“I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s all right. I didn’t mean to be silly about it.” She looked up at him, solemnly. “I like you being better than me.”
“Don’t be a baby,” he said; her candour touched him to the point of awkwardness. “I’ve come to talk to you about Pedlow. Now listen. You’re not to let her upset you. I’ll deal with her. If she tries to start anything, come straight to me. What’s she been saying to you?”
“Nothing.”
Kit nodded, his expectations confirmed.
“That’s what’s so horrible,” Christie said.
“What about this room, then?”
“She just did that. She moved my things to the spare room as soon as I was up. She didn’t ask me, or anything. I’ve hardly seen her. She spent the rest of last night—in there—I think.”
“I see. What about having the light on?”
Christie went over to the switch. The dusty crystal chandelier leaped into life, its facets reflected in the silver on the mahogany tables. Kit narrowed his eyes against it; it accented a certain grimness in his face. He sat down beside Christie on the brocade settee.
“Have you got any money?” he asked.
“Yes, I’ve got seventeen pounds, but most of it’s in the Post Office. I could get some to-morrow if it wasn’t more than three pounds. How much would you like?”
Kit’s jaw relaxed a little in spite of himself. “Little lunatic, I don’t want any. I was only wondering whether she’d start by trying to blackmail you or me. Your being out of it simplifies things. If she tries it with me I shall go to the police. Anything’s better: you agree to that?”
She stared at him. “Blackmail you? Pedlow? You must be mad.”
“I don’t think so. Doctors are favourite subjects, you know. I’ve been more or less prepared since last night. Don’t worry; your name won’t be dragged in.”
“But, Kit—you didn’t think Pedlow was like that?” Her eyes were blank with bewilderment; she stammered as she sought for words. “Why, Pedlow—Pedlow would die before she’d steal a safety pin off my dressing table. How could you think—don’t you see, that’s why she frightens me.”
Kit looked at her, in compassion for her simplicity. “I think you’ll find—” he began.
“Oh, Kit, don’t be silly. When you live with a person who hates you, you get to know them. Besides, Pedlow’s got plenty of money. She won’t know how to spend it, as it is. It isn’t money she wants.”
“How do you know?”
“Aunt Amy’s left her a lot of money. Most of what she’s got, I think. She wanted to alter her will and leave some of it to me. It was terrible; she kept saying would I remind her to ring up her lawyer. I had an awful job, sometimes, to put her off. It would have been bad enough to take it when all the time I … But to have had something of Pedlow’s … It would have been like the gold they take from tombs, that kills you if you have it in the house. Thank God I managed not to let it happen.”
Kit patted her hand. He felt his whole body relaxing in relief.
“Why didn’t you tell me that before?” he said.
“I didn’t think it was important.”
“But it explains everything. Her dislike of you, and spying about. Naturally, she was afraid for her expectations. No doubt your aunt had told her about the will; she was open about things, and fond of her. Pedlow’s idea in watching you was that if the lawyer actually called, she could produce something against you and get your aunt to alter it again. She was too discreet to act unnecessarily. Now she knows her money’s safe she’s got no reason to make trouble. Your natural honesty’s saved the two of us. Queer that you didn’t see it yourself.”
“Do you think so?” said Christie without conviction.
“It’s obvious.”
“It sounds simple, put that way. … I don’t know, though. I’ve thought, once or twice, that Pedlow wanted me to be after Aunt Amy’s money. It would have given her a sort of advantage over me. Sometimes I think when she finds I wasn’t, she’ll hate me more than ever. I know it sounds silly when you’re being so practical, but it seems to me there were only two things she cared about, Aunt Amy and being more righteous than any one else. … She got out all my boxes this morning, and dusted them.”
“Well, that was quite a natural thing to do.”
“I saw her face as she was doing it, before she saw me.
“Darling, you’ve been through a lot and you’re fancying things.”
“Yes, perhaps it will all look different in the morning. Only—well, this morning I wanted to go in to—to look at Aunt Amy. I thought I’d feel better in her room. I was happy with her, you know; I never had time to tell you much about that. Pedlow passed me in the hall, and just looked at me. It—it made me feel as if I were a murderer going to gloat over some one I’d killed. I haven’t dared to go even near the door, since. I knew I’d find her waiting.”
“She’s upset, that’s all.”
“I suppose so. I wish I wasn’t so frightened all the time.”
“It’s the house; the blinds and everything.” He put his arm round her shoulders. Pedlow had grown dim in his mind, Christie near and warm. He could only remember that in a few days she would have gone away. The comfort he offered her covered a longing to demand it for himself. “Get out of doors as much as you can. Look, that reminds me. I’ve brought you a bottle of pick-me-up, and a sedative for the night. Don’t forget to take them. You’ll feel better after a proper sleep.”
“Dear Kit.” She took the bottle and pill-box with an attempt at a smile. “You always promised me a tonic, didn’t you?” She looked up at him. The mist of fear cleared from her eyes; she caught him by the sleeve. “I don’t want you to go away. I want to stay with you. I’d sleep all right if you were here.”
