Kind Are Her Answers (16 page)

As he bent over the bedside table, sawing at the fine glass by the light of the lamp, he heard a faint movement beside him. The old woman’s struggle for her shallow breath had eased for a moment; the fear in her eyes was superseded, as they turned towards him, by gratitude and surprise. With a fluttering gasp she whispered, “Dr. Anderson … how good … get here so quickly … such a trouble …”

Her yellow hand was picking and fidgeting at the sheet. He held it for a moment, slipping a finger up the wrist to feel the pulse. It was imperceptible; he had not expected anything else. He said, “We’ll have you feeling better in just a moment.” The greying face on the pillow gave back a remote reflection of his smile.

Christie had put down the glass of water beside the syringe. He rinsed it, and drew up the coramine. “This isn’t going to hurt you. Just the usual prick.”

He picked up a fold of skin and slipped the needle under it. Christie had gone round to the opposite side of the bed. He saw her hand close, warm and comforting, over the limp hand on the sheet. For a moment Miss Heath’s eyes moved from one to the other: not very differently, seventy years before, little Amy Heath had looked from her dear Mamma to her dear Papa as, clutching their fingers, she walked towards the darkest, laurel-roofed bend of the drive. Then Kit drove the piston home. In the first instant after the needle was withdrawn that look of dream-shadowed, timid trust remained; in the next, a kind of lightning-flash of consciousness lit the flaccid face and the glazed eyes. They fixed themselves on Kit in a stare as of astonished realization; but what they saw he could not tell, for immediately there was a tremor of the limbs, and a jerking spasm of the breath which no other breath succeeded. Miss Heath’s hand lay still, with a little fold of sheet under the fingers, and her mouth dropped open as it had been on the night when she had snored in her sleep. Her eyes, still fixed in their stare, became, with the strange definiteness of death, no longer eyes but simply part of the blank surface of a body. Kit bent and closed them.

He had known, as he gave the injection, that it was too late. The syringe was in his hand. He glanced round the room, registering, almost unconsciously, the fact that there was nowhere to boil it.

“She’s gone,” he said. He began to draw the pillow out from under the dead woman’s head, not realizing that he had waited a moment, instinctively, expecting Christie to support it as a nurse would have done.

There was a window-bay at the far end of the room. It was almost an outer room in itself, with a wide window-sill where greenhouse plants flowered in pots of willow-pattern china. A heavy lace curtain shut it half away. Miss Heath’s chair had been wheeled into it on sunny days.

Christie stood in the window, stroking the thick grey-green leaf of an ice-plant between her fingers. She did not look up when Kit went over to her, and he did not look at her. He said the things that doctors say to devoted relatives after a death; that it had been inevitable for months, that she had been a comfort to her aunt, given her interests, prolonged her life. His voice had a practised, professional kindness. Christie nodded, fingering the glaucous leaves. There was a tension between them, of fear for the moment when some personal inflection would first be used.

Kit said that he would call in the morning to make out the certificate and see if there was anything he could do. Christie said, “Thank you. I should be glad if you would”; and looked at a small round rosette she had snapped away from the plant, as if she were surprised to see it in her hand. Turning it round she said, without any alteration of voice, “She was frightened by herself. She rang twice. I came here so that she could have some one to come at once when she rang.”

Kit, looking past her at the blank dark of the window, said, “If I hadn’t been here, you’d have had to leave her to go to the phone.”

They both stopped, like people at the end of their conversation.

Kit moved out past the curtain. The face on the bed seemed, to his questioning eyes, very remote from reproach or forgiveness. It was concerned only with itself, with being a thing in its final form; like print of which the manuscript has been destroyed. There could be no more emendations, no revision, no touching up. Kit went over and covered it with the sheet. Christie returned the bunch of leaves carefully to the flower-pot, as if importance attached to the act.

“Shall you be all right,” he asked, “here for the night?” This too was a formula; people were often afraid of being alone with a corpse; they got a relation or a neighbour to come in.

“Yes, thank you.” They moved towards the door. “You know, the servants are in the house.”

“Oh, yes,” said Kit. “Of course.”

