The Backward Shadow (26 page)

‘Henry is dying,' she said very quietly. ‘And he wants to do it well.'

I CAN'T
remember now the exact details of Henry's illness. He had only one kidney and there was something wrong with the other—something like that; it makes no difference now, anyway. Apart from having to take it easy, and follow a regular course of treatment, there was nothing he could do, and the disease was not incapacitating or even specially uncomfortable. It was simply a matter of waiting.

What I do remember very clearly is the effect this incredible piece of news had on me. It wasn't exactly that it made my loss of Toby seem less important; it was merely that it knocked all thought of that or anything else right out of my head. I went about for several days reeling mentally as if I'd just been given incontrovertible proof that the law of gravity was about to start working in reverse, or that two and two make eight. Dottie said afterwards that I wore a deep frown all the time, not of sadness or anger, but of serious puzzlement. I was trying to come to grips with it—Henry dying, and knowing it, and behaving as he did, and had, and continued to do; and, hardly less bewildering, Dottie, knowing it too, being in love with him and knowing that he had at best a year to live, a little, little year, of which every hour through which we were all living together was one hour less.

My personal acquaintance with death at that time was limited to Addy and Mavis, and Mavis hardly counted, though that news had given me a sharp momentary shock. Addy's death had of course been a bitter blow and one from which I took months to recover; but at the same time, unexpected, unbelievable as it had seemed at the time, on reflection I had to realise that Addy was old, and that some part of one's subconscious must always be prepared for the death of an old person. But Henry was 39 years old, and moreover I don't think I've ever in my life met a more robust, solid, indestructible-looking man. To think of him with the seeds of
death already sprouting in him was ludicrous. But there it was.

Getting accustomed to this, at first, wholly unacceptable situation, then, proved to be a full-time emotional and mental occupation. It left little time or energy for my own sorrow. I watched with a dreadful, an ignoble fascination, as Dottie and Henry proceeded with their daily lives in an atmosphere of unassailable calm. How was it possible? They were in love with each other; Dottie had said so in a perfectly level voice as if announcing the state of the weather. They had been in love since Christmas Eve, the night when Dottie, acting, she said, on an irresistible impulse, had got out of bed and gone down to talk to Henry in the middle of the night. ‘I wanted,' she said, ‘to explain that brainless laugh.' So driven was she by the sudden need to speak to him that she had actually woken him, crouching by the sofa where he lay asleep in front of the last red embers of our Christmas log. And, half-waking, half-sleeping, undefended, unmanned by the whole evening and Dottie's sudden unlooked-for appearance, Henry had put his arms round her. In that moment, she told me, she knew her ‘search' was over, that here she had found her refuge and her companion, her cause and the end of the terrors of the backward shadow, all in this man whom she had once sneered at to me for his funny hair and short body. For the length of that one kiss, she experienced the exquisite relief of safety, the safety of finding one's love at last centred in a basically good person who loves you in return—the thing we're all constantly looking for.

And then he woke up properly, and sat up holding the covers round him, and let go of her. She said she felt ice-cold where his arms and his lips had been, and could remember the exact physical sensation even now, long afterwards. And suddenly she saw it was no good. She could neither believe it nor accept it, and so she begged him, Dottie, who would sooner die than humble herself, she begged him to love her. Then he—rather than let her think the kiss had been false—told her the truth.

Dottie, in that first moment of knowing, filling up slowly with horror and pity for them both, offered herself on any terms at all, and he said, ‘On my terms only'. His terms were, no marriage of course, no bed, no kisses even, no physical intimacy at all, because he knew that would draw them closer and closer to a point where the inevitable, when it came, would be the breaking of her; but a business relationship, a sharing of a project outside themselves that would allow them contact and partnership under the strictest sort of self-protective controls.

