“But you ought to have friends, Livia—YOUNG friends. I know it would
be hard for you to make them in Browdley—for various reasons… but you
ought to have them—there ought to be people of your own age whom you
could spend holidays with at their homes.”
“Or they could come here to spend holidays with me—how would you
like that?”
The point was taken. He replied: “I wouldn’t mind it so much. I wouldn’t
have to see a great deal of them, and if they were YOUR friends, I’d do my
best to make them feel at home.”
She smiled. “But they wouldn’t be, they couldn’t be, and I’d mind them
here, anyway. Martin, don’t you worry about me, either.” And then sharply:
“Who’s been talking to you? Sarah? She had no business to… why should she
interfere?”
He did not deny that Sarah had talked to him.
“All right,” he said temporizingly, “but don’t go and nag Sarah about it.
She means well.”
“That’s not always a good defence,” she said, thinking of it suddenly,
“when people do the wrong thing.”
She often gave him cues like that, as they occurred to her on the spur of
the moment, hoping they might lead him into talk of the past. But they never
did, and she wondered if he ever guessed that they were deliberately put out,
and if he just as deliberately ignored them. One evening, however, without
any cue at all, he began to talk of his years in prison. They were walking in
the garden, with the stars especially bright in the frosty air, and that drew
him to remark that the books he had read in prison were mostly about
astronomy and philosophy. “You see, in prison, after the first period of
getting used to it, which is rather dreadful, you slip into a mood of
timelessness that isn’t either happy or unhappy, and in that mood—for
me, at any rate—the things to think about were the timeless ones
—the mysteries of life and existence that have sent many men into cells
not very different from mine… the cells of monasteries, or the other kind
where mad people are put. Not that I invented any special philosophy or had
any special vision to match those I read about. I don’t have the tight
quality of mind.”
“Neither do I,” she answered. “You liked that kind of book because you
were in prison, but I’d feel in prison if I had to read that kind of
book.”
“I know,” he smiled. “But a very kind and gentle prison. A prison within
the other prison. It wasn’t so bad—although, as I said, my mind wasn’t
exactly equal to it—because, after all, I’d only been a smart business
man most of my life.”
“And not even so smart,” she said softly, taking his arm.
“That’s so. Well, let’s say just a business man. Perhaps that’s why I
think now of the end of a man’s life as a sort of taking-over by a junior
partner—some cheeky young fellow whom at first you thought of no
account, but he grows and grows inside your affairs till he begins to touch
them all—you’d like to get rid of him but you can’t, he’s the fellow
you try to forget when you go to sleep, but he wakes you in the morning with
his nagging and needling… the first step you take you know he’s still
there, at your elbow, jogging and shoving and hurting like the devil…
you’re at his mercy—his strength grows all the time at the expense of
yours—he knows he’s going to have his own way in the end—it’s
only a matter of time, and a horrible time at that… and from his point of
view, of course, everything’s going exactly as it should—HE is healthy,
striving, spreading—you are just an old decaying out-of- date thing he
feeds on.” He checked himself. “Am I talking too much?”
“No,” she answered, transfixed.
“Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Not altogether.” She added quickly: “But I don’t mind not knowing
altogether. You remember once I said I didn’t mind being bored. When you
don’t mind being bored, it isn’t boredom, really. And it’s like that when you
don’t mind not understanding—perhaps it means that you DO understand
—a little.”
“I hope so,” he said, holding closely to her as they reached an uphill
part of the path. “Now tell me some more about Cheldean.”
She racked her brains to think of a story because she knew that in some
obscure way those yarns about school life took his mind in a pleasant
direction, even if he did not always listen carefully; but she had already
told him most that had happened, and now she could only think of something
that had not happened. It was an incident she had once invented during a
rather dull service in the Cheldean school chapel. The preacher was a local
divine who came regularly and always devoted a large part of his extempore
prayer to the weather; he was never satisfied with it and always wanted God
to change it to something else, so that the slightest sign of floods,
drought, a cold wave or a heat wave, gave him an excuse. One sunny Sunday
after a week of consecutive fine days, he prayed most eloquently for rain
—which the girls definitely did not want, since there was a school
holiday the next day; and Livia, sharing this resentment, suddenly noticed a
sort of trap-door in the roof of the chapel just over the pulpit.
