Kind Are Her Answers (3 page)

Pedlow opened the door. She was a subterraneous-looking creature with a cachetic skin, and moved with faint crepitations which Kit could never certainly assign to her black alpaca dress, her corsets or her bones. She still wore the little round cap, like a frilled doily, of two generations back, and the trefoil-shaped coiffure—two lumps of hair in front and one behind—necessary to support it. In her presence Kit felt transported into a world whose receding colours had dimly tinged his infancy; she suggested gas lighting, tea-urns, baths in mahogany frames, and the soap-smelling lace supported on whalebone which had encased his mother’s neck.

Because Miss Heath so often misheard his questions, or rambled on about something else instead of answering them, Kit had reduced them to a formality and always collected his real report from Pedlow in the hall. He could tell at once, from the way she fiddled with the bib of her apron, that things were not going so well. Miss Heath, it seemed, had been taken quite bad during the night.

“Well, I wish you’d sent for me,” Kit said. “Don’t hesitate if it happens again. Miss Heath’s in a condition, you know, when it’s impossible to be too careful. What exactly happened?”

A blush, brownish and dim like sawdust, crept into Pedlow’s sallow cheeks. “That’s what I can’t forgive myself, doctor; I never knew anything about it till morning. Miss Heath rang the handbell by her bed for me, but I sleep so sound. I have from a child and I can’t break myself. And Miss Heath doesn’t like the idea of any one sleeping in the room with her. I’ve kept thinking all morning how I might have come in and found her passed away. And so good she was about it. When I didn’t come, she said to herself—so she told me—no doubt it was the will of God.” A rim of moisture formed round her pale eyes.

“Well,” said Kit hastily, “I don’t think there’s any need to assume that. The solution seems to be that Miss Heath should consider getting a nurse this winter. It’s been in my mind for some time, and this morning I’ll suggest it to her.”

Pedlow’s face underwent a curious setting and buttoning process, and the joints seemed to lock with an almost audible click all over her body. She explained that Miss Heath didn’t like the idea of a nurse. She had had one some years ago, and the arrangement hadn’t answered, it hadn’t answered at all.

Kit sighed inwardly. He might, of course, have known. Pedlow was just of the class and period to whom trained nurses were an upstart kind of domestic servant, giving themselves airs above their station, and demeaning to wait upon. If he imported one there were obviously going to be ructions, as shattering in this millpond quiet as burglary or homicide and probably as lethal to his patient as influenza.

“Sooner than have Miss Heath upset like she was that time,” Pedlow said, “I’d sit up with her myself and just take a little nap in the day. That’s what I’d been meaning to do.”

“I hardly think that’s an ideal arrangement. We shall be having you ill too. Perhaps Miss Heath has some relative who could come for a time. Well, I’ll see what she thinks about it.”

He crossed the hall to what had been the morning room, but was now Miss Heath’s bedroom because of the stairs; trying as usual not to feel like a small boy in the presence of the towering wrought-brass bed, with its crochet counterpane representing as many years’ work as an altarcloth; the rusty silhouettes of Miss Heath’s parents at its head; the thunderous steel engraving of Moses on Sinai; and Miss Heath herself, throned in her great plush armchair in the bay window, her dropsical legs tucked away under a red and green wool rug; the thin silver hair parted and combed back from her pale moon-face, which was like the face of an old Buddha who had outlived his wisdom with undisturbed calm. Beneath her stuff dress were visible the superimposed ridges of many woollen garments, conjectural in function and in form. Her hand, whose plump beringed whiteness she still displayed rather from unconscious habit than design, lay on a round mahogany table beside a large black Bible, the
Parish Magazine,
and the tray of sherry and Bath Olivers which she always had ready for him.

He talked to her about a companion, but she did not seem much impressed: and he refrained from bullying her in the matter, having perceived, as soon as he saw her, how little difference it could really make.

