His anger mounted. “Why not? For God’s sake what was wrong about it?”
“I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the people there—I mean the other
people with their children.”
“SNOB!” He shouted the word. “Weren’t they well-dressed enough for
you?”
“Most of them were as well-dressed as I could afford to be.”
Yes, he knew that; he had let his anger tempt him into an absurdity as
well as a side issue. “Then why—WHY?” he reiterated. “Why didn’t you
have it done?”
“I told you—I didn’t like the place. Some of the children looked
dirty, and they had bad colds—”
“And Martin might have caught one! Or a flea perhaps! So to save him from
that you let him catch diphtheria—”
She interrupted in a dead-level voice: “I don’t want to quarrel, George.
But don’t you remember I asked if it couldn’t be done by a private doctor?
And do you remember what you said?”
Yes, he remembered. There had been a wrangle, though a less bitter one,
about that also. Couldn’t she realize, he had asked her indignantly, that for
months he had been making speeches all over the town in favour of free public
immunization? What would it look like if, after all that, he took his own
child to a private doctor? Couldn’t she see what a fool and a hypocrite it
would make him appear? So Martin MUST go to the clinic. “Livia, I wouldn’t
insist if it meant that the child would be getting anything second- best. But
the free immunization’s just as good—just the same, in fact— as
anything a private doctor could give. The only difference is in where you
take him to get it. Don’t you see we have to set an example to the town in
these things? If we don’t use the new facilities ourselves, if we behave as
if we thought them not good enough for our own children, how can we expect
anyone else to trust them?”
Thus the argument when Martin was six months old. George had thought it
ended in his own victory; now, six months later, he realized that the end was
neither victory nor defeat, but just post- dated disaster.
He cried out, desperately: “I know all that, Livia… And I don’t want to
quarrel, either—it’s no good now—it’s too late. But why…
whatever you did… why didn’t you do SOMETHING? Why DIDN’T you take him to a
private doctor if you absolutely refused to do what I wanted? Oh, anything
—ANYTHING rather than this… Or why didn’t you let ME do it?… Why
didn’t you TELL me, anyway? Why did you LIE to me?”
He saw her hurt, stung face, and knew she was suffering so profoundly that
his accusations made little difference. But she could sting back and make HIM
suffer more, as when she answered with deadly irrelevance: “I did tell you
one thing. I said we ought to leave Browdley.”
“Oh no, that’s not the point—”
“It is and always will be. If we hadn’t stayed here, nothing like this
would have happened.”
Even that wasn’t certain, he knew, but he saw the certainty in her eyes,
and knew also that she would never believe otherwise, however much he went on
arguing.
The arrival of the doctor interrupted them. His visit lasted an hour, and
when it ended there was nothing more to argue about, only a dreadful
possibility to face.
The local hospital was already overcrowded, so Martin lay in the spare
room above the printing-office. Livia shared it with him, while George slept
on his study couch—so far, that is, as he could sleep at all. Becky,
banished from upstairs, curled mournfully under the desk. George had not
realized till then the depth of his affection for the child. He was like that
with all his affections—they grew, and then lurked, and then sprang to
give him pain. He was torn unutterably by remorse at having been so busy
those past few months, so busy with the affairs of the town, too busy to look
after the physical safety of his own household. He should have made sure that
the immunization had taken place, instead of just mentioning the matter to
Livia and taking it for granted that she had done it. It was HER fault
—and yet it was HIS fault too, for leaving everything of that sort to
her. It was the streak of unreasonableness in her cropping up again, and this
time tragically—he should have been prepared for it, in all vital
matters he should have watched for it. He wished… he wished… and one of
the things he did wish now, but dared not wish aloud, was that he HAD left
Browdley. He almost dared not wish it in thought, lest there should pass some
spark between his eyes and hers, some spark to set off a conflagration, or
—even worse—to indicate a mood which she would take to be
surrender. So it had come to THAT—that he thought of her as an enemy,
or of his love for her as an enemy? Which—or both? He puzzled over it,
far too modest to think his own emotions unique, but wondering if there were
outsiders who would understand them better than he did— novelists, say,
or psycho-analysts. Or that fellow Wendover, if ever he got to know him well
enough? Though how could a priest… and yet, after all, it WAS a spiritual
matter in some ways. Thus he argued with himself, and as the days passed and
Martin did not improve, it occurred to him that the greatest single
difference between Livia and himself was that she was too utterly fearless to
be reasonable, while he was too reasonable to be utterly fearless. And at a
certain level of experience there was simply no compromise between them.