She had promised. She had had to, she told me, because otherwise he told her that he would go away. Privately it seemed to me that this would have been the best thing to do, but I remembered many little things I had noticed about Henry's behaviour at the beginning and I knew that in his quiet, undemonstrative way, he loved her deeply and probably couldn't have left her although he wanted to spare her as much as possible. Although I rebelled at first against the idea of his having told her the truth like that, so brutally, I soon saw it was the kindest, the only way. She had a year's pain to face while he was still alive to modify the pain with his presence, but then when the time came, she probably wouldn't suffer so much because she would be accustomed to the idea; in a way, by then, his actual death might come as a sort of relief.

But meanwhile, they behaved incredibly bravely and well. I watched with almost unbearable admiration how they stuck to their bargain. ‘He's the strongest man living,' Dottie had said. And to me she became his counterpart in strength—she told me it was almost easy; because he had demanded it of himself, he expected no less of her, and so she had to be his equal in courage and control. Even when they were alone, she told me, they only talked business or about everyday things; they didn't so much as look straight into each other's eyes. Yet all the time she was consciously aware of how much she loved him, how much she wanted him, with what degree of despair she felt the passing of time. Every night as she got into bed, however exhausted she had made herself, she always thought: Another day less of him. Yet she seldom cried, even secretly, and sometimes
she could rouse real happiness in herself, such as on the day she went to see Ron. She had the basic health to realise that these occasions were not disloyal to Henry, but a tribute to his wisdom. ‘Could I have even those little moments of detachment if we'd been sleeping together? He was right. I haven't the strength to survive if we had been even one fraction closer to each other. As it is, there's hope for me for afterwards. Sometimes I can't see it, but it's there.'

As I watched, I shrank in my own eyes. And Toby shrank in proportion. I felt him slipping away from me finally, and cried new tears, because now I was really losing him, losing even the bond of hating him; it had been an entirely false bond, fabricated by me out of my need to wean myself away from him, but now that I began to find I had no strong feelings at all about him any more I felt an exhausted, empty sadness, different from anything that had gone before.

I went to see Billings the following day, as I'd promised, but I was in a sort of daze and perhaps because of that I didn't find the right words to apologise and convince him that we were reliable. He was friendly enough; a bluff broad-bodied farmer with health and good sense written all over him except in his eyes, where fanaticism gleamed inconsistently; he smiled and patted my shoulder and said of course, of course, he understood, it could happen to anyone, but I could see him mentally adding: to anyone half daft and wholly amateur, that is. In the end he said good-naturedly that he'd order the accessories from us, linen and table-napkin rings, place-mats, maybe cruets if we could show him something ‘really earthy' that took his liking; but the big stuff, no. Better find a good carpenter and order direct—cheaper too. Sorry and all that, and he wished us the best of luck.

I went creeping home with my tail between my legs; knowing that Dottie would not now blast me but would suffer her disappointment silently made it worse. I vowed a solemn vow, that I would put my very heart and soul into the shop from now on, that even if no such titanic opportunity again
presented itself, I would make it up slowly by taking every possible advantage of the little day-to-day ones. I began to look for things to do, to put my mind to it; I realised I had never contributed one single original idea, and since I had always flattered myself that I am good at things like that, this seemed doubly a pity. I often looked round the shop, saw how very well done it was, and felt envious and regretful that I couldn't credit myself with any of it, at a time when a bit of credit was exactly what I most needed. Totting up in the small hours, I realised I had nothing to show for the past ten months except a healthy baby, and after all any dim-wit can achieve that, given reasonable conditions.

Business, having fallen off after the first rush, picked up a bit as spring advanced and the weather improved, but of course fell right off again with the start of the summer holidays. David's first birthday was a pretty gloomy occasion for us, because the day before happened to be quarter-day and Henry's week's work on the accounts had succeeded in showing only that we had passed some sort of graphic peak and were now—only temporarily, we hoped, but still—on the downgrade. We owed quite a lot of money to various suppliers, which Dottie insisted on our paying immediately since most of them were ‘struggling artists', as she called them, who depended on our prompt payment for their very livelihood (‘How have they been managing up to now?' Henry asked, to which Dottie retorted, ‘That wasn't our responsibility. This is.') The end of Henry's £5,000 was rather closer than just in sight, and although he said very little, I could see he was worried.

