Short Stories 1927-1956 (42 page)

Emilia might as well have been dreaming all this, since although these
picturings
, this misery, this revulsion of jealousy, and the horror of what was to come persisted in a hideous activity somewhere in her mind, she herself had refused for the time being to have anything to do with it. There was something infinitely more important that must be done at once, without a moment’s delay. Husbands may go, love
turn,
the future slip into ruin as silently and irretrievably as a house of cards. But children must not be kept waiting; not sick children. She was already clumsily tugging at the tiny
middle
drawer of the old mirror, one of their first bargains, on the
dressing-table
, and she caught at the same instant a glimpse of the face reflected in its glass; but so instantaneously that the eyes of the image appeared to be darkened and shut, and therefore blind.

What a boon a little methodicalness may be. What a mercy that in this world
things
stay where they are put; do not hide, deceive, play false,
forsake
and abandon us. Where she always kept it,
there
lay the slim, metal, sharp-edged case of the thermometer. It was as if it had been faithfully awaiting this very reunion – ever since she had seen it last. In the old days, before she was married and had children, even if she had possessed such a thing, she might have looked for it for hours before discovering it. She had despised thermometers. Now, such a search would have resembled
insanity
.

She hesitated for scarcely the breadth of a sigh at the door, and then with decision switched off the light. Stuffing her husband’s scribbled note into her apron pocket, she flew into the next room, put a match to the fire laid in the grate, pushed the hot-water bottle between the sheets of the bed, and
hastened downstairs. Her legs, her body, her hand flitting over the banisters, were as light and sure again as if she had never experienced so much as an hour even of mere disappointment in her life. Besides, for some little time now, that body had been habitually told what it had to do. And so long as her orders came promptly and concisely, it could be trusted to continue to act in the same fashion, to be instantly obedient. That was what being a mother taught you to become, and even taught you to try within limits to teach a young child to become – an animated automaton.

‘Dr Wilson’ stood where she had left him beside the table and in
precisely
the same attitude. He had not even troubled to sit down. He had, apparently, not even so much as moved his eyes.

‘Now, doctor,’ said Emilia.

At this, those eyes first settled on her fingers, then quietly shifted to her face.

‘You were a long time gone, Mrs Hadleigh,’ he remonstrated in a
drawling
voice, as if his tongue were sticking to the roof of his mouth. ‘A very long time.’ He took the thermometer and pushed it gingerly between his lips, shutting them firmly over the thin glass stem. Then his blue and solemn eyes became fixed again, and, without the faintest stir, he continued to watch his mother, while she in turn watched him. When half a minute had gone by, he lifted his eyebrows. She shook her head. In another half-minute he himself took the thermometer out of his mouth, and, holding it between finger and thumb, gravely scrutinized it under the light. ‘A hundred and forty-seven,’ he announced solemnly. ‘H’m.’ Then he smiled, a half-secret, half-deprecatory smile.
‘That’s
nothing to worry about, Mrs Hadleigh. Nothing at all. It looks to me as if all you did was to worry. Put him to bed; I will send him round a bottle of very nice medicine –
very
nice medicine. And …’ his voice fell a little fainter, ‘I’ll look in again in the morning.’

His eyes had become fixed once more, focused, it seemed, on the
faraway
. ‘Mummie, I do wish when Mary pulls down the blinds she would do it to the very bottom. I
hate
seeing – seeing myself in the glass.’

But Emilia had not really attended to this fretful and unreasonable
complaint
. She herself was now examining the thermometer. She was frowning, adjusting it, frowning again. Then she had said something – half-muttered, half-whispered – which Dr Wilson had failed to catch.

‘I’d give him,’ he again began wearily, ‘some rice pudding and lemonade, and —’ But before the rest of his counsel could be uttered she had wrapped him tighter in his bath towel, had stooped down to him back to front so that he could clasp his hands round her neck, pick-a-back; and next moment he was being whisked up the dark staircase to the blue and white nursery. There she slid him gently down beside the fender, took off his shoes, smoothed his fringe, and tenderly kissed him.

‘You have very bright eyes, Dr Wilson. You mustn’t let them get too bright – just for my sake.’

