The Complete Stories (35 page)

  In these weeks Lucy and I grew adept in construing the jargon of the estate agents. We knew that "substantially built" meant "hideous," "ripe for modernization" "ruinous," that "matured grounds" were a jungle of unkempt laurel; all that belonged to the underworld of Punch humour. We learned, what was far more valuable, to detect omissions; nothing could be taken for granted, and if the agent did not specify a staircase, it had in all probability disappeared. Basil explained to me how much more practical it was to purchase a mansion; really large houses, he said, were sold for the sake of the timber in the park; he had a scheme, rather hazily worked out, by which I should make myself a private company for the development of a thousand acres, a mile of fishing, a castle and two secondary residences which he knew of in Cumberland, and by a system of mortgages, subtenancies, directors' fees and declared trading losses, inhabit the castle, as he expressed it, "free"; somewhere, in the legal manoeuvres, Basil was to have acquired and divested himself, at a profit, of a controlling interest in the estate. Roger produced a series of derelict "follies" which he thought it my duty to save for the nation. Other friends asked why I did not settle in Portugal where, they said, Jesuit Convents in the Manuelo style could be picked up for a song. But I had a clear idea of what I required. In the first place it must not cost, all told, when the decorators and plumbers had moved out and the lawyers been paid for the conveyance, more than £3,000; it must be in agricultural country, preferably within five miles of an antiquated market town, it must be at least a hundred years old, and it must be a house, no matter how dingy, rather than a cottage, however luxurious; there must be a cellar, two staircases, high ceilings, a marble chimneypiece in the drawing room, room to turn a car at the front door, a coach-house and stable yard, a walled kitchen garden, a paddock and one or two substantial trees—these seemed to me the minimum requisites of the standard of gentility at which I aimed, something between the squire's and the retired admiral's. Lucy had a womanly love of sunlight and a Marxist faith in the superior beauties of concrete and steel. She had, moreover, a horror, born of long association, of the rural bourgeoisie with whom I was determined to enrol myself. I was able to excuse my predilection to others by describing it as Gallic; French writers, I explained, owed their great strength, as had the writers of nineteenth-century England, to their middle-class status; the best of them all owned square white houses, saved their money, dined with the mayor and had their eyes closed for them at death by faithful, repellent housekeepers; English and American writers squandered their energy in being fashionable or bohemian or, worst of all, in an unhappy alternation between the two. This theme went down well with Mr. Benwell who, in the week or two after I expounded it to him, gave deathless offence to several of his authors by exhorting them to be middle-class too, but it left Lucy unimpressed. She thought the object of my search grotesque, but followed in a cheerful and purely sporting spirit as one may hunt a fox which one has no taste to eat.

  The last occasion of her leaving London before her confinement, was to look at a house with me, below the Berkshire downs. It was too far to travel comfortably in a day, and we spent the night with relatives of hers near Abingdon. We had by now grown so accustomed to one another's company that there seemed nothing odd to us in Lucy proposing me as a guest. Our host and hostess, however, thought it most irregular, and their manifest surprise was a further bond between us. Lucy was by now seven months with child and at the back of her relatives' concern was the fear that she might be delivered prematurely in their house. They treated her with a solicitude that all too clearly was a rebuke to my own easygoing acceptance of the situation. Try how I might to realize the dangers she ran, I could never feel protective towards Lucy. She looked, we agreed, like Tweedledum armed for battle, and I saw her at this time as preternaturally solid, with an armour of new life defending her from the world. Biologically, no doubt, this was a fallacy, but it was the attitude we jointly accepted, so that we made an immediate bad impression by being struck with fourire in the first five minutes of our visit, when our hostess whispered that she had fitted up a bedroom for Lucy on the ground floor so that she should not be troubled by stairs.

  The house we had come to see proved, like so many others, to be quite uninhabitable. Its owner, in fact, was living in his lodge. "Too big for me these days," he said of the house which, when he opened it to us, gave the impression of having been designed as a small villa and wantonly extended, as though no one had remembered to tell the workmen when to stop and they had gone on adding room to room like cells in a wasp-nest. "I never had the money to spend on it," the owner said gloomily, "you could make something of it with a little money."

