Homecomings (44 page)

‘What does that mean?’

Another murmur.

‘You can’t tell me anything more?’

There was a longer reply.

‘I see,’ said Margaret. ‘Yes, we’ll ring up tomorrow morning.’

Simultaneously with the sound of the receiver going down, she told me: ‘They said that he was holding his own.’

The phrase fell dank between us. She took a step towards me, wanting to comfort me: but I could not move, I was incapable of letting her.

IN the middle of the night, Margaret was at last asleep. We had both lain for a long time, not speaking; in the quiet I knew she was awake, just as I had listened and known years before, when Sheila was beside me in insomnia. But in those nights I had only her to look after, as soon as she was asleep my watch was over: that night, I lay wide awake, Margaret’s breathing steady at last, in a claustrophobia of dread.

I dreaded any intimation of sound that might turn into the telephone ringing. I dreaded the morning coming.

I should have dreaded it less – the thoughts hemmed me in, as though I were in a fever or nightmare – if I had been alone.

It had been easier when I had just had to look after Sheila. Of the nights I had known in marriage, this was the most rending. Margaret had been listening too, lying awake, until she could be sure I was safe out of consciousness: it was only exhaustion that had taken her first: she wanted to look after me, she was thinking not only of the child but of me also.

She wanted to look after me but I could not let her. In this care and grief I had recessed, back to the time when I wanted to keep my inner self inviolate.

As a child I had not taken a sorrow to my mother, I had kept my sorrows from her, I had protected her from them. When I first loved I found, and it was not an accident, someone so self-bound that another’s sorrows did not exist.

But with Margaret they existed, they were at the core of our marriage: if I kept them from her, if I did not need her, then we had failed.

In the darkness I could think of nothing but the child. The anxiety possessed me flesh and bone: I had no room for another feeling: it drove me from any other person, it drove me from her.

I thought of his death. In the claustrophobia of dread, it seemed that it would be an annihilation for me too. I should want to lose myself in sadness, have no one near me, I should not have the health to admit the claim of the living again. In sadness I should be alone: I should be finally and at last alone.

I thought of his death, as the light whitened round the curtains. The room pressed me in; I had a picture, sudden and sharp as an hallucination, it might have been a memory or a trick with time, of myself walking along a strip, not of sand but of pavement, by the sea. I did not know whether I was young or an old man: I was walking by myself on the road, with the sea, leaden but calm, on my right hand.

I slept a little, woke with an instant’s light-heartedness, and then remembered. Margaret was already dressing. As she looked at me, and saw the realization come into my face, hers went more grey. But she still had her courage: without asking me this time she said that she would ring the ward. Remaining in the bedroom I heard her voice speaking, the words indistinguishable, the cling of the bell as she rang off, the sound of her feet returning: they were not light, I dreaded to see her eyes. She told me: ‘She said there’s no change to speak of.’

All I could make myself reply was a question about our visiting Geoffrey at the hospital: when would she be ready to leave? I heard my voice deaden, I could see her regarding me with pity, with injury and rejection, with her own pain.

Whilst she gave Maurice breakfast and got him off to school, I did not move from the bedroom. At last she returned to me there: I said that it was time we were setting out.

She looked at me with an expression I could not read. She said: ‘I think perhaps it would be better if you went alone.’

All of a sudden I knew that she understood. The night’s dreads – she had divined them. She had endured her own suffering about the child, and mine also. What could she do now either for the child or me? She could not bear, any more than I could, not to be with him; yet she was trying to tend me. Her tone was tight, she was admitting as much as she could bear.

It was a moment in which I could not pretend. To refuse her offer just because she craved I should – that was not in me. To refuse out of duty, or the ordinary kind surface of love – that was not in me either. There was only one force out of which I could refuse, and that was not love, but need.

All of a sudden, I knew that the fugue of the night was over. That part of me, which she understood even if it cost her her last hope, was not overmastering now.