‘Not at all, Mrs Hadleigh,’ he parroted, and then suddenly his whole body began to shiver.

‘There,’ she said, ‘now just begin to take off your clothes, my own precious, while I see to the fire – though
that,
Dr Wilson, should have been done
first.
Look, the silly paper has just flared up and gone out. But it won’t be a minute. The sticks are as dry as Guy Fawkes’ Day. Soon cosy in bed now.’

William with unusually stupid fingers was endeavouring to undo his buttons. He was already tired of being the doctor. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘do your teeth chatter, Mummie, when you are very hot? That seems funny. And why do faces come in the window, horrid faces? Is
that
blind right down to the very bottom? Because I would like it to be. Oh dear, my head does ache, Mummie.’

It was extraordinary with what cleverness and dexterity Emilia’s hands, unlike her son’s, were now doing as they were bidden. The fire, coaxed by a little puffing in lieu of bellows, in a wondrous sheet of yellow, like crocuses, was now sweeping up the chimney as if to devour the universe. A loose under-blanket had been thrust into the bed, the hot bottle wrapped up in a fleecy old shawl, the coal scuttle had been filled, a second pair of small pyjamas had been hung over the fender to air, a saucepan of milk had been stood on the stove with its gas turned low – like a circlet of little blue wavering beads; and William himself, half-naked for less than the fraction of a second, had been tucked up in his bed, one of her own tiny
embroidered
handkerchiefs sprinkled with lavender water for company. There, he had instantly fallen asleep, though spasmodic jerks of foot and hand, and flickering eyelids showed that his small troubles had not wholly been left behind him.

So swiftly and mechanically had her activities followed one upon the other that Emilia had only just realized that she was still unable to make up her mind whether to telephone at once to the doctor or to venture – to dare – to look in on Sallie.

Blind fool!
Blind
fool! – foreseeing plainly every open or half-hidden hint and threat of tonight’s event, smelling it, tasting it, hearing it again and again knocking at the door of her mind, she had yet continually deferred the appalling moment when she must meet it face to face, challenge and be done with it, and accept its consequences. The mere image in her mind of her husband’s school tie left abandoned on the bed had made the
foreboding
of looking at Sallie a last and all but insupportable straw. The futility, the cowardice! What needs most daring must be done instantly. There had not been the least need to debate such a question. You can’t do twenty-
one
things at once!

Having stolen another prolonged scrutiny of William’s pale
dream-distorted
face and dilating nostrils, she hastened into her own bedroom again, groped for the tiny switch-pull that dangled by the bed-rail, stooped over the cot beside it, and, screening its inmate’s face as much as possible from the glare, looked down and in. The small blonde creature, lovelier and even more delicate to the eye than any flower, had kicked off all its
bedclothes
, the bright lips were ajar, the cheeks flushed – an exquisite coral red. And the body was breathing almost as fast and shallowly as a cat’s. That children under three years old should talk in their sleep, yes; but with so minute a vocabulary! Still, all vocabularies are minute for what they are sometimes needed to express – or to keep silent about.

No sickness, no sore throat; but headache, lassitude, pains all over the body, shivering attacks and fever – you just added up the yeses and
subtracted
the noes; and influenza, or worse, was the obvious answer. Should she or should she not wheel the cot into William’s room? Sallie might wake, and wake William. Whereas if she remained here and she herself lay down in the night even for so much as an hour – and began to think, she wouldn’t be alone, not hopelessly alone. It was the fear of waking either patient that decided the question. She very gently drew blanket and counterpane over Sallie’s nakedness, draped a silk handkerchief over the rose-coloured shade, switched on the electric stove in the fireplace, and ran downstairs. There for a few moments, eyes restlessly glancing, she faced the stark dumbness and blindness of the mouthpiece of the telephone.

Dr Wilson
was
in. Thank heaven for that. Incredible, that was his voice! There might have been a maternity case – hours and hours. He might have had a horde of dispensary patients. But no, he would be round in a few
minutes
. Thank heaven for that. She put back the receiver with a shuddering sigh of gratitude. All that was now needed – superhuman ordeal – was just to wait.