‘What shall we do when we run out of liquid assets?' I asked uneasily.

‘Borrow more,' said Dottie shortly.

I looked at Henry. I seldom did this directly any more, for fear he should somehow divine that Dottie had broken her word and told me. But this time he refused to meet my eye. Instead he said quietly, ‘I don't like that idea much. Surely there are some other assets we could cash in on. My car, for instance.'

But Dottie flatly refused to hear of that. There was a silence, and then I said, ‘Are we really desperate? Because there
is
Addy's £400.' Henry said, ‘It's not come to that yet,' but I caught Dottie's swift, grateful look at me. I was gripped with a mixture of satisfaction and regret that I had spoken the words. I knew I had done, or rather said, the right thing, but I could hardly bear the thought that I might have to make it good. The situation was so confused and miserable now, that the thought of a line of escape which had been laid down too early for it to count as desertion, was sustaining me more than I cared to admit. Yet how could I even dream of running out on Dottie, as things stood? That night in bed, I lay awake trying to think, to plan. The plain truth seemed to be that I was deeply afraid of Dottie's suffering. I was afraid to be left alone to cope with it after Henry died—to be so close to another person's pain was worse in a way than anticipating one's own. I didn't know how it might take her. If the positions were reversed—if Toby had died, say, at the height of my love for him—I could well imagine myself wanting to die too, or at least retreating so far into myself as to be unreachable by all around me. Perhaps Dottie would start to drink, perhaps she would run wild with all sorts of men; it was impossible to predict. I felt guiltily that such thoughts were unjust to her, considering how well she was behaving now; but fear seldom takes justice or loyalty into account. I even went so far as to wish she hadn't told me about Henry, so that when autumn came I could go off to America with an easy conscience, not knowing what I was leaving Dottie to face. Perhaps—perhaps she had told me the truth about Henry in order to inhibit me from this very action? And if so, who could blame her? In her situation I would have moved heaven and earth, and put aside all scruples, to avoid being left alone. Besides, if I really loved her as a friend should, how could I contemplate leaving her?

When I look back on it now, to do myself justice I think I really had done my native decency and courage, such as it is, an injury with those months of trying to destroy my relationship
with Toby. By the time this awful time of ‘dis-ease' came to an end, when the fire inside me burnt itself out, there was very little left for the time being of such strength of character as I had once had to draw on. What an irony it seems now! All my efforts to build myself into an independent person for whom loneliness held no terrors, with reserves of strength to offer the person I loved, had themselves reduced me to such a sickly, craven condition that I was prepared to run away from the only real friend I had left in order to avoid having to support her through an ordeal far worse than mine.

It was around this time that Father paid me one of his evermore-infrequent visits, and told me that he was going to have to go abroad for his health.

‘All the quacks seem to be agreed,' he said with seeming gloom. ‘This climate isn't for me.' He was sitting in the living-room in front of a fire which I'd hastily lit, even though it was the beginning of July, because he looked so frail and cold. It was barely a month since I'd last gone up to town to see him, but in that time he had somehow got smaller in his clothes; his normal robustness, the almost military set of his shoulders, seemed to be thawing into a kind of flabby limpness and I felt frightened. Could he, too, be going to die? I felt a sudden pang of foreknowledge of how old people must feel, when the friends and acquaintances of their lives all begin dropping away one by one. But Father hastened to tell me that it wasn't a matter of life and death—‘It's only a precaution. Frankly, I wouldn't have taken any notice of them, if I hadn't rather fancied the idea of living somewhere warm,' he said. ‘I'm retiring this year anyway—get my pension—which will just about keep me in drink and cigarettes … H'm, I've just thought. The drink will presumably be wine where I'm going. Supposed to be good for the stomach. Personally I've always doubted it.' But I could see the idea didn't really displease him. The only thing he didn't like about it was leaving me.