by Nina Bawden
He drank a lot of wine, and when dinner was over and we went into the drawing-room, leaving Brigid to get the coffee, his face was flushed and his speech slurred. He stood with his back to the fire, watching me with his shy, uneasy eyes. Then he coughed artificially, and said:
“I say, Paul, old man. I’m awfully sorry and all that. Venetia meant an awful lot to you, didn’t she?”
He hesitated, blushed an even deeper red, and came over to the sofa holding out his hand. I got up, and solemnly, absurdly, we shook hands. It was ridiculous, laughable, and yet somehow I didn’t want to laugh. At that moment I found Henry oddly likeable; for the first time, now that Venetia was dead, I did not hate him. I had always despised his kind; the middle-aged public schoolboy, inarticulate, yet bursting with sentimentality. I did not even despise him now.
Henry put his hands in his pockets and rocked backwards and forwards on his feet, his eyes on the hearthrug. At last he said, “Paul, old chap, this isn’t easy. I feel pretty frightful. About Venetia. Not just about her dying, though that’s bad enough, but about everything. I … I didn’t make her happy, you know.”
I said, “That wasn’t all your fault.”
I don’t think he heard me. “I wasn’t good enough for her,” he said. “She was so different from me. I couldn’t keep up with her. She was clever, you know, not like me. And fine … I can’t express what I mean … never was any good at that sort of thing. I loved her the first day I saw her … didn’t stop to think … better if I had. Only I didn’t feel the way a man usually feels when he wants to get married. Didn’t think of her like that … damn it … I was too scared to kiss her. I wanted to make her happy, but I didn’t make much of a job of it. I don’t know quite what made me fall for her; I know she was jolly good-looking, but it wasn’t that. Made me want to read poetry, the sort of stuff I hadn’t touched since I was at school. Tennyson and the rest of’em.” He gave a self-conscious grin. “There was a bit I remember that took my fancy. Something like this. ‘The blessed Damozel leant out from the gold bar of Heaven.’ That’s what I felt about her, only when we got married it all went wrong, somehow. My fault, too. You know all about it, I expect. Damned awkward business to talk about. Especially to Venetia. And as things went on it got worse and worse. I felt such a swine all the time. You do see, old man, don’t you?” He looked straight at me with bright, miserable eyes.
“Yes,” I said. Oddly enough, I did see.
I had been abroad on a job when Venetia had first met Henry. It was at the end of the war, just after her twentieth birthday. He had been stationed near the village where Venetia was staying with her stepmother and Brigid and the baby Sebastian. He was waiting to be demobbed.
Venetia wrote to me quite often. I have all her letters still. At twenty she was beautiful, and plenty of men had been in love with her. They were divided, she wrote to me, into two quite distinct groups, the idealistic and the peculiar. The peculiar ones thought a woman with one leg might be rather exciting, and the others worshipped her, seeing her with her deformity and her extraordinary beauty as a princesse lointaine. Henry was one of the idealistic ones.
She did not mention Henry to me until a little while before the marriage. Perhaps she had been afraid of what I would do.
She wrote: “I’m being a fool, Paul. A quite incredible fool. I don’t know myself any longer. You will despise me, I know, for falling in love with a ruddy face and a stupid expression. I despise myself. I’m a bit frightened, too, Paul. He treats me as if I were going to break if he touched me; sometimes he behaves as though I were a favourite horse with a broken leg. He hasn’t even kissed me, and we are going to be married tomorrow. I wish you were here, Paul. I’m not complete without you. I can’t think straight. I lie awake at night and long for you to be here.”
She had never written to me like that before. I was frightened and angry and jealous. I had never thought of Venetia marrying, although there was no reason why she should not do so. By the time I got the letter they were already married and there was nothing I could do. I wrote her a bitter, angry letter, and tore it up.