But this Emilia was to be spared. For midway up the staircase, whose treads now seemed at least twice their usual height, she had suddenly paused. Fingers clutching the banister rail, she stood arrested, stock still, icy, constricted. The garden gate had faintly clicked. There could be only one explanation of that – at least on a Wednesday. Edward’s few friends and cronies, every one of them, must have discovered long ago that Wednesdays were now
his
‘evenings out’. And she – she hadn’t much fancied friends or company recently. It was he himself, then. He had come back. What to do now? A ghastly revulsion took possession of her, a gnawing ache in the pit of her stomach, another kind of nausea, another
kind,
even, of palpitation.

If only she could snatch a few minutes to regain her balance, to prepare herself to be alone. Consciousness was like the scene of a fair – a
dream-fair
, all distortion, glare, noise, diablerie and confusion. And before she was
even aware of her decision – to make use of a deceit, a blind, a mere best-thing-for-the-time-being – she had found herself in her bedroom again, had somehow with cold and fumbling fingers folded the note into its pretty cocked-hat shape again, and replaced it where she had first set eyes on it, beside the charming little travelling clock, the gift of Aunt Sarah, in the
middle
of the mantelpiece.

What light remained in the room behind the blinded and curtained
windows
could not possibly have been detectable outside. That was certain. In an instant she was in William’s room once more – listening, her heart
beating
against her ribs like the menacing thumping of a drum. She had not long to wait. The latch of the front door had faintly squeaked, the lower edge of the door itself had scraped very gently across the coarse mat within, had as softly and furtively shut.

‘Is that you, Edward?’ she heard herself very gently and insidiously
calling
over the banisters from the landing. ‘How lovely! You
are
home early. I didn’t expect you for – for hours and hours!’

And now she had met and kissed him, full in the light of the hall-lamp. ‘Why, what’s the matter, darling …? You are ill!’ She was peering as if out of an enormous fog at the narrow, beloved, pallid countenance, the pale lips, the hunted, haunted, misery-stricken light-brown eyes in those pits of dark entreaty and despair.

‘Is it
that’s
brought you home?’

He continued to stare at her as if, spectacles lost, he were endeavouring to read a little book in very small print and in an unfamiliar language. His mouth opened, as if to yawn; he began to tremble a little, and said, ‘Oh, no; nothing much. A headache; I’m tired. Where
were
you?’

‘Me?’ But her lips remained faintly, mournfully, sympathetically smiling; her dark eyes were as clear and guileless and empty of reflections as pools of water under the windless blue of the sky. ‘I was in William’s room. It’s hateful to say it now, Edward – now that you are so tired yourself – but – but I’m rather afraid, poor mite, he’s in for another cold – a little chill – and I shouldn’t be surprised if Sallie … But don’t worry about that – because, because there’s nothing of course at all yet to worry about. It’s you I’m thinking of. You look so dreadfully fagged and – what a welcome! … There’s nothing …?’

Her vocabulary had at last begun to get a little obstinate and inadequate. ‘You don’t mean, Edward, there’s anything
seriously
wrong? I fancy, you know’ – she deliberately laid her hand for an instant on his, ‘I fancy
you
may be the least little bit feverish yourself – you too. Well …’ She turned away, flung up a hand as if to flag off a railway train, ‘I’ll get you
something
hot at once.

‘And Edward’ – she turned her head over her shoulder, to find him as
motionless as she had left him, in almost as stolid and meaningless an
attitude
as ‘Dr Wilson’s’ had been in the kitchen, as he stood brooding on the nightmare faces in the darkness of the glass. ‘There is just one thing, if you could manage it. Just in
case,
would you in a moment or two first wheel Sallie’s cot into William’s room. I’ve lit the fire – and I
had
to ask Dr Wilson to come. I’m so dreadfully stupid and anxious, when – even when there’s no reason to be.’

The two faces had starkly confronted one another again, but neither could decipher with any absolute certainty the hitherto unrevealed
characters
now inscribed on them. Each of them was investigating the map of a familiar country, but the cartographer must now have sketched it from an unprecedentedly eccentric angle. The next moment she had turned away, had whisked upstairs and down again, leaving him free, at liberty, to
dispose
of himself – and of anything else he might be inclined to. In every family life there are surely potential keepsakes that would be far better destroyed; and perhaps a moment
some
time might come. But now …