Kind Are Her Answers (11 page)

She turned to the middle of the novel, tasting it here and there. It was a pretty, sentimental tale, pleasant enough but, she knew, a thing he would never dream of reading himself. She had often reproved him for bringing her back books which had excited him but which she thought heavy. Yet to realize that he must have chosen this one without interest, as the kind of thing she would be likely to like, made her feel neglected.

Turning back to the first chapter, she tried to read. It was, in fact, a book she might very well have chosen in default of something better for herself; but, perhaps for this very reason, it irritated her. There was a tickle in her throat, and she coughed, rather more loudly than its relief demanded. He did not notice. To impress him that the cough had happened she coughed again.

He looked up, half his mind transparently still in the book. “Not caught a cold, have you?” he asked.

“Not a really bad one.” She took out the cologne handkerchief unobtrusively and patted her nose. “I think it must have been when I got wet yesterday. It’s only on my chest a little.”

“If it’s on your chest you must look after it.” He put his book aside, fishing an envelope out of his pocket to mark the place. (Once, she thought, he would not have waited to do that.) In a detached businesslike way he got out a thermometer, uncased it, shook it down, and slipped it into her mouth. “No, under your tongue.” His hand closed firmly and easily on her wrist. She remembered from earlier times the careful tension of his touch. “Cheer up,” he said. “You’re not going to be ill.” He held her wrist lightly, waiting for her pulse to settle.

Her temperature was normal. She had been certain that at least it would be ninety-nine. “But of course I’m all right,” she said pluckily. “I told you it was nothing.”

“I’ll just go over your chest to make sure.” He ran down to the consulting room, came back with a stethoscope, and held the metal end carefully to warm at the fire.

Her dress was a dark ninon that fastened to the throat with a little row of silver buttons. Slowly and thoughtfully she fingered the top one, and began to undo it.

Kit straightened, testing the end of the stethoscope against his palm. “Oh, don’t bother with that,” he said cheerfully. Evidently he had noticed what she was wearing for the first time. “I can listen through that all right. It’s only thin.”

Janet fastened the silver button again and took her hand away from it as quickly as if it had burned her.

She stood up while he moved the instrument here and there, with silent precision, over the stuff; his face intent, his mind, she saw, a mile away from her, concentrated in his ears. She might, she thought with bewildered resentment, have been a patient. He moved round to her back, out of sight. “Just cough once or twice, will you?” She coughed; a thin and, it seemed to her, a pathetic little sound. He took the stethoscope away.

“That’s all right. Nothing there. You’ve a spot of tracheal irritation, I expect. Wait a minute, I had a sample of lozenges to-day. You can try them out for me, will you? The formula looks all right.” He got them out of a coat pocket, opened and sniffed them, said, “Not more than one an hour, I should say; they’re strongish,” handed them over, and settled himself back again with his book.

Janet took a lozenge. It was bright pink, contained formalin, and had a sweetish-sharp flavour. She had expected something more medicine-like, menthol, or eucalyptus. She was being kept quiet with a sweet, she thought, like a fractious child. The lozenge stung her throat a little. She was certain now that it really was sore, and remembered her headache, which she had allowed temporarily to lapse. It occurred to her that she had meant to be lying down when Peggy (who was taking tea at Shirley’s) got back. It was nearly six; she might arrive at any moment. Janet thought, with inward shrinking, of her own confidences of a night or two ago. They had seemed possible then. She had got a little generous glow out of making excuses for Kit, explaining that, in spite of his insensitiveness and egotism, he loved her, she was sure, as deeply as he was capable of loving any one; that she always tried, for that reason, to spare his feelings by hiding her own. Now, as she remembered it and watched him—so contained in himself, so suddenly an unknown quantity—she had a sickening sensation of the words appearing in his presence, twisting themselves, looking quite different from the convincing and touching picture they had made at the time. Presently Peggy would be coming in, fresh from talking to Shirley about it.

In her heart she knew that she never wanted to see Peggy again. She wanted to spend the evening, as she had spent so many evenings such a little while ago, sitting composedly, conscious of poise, of delicate grace and aloofness, aware of a secret audience, knowing that Kit was watching her under his lashes when he thought she was looking the other way.

