by Ursula Bloom
‘I’ll be all right.’
They tottered up Strada Reale and it was as much as Dinah could do to reach her own door opened by Ginni.
‘You see after your mistress. See that she goes straight to bed, and keeps her feet up,’ insisted Mrs. James, now convinced that this mysterious complaint was one of those which entailed the frequent putting-up of the feet!
The door closed on her.
Clinging to Ginni, Dinah was helped to her bedroom, and slipped into bed with the blinds drawn on the glare of the day.
‘You’ll be all right,’ said Ginni comfortingly; ‘it makes the English ladies like this. It is Mediterranean fever.’
‘I’ll be all right,’ she said.
Much later she heard the sound of Piers’ key in the door, a muffled word with Ginni who had evidently interrupted him in the hall, and then his sudden appearance in the bedroom.
‘Darling, you aren’t ill?’
‘I think it’s Mediterranean fever.’
‘Good God, it can’t be! People don’t have that in these enlightened days.’
‘Oh,’ and she realised that her voice was sounding weak and very far away.
He said, ‘I’ll send for Lewis. He is the man to get.’
‘Mrs. James says that he is always drunk.’
‘That woman ought to be hung, drawn and quartered. She doesn’t know anything about it at all. Of course he isn’t always drunk, he is an absolute sportsman. I’ll get him round. Don’t you worry, my pretty, I’ll see after you and have you right in two shakes.’ Off he went to telephone.
She felt helpless and afraid. Max had always been reassuring, he had long experience of the difficulties and predicaments of life, so that she could be sure of leaning on him. She could not lean in the same way on Piers, because the youth that had until this moment been such an attraction now alarmed her. He seemed haphazard. He came in again to say eagerly that old Lewis was ‘trotting along for a gin’. She must not be narrow-minded and think that he drank if he had a gin, because he really was a very decent fellow. She said little, she felt too ill.
Dr. Lewis when he did arrive was small and flyblown. He was in the fifties, putting on weight and shedding hair. He had come to Malta not from any actual wish but because he had had an unhealthy accident in a South-west London practice. He had never been clever, but he had had certain ambitions, which long since were blasted. The nasty accident had been the final blow to an unpromising career, and he had come out to Malta with a few cheap instruments, and the hope that there would not be too keen competition. His aspirations in this quarter were fulfilled. The average ship’s doctor was only used to the most ordinary male complaints, anything interesting was popped immediately into Bighi hospital; the patients who fell into his hands suffered such simple maladies that there was never a chance for wrong diagnosis. He did not understand women and had long ago forgotten anything he had ever known about treating them. The result of this was that officers’ wives were rationed out to Dr. Lewis or Mr. Simkins, and suffered duly at their hands.
There had been a time when Dr. Lewis was interested in his job, but gradually he had nursed a grudge against life which had let him down so badly. He could never forgive that unhealthy accident which had blighted his career. When he had first got to Malta he had suffered from the climatic change, and the regrets that the new beginning was really the grave of the old ambitions. He had worked hard, taken to a free and easy life, and the Plymouth gin offered by grateful husbands for services rendered. The gin habit grew, and extended; what did it matter? he asked himself. He knew that he drank too much but why not?
He came into Dinah’s room in a gay mood, because he was going to an excellent dinner party to-night, given as a token of esteem for extracting a fish bone from the throat of an Admiral’s wife. He was in fine fettle. Dinah disliked his gaiety and the fact that he thought all this was so amusing, when she felt too ill to be amused.
‘A touch of the old fever,’ said he brightly, as though that were nothing. ‘Feel like death, but are nowhere near it,’ and laughed loudly at the joke.
She lay very still, her hand groping for Piers. He did not share her anxiety. Piers was sure that he had got a good doctor here, and although he might appear a rum cove, he would put things to rights.
