Kind Are Her Answers: A Novel

  Just underneath it, in the middle of the red turkey carpet, stood Pedlow, fully dressed, her starched cap and clean apron standing out with wooden stiffness, her face as unmoving as the folds of her corseted black dress. She had something dark over her arm; Kit, in the first dulled moment, took it for a rug.

  He heard Christie, beside him, make a little sharp breath-sound, like the involuntary sound people make at a sudden shock of cold. After a moment she said, in a little, high voice, “Well—thank you, Dr. Anderson. It was very good of you to get here so soon. I’m sure you did everything possible. … Thank you. Good night.”

  Pedlow moved forward, reaching the door, with her smooth well trained haste, a moment before him. She was handing him something, with such correctness that Kit had taken it from her before he awoke to what had happened. It was his overcoat, which he had lent to Christie. Christie’s face would have told him, if he had not already guessed, where Pedlow had found it.

  “Thank you,” he said. Neatly and silently, Pedlow lifted it for him to put on.

  Without turning, he could feel Christie’s eyes fixed on his face. He put on the coat slowly, delaying while he could the moment when he must turn and display his emptiness to her need. The time for playing house was over. He had no defence to make for her, no shelter to offer her even for this one night.

  “Good night,” he said.

  Christie straightened her shoulders, said “Good night,” and tried to smile at him. As he went out he saw Pedlow stop for a moment to look at her, before she crossed to the closed door of the room they had left.

  CHAPTER 10

  ONCE, IN THE MORNING hours, Kit knew that he had dozed for an odd half-hour, because the sky in the window changed its colour suddenly from black to grey: but his eyes felt wide open and fixed, as if he had been staring at something during the time. When it was just light he dropped into a heavy sleep, from which the maid’s morning tap waked him with a protesting shock. At breakfast Janet looked at him thoughtfully, and asked if he had had a pleasant evening with Dr. McKinnon. An inflection in her voice made it clear that she supposed him to have been drinking most of the previous night.

  The post had presented him with a circular advertising a newish drug. He had been employing it in his practice for a year, but he read the explanatory matter from end to end, and, when he had finished it, the testimonials. Janet returned to her own correspondence. Her last letter was several pages long. When he happened, once, to glance up at her, she shuffled the pages with self-conscious negligence, so that the blank sheet at the back was turned towards him.

  He managed to eat a little. His body was too well organized to become, even now, a parasite on his nerves. It cleared his head enough to make him think a little of appearances; he tried to smooth the strain out of his face and attempt a kind of conversation. Because of the effort this involved, it did not occur to him at once that Janet’s replies were almost as perfunctory as his own. It was not till the end of the meal, when she gathered up her letters and began to fidget aimlessly round the room, that he recognized the familiar symptoms of preparation.

  She was about to make a gesture; something she had been saving for some time. Seeing it coming, his mind said, in simple protest, “Not in the morning.” It was too much. It took him a moment or so to remember what else it might be. He took his pipe out of his pocket and began carefully to fill it.

  Janet fingered the envelopes in her hands and said, “Christopher, dear, couldn’t we have a little talk? I think it would be good for both of us. We haven’t got together over things lately, have we?”

  She smiled at him. It was a smile which looked as if she had copied it from some one else; it had a kind of forced friendliness verging on the genial, which, chiefly because it was so unsuited to her, jarred sharply. In his surprise he actually forgot the fear it had relieved. She went on, still smiling, “I know what you’ve been feeling these last few weeks.”

  Kit thrust the tobacco down into the bowl in a solid block which, as he discovered later, prevented the pipe from drawing at all. Without noticing, he added another layer.

  “You feel I’ve been neglecting you. But though it may have seemed like that, you’ve been a great deal in my mind.”

  “Not at all,” said Kit. “I mean, of course I’ve thought nothing of the kind.” He glanced automatically at the clock, which made it just under a quarter of an hour to morning surgery. There were half a dozen things to get in order beforehand. Keying himself up to routine had taken everything he had; there was simply nothing left for this. He felt incapable even of the effort necessary to stave it off, and stood helplessly with his pipe (which he never smoked at this hour of the day) cold in his hand.