Just before dawn one morning he dozed off in the chair and dreamed of his
own boyhood, a dream he had had recurrently before, though never with such
clarity. It was about his Uncle Joe, whom he had gone to live with when he
was seven years old, and of whom he had had more fear (on one occasion only)
than ever before or since of anything or anyone. What had happened actually,
though not always in the dream, was that uncle and nephew had met for the
first time at the house in Mill Street, when no one else was there. This was
a few months after his father had died, a week after the funeral of his
mother, and a few hours after the door had closed on his elder brother Harry,
his elder sister Jane, and the furniture-removers.
George had been the youngest of a family of six, with a gap so wide
between himself and the rest that at the time he was left parentless all the
others were grown-up and some of them married. Their bickerings about who
should take care of him (each one having a completely plausible alibi) had
made them jump at an unexpected offer from their mother’s brother, despite
the fact that he and their father had quarrelled years before over some point
of behaviour which (according to the latter) “just shows what a wicked man
Joe is”. Nobody ever told George more than that; all Harry would add was an
especially sinister: “You’ll find out soon enough, Georgie.” And when the
Mill Street household was broken up, Jane and Harry watched the last of the
furniture stowed away in the van, then looked at George as if it were somehow
disobliging of him to be alive. Finally Jane whispered: “We might as well go
now, Harry—George’ll be all right by himself till Uncle Joe comes
—he said he’d be along as soon as he closed the shop.”
Which made an excellent excuse to go about their respective affairs and
leave a boy of seven alone in an empty house in which both his parents had
recently died, there to await (with no lights and dusk approaching) the
arrival of a man he had never seen before, and who, from mysterious hints and
rumours he had heard, must surely be some kind of monster.
And about nine o’clock this legendary Uncle Joe, having paused longer than
he intended at the Liberal Club, came striding along Mill Street to knock at
Number Twenty-Four. George could not, at that moment of panic, decide whether
he were more frightened of the darkness or of his uncle; he could only crouch
under the stairs until the knock was repeated. Then he decided that the
unknown peril was worse and that he would not open the door at all. But in
the meantime Uncle Joe had gone round to the back of the house and found a
door there unlocked, so that he simply walked in, stumbling and making a
great commotion in the dark while he struck matches and called for
George.
George saw his face first of all in the light of the quick-spurting flame
—not, perhaps, the most reassuring way for anyone bordering on hysteria
to encounter a feared stranger. He saw a big reddish face, with bristling
moustaches, tufts of hair sticking out of the nose and ears, and eyebrows
which, owing to the shadow, seemed to reach across the entire forehead.
The result of all this was that by the time Uncle Joe, groping after a
series of wild screams that jumped alarmingly from room to room, finally
traced them to the corner of an upstairs cupboard, George had fainted and the
old man had used up all his matches.
The only thing he could think of was to carry the boy downstairs in his
arms and thence out of the house into the street. They had reached the corner
before George came-to, whereupon Uncle Joe, panting for breath, gladly set
him down on the edge of the kerb with a lamp-post to lean against. Then,
being a man of much kindness but little imagination, he could think of
nothing further but to relight his pipe while the boy ‘got over it’, whatever
‘it’ was.
