Kind Are Her Answers (35 page)

She looked away. At last she said under her breath, “But I thought … That was different. She wasn’t kind to you.”

She was sitting with her knees screwed up on the table, trying to see his face. He got up, and moved away.

“That’s a matter of opinion,” he said crisply. “She was faithful to me, though.”

He heard a shallow sound behind him, but still stared at the frosted glass of the window, crossed, at intervals, by the jerky shadows of feet outside.

“No one’s to blame. Our circumstances are a bit unfortunate, that’s all. I think it’s only fair to give you the first chance of clearing out. If we left it much longer, it might be me. You can’t drag these things on. When they’re over, they’re over. What about it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She had wrapped her arms round her knees, as if she were cold. “I don’t know anything when you talk like that.” She got off the table, and came, hesitating, towards him. “Kit—please—won’t you be ordinary, just for a minute? I’d feel safer if you would.”

This dependence, this persisting trust, were what he had most feared. Suddenly he feared them no longer. They were what he had needed. She had no one, he thought, to give her things. He could look at her now.

“I am being ordinary. After all, we’re separated for fairly long stretches. One doesn’t spend all that time in a welter of emotion, particularly if one’s got a job to attend to. I’ve thought for some time this would be the best way out, for both of us.”

“Kit. Is that true?”

“Perfectly true.” He had thought it often, as one thinks how much simpler life would be if one could dispense with the need for food. “Haven’t you?”

“I don’t know. Thinking didn’t seem to come into it, really, very much.”

“Well,” he said briskly (the tone often worked well with nervous patients), “I think it’s about time it did. You only fancy I matter more than Maurice and Co. because I’ve been more persistent. You’d have left me several times already, if I hadn’t kept making scenes.” (It was amazing what rational material could be produced from bad dreams.) “Presently we’d both have got sick of it. You’ll forget all these episodes, when you’ve had a kid or two.”

“I always wanted them to be yours. … You make it all sound so reasonable, you muddle me up. Don’t keep-talking about me, as if you weren’t there. Won’t you be unhappy—don’t you
mind?”

“Oh; me. It’s different for a man, you know.” Phrases returned to him; he could almost have smiled at the faithfulness with which he had learned them. “These things take a much smaller place. Men have so many other interests. They’re naturally more self-centred.”

She looked puzzled, as if she were being set a lesson in advance of what she had learned.

“I don’t know about men. I only know a few people. We’d be lonely without each other.”

“For a week or two. It blows over.”

“I shall always want to tell you things.”

“Well, there’s nothing to stop your writing to me. This isn’t a Lyceum melodrama.” (If would be like her, he thought, to write on her honeymoon. He would read it, too, and be proud that it was possible.) “I’m always there if you get worried about anything.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I can always write, can’t I?”

He knew that was decisive. He might have thought of it sooner. She only needed to be saved the cold plunge of a decision on the spot. Nothing remained but to get out of the way. The current would carry her.

“We’ll meet again sometime. Not for a bit, though; you’ll have enough to think about. Well, I’d better be going.”

“Oh, not yet! I haven’t—I wanted us to have to-day.”

“I’ve got to get back to a case. I meant to tell you before.”

“Kit. Kiss me good-bye.”

She had no concealments. It was not a farewell she wanted; it was a decision her mind need not make.

“No,” he said. “Don’t be silly. You know it’ll only unsettle you. You’ll be all right. Good-bye.”

“Kit—I love you—”

He paused, with his hand on the door. He had done everything. If, after all …

“—I’ll never, never forget you.”

No, he thought; of course. I wondered, for a moment …

“Thanks for being nice to me.” (That was right, wasn’t it? He had seen it in a book, or somewhere.) “Good-bye.”

He went out without looking back.

In the car, driving home, the spurious years dispersed from his face. He might have been twenty-five. But there was no need to look for the horn glasses, since he was alone.