  “What I wanted to say,” Janet continued, “is this.” She had lifted her chin and pitched her voice a little beyond him. It had a kind of rehearsed effect, as if she were addressing herself to several people rather than to him, which made him feel uncomfortable. “I’ve realized that up till this last month I’ve never been absolutely honest with myself about the reasons for our marriage having drifted onto the rocks.”

  What on earth has she been reading? thought Kit in dim astonishment. The magazine slang sat as startlingly on her as if she had walked into the room in trousers. Yet another thing he ought to be doing in the surgery jogged at his mind; he glanced at the clock again.

  “I haven’t faced up to my own selfishness. I’ve clung to my reserve, and reserve is a form of selfishness, Kit. I haven’t shared with you as I should have done.”

  “Shared what?” asked Kit dazedly. His mind had little capacity, this morning, for curiosity or surprise.

  “Oh, that’s just a … Shared my thoughts with you, I mean. I shouldn’t have kept my feelings secret from a mistaken pride in bearing things alone. After all, there’s a very sacred sort of bond between us. It’s a thing we ought to have got together over.” She seemed checked here, perhaps by Kit’s face, perhaps by a momentary doubt of her phrasing; but went on, quickly, “In fact, I’ve been selfish in many ways.”

  “My dear,” said Kit, horror at last overcoming his inertia, “you’ve done your duty by me fully, and if I’ve seemed not to appreciate it I’m sorry; I can only assure you I do. I’ll talk over anything you like later on, but would you mind now? I’ve got one or two examinations and so on to lay out for downstairs.”

  “Kit, it’s only ten to nine. You must face up to things now: we’ve both got into the habit of dodging realities. It won’t take a minute to finish what I wanted to say to you. It was only to tell you how wrong I feel it was of me to have let the—the physical part of our marriage go, just because it didn’t mean anything to me. I should simply have told you honestly that it didn’t, and fulfilled my part of it for your sake. And that’s what I’ve resolved to do, Kit. I’ll see a specialist, or anything you think necessary. I’ve been unfair to you, and I shan’t rest till I’ve got right with myself about it.”

  She paused, and, in time, it evolved on Kit that she was awaiting his expressions of gratitude. He turned the pipe over attentively in his hand, rejecting, one after the other, the answers that occurred to him. The conception of himself as an altar-stone for his wife’s votive offerings was not altogether a new one, but it had not been presented to him before with just this cheerful bonhomie, or at just this crux of his affairs. His resentment and bitterness were almost swamped by his sheer embarrassment; the violence of the three left him with no very clear impression of what he did feel. He clung, however, to an idea that if he expressed it he would be sorry afterwards, and, presently, the smoke within him dispersed. But he was no nearer knowing what to say. The situation, when he got outside it, was like things he saw in the course of his practice, and left him with the same feelings of futility and impotent pity.

  “You don’t think I’m sincere,” Janet was saying. “You’re afraid I shall regret it afterwards, and perhaps resent things and reproach you. But I shan’t, Kit. I’ve found a strength I never had before.”
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  I must say something, Kit told himself desperately. To state the bald truth, of which he had no doubt, that the thing was impossible by now in any case, would be simple but brutally inadequate. He believed she had meant it; if so, heaven knew with what effort she had prepared this sacrifice to her conception of herself. To miss the cue entirely would be too cruel. Any cliché would be better; even “My dear, I’ve learned to care for you in a different way.”

  It stuck in his throat, however. In the old days his lies to her had been like his consulting-room lies, prescribed as he might have prescribed a sedative, untainted by interest of his own. He was not quite aware that he had come to treat her as a patient, and did not know, now, why he felt obscurely that his professional integrity was being damaged. But she was waiting.

