Love in Our Time (10 page)

The machine was still playing, only more softly by
now, when the two men left. Alice signed a paper that acknowledged that the instrument was in perfect working order when it had been delivered, and the van drove away. Then she went back into the drawing-room and began to play with the knobs; it was tremendous, like toying with a battleship. The thing blared and boomed. Finally, she found some distant and improbable station that was transmitting dance music and let it play to her. She put her feet up on the couch and lit a cigarette. It was the kind of thing she had always seen herself doing; it was having one's feet up on a couch in the afternoon, instead of on the oilcloth under a typist's-table, that was the difference between marriage and earning your own living.

If it weren't that she still felt sick, the afternoon would have been perfect.

When Gerald left the office he turned and went the other way. He wasn't going straight back to Finchley to-night; he was going to see his father first. In readiness for the visit he bought an extra evening paper and a pound of grapes from a man he found pushing a barrow.

St. Martin's Hospital stood in a grey square at the back of the Pentonville Road. It was not an encouraging neighbourhood. The houses, which all looked the same, ran in sloping, congested rows at right angles to the bleak hill up and down which the trams went grinding. It was not that the area was a slum; very far from it, in fact. A slum has a nasty, teeming vitality of its own. And St. Martin's Square, and St. Martin's Street and St. Martin's Terrace had nothing. They were simply forlorn and hopeless, the decaying vestiges of a once-triumphant civilisation. The stucco had flaked off the front of the
public house at the corner; and the stone steps up to the front doors were worn into shallow arcs by the passage of endless regiments of tired, unliftable feet. Even the lamp-posts—old fashioned, gas-mantle affairs—looked shabby.

Gerald gripped the brown paper bag, which already had grown suspiciously moist in the corner, and set off to take a short cut. He felt himself growing more and more depressed as he proceeded. It was all so terribly like his own native Station Approach.

Then he turned the corner of St. Martin's Road and came on the back of the hospital. It towered up like a great lighted iceberg; the mere mass of it was chastening. As he walked past, a door in the side of the place opened—it was a narrow, intimate sort of door—and two men came out carrying a coffin. There was a light hearse, little more than a dog-cart, waiting outside. The two men loaded up and drove briskly off. Gerald looked away. He felt curiously ashamed, as though he had seen more than he was meant to see. That little door at the back through which the failures were carried out had evidently never been intended for visitors' eyes.

He had some little difficulty in seeing his father at all. But the Night Sister was Irish and could therefore understand relations wanting to see each other. She seemed in particular to understand Gerald's wanting to see Mr. Sneyd. She kept calling Gerald “You poor boy,” while she talked to him.

Mr. Sneyd himself was sitting up in bed wearing a hospital bed-jacket. It was a pink flannel affair tied up with tapes; it might have been designed to make its wearer look ridiculous. Mr. Sneyd's sallow face, and creased almost fleshless throat, looked strangely insect-like
emerging from all that pinkness. He held out his hand, his damp, trembling hand, and seized Gerald's warmly.

“Good boy,” he said. “Good boy.”

“I've brought you these,” Gerald answered awkwardly. “Just a few grapes.”

“Good boy,” said Mr. Sneyd again. “Good boy.”

It was obvious that he was overcome, and he could not trust himself to say more. He just lay there and kept darting sideways glances at Gerald as though to satisfy himself that it really was his son who was sitting at his bedside; after ten years it seemed a long time.

“How are you feeling?” Gerald asked at last.

“Oh, I'm better when I'm in bed,” Mr. Sneyd answered. “Perhaps all I needed was a good long rest. A real, proper rest in bed.”

He savoured the words with his tongue as he said them, making them sound something lofty and unattainable. And, as Gerald looked at his father, it occurred to him that perhaps that was what was the matter—it was simply that his father was utterly worn out, an exhausted, burnt up husk of a man.

“That's right,” he said. “You'll feel better if you'll just take it easy for a bit.”

“Got to get my strength up,” the older man remarked. “They're keeping me on slops at the moment. It's” lowering.”