Somehow the moment held not only the strains of our past, but something like a prophecy. I thought of the child’s death, as I had in the night. If I lost him, I knew – it was the certainty of the fibres, not of thought – I should not be much good to her, but I should need her.

‘No,’ I said, ‘come with me.’

THROUGH the underground corridor of the hospital, which smelt of brick dust and disinfectant, Margaret and I were finding our way to Geoffrey’s office. Along the passage, whose walls, as bare as those of a tube railway, carried uncovered water-pipes, went mothers with children. At a kind of junction or open space sat a group of women, their children in pushchairs, as though expecting nothing, waiting endlessly, just left there, children not specially ill, their fate not specially tragic, waiting with the resignation that made hospitals seem like forgotten railway stations littered with the poor and unlucky camping out for the weekly train. Nurses, their faces high-coloured and opaque, moved past them with strong, heavy-thighed steps as though they did not exist.

When at last we saw a notice, turned down a subsidiary passage and reached the office, which was still underground, Geoffrey’s secretary told us that he was with the child, that he had been giving him his sixth injection. That if we liked, we could wait in the doctor’s room until he returned. Like the nurses in the corridor, she was a strong young woman, her face comely and composed with minor power. When she spoke to us it was in a tone which was brisk and well ordered, but which held an undertone of blame, as though we were obscurely responsible for our ill fortune. It was the tone which is not far distant from most of us, when we have to witness suffering and address it, as though when the veils of good nature were off we believed that the suffering were merely culpable, and suffering a sin.

In the office so small that the walls pressed round us, the light was switched on although through a window one could look up to the sky. The room glistened under the light, both naked and untidy – a glass-fronted bookcase full of text-books and sets of journals, a couple of tubular chairs, a medical couch. We sat down, she put her hand on mine: there we stayed like those others in the corridor, waiting as they were, not expecting to be picked up, too abject to draw attention to ourselves.

I was aware of her palm touching the back of my hand: of my own breathing: of the sheets of typescript on the desk, which looked like a draft of a scientific paper, and the photograph of a woman, handsome, dashing, luxurious.

The telephone rang, the secretary swept in and answered it. It was the mother of a patient: there was a misunderstanding about an address and the secretary was confused. As it happened, I knew the answer: I could not get the words out. It was not malice, I wanted to help, I even wanted to propitiate her, but I was dumb.

When she went out, having at length solved the problem, I muttered to Margaret that I had known all along, but she did not understand. At last she had become no braver than I was, all she could do was press my hand. We had each got to the point of apprehensiveness which was as though we were not thinking any more, as though we were no longer waiting for release. This was all we knew, sitting there together; we were incapable of looking for an end to it.

There was a noise outside, and Geoffrey banged the door open. As soon as I saw his face, I realized. He was shining with a smile of triumph and elation, with a kind of repleteness such as one might see in a man who has just won a tennis match.

Margaret’s fingers touched me. Suddenly our hands were slippery with sweat. Without a word said, we were certain.

In the same instant, Geoffrey cried: ‘He’ll be all right. He’ll do.’

Margaret exclaimed, the tears spilled down her cheeks, but Geoffrey was oblivious of them.

‘It’s interesting,’ he said, ‘I’ve noticed it before, how the very instant the objective signs are beginning to go right, then the child seems to know it himself, one’s only got to look at his face. It’s interesting, one might have thought there’d be a time lag. But the minute that the count in the lumbar fluid showed we had really got this one under control, then the boy was able to hear again and his mind began to clear.’

Suddenly he said, still wrapped up in his triumph: ‘By the way, you needn’t worry, there oughtn’t to be any after-effects. He’s a fine boy.’

It was not a compliment, it was just his statement of biological fact. He was brimming with his own triumph at seeing the child recover: but also, uninterested in so many things which preoccupied the rest of us, not reading the news, contemptuous of politics, laughing off art as a plaything, he nevertheless was on the side of the species. He drew his most unselfcentred happiness, with a kind of biological team spirit, from the prospect of a strong and clever child.

