Kind Are Her Answers (25 page)

Neatly and blindly, Kit folded her letter into four and put it in his pocket, wrapped the tie in its tissue paper again and shut it in the bottom drawer of the desk. Everything became, suddenly, quite silent, as if his ears had been plugged with wool. He did not know how long it was before he became aware again of external sound. Then, as abruptly as if he had waked from sleep or an anaesthetic, he found that the carol-singers had moved from the house next door, and were singing just under the window. A boy’s voice, pure and sexless floated out alone:

Sire, the night is darker now,

And the wind grows stronger;

Fails my heart, I know not how …

There were footsteps on the stairs. Janet was coming down, to hear better, perhaps, or to give silver at the end. His body seemed to shrink back of itself, like an injured animal hiding.

“… no longer.” The last notes of the treble died away; the tenor leaped into its confident answer. Kit walked over to the switch and put out the light.

W
HILE IT WAS STILL
dark, the Christmas bells began to ring. Kit closed
The Thirty-nine Steps,
which he had been reading since four, welcoming the sound, as he would have welcomed factory hooters or the screech of a tram. They were like small nail-holes piercing the wall of his private darkness with evidence of an external world. A little later he heard Janet leaving the house on her way to church. He dressed himself, and walked through the streets in the grey creeping light, on pavements that rang like iron under the delusive down of a white frost. He felt bitterly cold, and no increase of pace would warm him. The faces of the people he met looked pinched and withered; everything that moved seemed to be moving with feverish noise and speed.

He got in just before Janet, kissed her at the breakfast table, and gave her his present, a dress clip which she had chosen when he had asked her what she would like. She gave him a pigskin wallet, stamped with his initials. He admired it and thanked her for it with so much animation and charm that she glowed almost into warmth; he observed, curiously, that one part of him felt an overkeyed pleasure in their friendliness, like the bonhomie one feels in the middle stages of drink, while another part of him was thinking that he would never be able to look at the wallet without being reminded of wizened faces and freezing streets. They each had letters from relatives, and read aloud to one another items of family news.

Janet’s mother was driving over to lunch. She and Janet got on badly. She had belonged to a rackety set in the post-war years, and Janet’s character had been partly formed on violent reaction from her. Since then she had mellowed, but still thought Janet a prig. This morning, for the first time, Janet admitted aloud that she wished her mother had decided to spend Christmas elsewhere. Kit was cheerfully sympathetic about it, and promised to get back as early as possible from the hospital to break up the tête-à-tête. They talked on, sitting at the table, for half an hour. Kit clung to the conversation, as sick men will cling to a chance visitor whose gossip distracts them from the fear of death. At the end of the half-hour, the talk fell flat all in a moment, like an effervescence ceasing; they were left looking at each other awkwardly, and presently Janet made an artificial excuse and went away. The fact that Kit had eaten nothing at all had escaped her notice, because of their chattering and the scattered letters and cards.

Kit was left alone in the dining room. He got up and stared out of the window, waiting for the telephone bell to ring. His mind pushed at it, like the mind of some one in haste pushing at a slow train. In a minute it would ring and he would answer it, and it would be Christie to wish him a happy Christmas. He would ask what she had meant by her letter, and it would all turn out to be a misunderstanding, or some mood that she had had and would almost have forgotten. He could go on pretending this for some time, he thought; and at once turned away from it revolted, as the talk and laughter with Janet had revolted him in the end. But his mind was still stretched for the telephone; he found he could not relax it. He wished it would ring for some complicated emergency which would not allow him for several hours to use his brain for anything else. But he knew that if it did, he would come back to himself with the same disgust as before.

He understood that this would go on till he had done something with his solitude, cleaned it and made it endurable to live in. He tried; but the effort ached in him, like the effort to focus one’s eyes on some fine object when vision is blurred with alcohol or drugs. For a moment, he could see causes and effects, relate this thing to other things; shake off the terrible feeling of uniqueness, of the universe spinning like the spokes of a wheel round the axis of his pain. He would hold it off for a moment, look at it distantly. Then it would come back again.