He raised his hand wearily to his forehead as he spoke. The pink bed-jacket fell away and revealed his arm; it was withered and bony; all the flesh seemed to have vanished from it.

“Got to build up again,” he added apparently to himself. “Must keep going at all costs.”

“They'll build you up all right,” Gerald assured him. “That's what they're here for.”

The vision of the narrow back door rose for a moment in his mind and he suppressed it.

But Mr. Sneyd senior did not appear to be listening. He beckoned Gerald to him.

“I want to talk to you,” he said. “Bring your chair up closer.”

When Gerald had done so, Mr. Sneyd took his hand again. “You've done all right for yourself you have,” he said. “You're all fixed up.”

There was no envy in his voice as he said it; only relief and a little unconcealed astonishment that in an insecure and precarious world anyone should have been able to establish himself in comfort.

“You've got a lovely wife,” he added.

“I'm glad you liked her,” Gerald answered.

“She's a peach,” Mr. Sneyd repeated. “You're one of the lucky ones.”

“You must come down and stay with us when you're better,” Gerald went on. “Got a little car you know. Run you about and show you things.”

“Got a car, have you?”

The tears in Mr. Sneyd's eyes ran over and he was openly crying; crying from sheer happiness. He felt that if he had to die there and then all the pain and sharpness of parting would be softened by the knowledge that his son possessed a car.

“You've done better than me,” he said at last. “I've kept things going. That's been about all. Never been able to make any proper provision.” He paused and began picking at the bedclothes. “If only this operation “—it was the first time he had used the word; it slipped
out carelessly and unnoticed—” could have waited for another five years.' Then Violet would have been grown up. It wouldn't have mattered so much then if anything had happened to me.” He shifted in the bed and corrected himself. “Not that it's anything serious, you know. Just an ordinary sort of operation. It's really observation I'm here for.” Mr. Sneyd suddenly sat up on one elbow as though something had frightened him. “Don't let that car of yours use up all your money,” he said. “You may need it some day.”

“That's all right,” said Gerald awkwardly. “I'm looking after that.”

“D'you carry any life insurance?” Mr. Sneyd asked him.

Gerald told him that he did.

“They' wouldn't have me,” Mr. Sneyd admitted miserably. “I went up before them and they wouldn't have me.” There was another pause and Mr. Sneyd gave a little grimace as though something inside had hurt him. “I wish you'd see Flo sometime,” he said. “She's always asking after you. She hasn't been well lately and now with me away … ” His voice trailed off and he closed his eyes.

The Sister came over to the bed and told Mr. Sneyd that he had talked too much already. Gerald got up and held his hand for a moment; the fingers felt damp and feeble as he touched them. And Mr. Sneyd kept putting his other hand on top of Gerald's as he said good-bye. It was with difficulty that Gerald finally broke away. Then he tiptoed down the ward with the Sister beside him. At the door he turned and looked back. He could see Mr. Sneyd's dark eyes staring after him.

It seemed strange, emerging into the outside world again. Once through the glass swing doors of the lobby, he turned St. Martin's Corner and came on a street of cheap tailors, cooked-meat shops and classic cinemas. There was life of a flashy, noisy kind going on all round him. It was crude and ugly. But at least it
was
life; it had the laugh over the precarious, exhausted stuff that was just kept going in the wards.

The thought of Alice waiting for him in the clear, fresh-smelling heights of Boleyn Avenue reminded him how lucky he was; a fivepenny bus ride and he had escaped from all this.

The only thing that worried him was having to leave his father behind in the midst of it all.

“Where
have
you been?” Alice asked when Gerald came in. “I've been getting so nervous about you.”

She went up and put her arm through his. This was the moment she had been waiting for all the afternoon. And now that it had come, she couldn't say what was on her mind. She was just standing there as if it had been any ordinary evening.

“Sorry I'm late,” he said. “I've been seeing the old man.”

“How is he?” she asked.

“Bad,” Gerald answered.

“You don't think it's anything dangerous, do you?”