She remembered how she had found him on the morning he had overslept. He had looked so vulnerable and so young, lying there tousled and half-clothed in a dead sleep of weariness. She had felt powerful and compassionate. His absorption maddened her. She got to her feet, moved only by the impulse to throw something at it.

“I think I shall go to bed,” she said. “I’ve rather a headache.”

He looked around. “Have you? Too bad. Yes, go to bed and sleep it off. Meeting tired you, I expect.”

“Perhaps it was that.”

“Peggy’ll be all right, I suppose? I’m seeing McKinnon this evening.”

How could he, she thought, how
could
he stroll calmly out of the house after she had explained to him that she was ill? It had never happened. He had loved to be depended on, to be allowed to gain a little importance with her. She pressed the handkerchief to her forehead.

“Yes, Kit dear, do go out and amuse yourself. I know I’m not very entertaining company for you when I feel like this. I’m sure Peggy will understand.”

He said nothing. She collected a few small things about the room, waiting. Surely he would apologize, or at least protest. As she got to the door she looked over her shoulder. He was glancing at the clock, regretfully putting his book away because it was time for the evening surgery. He looked neither angry nor hurt; simply a little tired. She went out.

In her own room she drew the green satin curtains, undressed and lay down. The ordered prettiness of the place wrapped itself comfortingly around her. How generous, after all, the things she had said to Peggy had really been. It was for his sake, she reflected, more than for her own that she minded. Poor boy; in his self-centred way he loved her so much. Her mind drifted on to a little scene in which her cold got worse. She had pneumonia; double pneumonia; she was dying, and Kit leaned over her bed, asking her forgiveness, frantic at the thought of losing her. “Don’t have any regrets,” she was saying to him, very gently, in her dying voice. “Some day you’ll—understand.”

Her real illness—the blanketing weakness, the fading of thought and desire, the squalor and pain—she had long ago pushed into the basement of her mind. It had emerged slightly altered; tidied-up and refined, the dramatic values underlined and inartistic passages soft-focussed.

How concerned the boy at the meeting had been about her! She smiled maternally at the thought of it. It had, she remembered, seemed to mean so much to him that she should come with him to the next meeting, and hear the International he admired. They could sit at the back, he had said, so that if she felt faint they could come out at once. If she did not come it might spoil the freshness of his enthusiasm. That would be such a pity. Really, somehow, she must try to be well enough to go.

I
T WAS NEXT EVENING,
while the International was dealing faithfully with the sins of his former state, that Kit’s surgery was interrupted by an urgent call from Laurel Dene.

He found Miss Heath semi-collapsed, shrunken and blue in her high chair of pillows, clinging to Christie’s hand. She scarcely noticed Kit when he came in. As he slipped the needle, with the almost painless speed of practice, under the withered skin of her forearm, Christie was saying in her warm comforting voice, “I didn’t mean it about going away. Of course I’ll stay with you. I promise I will. Always. See, you’re going to be all right now.” A faint gleam of relief mingled with the fear in the moist, shallow eyes.

When the worst of the attack was over, Pedlow came to sit with her mistress. As she went over to the bed to take up her charge, her body looked softer, less angular; mysteriously, almost comfortable. “Well, there, now, Miss Amy,” she said. Miss Heath’s eyes wandered past her, following Christie to the door.

Kit and the girl went out together into the grey twilight garden with its sweet evening smell of dusty leaves and dew.

“What now?” he said.

It was a last checking point for decision. They searched one another’s faces in the shadow, both knowing it.

Kit found that he could think no further than the whiteness of Christie’s face, and the little blue streaks under her eyes. She had been tired, and then badly frightened. The deadness of the half-light took the last trace of colour from everything but her hair; she looked like a restless ghost. When he took her hands she blinked, swallowed, and began to cry.

The moment of choice passed. He comforted and held her. She was not to worry about anything to-night, he said. He would take care of it all. He would look after her. He wouldn’t bother her; everything should be as she wanted.

She nodded, tightening her arms round his neck. It was no good talking about anything now, she said as he dried her eyes; they would feel different in the morning. She would be sensible then; she would do anything he said.