The maid came in to clear the table; he took up his letters and cards and Janet’s present and tidied them out of her way. Time moved in curious jerks; five minutes would seem like half an hour, then half an hour would be gone as if the hands of the clock had jumped it. Once he heard Janet’s feet in the hall, and sat down, lest she should come in, with a magazine which was lying about open in his hand. Suddenly he remembered the District Hospital, and that he was overdue.

As soon as he got inside the doors, hilarity and welcome teemed round him, insistent and unremitting, like a swarm of flies. Christmas had got under way earlier here than anywhere else. It had started at one or two in the morning, when night nurses had whispered and giggled with housemen doing their final round, and furtive toasts had been drunk behind the ward-kitchen doors. The crescendo, at half-past eleven when Kit arrived, had got nearly to the top of its curve. The residents’ common room sucked him in as noisily as a vacuum cleaner, providing drink and rude stories hot from the source. He thought, when he had finished his first whiskey-and-soda, that it must have been given him nearly neat, and amid shouts of protest refused a second round. At last he escaped, leaving a limerick trailing off into the distance behind him. Then it was the Sisters’ turn.

“Why, look, here’s Mr. Anderson!” … “Happy Christmas, Mr. Anderson! I was wondering where you’d got to.” … “Oh,
there
you are, Mr. Anderson! Now, now, you can’t go rushing past Bassett Ward like that. Why, you haven’t seen the decorations. Yes, they really are, aren’t they? My staff nurse is wonderful with them, she went to a School of Art. Don’t you
rather
love the little gnomes? Oh, you
mustn’t
run away before you’ve had some sherry; it’s all ready in my sitting room (I’m called away for a few minutes, Nurse; you might make sure the diabetic dinners have come.)” All the Sisters had been given chocolates, fortunately for Kit, whom more drinks on an empty stomach would soon have made uncertain on his feet. He ate all he could lay hands on, and with curiosity and surprise watched himself being socially agreeable: the scene seemed to be streaming past him, thin and bright and two-dimensional, like a strip of lantern slides.

In Collis Ward he was carving the turkey, and so ranked as the guest of honour. He was furnished with a tall red paper cap, and, following honoured ritual, kissed Sister under the mistletoe in the middle of the ward. Sister was fat and rosy, and quaked all over with mirth as she squeaked and pretended to struggle in his arms. Her clean apron crackled and she smelt of carbolic and Bourjois powder. When she emerged with her cap over her ear, the women in their beds all down the ward clapped and cheered. They thought Kit just lovely, and said so at intervals for the rest of the day.

When he went out afterwards into the passage, he saw the little pink nurse with black curly hair whom he had remembered the day before. She was standing just outside the linen room. Over the door an extra, unofficial sprig of mistletoe had been hung. When Kit caught her eye she smiled, dropped her dark curly lashes, and went into the linen room, leaving the door ajar.

A minute and a half later, the large outer doors of the ward opened and closed with a wide swing. In the linen room, the curly-haired nurse stood with her cap in her hand, dazedly patting her hair.
Well!
she thought; and for some time no more coherent thought occurred to her. Then she rearranged herself, and spent the next few hours looking forward to the delightful moment when she could tell her best friend.

Kit went round to his favourite Sister, a comfortable elderly Scotswoman, and asked for a cup of black coffee. She made it for him herself, double strength, and left him alone in her room to drink it.

In the afternoon, Janet’s mother thought him most amusing, and congratulated Janet on him in private when she was putting on her things.

Boxing Day brought in the usual acute abdominal case, and the usual case of cerebral haemorrhage; but there was still a great deal of it left. It dragged on its broken-backed length, bringing to the healthy a dim repletion, nemesis to the dyspeptic; to family house parties a misanthropy from which they fled in carloads to the pantomime; to the bereaved, the guilty and the fearful a cage of leaden inactivity in which their private skeletons had dancing room.

