming a jungle; but one never saw him. Noticing the poplar leaves plastered moistly to the bonnet of his car, Kit had the year’s first feeling of autumn, and said to himself, “Of course, she’ll never go through the winter.”

The thought made him look about, as he got out of the car, with a keener, regretful appreciation. The Virginia creeper, turning fìg-purple and red, dropped its swinging beards over the windows and dripped from the pointed arches of the porch; in the middle of the lawn a wagtail was perched on a solitary croquet-hoop which decades had reduced to a thread of rust. He wondered what the place would be like next summer; more offices, he supposed, or a dreary private hotel.

He tugged at the brass bell-pull, whose pattern had been smoothed by palms and fingers to a, soft ripple like ebb-tide sands; and thought about conversation, which was important. Ten years ago, Kit’s predecessor had explained to Pedlow that Miss Heath was not to be worried, and Pedlow had taken it to heart and remembered it every morning when she read aloud from the
Times.
Every new visitor had to be told, under the stuffed alligator in the hall, that Miss Heath had not heard about Hitler, and had better not know that there were any Communists in England because some one had told her about Russia and it had upset her. All this was easy, but the Royal Family was tricky going, because Miss Heath was devoted to royalty and supposed the Duke of Windsor to be still on the throne. The Abdication would have upset her terribly, so Pedlow had never mentioned it. There were several large photographs of the Duke in various uniforms as Prince of Wales: Miss Heath always referred to him as The Dear Boy. Once she had complimented Kit on having hair of the same colour (it was several shades fairer, but her sight and memory were both growing dim) and he had decided that this was probably her chief reason for liking him.