  “My dear,” he began as gently as he could, “I’ve—”

  There was a tap at the door. Janet looked irritably towards it. He could see her making up her mind not to say “Come in.” The thought of approaching rescue was too much for him.

  “Come in,” he said.

  The door opened, apologetically, to admit the elderly maid from the Fraser’s flat. She scarcely ever came with messages; the men had a house telephone between their surgeries, and Fraser was overpunctilious, if anything, about interference out of hours. Kit was delighted to see her but wondered what she could want.

  “Oh, Dr. Anderson, sir. I’m so sorry to trouble you so early, but Mrs. Fraser said would you be good enough to step down before surgery and see Dr. Fraser? He isn’t very well and she doesn’t think he’ll be able to see his patients to-day.”

  “Of course,” said Kit. “Tell Mrs. Fraser I’ll be down at once.”

  He saw Janet looking at him as the door closed. Her face told him that she knew he would use this excuse to leave her without an answer, that after all she was relieved and determined not to admit it to herself. He went over and kissed her quickly on the forehead. Each, for different reasons, avoided the other’s eyes.

  “That settles it,” he said, “I’m afraid. Surgery will start late as it is, if I have to look him over first. I hope there’s nothing seriously wrong with the poor old boy.” Janet was reading the address on one of the envelopes in her hand. Looking past her, he said, “Don’t worry over things, my dear, you’re everything to me that I need you to be.”

  He had no time to think the conversation over, for at the foot of the stairs Mrs. Fraser met him, with trouble sitting reluctantly on her broad healthy face.

  Fraser was in bed, looking pinched and yellow and, unusual for him, every year of his age. He said that he had a gastric chill; he had had a call in the early morning, and been caught in a sharp shower.

  “Not one of my cases, I hope?” said Kit. His feeling of guilt was reasonless; he supposed it must be becoming a habit.

  “No, no, one of my own.” Fraser, with his practice on his mind, was impatient of irrelevances. He had been working till the last minute on a sheaf of notes for Kit. Before going over them he apologized, with his careful and rather ponderous courtesy, for giving his partner the extra work. He would not, he assured Kit, be hors de combat long enough to make a locum necessary.

  Kit, not liking a sunk look about his eyes, tentatively suggested examining him; but the old man waved him away. He had had similar chills before, a matter of twenty-four hours; a little bismuth and a fluid diet would settle it. His thermometer and watch stood on the bedside table, but, with an obstinacy Kit remembered from other occasions, he kept their findings to himself.

  Kit, whose programme had been fairly well filled already, went through to the small annex in which his consulting room was built, and looked at Fraser’s notes, written in a Victorian hand which combined an appearance of great symmetry and beauty with the elusiveness of a cryptogram. He took out his own notebook, put it side by side with the notes, and tried to correlate them into some kind of plan. He stared at them, together and apart, and stared again; but each time the grip of his brain slipped like the grip of a hand with a cut tendon. He could only wonder how he was going to see Christie, and, when this brought him back to the notes on the desk, stare at them and think of Christie again, and of what had happened in the night. He had had twenty-four hours with negligible sleep, but was too tired even to sort its effects from the rest of his trouble. After five minutes of it he pushed the notes on one side and rang for the first patient to be shown in.

  The surgery, even with summary treatment, finished an hour late. Fraser’s patients, through contact or affinity, nearly all had a dash of Fraser about them. They were mostly middle-aged, liked to come to the point in their own time, and were full of leisured conversational gambits which had, in decency, to be followed up for a few minutes at least. The visits were the same, but more so. Additionally there was the case to which Fraser had been called up, a sub-acute abdominal on which Fraser wanted a second opinion. Kit, whose own ideas on the subject were perfectly clear-cut, had to ring up the consultant and pay a second visit in order to meet him. He had been able to stifle his private thoughts during work which he felt to be necessary; but the fuss and hanging about which this business involved brought up all his raw edges. The consultant, a friendly and cultured person with a zest for abstract discussion, drove home regretting the unimaginative parochialism of the provincial G.P.