Christie opened the door. They both stopped, aware that something was different before they knew what it was. The hall was no longer dark, lit distantly, as it had been, by the light outside the porch. The big cut-glass lamp in the ceiling was burning, looking strident and unreal, as a bright light does in the dead hour of the night.

Just underneath it, in the middle of the red turkey carpet, stood Pedlow, fully dressed, her starched cap and clean apron standing out with wooden stiffness, her face as unmoving as the folds of her corseted black dress. She had something dark over her arm; Kit, in the first dulled moment, took it for a rug.

He heard Christie, beside him, make a little sharp breath-sound, like the involuntary sound people make at a sudden shock of cold. After a moment she said, in a little, high voice, “Well—thank you, Dr. Anderson. It was very good of you to get here so soon. I’m sure you did everything possible. … Thank you. Good night.”

Pedlow moved forward, reaching the door, with her smooth well trained haste, a moment before him. She was handing him something, with such correctness that Kit had taken it from her before he awoke to what had happened. It was his overcoat, which he had lent to Christie. Christie’s face would have told him, if he had not already guessed, where Pedlow had found it.

“Thank you,” he said. Neatly and silently, Pedlow lifted it for him to put on.

Without turning, he could feel Christie’s eyes fixed on his face. He put on the coat slowly, delaying while he could the moment when he must turn and display his emptiness to her need. The time for playing house was over. He had no defence to make for her, no shelter to offer her even for this one night.

“Good night,” he said.

Christie straightened her shoulders, said “Good night,” and tried to smile at him. As he went out he saw Pedlow stop for a moment to look at her, before she crossed to the closed door of the room they had left.

O
NCE, IN THE MORNING
hours, Kit knew that he had dozed for an odd half-hour, because the sky in the window changed its colour suddenly from black to grey: but his eyes felt wide open and fixed, as if he had been staring at something during the time. When it was just light he dropped into a heavy sleep, from which the maid’s morning tap waked him with a protesting shock. At breakfast Janet looked at him thoughtfully, and asked if he had had a pleasant evening with Dr. McKinnon. An inflection in her voice made it clear that she supposed him to have been drinking most of the previous night.

The post had presented him with a circular advertising a newish drug. He had been employing it in his practice for a year, but he read the explanatory matter from end to end, and, when he had finished it, the testimonials. Janet returned to her own correspondence. Her last letter was several pages long. When he happened, once, to glance up at her, she shuffled the pages with self-conscious negligence, so that the blank sheet at the back was turned towards him.

He managed to eat a little. His body was too well organized to become, even now, a parasite on his nerves. It cleared his head enough to make him think a little of appearances; he tried to smooth the strain out of his face and attempt a kind of conversation. Because of the effort this involved, it did not occur to him at once that Janet’s replies were almost as perfunctory as his own. It was not till the end of the meal, when she gathered up her letters and began to fidget aimlessly round the room, that he recognized the familiar symptoms of preparation.

She was about to make a gesture; something she had been saving for some time. Seeing it coming, his mind said, in simple protest, “Not in the
morning.”
It was too much. It took him a moment or so to remember what else it might be. He took his pipe out of his pocket and began carefully to fill it.

Janet fingered the envelopes in her hands and said, “Christopher, dear, couldn’t we have a little talk? I think it would be good for both of us. We haven’t got together over things lately, have we?”

She smiled at him. It was a smile which looked as if she had copied it from some one else; it had a kind of forced friendliness verging on the genial, which, chiefly because it was so unsuited to her, jarred sharply. In his surprise he actually forgot the fear it had relieved. She went on, still smiling, “I know what you’ve been feeling these last few weeks.”

Kit thrust the tobacco down into the bowl in a solid block which, as he discovered later, prevented the pipe from drawing at all. Without noticing, he added another layer.

“You feel I’ve been neglecting you. But though it may have seemed like that, you’ve been a great deal in my mind.”