I was giddy with Margaret’s joy, which resonated with mine, so that I could not have distinguished which was which. I wanted to abandon myself to praise of Geoffrey: I was in the sublime state in which all my extravagance, so long pent in, was pelting against the wall of tact, or even of ordinary human consideration. I wanted to patronize him and be humble; I wanted to ask him outright whether he intended to marry the woman in the photograph. I should have liked to ask him if I could be of any use to him.

But I was moved by a compulsion which came from something deeper among the three of us.

‘He’s a fine boy,’ Geoffrey repeated. I was compelled to say: ‘So is yours.’

For an instant he was surprised.

‘Yes, I suppose he is.’

He added, with his head tossed back, with his student vanity: ‘But then, I should have expected him to be.’

He was staring at Margaret. Her tears were not dry, her expression was brilliant with rapture and pain. She said: ‘I’m watching for the first sign of anything wrong with him.’

‘Yes,’ said Geoffrey. ‘If nothing happens within a fortnight from now, then he’s clear.’

‘I shall do anything you tell me,’ she said.

He nodded.

‘I’d better see him two or three times a week until the period of incubation is over.’

She cried: ‘We must save him from anything we can!’

She had known, when she came to me, the loads that she was taking; some could shrug them off, not she: even now, in the midst of rapture, they lay on her, lay on her more heavily, perhaps, because she was uplifted. Somehow the boy’s chance of infection stood before her like an emblem. When she spoke of it, when she said we must save him from anything in our power, she was speaking, not only of the disease, but of the future.

I said: ‘Yes, we must save him from everything we can.’

It was a signal of understanding between us. But Geoffrey, who had also heard her affirmation, appeared to have missed it. He replied, as though illness was the only point: ‘Well, even if he does show any signs, which incidentally is much less likely than not, you needn’t take it too tragically. We should be pretty incompetent if we didn’t get it in time. And children are very tough animals, you ought to remember that.’

He said it with detached satisfaction. Then, in a totally different tone, he said: ‘I’m glad I was able to do something for your child.’

In the constricted office, he was sitting on the desk, above us, and, as he spoke he looked down first at her, then at me. In the same tone which was sharp, insistent, not so much benevolent as condescending, he said: ‘I’m glad I was able to do something for you.’

He was free with us now. Before, he had been constrained, because he was a man, light-natured but upright, who did not find forgiveness easy, who indeed felt not revengeful but inferior and ineffective in the presence of those whom he could not forgive. Now he had us under an obligation. His was the moral initiative. He was ready to be fond of her again: he was even ready to like me. He felt happy, released, and good.

So, it might have seemed incongruous, did we. She, and I also, had previously felt for him that resentment which one bears towards someone to whom one has done wrong and harm – a resentment in which there lurks a kind of despising mockery, a dislike in which one makes him smaller than he is. Now he had been powerful when we were abject. We had been in his hands; and, for both of us, for her more violently, but for me also, the feeling swept hidden shame away.

He sat there, above us, his head near the light bulb. Margaret and I looked up at him; her face was blanched with sleeplessness and anxiety, her irises were blood-streaked; so must mine have been. He showed no sign of a broken night: as usual, vain about his appearance, he had his hair elegantly brushed and parted, he smelt of shaving powder.

He was happy: we were sleepy with joy.

JUST over a fortnight later, on a humid July afternoon, the clouds so dense that some windows were already lit at six o’clock, Margaret called at my office to take me home. She was wearing a summer frock, and in the heat she was relaxed with pleasure, with delectable fatigue, coming from the hospital, where she had been arranging for the child to return to us next day.

He was well and cheerful, she said. So was Maurice, who had escaped the infection altogether: there was no one in her charge to worry her now, she was lazy with pleasure, just as she had been when Gilbert first brought her into my sick-room.