  We went upstairs and along a lightless passage. He had been showing people over this house since 1920, he said, and with the years he had adopted a regular patter. "Nice little room this, very warm in the winter..... You get a good view of the downs here, if you stand in the corner..... It's a dry house. You can see that. I've never had any trouble with damp..... These used to be the nurseries. They'd make a nice suite of spare bedroom, dressing room and bath if you didn't ..." and at that point, remembering Lucy, he stopped abruptly and in such embarrassment that he scarcely spoke until we left him.

  "I'll write to you," I said.

  "Yes," he said with great gloom, knowing what I meant, "I sometimes think the place might do as a school. It's very healthy."

  So we drove back to Lucy's relatives. They wanted her to dine in bed or, anyway, to go to her room and lie down until dinner. Instead she came out with me into the evening sunlight and we sat in what Lucy's relatives called their "blue garden," reconstructing a life history of the sad little man who had shown us his house. Lucy's relatives thought us and our presence there and our whole expedition extremely odd. There was something going on, they felt, which they did not understand, and Lucy and I, infected by the atmosphere, became, as it were, confederates in this house which she had known all her life, in the garden where, as a little girl, she had once, she told me, buried a dead starling, with tears.

  After this expedition Lucy remained in London, spending more and more of her time indoors. When I finally found a house to suit me, I was alone.

  "You might have waited," said Lucy. It seemed quite natural that she should reproach me. She had a share in my house. "Damn this baby," she added.

  III

  In the last week before the birth of her child, Lucy began for the first time to betray impatience; she was never, at any time, at all apprehensive—merely bored and weary and vexed, past bearing, by the nurse who had now taken up residence in the house. Roger and Miss Meikeljohn had made up their minds that she was going to die. "It's all this damned prenatal care," said Roger. "Do you realize that maternal mortality is higher in this country than it's ever been? D'you know there are cases of women going completely bald after childbirth? And permanently insane? It's worse among the rich than the poor, too."

  Miss Meikeljohn said: "Lucy's being so wonderful. She doesn't realize."

  The nurse occupied herself with extravagant shopping lists; "Does everyone have to have all these things?" Lucy asked, aghast at the multitude of medical and nursery supplies which began to pour into the house. "Everyone who can afford them," said Sister Kemp briskly, unconscious of irony. Roger found some comfort in generalizing. "It's anthropologically very interesting," he said, "all this purely ceremonial accumulation of rubbish—like turtle doves brought to the gates of a temple. Everyone according to his means sacrificing to the racial god of hygiene."

  He showed remarkable forbearance to Sister Kemp, who brought with her an atmosphere of impending doom and accepted a cocktail every evening, saying, "I'm not really on duty yet," or "No time for this after the day."

  She watched confidently for The Day, her apotheosis, when Lucy would have no need for Roger or me or Miss Meikeljohn, only for herself.

  "I shall call you Mrs. Simmonds until The Day," she said. "After that you will be my Lucy." She sat about with us in the drawing room, and in Lucy's bedroom where we spent most of the day, now; like an alien, sitting at a café; an alien anarchist, with a bomb beside him, watching the passing life of a foreign city, waiting for his signal from the higher powers, the password which might come at once or in a very few days, whispered in his ear, perhaps, by the waiter, or scrawled on the corner of his evening newspaper—the signal that the hour of liberation had come when he would take possession of all he beheld. "The fathers need nearly as much care as the mothers," said Sister Kemp. "No, not another thank you, Mr. Simmonds. I've got to keep in readiness, you know. It would never do if baby came knocking at the door and found Sister unable to lift the latch."

  "No," said Roger. "No, I suppose it wouldn't."

  Sister Kemp belonged to a particularly select and highly paid corps of nurses. A baby wheeled out by her, as it would be daily for the first month, would have access to certain paths in the Park where inferior nurses trespassed at the risk of cold looks. Lucy's perambulator would thus be socially established and the regular nurse, when she took over, would find her charge already well known and respected. Sister Kemp explained this, adding as a concession to Lucy's political opinions, "The snobbery among nurses is terrible. I've seen many a girl go home from Stanhope Gate in tears." And then, esprit de corps asserting itself, "Of course, they ought to have known. There's always Kensington Gardens for them."