When I got back to England Henry had not been demobbed, but posted. Venetia would not see me; she had not, they said, seen anyone since Henry had left. They had taken her meals to her room and she had not touched them. I stood outside her door and bullied her; she shouted at me to go away in the same voice that had frightened her stepmother when she, Venetia, was fourteen, and had struggled alone in the bathroom with the pain and the humiliation of a leg that had to be fastened to her body with a strap.
She opened the door at last, and I was shocked by how white she was, and by the thinness of her clenched hands as she stood by the window and looked out at the garden where the apple trees were in bloom. There was shame and anguish in her face.
She told me about it and it was a simple story. She had fallen in love with Henry; she had known it was foolish and that he wasn’t her kind. We had always thought the English landed gentry very funny, without having met any of them. Venetia had been born in a row of small suburban houses; her father had been the clever child of a grocer who had become a professor of economics at London University and had never had the time or the inclination to correct his cockney accent. Her mother had been an Irish dancer in a music-hall; she had died when Venetia was eight. Her father had married again; his second wife was the widow of a bank manager, fat and kind and stupid. Venetia’s only friends had been the children at her school; girls who were destined to be office girls and typists and council school teachers. Venetia hated them because they were stupid, she said, and dull, and because they never wanted to be anything but mediocre. She had a clear, quick brain, and if she had been older she might have been happy with her father’s university friends; but the war, and then her father’s early death, isolated her from them. When her father had died her stepmother had taken her out of London to a Dorset town. There, for the first time, she met the kind of people who have private incomes and who lived, sometimes a little precariously, and in wartime not very comfortably, in big old houses with acres of land. People who hunted and entertained and had their photographs in The Tatler.
Venetia disliked most of them, but she did not show it. There was too much calculating Irish blood in her. She might not like these people, but they were better than the bank clerks, the spotty young men in the suburb where she had been born. She set herself out to charm the county gentry and she succeeded. She was passionate, sensual and clever; she knew what she wanted, and what she wanted most of all was not to go back to the life she had lived before the war.
I believe that she was, for a short time, honestly in love with Henry, but that she fell in love with him at a time when her stepmother was joyfully planning to return to the cosy comfort of their suburban villa is inescapable.
He adored her. That his adoration was a mixture of romantic idealism and frank sentimentality (the kind that takes in stray dogs and cats and keeps horses long after their usefulness is past, rather than send them to the knackers) was the cause of the disaster.
They were married, and they drove to the coast for their honeymoon. For a few hours Venetia was happy. Socially, financially, she was safe for the rest of her life; the man she had married might not be over-intelligent, but he was reasonably attractive. She watched him as he drove. The sun shone on his fair moustache and his hands on the wheel were firm and capable.
He had booked two rooms at their hotel. She thought it was rather quaint of him. But when they went to bed he kissed her chastely on her forehead and said good night.
Her face was pale when she told me.
She said, “Paul, I have never been so ashamed. When I tried to talk to him about it, he blushed and stammered and tried to change the subject. I made him kiss me, I tried to make him see that I wasn’t really any different from other women. He shrank away from me as though I were unclean. He said he’d put me on a pedestal … that he didn’t think of me ‘that way.’ He was afraid of me, Paul. Afrai
d, because I only had one leg. The thought of sleeping with me was impossible. I was a cripple. I wasn’t to live like other women. I was just to be beautiful … and brave. I disgusted him. Oh, Paul … Paul …”
I had never seen her cry before. I hated Henry then as I had never hated anyone. I had hated him ever since. Until now. And now I felt too tired to hate anyone. And too alone.
I said, “You weren’t in love with her lately, were you?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t want not to be,” he said unhappily. “I’d been such a swine to her.”
“You couldn’t help it,” I said wearily. “You can’t go on being in love with people when you feel you’re letting them down all the time. It puts you at such a disadvantage with them.”
I don’t think he got that. He looked puzzled and anxious. I gave it up.
“Anyway,” I said, “you’re in love with Brigid, now, aren’t you?”