Janet had read F. M. Alexander and ten or twelve other books in the last fortnight. She had taken to reading voraciously, indiscriminately and, apparently, without any unifying personal taste or even much enjoyment. She read what was being talked about; good or bad, light or heavy; but nothing she read seemed to undergo a digestive process. Yet she did not read apathetically; the most diverse things could leave her in a state of defensive indignation. Kit, who had been accustomed to take refuge in this kind of discussion when things were difficult, now found it as full of pitfalls as any other. It was as if the walls of her ego were closing in on her; she seemed incapable of disengaging any idea from its personal attachments. She had a naturally quick intelligence, and could wrest even from moderately difficult works just enough of their purport to find some application to herself or him. She never began by stating this directly, but would open some seemingly abstract discussion with a strung-up insistence that gave her away at once. Under such conditions conversation ceased to exist, and became, as far as Kit was concerned, simply a series of exercises in passive defence. He often made efforts to conquer his caution or ignore it; he found the constant contraction of his mental muscles tiring; but it was no use. He could feel behind all she said the tension of something waiting to pounce, and it was impossible to relax while one watched to see where the spring was coming from.

There was very little room in their home for getting away from one another. They had chosen it without reference to this need, as people in love will, unless one at least of them has pronounced habits of solitude already. In any case, they had little choice. They shared with the Frasers a solid, two-storey Georgian house, taking the upper floor and the front garden. The rooms were well proportioned and lit with fine square windows; but there were very few of them. Kit slept in the room which had been meant for the nursery; a fact which Janet, he knew, always silently remembered; she seldom entered it. They had only one guest room, a living room and a small dining room, not adapted for anything else. There remained his consulting room downstairs; it was cramped and rather bleak, containing chiefly a roll-top desk, examination couch and steel filing cabinet; but it was useful as a last resource. Unluckily, Janet knew, by now, the times when he really needed to be there. Even when it had evidently averted a break of control on one side or the other, his disappearance really hurt her. Kit knew that this at least was genuine, because she often tried to hide it; and it left him at a loss.

He hated to hurt her, partly because he disliked hurting anything—a fact which sometimes made his work more wearing than it need have been. Besides, he always had more knowledge of her moods than she of his, being less concerned to fit them to a preconception; and the mere fact of minding about them died hard.

That evening an extra heavy surgery, which he spun out as far as possible, gave him a decent excuse for working late. At dinner she was subdued; and Kit, who felt tired, was glad enough to be quiet. Over the coffee she said, “Whatever were you doing to that poor little boy who was screaming downstairs?”

“Just feeling her tummy over. It was a girl.”

“She must have been in terrible pain. What was the matter with her?”

“Half a pound of liquorice allsorts.”

“Really, I think children should only be taken to women doctors.”

“Very likely.”

“She sounded absolutely terrified.”

“She was. Her mother had been telling her for years that if she wasn’t good the doctor would come and take her away in a black bag.”

Janet stirred her coffee in silence. Her head bent lower, and presently he saw that she was struggling with tears. For a moment he felt simply an exhausted refusal to cope with it; then he came over and sat on the arm of her chair.

“I’m sorry, Janie. Honestly I am.”

She took out her handkerchief and said, half under her breath, “You find me easy to score off now, don’t you, Kit?”

“Why do you let yourself be?”

“I don’t know. It’s so—unfair. Men have everything.”

“Have they?” said Kit. In their courting days he had found her generalizations about “men” and “women” faintly exciting, because of their purely personal implications; besides, he had been a few years younger and more prone to make them himself. Now his mind had ceased to move, except clinically, in these channels, and his response consisted mainly of patience. But her grief troubled a loyalty in him which had little to do with the obligations of marriage. He had never examined its sources, or reflected that it came from a kind of personal coherence woven into his self-respect. He had loved her, and, in fact, betted his life on being right about them both. If he had not foreseen her response to this or that it was as much his responsibility as any one’s.

“How do you mean?” he asked.

“Well, you’ve got your work; it never stands still; always something new being discovered. You never have to think that everything will be the same for you in ten years, except that you’ll be older.”

“But, my dear …” As if she had been struggling in the sea and had stretched out a hand to him, Kit’s apartness, his resolute toleration melted. He bent towards her, with a sudden sharp pang of returning tenderness.