“Oh, God,” said Kit under his breath, “I can’t stand this.” He pulled her into his arms. The pill-box rolled away over the floor, making a little noise like a baby’s rattle. She clung to him silently for a moment, then began to cry, blindly and inconsolably, as children cry who can imagine no future beyond their grief. He could feel a hot trickle of tears against his neck.
“Don’t,” he said, and tried to say something more, but could not.
She rubbed her closed eyes on his shoulder, making a wet trail on the cloth of his coat. “I can’t bear to be alone again now you’ve been here.” She tried to whisper, but choked instead.
“S-sh. Careful.” He got out his handkerchief and dried her face; if she had cried with any sort of feminine art, with any reservation of prettiness or poise, he felt he could have borne it. He offered her what comfort he had, which was simple and physical; indeed, he could scarcely have spoken if he had had anything to say. But presently she stopped crying, absently, like a baby who has been given something sweet to keep it quiet. In a little while she was kissing him, her face still hot and sticky with tears; and, a few minutes later, was amusing herself, in a kind of dejected enjoyment, by making a piece of his hair stand up on end.
“Isn’t it too bad?” she murmured when she had arranged it to her liking. “I can’t put it back again. I haven’t got a comb in here any more.” She never seemed, like other women, to carry the essentials of repair about with her. “I’ll just have to sort of smarm it with my hand. There, that hardly notices at all. You do look sweet. I feel so nice now you’re here. It’s a bad idea to cry; it makes a kind of bruise in your stomach that goes on after you’ve stopped.”
“I won’t be gone long. We’ll be able to meet somewhere, now you can leave the house. Look, I’ll write you a letter to-night and you’ll get it first thing in the morning.” He could not imagine when he was going to write it; straightening Fraser’s records and his own would take him till well on into the night. He had wanted to plan with her, discuss the future and leave with something to look forward to beyond the blankness of the immediate present. He could not remember how far away the place was to which she was going back. He could not ask her
now. Within the small circle of her art they were ageless equals; now, outside it, the eight years between them gaped like twenty. He felt only that he must tiptoe away without rousing her grief again, as if she had fallen asleep holding his hand.
Fortunately he had all the information he needed for the death certificate and had filled it in already. He put it into her hand with brief instructions which she acknowledged vaguely, smoothing down his hair again.
“Will you think about me to-night when you’re in bed?”
“I always do that.”
“Do you, darling? What a shame. I’ll be so nice to you next time.” She kissed him, and he felt the gap of experience between them close again.
As they went into the hall, he heard the door opposite close softly. He knew that it was Pedlow, going into Miss Heath’s room. Once or twice, when he had been making love to Christie, he had paused at the thought of the old woman lying near them, and wondered a little that she could have forgotten. But when she took comfort, he had been too glad to think about it much. He drove out through the dark drive, remembering her hands about his head.
CHAPTER 11
IT WAS FIVE DAYS before he met her again, and on the first of them he had no time even to miss her. When he wrote to fix the time and the place Fraser was still in bed, and he was doubtful even of the bare half-hour he hoped for. But on the third day Fraser got up; he looked a little thinner and yellower, and moved with a slight increase of his dignified stoop, but there was something rocklike in the set of his back into his consulting-room chair, which discouraged comment or advice. He’ll kill himself one of these days, Kit thought as they were going through the work together; and he reflected, not for the first time, how little Fraser’s most irritating mannerisms really mattered. He was solid, good-wearing stuff all through; and, thinking about him, Kit felt his loneliness and dread of coming loss suddenly lightened with a flash of relief, because whatever trouble he ran himself into henceforward, Fraser was out of it. The practice was no longer involved. His illness, as it happened, had struck a lucky day for Kit; Miss Heath’s death slipped in with the general summary, and there was no need to invent a reason for his having been there on a night when he ought not to have been seeing patients at all. Kit was not blind to the fact that his habitual honesty was an unfailing passport of his lies, and it did nothing to increase his pleasure in telling them.
In the last two days the work slackened for no definite reason, as medical work will; so in the end it happened that they had a full two hours together.
They met in a lane they had agreed on, a little way out of the town. It was a fine day, flooded with the clear cool sunlight of autumn; already, at three o’clock, shadows were looking pointed and a solemn gold was flowing into the colours of things. Christie’s face and hair were tinged with it too; her voice was a little muted, like the outdoor sounds of afternoon, and for her she talked very little. She was unfailingly responsive to atmosphere, and, generally, as unconscious of the springs of her own mood as lake water or a tree. It was enough for Kit that she melted, as if he had dreamed her, into the light and silence and his own sense of shining tragedy and the high sorrow of the world. He drove out through quiet lanes where leaves swished and whispered along the sides of the car. When he had seen her first, standing silent with the long light seeming to slant into her like light into a shell, he had made up his mind where he would take her.
It was a place of his own, an old camp hidden in a wood on a hill, which he had found for himself one day when he had felt particularly unhappy and had tried, as he did when he had time, to blow it off in the open air. The crown of the hill was covered in beeches, and between their trunks the old walls meandered, showing here and there the texture of archaic stonework dry-walled in diagonal courses, sometimes falling away to a shallow mound muffled in beech-mast and leaves. Between the smooth columns of the trees there were gaps in which only distant things showed; hills on the skyline, a stream coiling like a snake through a level meadow, a strip of chessboard fields across which a toylike train threaded a fluff of steam.