He sat down heavily on the sofa and put his head in his hands.
“Oh, God,” he said.
“You haven’t anything to worry about,” I said. “You can marry her now.”
He looked up at me as though I’d stuck a knife into his ribs. “I feel as if I’d killed her,” he said.
“You must admit,” I said, “that it has turned out very nicely for you.”
I don’t know why I baited him. I hadn’t meant to. He would never have left Venetia. He would have shut his mouth and his heart and borne his unhappiness to the end of his days rather than leave her. He would feel that it would be letting her down. It is, I am told, the public school spirit. I wouldn’t have felt like that, but then I didn’t go to a public school.
He said dully, “We can never get married now, Brigid and I.”
I sat upright. “Why the hell not?” I said.
“Yes,” said Brigid from the doorway, “why not?”
I don’t know how long she had been standing there. She had a tray with the coffee things on it in her hand. She came into the room and set the tray down on a table. Her eyes were bright and her face was red.
“Why shouldn’t we get married, Paul?” she said.
Neither Henry nor I said anything. We just watched her like a pair of oafs while she poured out the coffee and handed us our cups. I should think that it was the first time in her life that Brigid had kept two men so silent.
She said, “Paul, I’d like a cigarette.” I handed her the box and Henry got up clumsily, falling over himself to light it for her. She puffed at it slowly, holding it awkwardly. Then she said:
“I’m going to marry him, Paul. Whatever you do, however much you torment him. Venetia is dead. She can’t make either of us unhappy any more. She owes us both a little happiness.”
“I say, old girl, go easy,” said Henry.
She gave him a quick, tender smile.
“All right, Henry,” she said. “I won’t say much. But she didn’t make you very happy, did she? She made you think it was all your fault, but it wasn’t. It was hers. And she made me unhappy too. I didn’t want to marry Tony. But I would have done anything, just then, to get away from Venetia. I wasn’t clever enough to earn enough money to be able to live away from home. So I married Tony instead. I think we owe it to ourselves to get married and be happy.”
“You sound like a cheap magazine,” I said. “But I didn’t intend to stop you getting married.”
She looked at me oddly. “Didn’t you, Paul? Well, then, you’ll congratulate us, I’m sure.”
“You’ll have to get a divorce first,” I said.
“There won’t be any difficulty about that,” she said serenely. She stubbed out her cigarette and started to drink her coffee. She looked complacent and it angered me.
I got up. “I’m going to bed,” I said. They were going to be happy, those two, and just at that moment I couldn’t stand the idea of happiness.
Dorry was standing at the head of the stairs. I liked Dorry. She was a flat-faced, pleasant woman with a thick comfortable body. I could understand why Sebastian found her so comforting. She was looking worried. She said rather breathlessly:
“Oh, sir, I don’t like to trouble you, but would you come and look at Master Sebastian? I don’t like the look of him, not at all. I was just going to tell his mother, only it’s rather difficult, sir, that it is.”
She looked embarrassed. I wondered what could be wrong with Sebastian that made it difficult to tell his mother.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“He’s not been well, sir,” she said. “Sort of funny he was all day. He was in the kitchen with me most of the time. His mother wanted him kept out of the way while they were looking for poor Mrs. Sykes. He seemed sort of sleepy like, he was that good all day you wouldn’t have known him. And then, when he was going to bed he slipped off while I was running his bath and I found him in your bedroom drinking something out of a little flask by your bed. I told him he shouldn’t be a naughty boy and interfere with other people’s things, but he said you gave him a drink out of the little flask last night and it put him to sleep, and he wanted to go to sleep again to-night so he thought he’d have another drink. You mustn’t think badly of him, sir. He’s a funny little boy, but as innocent as a lamb really. I got such a shock when I found what was in the flask. It was brandy, sir, though I’ll swear he didn’t know it. I got him into bed and he went off to sleep straight away. I was so afraid his mother would come and look at him because she’d have smelt it on his breath. I thought he was drunk, so when I went in after he was asleep and thought he looked a bit funny I decided not to say anything. Master Henry’s a bit strict with him on account of having been brought up strict himself. And now he looks so funny I’m real frightened, and I do wish you’d take a look at him to ease my mind.”