Presently George looked up from the kerb, saw the big man bending over
him, and despite the now less terrifying eyebrows, would have raced away in
renewed flight had there been any power left in his legs. But there seemed
not to be, so he sat there helpless, resigned to the worst as he heard his
captor fumbling around and muttering huskily: “Bugger it! No more matches
—wasted ‘em all looking for you, young shaver!”
Suddenly then, by a sort of miracle, the heartening message came through
—that everything was ALL RIGHT; but only years afterwards was George
able to reflect that in that same first kindly breath there had been the two
things that had made his father call Uncle Joe a wicked man—namely, a
‘swear’ and the smell of whisky.
All this was what REALLY happened… but in the dream it did not always
end like that; sometimes the fear of the stranger’s footsteps in the empty
house lasted till the crisis of waking.
And now, years later, while his son lay desperately ill in the room above,
George dreamed of this fear again, and was wakened by the doctor’s hand.
“Sorry, George… but I think you’d best go up.”
“Is it—is it—bad?”
“Pretty bad… this time.”
George went upstairs, still with the agony of the dream pulsating in his
veins; and then, from the bedroom doorway, he saw Livia’s face. There was no
fear in it as she glanced not to him, but to the doctor.
The doctor walked over to the bed, stooped for a moment, then looked up
and slowly nodded.
One thing was now settled more definitely than ever: George
would not
leave Browdley, and if she should ever ask him again he would answer from a
core of bitterness in his heart. But she did not even mention the matter. She
seemed not to care where they lived any more, and if an absence of argument
were the only test, then they were at peace during the days that followed.
But George knew differently, and he knew that Livia knew also. It was no
peace, but an armistice on terms, and one only tolerable so long as both
parties fenced off large parts of their lives as individual territory.
They both grieved over Martin, and comforted each other up to the boundary
line, but that was fixed, and beyond it lay inflexibility. When, for
instance, she said a week or so later: “Tom Whaley telephoned while you were
out to say that the Council reconvenes on the seventeenth,” George simply
nodded, and went to his study.
She followed him, adding: “He wanted to know if you’d be there.” She
waited for him to reply, then said: “
I
don’t mind you going, George. I
don’t mind being left alone in the evenings.”
He answered: “Aye, I shall go.”
“Perhaps you’d better let him know then—”
“Don’t worry—I met him in the street after he telephoned you. I told
him I’d be going.”
And there was finality in that.
He went to the meeting, and found there an atmosphere not only of warm
personal sympathy, but of eagerness to accept him as a prophet; so that he
scored, almost without opposition, the biggest personal triumph of his
career. The housing scheme he had urged for years went through the first
stage of its acceptance that very night; even his bitterest antagonists gave
way, while to his friends he became manifestly the leader of a cause no
longer lost. There was irony (unknown to any but himself) that, at such a
moment of easy victory, he had never felt grimmer in spirit. When he reached
home late that night Livia was in bed, and he would not disturb her, for the
news he had did not seem enough excuse; she could read about it if she wished
(and there was irony there too) in the pages of the next Guardian. But the
excitements of the evening had made him sleepless, so he sat up in his study
till daylight, reading and writing and thinking and working out in his mind
the terms of the unspoken armistice.
One afternoon he found her with Fred, the messenger boy from the printing
works, busily engaged in clearing up the yard behind the office that had
always (as far back as anyone could remember) been a dumping-ground for old
papers, cardboard boxes, tin cans, etc. It was such a small area, enclosed on
two sides by buildings and on the remaining ones by high brick walls, that
nobody had ever thought of any other use for it. But now, when she saw his
curiosity, she asked if he would mind her turning it into a garden.
“Why, of course not,” he answered, pleased that she should show such an
interest. “But I doubt if anything’ll grow there.”
“We’ll see,” she said.
“I’ll give you a hand with it if you like.”
“No, there’s no need. Fred will dig it over, and then I can do all the
rest myself.”
“What’ll you plant?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll get you some books about gardening if you like.”