Kind Are Her Answers (12 page)

At Christie’s end of the business there was always the fear of the servants hearing something, though their rooms faced a different way. The house was full of the noises of old houses; sounds of mice, and cautious sounds of wood creaking as it contracted in the cool of the night. They never had, either of them, a moment’s security or of what by common standards could be called rest. Kit wondered, sometimes, when he was alone, why he found it worth while. He never wondered whether he did.

The truth was that she was the first person in years who had given him any use for being young. Fraser, Janet and the patients, if they had nothing else in common, seemed all alike in demanding from him the virtues of middle age.

One night, when they had not met for over a week, Christie rang him up at one in the morning. He had left a note asking her to do it, and had been lying awake for it; but the sound of the bell seemed an explosion in the silence and made him feel like a burglar who has trodden on the burglar alarm. The house was still quiet. He picked up the receiver, listening for the tap; but a sibilant whisper came through instead.

“Is that you, beautiful? Don’t be long.”

“For the Lord’s sake!” Kit, though not given to nervous outbursts, had felt the hair rise on his neck. “Wait till I say something. If I’d been called out, Fraser would have got that.”

“Oh, darling, I
am
sorry. I didn’t think, because you told me to ring. You’re not angry?”

“No, dear, of course. Look out at your end.”

“It’s all right. Pedlow snores. Isn’t it a good thing? What I wanted to say is, I’ve got a new scheme.”

“Well, don’t … hullo, are you there? Hold it till I come, won’t you?”

“It’s practically finished.”

“Oh, God, I’ll be right along. … Yes, darling, of course I do.” A board creaked somewhere in the house; raising his voice a little, he added, “Just keep her warm and give her sips of water till I come. Good-bye.”

When he tapped at the glass door, Christie met him with a dark coat thrown like a cloak over her nightdress. She took him by the wrist and led him outside again, finger on lip. Something had happened, he thought. Not daring to ask, he followed her towards a dark hump of shadow which he recognized as the summerhouse on the lawn.

“What’s the matter?” he whispered at last, his heart pounding on his ribs.

“Nothing, love. Don’t sound so worried. It’s just my idea. Come in.”

The summerhouse was muffled in thick Virginia creeper, which rounded the angles of the roof and walls, and hung in a deep fringe over the doorway. He could just see it, in the faint glimmer of a half-moon masked with clouds.

Fantastic as the notion was, it had its points. The place faced away from the house, and was in earshot of Miss Heath’s bell. His chief feeling about it was an irrational satisfaction in not being actually under his patient’s roof. It was absurd that this should seem any better, but somehow it did.

Christie lifted the curtain of leaves aside, pulled him in and kissed him.

“I haven’t quite finished doing it yet,” she explained presently. “I thought perhaps it might be noticed if I did it all too suddenly. But it seemed a shame not to be making the most of it before the nights get too cold.”

Kit got out the fountain-pen torch he used for examining throats, and flickered it here and there. Making startling and surrealist designs in the small beam, gaunt shapes detached themselves, trailing vast shadows, from the darkness. He picked out among them an old basket garden lounge—dangerously rickety and buttressed with a Tate sugar box at one end—covered with a fur carriage rug; a circular iron table with fancy legs; a croquet set with most of the paint cracked off and the balls split; a rotted tennis net rolled on a post, with cobwebs filling in the meshes; a racquet of 1890 design, with five strings; and a number of cushions in varying stages of decay. These were the recognizable objects. There were also a great many pieces of things, odd twiddles of wrought iron and broken bits of plaster mouldings.

“I shall cover the cushions,” whispered Christie, “gradually. I’ve done two already.”

Kit moved the torch back and saw that two of the amorphous lumps had been freshly dog-stitched with what looked like the material of an old summer frock. On the top of the iron table, the last of the Michaelmas daisies were arranged, with trails of creeper, in a jam jar.

“Lovely,” he said, and sat down on the basket lounge; it bent under him with a groan.

“It’s all right really,” Christie assured him, “now I’ve fixed it. I jumped on it this morning with both feet, as hard as I could, and it hardly gave at all. Do you like it in here?”