“I dunno. They wouldn't tell me. They just said you couldn't be sure with that kind of case.”

“Does he know how ill he is?”

“You bet he does,” said Gerald. “He's scared.”

“Can I go and see him?” Alice asked.

“He'd like it,” said Gerald. “He's gone on you.”

He took out his pocket-comb and straightened his hair in front of the hall mirror. The hall mirror had been a wedding present. It was an oval plaque of wood from which hung a clothes brush, a hat brush, and a buttonhook; the looking glass was a small inadequate circle in the middle. Alice watched him as he pulled his tie into position. Somehow, when he was tired he seemed more good looking than ever. They went through into the drawing-room together. The enormous radiogram greeted them from the opposite wall.

“Oh, it's come, has it?”

He made no attempt to go over to it, however. He just looked at it in a vague, hostile way and turned his back on it.

“Shall I put it on?” Alice asked.

She was already bending over the set as she spoke.

The machine jumped into life; a noisy, mechanical life of its own. Someone was playing dance music and the house became filled with it. It was like being shut up in a box with a band. Alice noticed that Gerald's right foot was moving in time with it. In the ordinary way he would have got up in a moment and put his arm round her waist. But to-night he didn't move.

“Turn it off, dear,” he said at last.

“Why?”

“I've got a headache. Do you mind?”

“Oh, no. Not a bit. Of course I'll turn it off if you want it turned off.”

She was disappointed. This wasn't in the least what she had expected it would be like. In any case, she had only put it on to keep her mind off other things; she could forget about the baby altogether while the music was playing.

She got up and turned the master knob. After so much noise, the silence seemed to come with a jolt.

“I'm sorry you don't like it,” she said.

“I do like it.”

“You must do, if you want it turned off.”

“It isn't that. I just don't feel like it.”

She went and shut the lid down hard. Unintentionally hard, in fact. It sounded as though someone had hit the thing with a hammer.

Gerald looked in her direction.

“There's no need to smash the thing,” he said.

“You're very fond of it all of a sudden, aren't you?”

“No, I'm not. You wanted it. I didn't.”

“Well, I'm sorry we ever got it. I am, really.”

“You're
sorry we got it?”

“Yes, I am. Very sorry. I wish I'd never seen it.”

“Then why did you make me buy it?”

“
I
didn't make you buy it.”

“Then who did?”

“You wanted it yourself.”

“I suppose you think I can put my feet up in the middle of the afternoon and listen to a gramophone.”

“Well, I like that,” she said. “If I put my feet up every afternoon how do you think the work would get done?”

“Oh, I dunno,” said Gerald. “Let's forget it.”

“You're beastly,” she said to him. “Simply beastly.”

He got up and went over to the door.

“What about having something to eat?” he suggested.

“You can have it alone,” she answered. “I don't want any.”

Then before he could stop her she had walked past
him and gone upstairs. He saw that she was crying again. …

It was a cheerless meal in the bleak, wooden-looking dining-room. The electric fire was all ready to fill the room with plausible, artificial flickers but he didn't trouble to turn it on. He just sat there remembering the hospital, remembering that Alice was miserable, remembering the radiogram.

It was the hospital in particular that he remembered. The white, shrivelled face of his father had unnerved him. It was so astonishingly like the face of a dead man already. And it was, moreover, strangely unlike the face that had appeared round the drawing-room door to announce that Mr. Sneyd senior, in diffident but indefatigable fashion, was searching for his son. It seemed somehow as though there had still been life in him then; and now there was none. It was as though when he had come out to East Finchley with the excuse that he was just passing, he had been having a last exquisite flutter before the gun went off.

Gerald got up from the table and went through into the drawing-room; it was doing him no good, he told himself, to sit there worrying about his father in that way. Alice was still upstairs and the drawing-room seemed lonely and deserted. He put his feet up on the couch and took out a pencil. Once he was settled he began to make notes on the back of an envelope. He wrote slowly and carefully, frowning as he did so. It was some time before he got the phrases exactly to his liking. When he had done so, he sat back and read them over.