  The consultation, and subsequent arrangements with a nursing home, dragged on till nearly the end of the afternoon, leaving two or three more visits that could not safely be postponed. He plodded round them, followed by the knowledge that Christie must have been expecting him since the middle of the morning. He could have called for a moment between these cases, but his fatigue had got to the meticulous stage when each detail has to be cleared up in its exact order, for lack of confidence in future effort. They carried him on through teatime; it was falling dark when he got to Laurel Dene at last. There was just light enough to show him the blank eyes of the windows with their drawn-down blinds.

  He rang, feeling unequal to the effort, which had somehow to be made, of facing Pedlow out. As it happened, he had nerved himself for nothing. The cook let him in, looking self-conscious, short of breath, and resentful—of her imposed office, Kit thought, rather than of him. There was no reason, he supposed, why she should not have done it often before in the course of Pedlow’s time off; but he had never known Pedlow to take any.

  The cook asked him if he would kindly step into the drawing room.

  Kit stared at her, and took an involuntary step down the hall. He supposed she meant the dining room; he had waited there once or twice, since Christie came.

  “This way, sir,” said the cook. She opened the right-hand door.

  Kit walked in, and stood still for a moment in the doorway. The drawing room had come back to itself. The bed had gone, the chest of drawers with its brushes and jars, the dressing gown thrown over the sofa and the slippers underneath it. His memory moving back over a couple of months, he realized that every occasional table, every vase, every photograph frame and nondescript silver object of art, had been arranged in its former place with the exactness of sacred vessels on which a ritual depends. The doors into the garden were shut. Looking again when the cook had gone, he saw the bolts drawn home.

  Kit walked up and down the long room, which the cook had left in its half-twilight. There was a deadness in his heart which was beyond anxiety or fear. He was gripped by the power that symbols of disaster have to be more frightful than disaster itself, because they leave the imagination free. He stared through the closed glass doors into the garden, over whose tree-fringed sky thin pink clouds, like unmoving fishes, swam in the stream of the last light; and a procession of possibilities, each more horrible than the last, trampled his common sense underfoot. When the door opened at last, he seemed to swallow his heart while he waited for the news that would come in. But it was Christie, wearing a dark brown dress, her hair looking dark too in the shadows. She shut the door behind her and stood with her hand on it, as if she were afrai
d to leave it unguarded. Her face was pale and tightly stretched; she looked cold.

  Shaken out of his own fears, Kit went over to her; but she was hard and unresponsive in his arms, looking not at him but over her shoulder at the door. He felt her hands resisting him as if they were doing it of themselves, and she would have restrained them if she could.

  “It’s all right, dear,” he said.

  She whispered, “Don’t say anything now. Some one will hear. It doesn’t take long to make out a certificate, does it? You’d better not stay longer than that.”

  Kit tightened his hold. Her terror had jerked his reason into its needed reaction. “Nonsense. No one can do anything to either of us.” He spoke with an assurance that almost convinced himself. “Sit down here and talk to me.”

  She pulled her hand out of his, and looked away.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Why did you leave me all day, Kit? It’s been … Why didn’t you come in the morning? I suppose you were busy, or something. But I just didn’t think you could.”

  He was dumb for a moment. She never reproached him, never asked for explanations. If he offered them, she always seemed to have accepted them beforehand. He felt, not so much a sense of injustice as a difficulty in finding his feet.

  “Fraser’s ill,” he said at last. “I’ve had to see his patients as well as mine. You know I’d have come if it was humanly possible to do it. I could hardly work for thinking of you, as it was.”

  “You do look tired,” she said, and absently gave his arm a maternal pat. “But, Kit, all day? Would all those people have actually died if you hadn’t been there?”

  “Well, no, of course not. But they were all people who had to be seen.”

  She peered at him a little, as if she were trying to see him in a better light. Thoughtfully and without resentment, she said, “You’re different from me, aren’t you? I mean, I see you were right, but if it had been me I couldn’t have helped going to you.”