She looked quickly up at him, and took his arm tightly between her hands. “Don’t get tired of bothering with me, Kit. I know I say things sometimes, but I …” She turned away and finished, half to herself, “One has to have somebody.”

Kit took her on his knee and stroked her hair, taking care, because he had been well trained, not to disarrange it. “You don’t have to worry about that,” he said.

She rested in his arms for a few moments, unrelaxed, her eyes closed; then said quickly, “Why do you let me be so childish? And I’ve so much to do this evening.” She slipped away from him, and going over to her neat pretty little desk with its painted pen-tray and coloured sealing waxes; started to make out her library list.

When the telephone rang very early that morning, it roused Kit from a sleep so deep that he did not remember, in the first moment of waking, where he was; he imagined himself in his little room at the top of the hospital, called by the casualty-bell; and beneath his sleepiness and irritation had a feeling of well-being and of reluctance to become conscious, as one has at the end of a pleasant dream. Perhaps because of this, instead of putting on the light with the notebook and pencil beside it, he rolled over and reached for the instrument in the dark.

“Hullo,” he said sleepily.

“Is that Dr. Anderson?” The voice had a low pitch, not exploding in the ear like most women’s voices on the telephone. He disliked being wakened by a metallic squawk. Feeling pleasantly drowsy again, he got back under the clothes, propping the instrument on the pillow.

“Speaking,” he said, with a half-hearted effort to sound alert.

“I’m so sorry to wake you up.”

“It’s all right,” said Kit, jolted a little; the voice had neither the panic of the distraught relative nor the crisp impersonality of the nurse. “Who is it?”

“It’s about Miss Heath. Pedlow says you asked to be called if she seemed worse. I think she must be—she’s so out of breath, and her lips are blue.”

Kit heaved his legs over the edge of the bed, and, telephone in hand, felt for his slippers. He thought casually that the information was selective for a lay person’s. “Right. I’ll come straight over. Will you give her a dose of the special mixture at once, please?”

“The dark brown one? I’ve given her that. It seemed to do her good.”

“Splendid. Don’t worry. I’ll be there in eight or ten minutes.”

A quick dresser, he was there in seven. It had rained, and would rain again. A wet, furred moon filled in the spaces between the poplars with its thin wash of light. Leaves were still falling, and the trees showed now in patches the stripped outline of branch and twig against the sky. The lamp in the porch had been switched on; its yellow spread fuzzily, like a blot, in the mists of the night. A faint wind in the upper branches shook down heavy drops that flashed into suddenly extinguished diamonds as they passed the circle of the headlamps; he could hear the hiss of unseen water flung outward by the tires.

As he stepped out of the car the front door was opened by a girl in a Chinese-blue dressing gown of quilted silk. She looked smaller than she was in the high hall, with its stagheads ten feet up and still far from the ceiling, the towering carved coat-stand, the assegais and the palms; small but concentrated, the silk of her gown and dark red sheen of her hair focussing the light like spar in a cave. For a moment her unexpectedness linked itself in Kit’s mind with the colours of the night, and the place looked different, as if he were seeing it for the first time. Its dusty oddities drew together into a mood, a powerful strangeness; against this the present business of his mind passed like the first waking thoughts against the background of the last dream, scarcely aware of what had tinged them.

“How quick you’ve been.” She spoke with ordinary, pleasant courtesy; but her voice was hushed because of the stillness of the house, and the slight words took from this a reasonless significance.

“Has there been any change since you rang me?” he asked.

“Yes. She looks so much better that I’m ashamed to have got you out of bed.”

“Oh, that’s all right.” He scarcely knew that he had smiled as he spoke, so that her answering smile seemed sudden and surprising. Her face in repose was compact and grave; square-boned, but clear in outline; with eyes widely spaced, the brows slanting up a little. He had thought it unrevealing; but her smile was as open as a small boy’s, a personal enjoyment rather than a social gesture. Her eyelids looked drowsy, and her skin, unpowdered, had a childish bloom of sleep. She had on a white silk nightgown which showed a little at the hem of her wrap but was too low to show at the neck.