Kind Are Her Answers (8 page)

Towards the end of his round he checked over his notebook, ticking off the visits he had already made. He found with relief that there were only two left, but flicked over the leaf perfunctorily to make sure. At the top of the last page was, “Thurs. Miss H. Laurel D.? renew prescription.”

It was, he realized, the first Thursday morning for months that he had not turned in at the gates as mechanically as he dressed or shaved, never varying the time by more than ten or fifteen minutes. He looked at his watch; it was a quarter to one. He sat in the car, with the notebook propped against the wheel, staring at the almost illegible scribble, which habit had reduced to a sort of symbolic glyph. After a moment or two he took his pencil and, scoring out the words with long heavy strokes, wrote underneath, “Visit last night.”

That’s that, he thought. It amounted to nothing in particular, since he would have to call within the next few days in any case; but it satisfied, momentarily, his impulse of recoil, and made him feel better.

At lunch he found Peggy Leach’s place empty. She was lunching with some of the people from the conference. He expected to feel relieved, but did not; he had, in fact, unconsciously counted on her as a buffer between Janet and himself.

It was the first time he had deliberately concealed from her anything more concrete than his own unhappiness. He had found deceit difficult once; even the needs of his own self-respect had got him no further than reticence. But, later, the demands of her weakness had coaxed his integrity from him step by step. He had made himself more and more an accessory to her flights from truth, till at last he lied to her instinctively, kindly, without mental apology, as naturally as he handed her cheques for the housekeeping. So, now, he felt strained rather than ashamed when she began to ask him about his night calls, whether one of them had been to the old lady with the weak heart, and whether she had been very ill. It was a ritual of hers, once in every day or two, to take an interest in his work. She never remembered what he told her, so he was used to suppressing anything complex or personally absorbing. He gave her a lucid, inaccurate account of the night’s work, shifting the times, almost automatically, to sound plausible. She listened with a bright, kindly little smile, sitting straight and graciously in her chair. She was as beautiful, still, as she had ever been. Now that it was all over he remembered the happiness she had given him rather than the pain, and the thought that he had broken his promises to her distressed him. That he was deceiving her, it did not occur to him to think. It was a condition of his life: he took it for granted.

No (he explained) Miss Heath wouldn’t have a trained nurse. She had a sort of companion who looked after her if she was taken ill in the night.

“Poor woman,” said Janet sincerely. “It must be terrible to grow old in other people’s houses, picking up the fag-ends of other people’s lives. I think I’d rather be almost anything than a companion.”

“Yes,” he said absently. The visit as it had really been had passed before his mind, and with it, suddenly, a picture of Miss Heath’s placid sleeping face. It occurred to him for the first time that Christie might not have told her he had called at all. He had not thought, in the night, of making any arrangement about it. In that case Miss Heath—and Pedlow—would have been expecting him this morning. He always called on a Thursday. It meant that he would have to go this afternoon. “This one isn’t so very old,” he said.

“That must make it almost worse.” Janet looked round the room, at the new curtains and the bright clever pattern of the dahlias on the table.

“I suppose so.” He ate something which he did not taste, and found difficult to swallow. He knew, now, that he had wanted all the time to go more than he had wanted to stay away. But he was too much at war with himself to feel pleasure at the thought of it. He resented the rather painful disturbance of his nerves, and told himself that she would probably be out, or in some other part of the house or the grounds; in any case, he was almost certain not to see her alone. He began planning conversational openings for Miss Heath or Pedlow which would be safely ambiguous. He would have to be careful, if he did not see Christie first. But in his heart he was sure that he would see her. She would manage it somehow. Against his will he thought of her comfort and her promises. While he was at work he had wanted to be free of her; but here at home, where every familiar thing had its own association of disappointment and loneliness, he knew why she had been necessary to him, and that she would be necessary again.

“… After all,” Janet was saying, “in practice it seems to work out, doesn’t it? They all seem such happy, contented people. Look at Peggy, for instance.”