J
ANET WROTE FROM MADEIRA
. She described the weather on the voyage, the deck sports. She enclosed a snapshot, which indicated greater distances than the foreign stamp on the envelope. There was a kind of family resemblance between all the four faces. He wrote back, slowly evolving suitable sentences, as if it had been a home-letter from school.

Christie wrote once, to say how often she thought about him, to tell him Florizelle had a new dress woven by Swedish peasants, and to ask him if he was sure she was doing the right thing.

He answered reassuringly.

The shape of her writing on the page was like a physical touch. Before he even read it, he could see her writing it twisted round sideways at the table, in her old smock that smelt of greasepaint, her leg tucked up on the seat of the chair.

It was all over. If he repeated this long enough to himself, presumably it would mean something.

A woman patient, for whom he had ordered a certain régime, came to him complaining of difficulties with her husband: he interviewed the husband, persuading him at length to view things in the light of reason. McKinnon came to call, and gave character-sketches of public personalities, consistent with his theories, but inconsistent, Kit felt, with a cursory glance at their faces in the illustrated papers. Bill, the husband of Shirley, met him in the street and said that the Group had a lot to offer him, any time he cared to come along. Headlines in the papers grew menacing, and parallel columns, reported from different capitals, related the same events like differently curved distorting mirrors. Every day something illustrated afresh the inability of human beings to be visible to one another; every catastrophe of astigmatism in action reminded him that he had once held a fugitive particle of truth.

Honour, morality, logic could justify its destruction, as scientists can destroy a living cell; like the scientists, they could not create it again. They could not even discover what had made it live.

All that remained with him was the satisfaction that springs from having passed a test of strength. It had all seemed quite straightforward at the time, his happiness for hers. But a confused thought was breaking in on him that what was gone could not be divided into hers or his; it was a life beyond them, with rights of its own, a light that had been put out; a soul, different from their separate souls in its weakness and its strength, which had been torn from its body and dispersed into the wind.

He brushed the tangled images aside. He had done the evidently decent thing. There was always his job. The only difference was that once he had looked forward to its intervals when he could be alone with himself.

Early in July, the
Telegraph
announced the forthcoming marriage of Christina Heath, daughter of the late Reverend Lucas Emmanuel Heath and of Mrs. Heath of 14a Park Drive, Edgbaston, Birmingham, to James Burford, second son of Colonel and Mrs. Burford, of the Grange, Winthrup, Hertfordshire. It was to take place at the end of the month.

Kit clipped out the announcement; he need not have troubled, however, as Christie sent him a copy. She was worried, she said; everything seemed different when she hadn’t got him there to talk to. She was staying in her mother’s flat, preparing her trousseau. The place (she added) was lousy with lingerie, and with hens she had never met in her life coming to stare at it. They seemed to expect her to have
made
the stuff. She felt like a horse being done up for a show. She wanted to talk to Kit. Couldn’t they possibly meet just for an hour or two—for half an hour? She wouldn’t be a nuisance. She just wanted to talk to him. She supposed she ought not to, now she was engaged; but somehow it didn’t seem to make any difference.

He did not answer the letter for two days. As long as he kept it in his pocket, it was as though Christie were on the other side of a door in the same house. He had thought that by now the current would have carried her too far for a backward glance.

Even now he could get her back. If she had made it less plain, he could hardly have kept himself from going to her. It would not matter what they talked about—Jimmie, the bridesmaids’ presents, her wedding nightgown. Why not? They would be together and themselves. But evidently that was what must not be allowed to happen yet.

He wrote back saying that it was too bad he couldn’t get away; he had a lot of work on hand. Perhaps a bit later. Meanwhile, he would always like to hear the news.

He paused a moment before he added the last sentence, distrusting any concession to himself. It would be a good moment to snip off the last thread. But again he had the feeling that violence was being done to a living thing, and a kind of fear restrained him. He let the letter go as it was.