“Awfully,” said Kit.

“I’m so glad. I’ll have it even nicer next time you come. It was such fun getting it ready. Come here and let me kiss you.” She sat down beside him on the basket lounge, which collapsed immediately. Fortunately dust, cobweb, and stray creeper which had grown in through the cracks of the wall, muffled the sound.

“Are you hurt, darling?” asked Christie, embracing him tenderly. She had landed somehow across his knees.

The crash had shaken down a shower of dust and bits, stirring up a sharp, earthy, potting-house smell. Somewhere against the opposite wall the scurry of a startled mouse sounded. The cushions had their own smell of sun-baked plantations and old conservatories. A little wind swayed the creeper to and fro across the glimmering gap of the door, and a sweet, cold, dewy air blew in with it. On his knees, oddly emphasized by it all, was Christie, warm and sweetly scented and smooth in her satin nightgown. She clasped her arms round him and laughed softly down his neck.

“We’ll have to mend it,” she said.

Kit pulled her down into the loose musty cushions. “That’s a rotten idea. Let’s have it where it can’t fall any further.”

He felt Christie’s cheek fold into a smile.

After this, they generally used the summerhouse on nights that were dry and warm. Christie became passionately attached to it, and lavished on it all the proprietary care that is expended in earlier youth on private tents, holes in bushes and roosts in trees. She covered the cushions one by one with bits of frocks and petticoats, or remnants joined together, and decorated the jam jar with gold paint in a fancy design. The lawn-mower and tennis set she draped over with a coloured dust sheet; and she kept a sort of treasure chest under the basket lounge. But her chief delight was entertaining Kit to a meal. For his better piece of mind he never enquired when, or how, she raided the larder to provide the thick tongue sandwiches, bits of cake and chocolate biscuits which she arranged in tasteful patterns on two odd plates and a couple of saucers. Once, triumphantly, she brought out cups as well.

“I’m going to do you really well to-night, sweetness. I’ve got some wine.”

“How marvellous. But I say, had you better? Wine’s the sort of thing people really do miss, you know.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that. That would be almost stealing. No, I got you this specially, myself. The man at the store said it was all right. It’s Burgundy. Hold your cup, and I’ll pour you some out. No, sweet, you have the one with the handle. Honestly, I like using this.”

The bottle was impressive, brilliantly labelled with coloured views of the Antipodes and giving off a dark red, dramatic bouquet.

“Is it nice?” asked Christie, watching him anxiously as he drank.

“A treat. But, darling, it’s a shame for you to have to get it. I’ll bring along a drink myself, next time. We’ve always got stuff in the house.”

“But, precious, I
love
giving you things. Have one of these biscuits with it. They’ve got coffee cream sort of stuff in the middle. Rather good.”

Kit finished his cupful, and allowed himself to be pressed to a second. He ate two coffee cream biscuits, and a pink cokernut one. The red potion, mixed with the scent of night and dry wood and leaves and Christie, took on a Swiss-Family-Robinson kind of charm. It was certainly warming. They were both laughing at nothing very much when Kit threw the carriage-rug over them, and blew into the broken flower-pot that shielded the candle.

“It’s such a shame,” murmured Christie later on, “that you can’t sleep here.”

“I know,” said Kit. The cushions were as lumpy as fieldgrass, but he meant it. He had recovered, lately, a gift for sleeping anyhow and anywhere, which had helped him through long stretches of heavy work in his hospital days. In the last two years, he had found it forsaking him; it seemed, somehow, obvious and natural that now it should come back.

“Do you get bored,” she asked, “playing house in here?”

Till she spoke, he had almost forgotten about the picnic. She had had one of her bewildering transitions to experience; when they were making love she seemed neither childlike nor sophisticated, but an ageless and necessary counterpart of himself. He stroked her hair drowsily and said, “No, I like it. It’s rather a rest.”

“Is it?” She pulled his hair—a sign of embarrassment—and said quickly, “You get so sick of sharing a room, or using rooms that aren’t yours. When I was a kid my room was really the spare room, and I had to keep it looking all polite. And at the Abbey, where I work, you’re liable to sleep pretty well anywhere, specially when the Summer School’s on. Once I slept on the stage. That was rather a lark.”