What fun, she thought, if one had climbed up there with a bucket of water
and, at the moment of the appeal, had poured it down over the preacher’s
head! The thought was so beguiling that she had giggled quietly in the pew;
but now, telling the story to Martin as a true one, she had him laughing
aloud.
“What really made you do it?” he asked. “Just for a lark?”
“I wanted to see his face when he looked up,” she said, still using her
imagination. “I thought he might think I was God.”
She had to invent the sequel of her own discovery and punishment, at which
he kept on laughing. In doing so he half stumbled to his knees; and while she
was helping him up Watson entered the garden from the yard. He gave them both
a rather long and curious stare, and a few hours afterwards, catching Livia
alone, asked how her father was. She answered “All right,” as she always did
to that question.
Watson grinned. “Just a little drop too much sometimes, eh?”
“What do you mean?” Then Livia realized what he did mean and was immensely
relieved. She had been afraid for a moment that he might have deduced some
real illness, and his mistake seemed the happiest and simplest alibi, not
only for past but possibly future events also.
She therefore smiled and retorted: “You ought to know the symptoms,
Watson, if anyone does.”
From then on, Livia cared less about what was seen and heard, even though
Watson’s knowing impertinences increased.
One evening Martin called her attention to a white dog
walking along the
path towards them, but she saw it was not a dog, but a piece of newspaper
blown in the wind; but he still insisted it was a dog and stopped to touch
it, then said it had run away. That made her realize how bad his sight was
becoming, and she begged him to see some other eye doctor; perhaps a special
kind of glasses or treatment would help; even if Dr. Whiteside were no use,
surely there must be someone in Mulcaster or London… But he said no; it had
all been diagnosed and prescribed for before; there was really nothing anyone
could do about it—perhaps it would not get any worse. And he could
still see many things perfectly well—colours, for instance. The red
geraniums, the blue lobelias, the yellow sunflowers; he welcomed them all
each day. That gave her the idea to put on a scarlet dress the next time she
walked with him, and he was delighted. From which she promptly derived
another idea, and that evening, though she was poor at sewing, she worked
hard after he had gone to bed, cutting up an old patchwork quilt and making
it into a multi-coloured dress to wear the following day. And he was
delighted again.
She then thought he might like a real white dog, and asked Watson to get
one; but when the dog appeared and was duly presented to his master in the
garden, he wriggled loose and scampered into the clough. “There you are,”
Martin laughed, when she fetched the animal back. “That’s what happened
before. The white dog will have nothing to do with me.”
“Then I must be a white cat,” she answered breathlessly. She had noticed
before that the silliest repartee of this kind seemed to lift his mood; it
was strange, indeed, how much of their talk had recently been either silly or
abstruse, seeming to skip the ordinary world in between. And as usual, the
silliness worked; he was lifted. “Come along, little white cat,” he laughed
again.
“Yes—and the white cat won’t run away,” she answered.
She could see that he was recalling something. “But a holiday, though…
that would be all right. Why don’t you take one?”
“A holiday?”
“Yes, why not?”
“Away… from YOU?”
“Well, only for a time…”
Suspicion filled her mind. “One of Sarah’s ideas?”
“Now, now, don’t get cross with Sarah. She’s not the only one who thinks
you need a holiday.”
“Who else, then?”
“Oh… several people…”
“Who? WHO?”