  Once Sister Kemp had attended a house in Seamore Place, in nodding distance of Royalty, but the gardens there, though supremely grand, had been, she said, "dull," by which we understood that even for her there were close circles. Roger was delighted with this. "It's like something out of Thackeray," he said and pressed for further details, but Lucy was past taking relish in social survivals; she was concerned only with the single, physical fact of her own exhaustion. "I hate this baby already," she said. "I'm going to hate it all my life."

  Roger worked hard at this time, in the morning at his detective story, in the afternoons at his committee for Chinese aid. Miss Meikeljohn and I tried to keep Lucy amused with increasingly little success. Miss Meikeljohn took her to concerts and cinemas where, now, she allowed Lucy to buy the seats as extreme comfort was clearly necessary for her. I took her to the Zoo, every morning at twelve o'clock. There was a sooty, devilish creature in the monkey house named Humboldt's Gibbon which we would watch morosely for half an hour at a time; he seemed to exercise some kind of hypnotic fascination over Lucy; she could not be got to other cages. "If I have a boy I'll call him Humboldt," she said. "D'you know that before I was born, so Aunt Maureen says, my mother used to sit in front of a Flaxman bas-relief so as to give me ideal beauty. Poor mother, she died when I was born." Lucy could say that without embarrassment because she felt no danger in her own future. "I don't care how disagreeable it's going to be," she said, "I only want it soon."

  Because of my confidence in her, and my resentment of the proprietary qualms of Roger and Miss Meikeljohn, I accepted her attitude; and was correspondingly shocked when the actual day came.

  Roger telephoned to me at breakfast time. "The baby's begun."

  "Good," I said.

  "What d'you mean, good?"

  "Well, it is good, isn't it? When did it start?"

  "Last night, about an hour after you left."

  "It ought to be over soon."

  "I suppose so. Shall I come round?"

  He came, yawning a great deal from having been up all night. "I was with her for an hour or two. I always imagined people in bed when they were having babies. Lucy's up, going about the house. It was horrible. Now she doesn't want me."

  "What happened exactly?"

  He began to tell me and then I was sorry I had asked. "That nurse seems very good," he said at the end. "The doctor didn't come until half an hour ago. He went away again right away. They haven't given her any chloroform yet. They say they are keeping that until the pains get worse. I don't see how they could be. You've no conception what it was like." He stayed with me for half an hour and read my newspapers. Then he went home. "I'll telephone you when there's any news," he said.

  Two hours later I rang up. "No," he said, "there's no news. I said I'd telephone you if there was."

  "But what's happening?"

  "I don't know. Some kind of lull."

  "But she's all right, isn't she? I mean they're not anxious."

  "I don't know. The doctor's coming again. I went in to see her, but she didn't say anything. She was just crying quietly."

  "Nothing I can do, is there?"

  "No, how could there be?"

  "I mean about lunch or anything. You don't feel like coming out?"

  "No, I ought to stay around here."

  The thought of the lull, of Lucy not speaking, but lying there, in tears, waiting for her labour to start again, pierced me as no tale could have done of cumulative pain; but beyond my sense of compassion I was now scared. I had been smoking a pipe; my mouth had gone dry, and when I knocked out the smouldering tobacco the smell of it sickened me. I went out into Ebury Street as though to the deck of a ship, breathing hard against nausea, and from habit more than sentiment, took a cab to the Zoo.

  The man at the turnstile knew me as a familiar figure. "Your lady not with you today, sir?"

  "No, not today."

  "I've got five myself," he said.

  I did not understand him and repeated foolishly, "Five?"

  "Being a married man," he added.

  Humboldt's Gibbon seemed disinclined for company. He sat hunched up at the back of his cage, fixing on me a steady, and rather bilious stare. He was never, at the best of times, an animal who courted popularity. In the cage on his left lived a sycophantish, shrivelled, grey monkey from India who salaamed for tidbits of food; on his right were a troup of patchy buffoons who swung and tumbled about their cage to attract attention. Not so Humboldt's Gibbon; visitors passed him by—often with almost superstitious aversion and some such comment as "Nasty thing"; he had no tricks, or, if he had, he performed them alone, for his own satisfaction, after dark, ritualistically, when, in that exotic enclave among the stucco terraces, the prisoners awake and commemorate the jungles where they had their birth, as exiled darkies, when their work is done, will tread out the music of Africa in a vacant lot behind the drug store.