Kind Are Her Answers (20 page)

Kit looked, for the tenth time, at the clock on the dashboard. Half-past three. She would be out. She might not have got his letter. He had only posted it late last night. He had been determined to come, but had not dared to announce it. A dozen things might have stopped him; he had nearly had to see the Regional Medical Officer for Fraser; he had nearly been needed to give an anaesthetic. He had been last week, and dared not make a routine of disappearing without explanation. The whole business of getting away had been something of a nightmare.

Two days after he had left Christie the week before, he had had a letter from her announcing that she had had an offer from a theatrical touring company. The manager had seen her at one of the Abbey’s week-end performances, and had written next day. Kit, who was an informed though sporadic theatregoer and read the notices of plays he could not attend, had never heard of the company. The manager, however, seemed to have charmed Christie, whose account was full of a vague and airy optimism more alarming than misgivings. Amid much extraneous matter, some of the terms of the contract emerged. Kit, who knew nothing of theatrical methods but something of business, thought that spuriousness reeked from them. Christie added, in a postscript, that she had been thinking it over when he last came and had meant to tell him, but hadn’t wanted to spoil the time. This took Kit longer to recover from than the proposition itself.

He sat down in his first free moment, and wrote her three pages of what seemed, at the time, closely reasoned argument. It happened, however, that he was called away before he could finish it, so that he had occasion some hours later to read it again. He stared at it for five minutes before he tore it in two and burned it. Had he really written these appeals, these confessions of dependence between every couple of lines? This was what he had promised himself should never happen to him again. This time it was all to be different.

Rapidly he convinced himself that he had not meant to write like this at all. It had been only concern for her that he had been trying to express. He wrote her another letter on these lines, reread it, was slightly sickened by it and tore it up in turn. Black curls of burnt paper began to choke the fire.

In the end he wrote her a business letter. He dissected the contract drily, and arranged the result with a few legal notes. He posted it with a feeling of relief. It was as if some impersonal agent had been pursuing him with a deed of great commitment, which he had managed to evade.

Christie’s reply came promptly. The letters she wrote from the Abbey were mostly typed, but her typing was as characteristic as her written hand; certain letters were always banged down harder than the others, and she had a trick of absently allowing a long word to overflow the line, and carrying it on to the next from some extraordinary division in mid-syllable. This time haste and eagerness emphasized both habits. Whatever had made him write her such a queer letter? Was he upset with her about going away? But that was the whole idea: she was doing it really for him. When she had made a success in the provinces, she would get a part in the West End. Mr. Cowen had assured her that this was practically a certainty. Then she would be quite free, and would have a marvellous flat of her own, where they would be able to meet. It would be so much nicer than being at the Abbey. (Here followed a page and a half about deficiencies in the Abbey wardrobe, and some trouble or other that Rollo was having with the scenery for the current play.) Mr. Cowen had said that it didn’t matter in the least her not having any training or experience apart from the Abbey. What audiences wanted was personality. And the company was
quite
sound financially; she herself was investing in it the hundred pounds she had had under her aunt’s unaltered will. She was going to sign everything in two or three days, when Mr. Cowen was taking her out to lunch.

It was at this point that Kit had begun making arrangements to go next day.

Until quite recently, one of several obstacles to this would have been the necessity of excusing himself to Janet. His free afternoon had been earmarked, in the early days, for excursions to town or elsewhere, and long after she had started to make her own arrangements it would still have been unthinkable that he should not have kept the time until he had asked her if there was anything she would like to do. But in the last weeks she seemed to have found the Group activities so absorbing that she had to be reminded when Wednesday came round. She never questioned his movements and, if he made motions of interest in what she was doing herself, became vague and changed the subject. Still, he never approached the day without a certain anxiety. This Tuesday he was relieved, when he got in from the afternoon round, to find that she had people to tea.