“Not at all,” said Kit. “I mean, of course I’ve thought nothing of the kind.” He glanced automatically at the clock, which made it just under a quarter of an hour to morning surgery. There were half a dozen things to get in order beforehand. Keying himself up to routine had taken everything he had; there was simply nothing left for this. He felt incapable even of the effort necessary to stave it off, and stood helplessly with his pipe (which he never smoked at this hour of the day) cold in his hand.

“What I wanted to say,” Janet continued, “is this.” She had lifted her chin and pitched her voice a little beyond him. It had a kind of rehearsed effect, as if she were addressing herself to several people rather than to him, which made him feel uncomfortable. “I’ve realized that up till this last month I’ve never been absolutely honest with myself about the reasons for our marriage having drifted onto the rocks.”

What on earth has she been reading? thought Kit in dim astonishment. The magazine slang sat as startlingly on her as if she had walked into the room in trousers. Yet another thing he ought to be doing in the surgery jogged at his mind; he glanced at the clock again.

“I haven’t faced up to my own selfishness. I’ve clung to my reserve, and reserve
is
a form of selfishness, Kit. I haven’t shared with you as I should have done.”

“Shared what?” asked Kit dazedly. His mind had little capacity, this morning, for curiosity or surprise.

“Oh, that’s just a … Shared my thoughts with you, I mean. I shouldn’t have kept my feelings secret from a mistaken pride in bearing things alone. After all, there’s a very sacred sort of bond between us. It’s a thing we ought to have got together over.” She seemed checked here, perhaps by Kit’s face, perhaps by a momentary doubt of her phrasing; but went on, quickly, “In fact, I’ve been selfish in many ways.”

“My dear,” said Kit, horror at last overcoming his inertia, “you’ve done your duty by me fully, and if I’ve seemed not to appreciate it I’m sorry; I can only assure you I do. I’ll talk over anything you like later on, but would you mind now? I’ve got one or two examinations and so on to lay out for downstairs.”

“Kit, it’s only ten to nine. You
must
face up to things now: we’ve both got into the habit of dodging realities. It won’t take a minute to finish what I wanted to say to you. It was only to tell you how wrong I feel it was of me to have let the—the physical part of our marriage go, just because it didn’t mean anything to
me.
I should simply have told you honestly that it didn’t, and fulfilled my part of it for your sake. And that’s what I’ve resolved to do, Kit. I’ll see a specialist, or anything you think necessary. I’ve been unfair to you, and I shan’t rest till I’ve got right with myself about it.”

She paused, and, in time, it evolved on Kit that she was awaiting his expressions of gratitude. He turned the pipe over attentively in his hand, rejecting, one after the other, the answers that occurred to him. The conception of himself as an altar-stone for his wife’s votive offerings was not altogether a new one, but it had not been presented to him before with just this cheerful bonhomie, or at just this crux of his affairs. His resentment and bitterness were almost swamped by his sheer embarrassment; the violence of the three left him with no very clear impression of what he did feel. He clung, however, to an idea that if he expressed it he would be sorry afterwards, and, presently, the smoke within him dispersed. But he was no nearer knowing what to say. The situation, when he got outside it, was like things he saw in the course of his practice, and left him with the same feelings of futility and impotent pity.

“You don’t think I’m sincere,” Janet was saying. “You’re afraid I shall regret it afterwards, and perhaps resent things and reproach you. But I shan’t, Kit. I’ve found a strength I never had before.”

I
must
say something, Kit told himself desperately. To state the bald truth, of which he had no doubt, that the thing was impossible by now in any case, would be simple but brutally inadequate. He believed she had meant it; if so, heaven knew with what effort she had prepared this sacrifice to her conception of herself. To miss the cue entirely would be too cruel. Any cliché would be better; even “My dear, I’ve learned to care for you in a different way.”

It stuck in his throat, however. In the old days his lies to her had been like his consulting-room lies, prescribed as he might have prescribed a sedative, untainted by interest of his own. He was not quite aware that he had come to treat her as a patient, and did not know, now, why he felt obscurely that his professional integrity was being damaged. But she was waiting.

“My dear,” he began as gently as he could, “I’ve—”

There was a tap at the door. Janet looked irritably towards it. He could see her making up her mind not to say “Come in.” The thought of approaching rescue was too much for him.