Everything, they promised one another, would be all right.

Three nights later, on his way back from a midnight call, Kit went through the garden at Laurel Dene, round the edge of the lawn, to the drawing-room windows. There was no need, he found, to tap on the pane; they were wide open.

“Darling. I’ve had an idea.”

“M-m?” murmured Kit, inclining half an ear. Christie always had ideas when he was feeling sleepy, but her voice was so pleasant it didn’t matter.

“I’ve got it under the pillow. Just let me put the eiderdown over your head, then I can put the torch on.”

Kit turned over, resignedly, while Christie arranged the eiderdown in a small tent over both their heads, and lit the interior with a Woolworth flashlamp.

“I like your hair,” he said, “with the light through it.”

Ignoring this side-issue, Christie dived under the pillow, and produced a crumpled piece of paper, on which were diagrams rather like the framework of noughts and crosses, complicated with arrangements of dots.

“Do you know what this is?”

Kit, who was still blinking in the light, recognized it after a moment as the commonest cipher generally used in preparatory schools. At the bottom was a sample sentence.

“It’s a code,” Christie explained superfluously. “Now we can write each other proper letters.”

“What, in that?”

“Yes, then it won’t matter if any one finds them.”

“Oh, good God,” breathed Kit. “Give it to me.”

“Don’t you think it would work?”

“Darling, if you have any more ideas like that, don’t do anything about them before you ask me, will you?”

“Not if you don’t like, sweetest. But it
would
have been fun. How soon the air gets breathed up under an eiderdown, doesn’t it?”

Kit had been astonished, at first, to find how quickly Christie had lost any kind of tragic feeling about their necessary deceit. Once she began, she had taken to stratagems as small boys take to playing Red Indians. There was something in it, he guessed, of escape from the crueller realities of the situation; but most of it was nature. Her favourite plots were concerned with the exchange of notes; he had assured her that there would be no harm in her occasionally using the post, but she preferred to conceal them in his gloves when he left them in the hall, to throw them, wrapped round stones, into his car as he came up the drive, or to put them in his bag, where they were liable to fall out embarrassingly at the next case he visited. The real trouble, for Kit, was that she transported him too effectively into the atmosphere of a Nesbit storybook; he often had to shake himself awake in order to take seriously the risks they were running.

They agreed at last on a posting box, a hollow tree in the drive. It was unsafe, but not more so than most of Christie’s more ingenious ideas. He could not bear to hurt her feelings by asking her to write less often; besides, he enjoyed her letters, which had a wild originality of thought and spelling.

Since Miss Heath’s last attack, he called there twice a week. Her hold of life was more tenuous than ever, but she was radiantly happy.

“I feel so much
younger,
doctor,” she confided to him. “Perhaps it comes of being more in touch with the world. Christie’s so good about reading me the papers. Poor Pedlow’s intentions of course were
most
kind, but it seems she had been keeping the most
essential
facts from me for years, from some idea that I should worry. As I said to her the other day, I hope I have more faith in Providence than to be frightened of Hitler. Such a nervous, excitable temperament; no doubt he was unkindly treated when he was a little boy. What was I saying? Yes, I’m thinking of buying a wireless set shortly; so nice for concerts, and the news. Can you recommend a reliable make?”

One day Kit remarked to Pedlow, in the hall, that Miss Heath seemed brighter lately, and that it was good to see her taking so much interest in life.

Pedlow said, “Yes, doctor, no doubt,” and held open the door. The air outside seemed, suddenly, colder than he had thought.

He managed to visit Christie about one night in seven. Their system, which they had evolved between them in one of Christie’s more realistic moments, worked quite well. It was necessary that, if he went out in the night, he should have received a telephone call, since even the soft-toned bell he had in his room could be heard, if any one happened to be awake, in other parts of the house. So in the small hours Christie used to dial his number on the telephone in the hall, tap on the mouthpiece when he answered, and slip back to her room; a quick and almost soundless procedure. A safer plan, when it was available, was for Kit to go round at the tail-end of a legitimate night call. If this turned out to be a scare needing little attention, he could risk the extra time.