The Frasers were going to the Isle of Wight for August. They went to the same hotel in Ventnor every year, but Fraser always discussed it judicially, as if he had made the decision after long doubt and comparison. Kit wished he had decided to go sooner; he looked tired and old nowadays, his digestive trouble had recurred several times. Kit, who suspected that he ate scarcely enough to keep himself going, made several tentative suggestions about taking on a little more of the work. But Fraser’s natural obstinacy was becoming complicated with the irritable temper of the gastric subject; it was impossible to insist.

It was a hot July. A few cases of diphtheria broke out; Kit was summoned to every one in the practice who complained of a sore throat, and did endless inoculations. He had so little time to himself that it always seemed next day would produce the little extra which would make it impossible to think at all. But thought was developing a knack of intruding upon action; every routine mechanical job gave him long enough to see a poky little flat in Birmingham, and Christie staring, her eyes clouded with formless doubt, at heaps of lace and crêpe de Chine. He turned the handle of the door, and saw her face clear—certainty and truth spring by themselves, untended, like weeks in sudden sun.

What’s the use, he thought. It was all so obvious. She’ll thank me in a few years’ time.

On the twenty-third of the month he woke very early. Either from the end of a dream, or some sudden leap of waking thought, Christie was as present with him as if she had been in the room. Everything was very quiet. The thought of her possessed him; not longing, nor imagination, but a contact, as if she had just spoken, or were standing just beyond the range of his eyes. He remembered that she would be married a week from to-day.

He lay listening to the noises beginning in the street, as wakeful as if it were noon. His whole mind and body were tuned to alertness. Perhaps, he thought, an urgent case was coming in. He had had, sometimes, this odd feeling of expectation. But the only summons that came was the postman’s ring. At once, without wondering why he did it, he put on his dressing gown, and went, for the first time in a couple of months, to take the letters from the hall.

It was there, as he had known it would be without knowing that he knew. It was the longest letter Christie had ever written him, and the most confused. It contained nothing of urgency, nothing but trifles. No separate sentence held the message which reached him from the whole. It was entire, like an animal with a small clear voice uttering a single note of fear.

Suddenly, his own mind answered it with a like simplicity.

He did not attempt to think any more. The arguments he had used for weeks seemed to lie about in his brain, functionless, like the crutches of a man who discovers, all in a moment, that he can walk alone. He would never know, he thought, why he was going to her, whether in the certainty of wisdom or self-will. Bill or Shirley, he supposed, would have been quite happy about it. They would have called it guidance, and if it led them where they wanted to go, that would only lend it agreeable confirmation. He had no such trust in his own processes. But he was going.

It would destroy his peace, he knew, for the rest of his life, even if nothing came of it; much more if it ended as it was bound to end. He could justify it endlessly; and without meaning, because his choice, right or wrong, had been entangled in desire. It was a choice that ought only to be made in a moment of freedom from oneself. When he looked back on this he would remember, not that he had done well or badly, but that he had not been free.

It made no difference. He was sure. He would rather have known why, but still he was sure. Whatever it was, was too strong for him, and he would go.

It wanted two days to his free afternoon, the only time when he could possibly make the journey. He sat down, still in his dressing gown, and wrote to her on a couple of leaves of a notebook he had in his room. He would meet her in the public art gallery, in the room upstairs where the Burne-Joneses were. He did not know Birmingham very well, and it was the only safe place he could think of on the spur of the moment. In a postscript he added that it might happen in the end he couldn’t get away; if so he would be thinking about her, and hoped she would understand. He hardly knew why he put this in; he supposed it was a last loophole, in case some conviction came to him that he could trust. He posted the letter on his morning round.

Most of next day he wondered, and sometimes dreaded, whether the clear moment would come. But it was imagination, not thought, that grew clear. By the time it came, he had ceased to open his mind for a revelation. He wanted what he wanted.

Next morning there was no need to think. Expectation penetrated everything, like a coloured light. He began the morning surgery, seeing through it the faces of the patients and the instruments he used.