She said all this in a whisper so that they couldn’t hear her in the drawing-room. I thought that if Sebastian was ill Brigid should really be told, but I decided that I might as well have a look at the boy first.
Sebastian’s room was small and crammed with heavy furniture that had been put there to get it out of the way. I squeezed my way between a monster wardrobe and the narrow bed, and looked down at the child.
He was breathing much too lightly. His face was white as stone and his mouth was cyanosed. His arms lay outside the cover and I picked up one skinny wrist and felt the pulse. It was faltering and shallow. I felt panic in my heart.
I dropped his wrist and turned to Dorry. She was looking at the boy with an anguished face, wringing her hands. I had never seen anyone wring their hands before.
“Where is the telephone?” I said.
“Down in the study, sir,” she said. “Do you think there’s anything wrong apart from the drink, sir?”
I said, “Yes, I’m afraid so,” and pushed my way out of the room. She followed me to the telephone and told me the doctor’s number. I dialled the operator and waited, listening to the steady burring at the other end and cursing the slowness of the exchange. It seemed an eternity before a sleepy male voice answered. Then the phone rang in the doctor’s house and they said that the doctor was out on a confinement case. A farm up in the hills. No, there was no telephone. Was it an urgent matter? I said it was urgent. There was a whispered conversation at the other end of the telephone and then they said that Dr. Carter might oblige; he was retired and he lived in the village, but he would most likely come in an emergency. If not, they would let the doctor know the moment he came in.
Dr. Carter was in. He sounded old and very tired, and my heart sank. But he listened to what I told him and he said he would come.
I put down the telephone and ran upstairs to my bedroom to look for my brandy flask. I had left it on the table by the bed and it was still in the same place, as though Dorry had put it back carefully, hoping I wouldn’t notice that it had been moved. I unfastened the top and sniffed at it. It smelt like brandy. There wasn’t much left in it; it looked as though Sebastian had taken a pretty good swig. Then I remembered how quickly he had g
one to sleep the night before after I had given him a very little dose. I put the flask down and thought for a moment.
I went to Sebastian’s room. He was lying very still and breathing so lightly that for a moment I thought he wasn’t breathing at all. His hand was cold.
Brigid came in, looked at the bed and put her hand to her mouth. “Paul,” she said, “what’s the matter? What’s happened? Dorry says you’ve called the doctor.”
“Yes,” I said, and then, because I was suddenly very angry, “You haven’t been bothering much about him lately, have you?”
“Oh, Paul,” she said, and then she flung herself on the bed, crying, the tears running down her face.
“Sebastian,” she said. “Wake up, darling. It’s Mummy, Mummy. Wake up, my precious, my darling…”
“That won’t do him any good,” I said. “For God’s sake pull yourself together. If you want to help you’d better get some hot water bottles. And get them quickly.”
She gave a sort of sobbing moan and got up from the bed. She caught hold of the lapels of my coat with plump, clutching hands.
She said, “Oh, Paul, he’s going to die, isn’t he? What have I done?”
I don’t think she knew what she was saying. And I didn’t have time, either, to wonder what she meant, because just then I heard a car outside, and Henry’s voice as he opened the door.
Dr. Carter was an old man, and his hands were trembly. But he knew his job. Dorry and I helped him and it wasn’t very pleasant. He washed out the child’s stomach and then he gave him an injection of something … strychnine, I think. Sebastian didn’t seem much better and Dorry and I gave him artificial respiration in turns until his breath came quicker and deeper and his face lost that dreadful grey look. We left him with Dorry on guard beside his bed.