Kit suddenly found the evening’s entertainment no longer amusing. He hugged her roughly and said, “I wish I could. …”

“Could what?”

“I don’t know. Look after you, and give you somewhere to be.”

She giggled. “What, put me
dans mes meubles?
How funny. I don’t know why it should be so funny, do you?”

“Of course it sounds funny when you put it in French. Too technical for you.”

“Would you like me to be more mistresslike, darling? Would I fascinate you more if I wore teagowns and black lace vests? And diamond garters?”

“You disgusting little horror. Would you like to?”

“Well, I’d look very nice in them. In fact, I never know why I don’t do well as a kept woman. I always do something terribly bad form, laugh at the wrong moment or something. Oh, darling, I do love having some one of my own age.”

Such information as this remark contained, Kit had guessed long before, and he did not want, particularly, to know anything further.

“Just how old are you,” he asked, “if it isn’t rude?”

“Practically twenty-two. Are you laughing? Your face feels funny.”

She dug her fingers into his hair and rubbed it, with catlike pleasure, against her cheek.

“You always smell so nice. What’s the stuff you scrub your hands with?”

“Dettol, I expect.”

“If I smelt that anywhere I should think of you.”

For Kit, the sweetish clean smell meant childbirth, infectious fevers, suppuration, death, and certain emergencies desperate enough to have survived the ruck of others in his mind. “Would you?” he said. “How funny.”

There was a little pause, in which an owl that had been squawking in the middle distance flew away, and a single star shone in through a gap in the creeper, looking curiously meaningful, like a signal. Kit pulled his arm from under Christie to look at the luminous dial of his watch.

“You haven’t been here very long,” Christie said.

In point of fact, he had sometimes stayed longer, but he felt, for no reason, suddenly keyed up and anxious; he could not settle down again, and left a few minutes later. On the way back he was annoyed with himself. Nerves were the last thing he could afford to cultivate. Next time it happened, he said to himself, he would take no notice.

But ten minutes after he was back in his room, the telephone rang, announcing an acute appendix. The call had been switched through from Fraser’s flat; Fraser, he learned next morning, had been called out half an hour before.

It was one of several things which he had always known might happen; a long shot, but almost bound to come off once in a month or two. The nearness of it made all the other dangerous possibilities seem nearer. He hurried out, thinking about them, and found the patient on the verge of perforation. That night he got very little sleep. He had put into his work, in the last two years, more of himself than he fully realized, including some of the emotions for which Janet had appeared to have no use. It did not occur to him as strange that he should lie awake in the creeping early light thinking not of Janet, but of the little shop-assistant whose life he had saved by about three-quarters of an hour.

Before he got up he had decided to write and tell Christie he could not come again. He began a letter, and destroyed it. It would be too cruel, he thought, not to see her again first. For a week, and most of the next week, he made only his routine visits to Laurel Dene. At last he had a chance to go in the night again, and went, knowing that when Christie reproached him with his absence the thing would come to a head. He waited for it, having ready what he would say. But she never reproached him. She was merely happy, as if he were her reason for existing. Compassion turned his resolve aside, and desire melted it.

He compromised by shortening his brief visits, and hanging his watch on a nail in the wall where it could not be ignored. She complained of nothing, and seemed concerned only lest she should be unable to give him, in twenty minutes, the tenderness of half an hour. He found that seeing her less only resulted in thinking of her continually. In a meek woman her devotion would have been intolerable; in Christie, it gave him the sense of more than credible felicity, like an opium dream. If she had claimed power over him he would have been roused into resisting her; but she thought no more of claiming power than a child thinks with its mother.

Miss Heath had bought her wireless set. It sat on the table beside the large black Bible, looking rather lost and self-conscious. Miss Heath loved it; especially the plays. The mildest of these seemed able to give her an adventurous glow; her dear mother, she said, had disapproved of the theatre.

“But, after all, things are so different now. So many nice people. … I’m sure you’d never guess, for instance, that my little Christie had acted on the stage?”