Max would have understood. Max would never have left her to the mercy of this awful old man with the dirty hands and the thinning hair. He drank. Although Dinah held no brief for Mrs. James, it was quite obvious that Dr. Lewis did drink.
He and Piers clamped out of the room together and left her; she heard the chink of glasses, and Ginni going to and fro. If only she had not felt so ill she would have sent for Piers to come to speak to her, but she felt horrible. It seemed an eternity that she lay there, then the front door closed, and she heard Piers coming back into the room and sitting down beside her.
‘He isn’t such a bad old stick; takes some getting used to, but all right really. He is sending you some stuff round, and he says you’ll be all right in a day or two. Take things easily and don’t get too worried.’
‘I’ll be all right,’ she agreed weakly.
‘You’ve been crying?’
‘I’m sorry.’
He laid his head beside her on the pillow, it smelt sweetly of the oil that he put on his hair, and she liked feeling him close to her like this. ‘My pretty, I do love you so. I want to make you wonderfully happy and it is rotten luck that you should get ill like this the moment you get here. Don’t cry, please don’t cry.’
She fell asleep in his arms, and woke up much later when the sun had set over the clover fields, and there was a chilliness in the air. She asked if her medicine had come. It hadn’t.
‘Oughtn’t I to be having some of it?’ she asked, because she was anxious to start the work of getting better.
Later still, Piers said he would go round to the doctor’s flat and fetch it. He went off. The flat was at the top of an unpromising building with over seventy steps up to it. He dared bet that flight was a bit of a trial last thing at night for the old boy when he wasn’t feeling too good.
Dr. Lewis had gone out to the excellent dinner party. No, said the manservant, he had not left any message, and there was no bottle of medicine. It was quite plain that he had forgotten all about it.
‘Blast the fellow,’ said Piers as he clanked home, his hands dug deeply into his monkey jacket pockets. He did not know what to do next. For the first time since this had happened, he was becoming really anxious about Dinah.
6
Dinah had been in Malta for six months now.
Three of those months had been spent lying in that bedroom with the jade green curtains, feeling so ill that she believed she never wanted to get up again. Days and nights had merged and dimmed. Fatigue. Pain. Listlessness. The desperate weariness which beset her like old age was something that she could not thrust from her.
Ginni continued the housekeeping and did well by it, making large profits over the marketing which she immediately denied when confronted. She was always amiable and bright, and so considerate that Dinah gave up all idea of arguing, and finally resigned herself to the fact that as she had got to be done one way or the other, it was better to be done by a smiling face than by a sour one.
Ginni worked gladly. She worked quite well; although her sweeping and dusting were jokes, she cooked passably, and shopped ably. She never asked to go out save when there was a festa or a church festival of some kind, and she felt that her soul needed some attention. She was engaged in no romantic affair, and appeared totally uninterested in family ties. Her brothers and sisters were legion and she and her mother got on badly, so she was content to stay where she was and did not ask favours.
In and out of the house pottered Dr. Lewis, occasionally in a bad mood when it was the morning after the night before, but at other times over-bright. Dinah did not know which mood she disliked the more. When he was gay he chose to treat her as a naughty child who was being merely pervers
e in that she would not yield to treatment but deliberately stayed ill. When he was in a less pleasant mood, he railed, taking it as a personal insult that he did not find her rapidly recovering.
He ran the full gamut of the pharmacopoeia, with little success, so fell back upon the indisputable diagnosis of the frustrated medical man and decided that it was a bad case of nerves. Meanwhile Nature, growing tired of his philanderings, did the work for him, and very slowly Dinah showed signs of recovery. She managed at last to crawl to a sofa where she lay, looking painfully thinner, and watching Sliema harbour with the ferry-boat service running to and fro, and the thin spit of land beyond, with the glitteringly white houses, and the few palms. She recognised now that the sofa was the first step to recovery.
Mrs. James came in and out.