He wouldn’t tell her, but it was easy to worm the truth out of Sarah, and
the full truth proved even darker than her suspicion. For it seemed that old
Richard Felsby (he of all people) had visited Stoneclough recently and talked
to Martin not merely about her taking a holiday, but about her leaving
Stoneclough altogether. Some friends of Richard’s who lived on the coast of
North Wales had been approached and had agreed to have her stay with them
indefinitely; Richard had offered to pay all expenses, and Martin had
actually approved the idea. This was the biggest blow of all; yet after a
wild scene with Sarah she could only reproach him sombrely. How could he have
even considered such a thing? And that awful old man, Richard Felsby—
how dared HE interfere with her and her affairs? “Oh, Martin, I thought he
never visited you any more. I thought you’d quarrelled. I hoped you were
enemies for ever.”
“Livia, he just called on business the other day—while you were out.
Something about a new mortgage on the house.”
“But he talked about ME—you both did—planning to have me sent
away—and Sarah already getting my clothes ready—all of
you—behind my back—against me—plotting—and then
pretending it was just a holiday—”
“Livia, please—it wasn’t like that at all—”
“Do you know what I’ll do? I’ll hate them both as long as I live—
I’ll NEVER forgive them—either of them—”
“They were only thinking of what might be your own best
interests—”
“To send me away from you? Is that what YOU think too? You don’t want me
here?”
“Livia, please… You know how much I like you—”
“I like you too. I love you. I’ve told you that before. And I wouldn’t go,
even for a holiday. I’ll never leave you. They’d have to drag me out of the
house and if they took me anywhere else I’d run away and I’d fight them all
the time. I’d kill anybody who tried to send me away from you.”
“Now, Livia, Livia… why should you talk like that?”
“Because I’m so happy here. What on earth would I do alone in a strange
place?”
“You wouldn’t be alone—”
“I’d be alone if I left you alone. I won’t go anywhere unless you go with
me. Then I’ll go—wherever it is. Even if you went out of your mind I’d
go out of mine too. That’s a bargain… So don’t you try to get rid of me.”
She put her hands up to his face and clawed him gently with her finger-nails,
suddenly and rather hysterically laughing. “The little white cat will scratch
you to death if you even think of it.”
Dr. Whiteside happened to meet Livia in Browdley one
afternoon. She did
not mention her father, until asked, and then she said he was ‘all right’.
The doctor was an old man now, long retired from practice, and for that
reason even readier to think out the problems of the families he had once
attended. He well remembered advising Emily to tell Livia the truth and send
her to school lest the life at Stoneclough, without playmates of her own age,
should make her grow up neurotic and self-centred; he had not seen the girl
often since then, but now, even to his dimmed perceptions, she looked as if
everything had happened just as he had feared. There was the peculiar rapt
expression, the angular tension of her whole body as she stopped to speak to
him in the street. And he made up his mind there and then to visit
Stoneclough unasked; he did not care how John received him, it was the girl
he was thinking about. She ought to be sent away, and he would tell John this
and be damned to the fellow.
So a few days later, amidst pouring rain that had already flooded the
low-lying districts of Browdley, Dr. Whiteside had his old coachman-chauffeur
drive him up to Stoneclough. Admitted by Watson, he was glad to find Livia
out, and made his own way across the hall to the drawing-room. He walked in
without ceremony, being both in the mood and at an age when such things were
possible. John Channing sat alone by the fireside, with a white wire-haired
terrier on his lap. It was one of the almost lucid intervals, less frequent
now and more fragmentary; the younger man shook hands, invited the doctor to
sit down, remarked on the weather, and in all ways but one seemed perfectly
normal. The exception lay in the fact that though he clearly did not
recognize Dr. Whiteside, he showed no surprise that a stranger should walk in
unannounced.
It would have puzzled a man less subject to freaks of behaviour than Dr.
Whiteside himself. “Good God, man, don’t you REMEMBER me?” was all he
exclaimed. “Whiteside… DOCTOR Whiteside. I’ve been meaning to look you up
for a long while… How are you getting on?”
“Oh, not so badly, thanks. Yes, of course I remember you now. It’s—
it’s just that I don’t SEE very well.”
“Still the same trouble?”
“No. It never was what you diagnosed.”
“You don’t say?” Dr. Whiteside was somewhat discomfited. “Well, of course,
I’m not a specialist. I hope you consulted one.”