The guests were Peggy Leach, who was apparently staying in the neighbourhood again, and a young married couple whose surname he discovered, with difficulty, to be Harrison; they were called Bill and Shirley by every one else. When he came in they turned, simultaneously, and fixed him with identical gazes of bright, interested calculation; a little as if they were reckoning up the chances of selling him something, but not just yet. Kit, after polite exchanges, prepared hopefully to withdraw into the background of the conversation and his own thoughts; they had all seemed more than adequate to one another’s entertainment when he came in. But this, it seemed, would not do at all. They centred on him, as if he were a new boy entering a study at school. With an engaging now-come-on-you-tell-me air, they flung him titbits of information about themselves, and waited open-mouthed (like Mappin Terrace bears, he thought) for reciprocal buns. Kit, whose whole personality was feeling tender and sore, found himself quite unable to detach even superficial parts for inspection. His replies grew guarded to the verge of incivility. Presently he saw them—together, of course—exchange a covert glance with Janet, as who should say, “Ah, yes, we see.”

After this the assault stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Instead the two of them formed, with Peggy Leach, a compact little conversational team, and began to toss round stories about the Group, as if they were engaged in a kind of exhibition match. They described how a friend called Bridget had been guided to break off her engagement owing to the resistance her fiancé had put up (to the Group, Kit gathered after a few ambiguous minutes) and become engaged to Bob, who had Changed her. Another friend, called Timmie, had been guided to give up the idea of trying for Oxford and to stay at home, working for the Group. At this Janet leaned forward a little, and a faint tinge of colour appeared in her cheeks. Probably, thought Kit dimly, all this was rather much even for her. He floated a little way off into himself again. Shirley helped him to visualize Christie, being her exact converse in almost every physical trait.

At precisely a quarter to six, Bill and Shirley sprang to their feet with such dynamic decision that Peggy Leach was drawn up after them, like a lump of iron by a magnet. Probably they had been guided, Kit thought.

“Well,” said Bill, “back to the daily round, the common task! We’ll keep a lookout for you folks to-morrow. Five-thirty sharp. I fancy you’ll find old Ted pretty fine value.”

“Both of you will,” said Shirley.

A pause, which no one filled, caused Kit to look up. Every one was gazing at him expectantly. He perceived that it was himself, and not Peggy, whom the plural included.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize you meant me. I’m afraid I can’t possibly manage to-morrow.” Three pairs of eyes regarded him with thoughtful interest; he could see them each framing the word Resistance, in block capitals. Rather desperately he added, “I should have been delighted, of course, but unfortunately I’m not free.”

Janet said, “But it
is
Wednesday to-morrow, isn’t it? I told Bill and Shirley we’d both come.”

Kit felt the pent-up suspense of the last days crackling dangerously within him.

“Well, I’m sorry,” he said, “but if you’d asked me first I’d have told you. I shall be away the whole afternoon.”

“I see,” said Janet.

Silence fell.

Kit sat staring in front of him. Accumulated emotions, and the effort of suppressing them, had made him go white. His reason for a moment in abeyance, he waited for Bill and Shirley to explain that they had known about everything for some time, and would be glad to share with him and Janet about it.

They merely looked at him in a kind of regretful satisfaction, as if he had demonstrated by some rather unpleasant reaction the conclusions of their research. Bill turned to Shirley. Both their faces lit up with a bracing smile.

“My dear chap, that’s perfectly all right with us. Absolutely. As a matter of fact, Janet here pretty well explained to us that you’d feel this way about it. It takes time, of course. It did with me. In fact I’ve been through it all, haven’t I Shirley old girl?”

“Rather,” said Shirley. “Worse, if anything.”

“Just think it over, when you’re alone. Turn up when you feel you want to. Don’t bother to let us know. We’ll all understand.”

Kit became aware that the thinness of a membrane divided him from some ineffaceable kind of scene. Murmuring something, he got up and left the room.

The consulting room settled him in a matter of minutes. He found that the clock stood at five to six. Sounds of departure had just come from the hall. He went upstairs again, to apologize to Janet. It was not the best time to pursue a situation which might turn into anything; but he felt incapable of beginning two hours’ work with the thing hanging over his head. He had never been publicly rude to her before in the whole course of their married life.

Janet had gone to her desk, and was preparing to write a letter.