After lunch, in duty spurred by desperation, Kit asked Janet whether she would like him to drive her up to town for a film or a show. She turned round from her thank-you letters and declined absently. It meant getting to bed so late, the drive back in the dark through crowded roads would be so long and cold; all the plays she particularly wanted to see were taken off for the holiday; she always preferred a matinée, in any case. She began to write again, but found that the question had broken her train of thought. It occurred to her that Kit had made quite an effort yesterday, had gone out of his way to be pleasant at breakfast, and (in the intervals of odd silences when he lost the thread of the conversation entirely) had been most helpful, even if rather in a silly way, with her mother in the afternoon. It would be wrong, she thought, to let this fall to the ground. Besides, if she did (though she put it somewhat less bluntly to herself) it would impair her sense of injury when she needed it next. She, too, was finding Boxing Day an uncomfortable forcing house for thought. A forgotten idea revived in her mind. She looked up.

“I’ve just remembered, Kit there
is
something on this evening that I really should like to see. And it would be a much shorter drive than going to town. The Brimpton Abbey Christmas Play. They were advertising it in Paxton when I was doing my Christmas shopping, and I made a note of the … What
is
the matter, Kit? That was the Frasers’ telephone, not ours.”

“Nothing.” Kit stared at the book on his knee. “I doubt if you’d care for it. It’s a semi-amateur thing. I don’t suppose it would be much good.”

“Oh, I think so. There was a whole column about it last year in the
Paxton Times.
I believe they put them on quite beautifully. You remember, I went with Mrs. Cleaver to see their Summer School do
The Tempest,
and told you how good it was. Such a dear little boy was Ariel. I’m sure I should enjoy it.”

Kit continued to gaze at his book. A three-word phrase of print fixed itself across his eyes and repeated itself, like a cracked gramophone record, again and again.

After a pause Janet said, looking in front of her, “Unless, of course, you prefer not to see a semi-religious play. There are one or two more performances, later in the week. I can go by myself.” It occurred to her, as she spoke, that Timmie would go with her.

Kit got up. “No,” he said, “it would interest me. We shall need dinner fairly early; their shows start at a quarter to eight, I believe.”

“As early as that? It will mean dinner at half-past six. I thought it was later.”

Kit saw her hesitation. There was a feeling of suffocation in his throat. He walked to the window, found himself drumming on the pane, and pushed his hand back in his pocket.

“We’ll have dinner at the Crown in Paxton,” he said. “May as well do the thing in comfort. We’d better start at a quarter to six, I should think. I’ve got one or two things I’ll have to see to now.” He went out of the room.

Down in the consulting room, unconscious of its icy coldness (the heating had been turned off for the holiday) he sat looking at the top of his desk, knowing that if he went back, even now, it would require only the slightest effort to make Janet change her mind. He found himself dully hating her because she had taken the decision from him and then, at that last instant, tossed it back to him again when his defences were down. Nothing on earth would have made him plan this for himself. It affronted his whole habit of living, his pride, the instinct for avoiding self-torment which was the difficult growth of years, his common sense. They hammered at him, warning and protesting. All through the dark early morning he had been ruling lines in his life, tearing up records, writing finis. It was the second lot of wreckage he had had to clear away; it should, he had proved to himself with monotonous logic again and again, be easier than the first. It was not. Into the edifice that had crashed this time he had been building, little by little and unaware, the dearest stuff of his first love.

Why was he going? He could not take refuge, when he saw her, in cynicism or self-pity or a sense of injury. His mind had already thrown off these drugs, as the healthy stomach rejects a poison. His image of Christie, which they might have dulled or distorted in his defence, burned before him agonizing in its truth. Nothing was to be had from the sight of her but many new kinds of pain and a renewal of the old. Notwithstanding all this, he knew that if Janet came into the room now to tell him she would rather not go after all, neither that nor anything else would stop him.

He put on his coat and went out again, no longer in search of thought but of escape. There were lights in McKinnon’s house as he passed, he rang, hoping for an hour’s wrangling over Russia, or whatever McKinnon happened to be feeling strongly about to-day. But McKinnon had his mother and sister from Manchester spending Christmas with him, and was assuming, dutifully, the incongruous character of a jolly young man. They welcomed Kit with enthusiasm, but he felt like sand in machinery and, after the shortest civil interval, drifted out into the streets again. He went home, had tea with Janet, and sat reading, or appearing to read, till it was time to change.