The camp was British, a local farmer had told him; he had never talked about it to any one he knew. The place represented an island in his thoughts, and, not very consciously, he had liked to keep it so. Its remoteness and its quiet gave out something benign, which he would have liked to create in his own life, but knew himself unable. He had never met any one else there, and never come there himself except alone, until to-day.
They left the car and walked up an old cart-track towards it. Their conversation, when they talked at all, was chiefly made up of “Do you remember?” By silent consent they avoided the future; it was a part of the struggle with circumstance, from which for the first time they felt a moment of freedom. The miracle was perishable, as they both understood.
They entered the camp through a gap in the wall, the ancient gate, perhaps, of a citadel. Within, the bowl-shaped circle of the wood was filled to the brim with broken light. The sun on its downward course struck through open places between the half-stripped trees, and gave everything it touched the glow of metal without its hardness or its cold. It moulded itself in plaques to the tree trunks, and lay strewn in softly shifting flakes on the ground. Leaves in its path were turned to golden transparencies, so clear that it would not have been hard to believe one saw the visible movement of sap through the veins. Only in the western rim of the hollow a thin crescent of shadow was beginning. A few leaves floated to the ground as they watched, and those that had already fallen received their feet with a brittle, hushing noise. The air was heavy with a good secrecy.
Kit stood and looked, thinking suddenly not of Christie but of the hours of solitude and peace he had experienced in this place alone: the few hours when his spirit had been free. He felt separated from them, and for a moment the happiness for which he had lived for days was tinged with a vague regret. He had a mind too simply practical for contemplation, but he had touched the fringes of it here, and felt now a sense of trespass which he did not define. He translated the feeling, dimly, into a fear lest Christie should say something to spoil it all. There’s a bit like that in Rupert Brooke, he thought; something about a girl quacking in a wood and the man wishing she were dead. This struck him as overemphasis, which he distrusted; he dismissed his nebulous memory of the verse, and turned to look at Christie beside him.
She stood gazing across the hollow into the sun-entangled leaves, her lips parted in delight. Her body was at rest, but there was a lightness of joy in it which made her weight seem not quite planted on the ground. Her hair made a central point in which all the lights and colours around them met and were resolved. As the pupils of her eyes contracted to focus the horizon, he could see the fine creases in the iris like pleats in brown-gold velvet. There was a faint gilded bloom on her cheek where it caught the light. Her hair, her eyes, the surface of her skin, seemed to be drinking light; he had a fancy that if he drew her into the shadow she would continue to glow. She turned and smiled at him in radiant, solemn thanks. Kit’s cloudy doubts dissolved. He took her hand and led her down the slope of the hollow. The leaves swished and rustled, and the bristly husks split under their feet, showing the polished nuts encased in silk like jewels.
The slopes of moss round the tree roots were already dry, in this sheltered place, from the rain of a few days before. They sat down looking towards the west, in a place where the leaves filtered the sun a little from their eyes. Christie took his hands, and said under her breath, “It’s so lovely, even if I’d been alone I’d have felt you were here.”
He laid his head on her knees. His heart seemed to be lighter than himself, and to weave subtly in the branch-patterns that the wind changed against the sky. All the mean expedients of their love seemed melted and washed away in a stream of blue and golden air, leaving only a clear sorrow that shone like a sword. He picked up one of the four-petalled husks from the ground, and, unconsciously stroking the silver-green lining, began to talk softly: he talked as he
had dreamed sometimes of talking to Janet before he grew accustomed to the thought that when the moment came the words would fail. A river of thought that had run underground for most of his life, the secrets of a solitary boyhood—he had been the only child of parents already middle-aged when he was born—flowed out into the sun. The bitterness of the world that he had seen in his calling and endured in his life was lifted, and his thoughts were coloured by a childlike rack of memory, distant and serene.
Christie listened, looking with her tender stoop and the smiling shadow in her cheek like one of Luini’s too-young Madonnas. Her silence fell round Kit like a protecting cloak. When he ceased to speak she put her hands on either side of his forehead, and lifted his face to hers.
“I love you so much,” she said.
The words, which she had murmured over him a thousand times, seemed to answer everything and include it. He laid his cheek against hers; the sunlight dazzled through the mingled gold of the leaves and of her hair. He smoothed out one of her curls against the dark green moss at the roots of the tree. All the warmth left in the late sun seemed to have sunk into her; and in her arms, after he had closed his eyes, he could see against his eyelids the colours of the sunset and the leaves.
A cool blue shadow, spreading outward from the western rampart, had widened from a crescent to a semilune. At last it touched them with its rim, and they saw that the gold on the tree trunks had deepened to copper, and every fallen leaf was throwing its shadow along the ground. Kit looked at his wristwatch. The invisible crystal that had enclosed them cracked. They kissed, stretched, laughed a little as they brushed leaves and fibres and beech-nuts from each other’s clothes, while past delight still hung, like a warm haze, between them and the chill of evening and of the parting to come.