“Yes, don’t they?” murmured Kit, wondering to what, and how long ago, she had changed the conversation. “It’s a question of what suits one, I suppose.” He was thinking that he would ring up, after lunch, to say he was sorry he had not had time to get over in the morning, and would be along shortly. Whoever answered, Christie would probably get to know. After all, he reasoned with himself, she had been extraordinarily good to him. When he broke the thing off it would have to be very gently indeed. He was bound to see her to-day. Put like this, it all looked simple and straightforward; but longing and resistance continued their conflict, unreconciled, within him.

The meal got to an end without Janet having noticed anything unusual. He had trained his face and his voice, by now, to look after the amenities when he himself was elsewhere.

He put the call through from his own room, because there was just a chance that Christie might answer. While he listened to the bell ringing in the empty hall his hands felt cold, and there was a constriction in his chest. He was angry with himself for not being able to take it more humorously, and tried to retell it to himself in terms of a funny story. But when the receiver clicked he started as if he had been shot. It was Pedlow, after all. He tried his most ingenious gambits on her, but she was completely—almost carefully—non-committal. Miss Heath seemed a little better, she thought. She said nothing about last night’s visit, and nothing to convince him that she did not know of it. He told her he would be there between half-past two and three.

That would give Christie time, he thought, to wind up anything she might be doing and get out to meet him in the drive. As the time drew near, and he got out the car, his mind felt smoothed-out and secure again. He thought that she would be pleased to see him—the first conviction of the kind he had known for years—and felt warmed, uplifted and protective. Again he decided that he must put an end to it. This time he was thinking not of himself, but of her.

He saw her when he was half-way up the drive. She was standing just as he had imagined her, in a gap of the laurels on the other side of the lawn; wearing a light soft dress, the colour of meal, and a little yellow jacket. She was too far off for her face to be clear, but he knew at once that she had seen him. He slowed down—he had not come in sight of the house—and lifted his hand to wave to her. At the same instant, she turned and disappeared into the trees.

At first he did not take it in. He thought she was coming to meet him by some hidden path, to avoid being seen. He stopped the car, and waited. Presently he caught a distant glimpse of her through the trees. Her back was turned; she was walking in the opposite direction.

There was a moment in which he appeared to himself to be accepting this quite naturally and calmly. Yes, of course, she was walking away. He had known this was quite likely to happen all the time. He started the car, contemplating the event reasonably, while the surrounding scene underwent a curious contraction, deadening and chill. In the next instant, this time fuse gave way to detonation. The focus of reaction inside him—his dread of self-betrayal, his painfully vulnerable pride—had been waiting for something of this kind all along. They had it all their own way, for every argument, moral and utilitarian, was on their side. Horribly hurt and blindly angry, he let them rip.

He found he had reached the porch, stopped, and, catching a glimpse of himself in the driving-mirror, waited a moment to settle down.

Pedlow opened the door. She seemed more drawn-in and buttoned-up than ever. Even her stays did not squeak.

“How’s Miss Heath?” he asked. “Any change since I last called?”

“None, sir, as far as I am aware.” It was not like Pedlow to be so non-committal. She was a woman of definite ideas. Probably, he thought, she was put out by having the girl in the house. Now he would have to glean his information from Miss Heath, a much more complicated matter. His resentment grew.

Worse was to follow, for Miss Heath turned out to be having one of her vague days. Her faculties fluctuated a good deal, as old people’s will. When he congratulated her on looking better than she had last time, she told him how thankful she was to Providence for not letting her suffer as her dear mother had done; and went on from there to a hunting accident her father had had when she was six years old.

“How did you sleep last night?” he asked her at last, in desperation.

“Oh, I can’t complain of my sleep, doctor. But I have disturbing dreams sometimes, very disturbing dreams. I dream sometimes that I’ve been thrown into the sea and that I’m just about to drown. And then one night this week I dreamed I heard you and Christie talking in the hall. Just the voices. It seemed quite real at the time; so foolish.”