She could not be persuaded to keep away, even though Dinah disliked her very much, and sometimes showed it. Piers looked upon her as some sort of pest associated with the sandfly, the mosquito and the bug, which permeated almost every home in Malta. It was difficult for him, because the padre was a decent bloke, and Piers had to meet him most days, therefore he could not openly flout his wife. So he accepted Mrs. James as one accepts most of the Maltese pests, and tried to put a good face on it.
Flowers were sent in by well-wishers, but the numbers decreased because Dinah’s illness exceeded the time limit of the best taste, and one could not be sending flowers for ever. One day the Commander’s wife came to call. She was a pleasant, chatty little woman, who loved the life in Malta, and thought that it must be too frightful for anybody to be laid low when there was so much going on. She appeared with an armful of pink roses, and they had almost died before she left, for in this island the flowers would not last.
But her conversation made Dinah think. She said to Piers, ‘You know you are missing an awful lot because I’m ill. Mrs. Pelham tells me that there is so much going on, and I do think you ought to leave me sometimes and join in. It makes me feel dreadful to deprive you of all your fun just because I’m ill.’
‘I can’t very well leave you,’ he said, and then as suddenly recalled an incident. ‘There is a dance on board on Saturday, and I suppose I ought really to go to that. The old man was fussy about the chaps turning up.’
‘Of course you must go.’
It was curious that, when he actually went, she hated it, yet she had been the one who had suggested it. It was a warm Maltese night, with that magnified moon above, and the flower scent in the courtyard. One of those romantic nights which never come to England, and the beauty made her feel more dismally alone. Ginni had drawn her sofa to the window, and there before it lay the island, with its square fields, and its dusty fig trees, grown lovely by reason of the dimness, and the stars like jewels in a woman’s hair.
Ginni had worked hard to-day because Dinah’s peculiar mosquito bites had been diagnosed as bugs, and it was discovered that the flat was swarming with them! Dinah had been horrified, but Ginni had accepted it calmly, and had appeared with a Flit outfit and would have left it at that. She had been grieved that Dinah could take a few bugs so hardly. A thorough spring cleaning seemed overdoing things. Now she had finished, and had gone out to a festa which necessitated her best faldetta.
Every little while Dinah could hear the crack of the fireworks, and see rockets breaking in the sky. It must be a very special festa.
It was funny that she should be thinking of Max. He would not have left her, because all he asked of life was that tender adoration which would give everything to the woman he loved, even his life. She wished that she did not keep on thinking of him so yearningly. Here, in this quiet room, with only the sound of the goat bells, and the goat-herds, and the sight of the banana tree in the light wind which blew across the island like a first kiss, she knew that the ghost of an old man walked. Piers might not be conscious of it, and possibly it was her illness that had sharpened her own senses so that she felt more deeply and was more imaginative.
Whatever the world chose to say about it, Max had made the great sacrifice. They could never blind her to that. He had given his life so that she might be happy, and he ought not to have died.
Piers came home at dawn and found that she had fallen asleep on the sofa, and lay there, with the wind blowing in on her, looking like a peaceful child. He himself was a little ‘on’, and in this mood was romantically loving. He carried her into her own room in his arms.
‘Growing heavier too, my pretty,’ he said, ‘that’s something to be proud of! You’ll be dancing all night with me soon. Those will be times, won’t they?’
7
The summer had come and had gone again.
The ships had trailed out of the Grand Harbour, had visited the Greek islands, and had come back with tired stories of their barrenness, their tiresomeness, and a definite inhibition of summer cruises. Still Dinah was chained to the sofa, though now, when the heat of the day was spent, she pottered out into the Hastings Gardens on Piers’ arm. Gradually she was throwing off the malady which had attacked her, but she was very weak and found life difficult, because the climate took so much out of her.
The heat had been exhausting, and now, with the early autumn that she had looked forward to, she found that it was oppressive because the sirocco returned.
‘But I’m better, Piers.’
‘You’re getting on grandly.’