“I’m sorry about this Wednesday business. I didn’t really mean to be short about it. I was thinking of something else.” Janet looked up. It was incredible, but evident, that for a moment she had forgotten what he was talking about. His feelings became deflated to mere embarrassment.

“It doesn’t matter.” She tapped her mouth with a corner of note paper. “Do you mean you’d like to come to-morrow after all?”

“No; I’m sorry. I couldn’t have done that in any case.”

“Then there’s no need to discuss it any more, is there?” She put the paper down on the table, and picked up a pen. He realized that his anxiety had been wasted; she had been relieved by his refusal. It had discharged her of some self-imposed duty and now she wanted to put it behind her. He began to say something perfunctory, saw no point in it and went downstairs again.

Without thinking about it much, he knew that a section of life finished; their relationship, such as it was, had tapered away to its last thread, and to-day—probably for no stronger reason than it has to happen some time—the thread had snapped. From now onward, they would be associated acquaintances, knowing each other only in the past, as separate in the present as workers at neighbouring desks in office or bank. He had seen it in other homes, but had not foreseen, in his own, a time when some kind of need would not be alive between them, at first his need of her, then hers of illusion. He had supplied it poorly, he supposed; it was better she should have turned to something that had, at the worst, potentials of truth. As far as he was concerned, it lifted somehow the guilt of his deceits; he felt in a confused way that they now became static and formal, like the lies of a servant answering a door. By the time surgery began he was thinking about Christie again. He had been thinking about her for most of the time.

The petrol van swung ponderously round, and vanished down a side-turning. Kit drew in a sharp breath of relief, and put on such speed as the road surface allowed.

The outskirts of Paxton came in sight; it was a largish town on whose further edge Brimpton Abbey hung like an ornamental tassel, the centre of an older village which ribbon development had turned into a well-to-do suburb. Already the glitter of tinsel in shop windows reminded him that Christmas was not many weeks ahead.

When he drove into Brimpton, a few lights were anticipating the dusk. He looked up at the gable where Christie had showed him, the first time he came, the window of her room. Its darkness dejected him like an omen; unreasonable since he knew she rarely had time to be there.

He rang, listening to the noises of the place, already familiar; feet and voices echoing on wooden stairs, a piano softly rendering the kind of accompaniment against which verse is spoken; the overtones of a declaiming voice, distance swallowing the rest. He wished it were possible to have some idea who was likely to answer the door; at the Abbey, this was the privilege of any one who might happen to be passing the hall. The domestic staff was loosely defined in function, and subject to rapid change. Perhaps it would be Christie this time.

It was Rollo, in shirtsleeves, with a cigarette in the corner of his long, upward-curving mouth, and a heap of brocades over one arm.

“Oh, hullo,” he said. “Are you looking for Christie?”

They surveyed one another with mutual lack of enthusiasm. On Rollo’s side this was due to finding Kit, who was standing a step lower down, still on a level with himself. This was the third time they had run into each other in a month; he would be living at the Abbey at this rate. Now Christie would be fussing to get away before they had got the scene right. An idea broke in on Rollo’s annoyance. Could the chap, since he seemed to haunt the play anyway, be induced to take St. Michael in the Prologue of the Christmas play? Colouring right; every bit of six foot, going on for seven in a helmet—what an eyeful to raise the curtain on! Kit stiffened under the sweeping and, to him, inscrutable stare with which Rollo—irritation melting in a proprietary glow—was dressing him and making him up.

“Is she busy?” he asked without warmth.

“Well, we’re more or less rehearsing at the moment.” Perhaps not the helmet, after all; a metal sunburst behind the head, fixed with a circlet. Blue-green eye-shadow, a lot of it. … Rollo removed the cigarette from his mouth, and smiled, as he could when he gave his mind to it, with considerable charm. “We’ll only be about half an hour, though. Come along in and watch, won’t you? We’d love some one to sit at the back and shout if we can’t be heard.” Rollo’s least whisper was audible in the last row of the sixpennies; but he contrived to charge the suggestion with diffident appeal.