“So long as you don’t actually stay awake,” said Kit evenly, “I don’t think we need worry about that. You must let me know, though, if you have any more restless nights.”

“It’s really of no consequence, doctor: I can always make it up in the day.” Her round face smiled at him, deprecating and kindly. He realized that he had become, in the last year, exceedingly fond of her. He hated lying to her as he had not hated lying to Janet; quite apart from the professional side of it, which left him no peace all day. She was leaning forward in her chair, peering out the window.

“Now, I wonder where my little Christie is. Naughty girl, she must have forgotten the time. I particularly told her you were coming; I know you like to have some one to help with the lifting. But I’ll ring for Pedlow.”

“No, please don’t bother. I think the chest will be enough to-day.” He listened, made out a fresh prescription, and left quickly.

He did not notice that he was doing a good thirty down the drive (which had a shocking surface) till he rounded a blind bend and saw Christie, walking well in the middle and quite oblivious of him, a few yards ahead. He just managed to avoid running her down by jamming on both sets of brakes, and skidding the car into a laurel-bush.

She was dressed for the street, wearing a long loose coat that swung pleasantly as she turned to smile at him. Her escape seemed not to have impressed her much. On Kit the effect of seeing her was like that of a violent blow in the diaphragm, uncomplicated by pleasure of any kind.

“Good afternoon,” he said. Aiming at a pointed formality, he ejected it like an insult.

Her smile disappeared. It was the only alteration in her face that anger allowed him to notice. “Good afternoon. Forgive me for delaying you.” She prepared to walk on.

Kit made a half-gesture towards his hat; but it never arrived, nor did the frigidly polite formula on his tongue take shape. He found them inadequate. What he wanted was a scene. He discovered in some astonishment that he had no intention of leaving without one. I can’t behave like this, he told himself; and was pleased, in a hot and painful way, by the certainty that he would.

“It really isn’t a very good idea,” he said, “to go to sleep in the middle of the road.”

In the first moment of meeting, Christie had gone rather white. Now the colour returned, with interest, to her face; she thrust her hands into the pockets of her loose coat, and planted her feet apart. “This is a private drive. If you hadn’t been tearing along as if it were the Kingston by-pass, you’d have had room to pull up.”

“I did pull up, or you wouldn’t be here. But it helps if the pedestrian makes
some
contribution.”

“Yes, I expect so. Don’t let me keep you; I know you never have any time to waste.”

Kit had reached a stage when even this was not sufficient to dislodge him. “If you’d ever seen a really bad road smash,” he said, “you’d be more careful.”

“I have seen one. … My father and mother were both killed in it.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” said Kit inaccurately. He was, in point of fact, furious with her for taking such a low advantage. As there seemed nothing to add to this, he said at last, “Well, I’ll say good-bye.”

“That made you look rather an ass, didn’t it?” she remarked as he was moving to go. “I thought it would. That’s why I made it up.”

Kit stopped in his tracks and, when he could speak, said, “Well, my God.”

“You looked so silly and smug, I had to get some sort of a rise out of you. Now do go home.”

Kit drew in a sharp breath through his nose. He wanted, quite simply, to get his hands on her and beat her. Being normally even-tempered, he was somewhat shattered by the experience. He stared at her, his face setting. The girl took a backward step which brought her up against the laurels at the side of the drive.

“I’m not frightened,” she said.

Slowly, Kit’s years of cultivated restraint reasserted themselves. He said at last, with deadly calm, “Possibly you might like to let me know, before you go, what you propose to tell your aunt about last night. She appears not to know that I called. It might be an advantage if we both stuck to the same lie.”

She looked up quickly, forgetting for a moment to be defiant. “But she was asleep.”

“But you happened not to mention whether you’d told her I was coming.”

“Oh.”

“And, incidentally”—Kit’s voice shook a little—he was out of breath—“old people, and people with weak hearts, sleep very lightly.” He paused, and added in a rush, “You’d better remember that—another time.”

“What do you mean,
I’d
better remember it?”

“What do you suppose?”