They drove round the island. To Marfa, with its single house which is hotel and post office and police station in one, surrounded by uncompromising prickly pears. To the gardens of San Antonio, where she sat in the sunshine, and ate the oranges which Piers picked from the trees.
Of course she would get better. And, when she got better, she would be rid of the ghost of an old man who moved in and out of the flat, lurking nervously, anxious to pat her hand, to touch her, and to sympathise on those evenings when Piers went out to entertainments.
Of course she couldn’t blame Piers, in fact she had been the one who had suggested it originally. He was too young to be chained to an invalid. She saw now that she herself was old in her ways, because Max had formed her thoughts along his lines, and very often she saw life only from his angle. She would change later on, but for the time being she was quite a middle-aged woman, and what was more, a prude.
‘I’ve married an old maid,’ Piers would say laughing when she shrank from some story he brought back of the behaviour at the Sliema club.
‘I’ll learn in time.’
‘I can’t think what dear old Max taught you.’
She could not tell him. None of this gay crowd would understand those quiet evenings when she and Max had sat reading, when they had been so happy in being together. Loving and being in love were not the same thing.
‘We were content. I suppose that was it.’
‘You must have been damned dull!’
‘I wasn’t, really I wasn’t.’
‘You get well quickly and I’ll show you life. There is so much to be learnt. Hurry up and get well, darling.’
‘Of course I will.’
It was October when she went to the Sliema club dance. She felt much better, but tired easily, and knew that she was a long way from being herself yet.
‘Nerves, my dear lady,’ said Dr. Lewis. When he failed, it must be nerves; and, as every medical man will tell you, they are most difficult to cure in an imaginative woman. This girl had lost her first husband in funny circumstances, very funny circumstances. He had heard it from a chap in Floriana. An old man who had shot himself, or something; not that Dr. Lewis talked scandal, as he was always telling people! Day after day he pottered into Marich’s, of whom he was a leading customer; there he would take some relaxation from the arduous rounds of his profession, and, sitting back, chatter of his patients in a manner that would have shocked the B.M.A., but which gave infinite satisfaction to his listeners.
Dr. Lewis washed his hands of Dinah, prescribed a good red wine because she looked so bloodless, and suggested that she took a little more intere
st in life. She must force herself to go to places like other people; the dance at Sliema would rouse her out of herself and do her a lot of good, said he.
Dinah had a new frock sent out from England; she was still too thin to wear her old ones with impunity, and she did not want to go looking like the skeleton at the feast. Aunt Lydia chose it for her. Aunt Lydia had been shocked by this long illness, and had wanted to come out to mother Dinah, but hardly liked leaving Kenneth. He was having one of his bouts, and she was putting more and more water into the decanter.
Dinah was looking forward to the dance, because it would be her debut into the social life of the island. She had become ill so soon after her arrival at the flat that she had never yet participated in any of the gaiety.
‘Will I do?’ she asked Piers.
Aunt Lydia had done well by the frock, white, with a thin gold stripe, flinging outwards in a graceful crinoline, and curving in to the waist.
‘You’re looking a dream!’ said Piers, ‘you ought always to wear white.’
‘I was thinking it might be a mistake, because people may suppose that it is my wedding dress dished up.’
‘But they must know that you married me in grey! Surely they won’t think that you kept your other wedding dress!’
‘Please, Piers, don’t!’ She did not know why, but she had recently become very squeamish over Max.
‘Sorry, darling.’ There was something about her that Piers simply could not understand. She had never been in love with poor old Max, and anyway he was dead now. Although it had been sudden, she must have known that in any case she would outlive him in the ordinary course of nature. Piers had liked Max, had thought that he was a jolly good sort and all that kind of thing, but after all being a jolly good sort isn’t everything.
Dinah stood there fastening the satin sash, fixing the bodice and putting a camellia in her hair. ‘I think I ought to put on some colour?’ she suggested.
