by Mary Renault
“But, my dear …” As if she had been struggling in the sea and had stretched out a hand to him, Kit’s apartness, his resolute toleration melted. He bent towards her, with a sudden sharp pang of returning tenderness.
She looked quickly up at him, and took his arm tightly between her hands. “Don’t get tired of bothering with me, Kit. I know I say things sometimes, but I …” She turned away and finished, half to herself, “One has to have somebody.”
Kit took her on his knee and stroked her hair, taking care, because he had been well trained, not to disarrange it. “You don’t have to worry about that,” he said.
She rested in his arms for a few moments, unrelaxed, her eyes closed; then said quickly, “Why do you let me be so childish? And I’ve so much to do this evening.” She slipped away from him, and going over to her neat pretty little desk with its painted pen-tray and coloured sealing waxes; started to make out her library list.
When the telephone rang very early that morning, it roused Kit from a sleep so deep that he did not remember, in the first moment of waking, where he was; he imagined himself in his little room at the top of the hospital, called by the casualty-bell; and beneath his sleepiness and irritation had a feeling of well-being and of reluctance to become conscious, as one has at the end of a pleasant dream. Perhaps because of this, instead of putting on the light with the notebook and pencil beside it, he rolled over and reached for the instrument in the dark.
“Hullo,” he said sleepily.
“Is that Dr. Anderson?” The voice had a low pitch, not exploding in the ear like most women’s voices on the telephone. He disliked being wakened by a metallic squawk. Feeling pleasantly drowsy again, he got back under the clothes, propping the instrument on the pillow.
“Speaking,” he said, with a half-hearted effort to sound alert.
“I’m so sorry to wake you up.”
“It’s all right,” said Kit, jolted a little; the voice had neither the panic of the distraught relative nor the crisp impersonality of the nurse. “Who is it?”
“It’s about Miss Heath. Pedlow says you asked to be called if she seemed worse. I think she must be—she’s so out of breath, and her lips are blue.”
Kit heaved his legs over the edge of the bed, and, telephone in hand, felt for his slippers. He thought casually that the information was selective for a lay person’s. “Right. I’ll come straight over. Will you give her a dose of the special mixture at once, please?”
“The dark brown one? I’ve given her that. It seemed to do her good.”
“Splendid. Don’t worry. I’ll be there in eight or ten minutes.”
A quick dresser, he was there in seven. It had rained, and would rain again. A wet, furred moon filled in the spaces between the poplars with its thin wash of light. Leaves were still falling, and the trees showed now in patches the stripped outline of branch and twig against the sky. The lamp in the porch had been switched on; its yellow spread fuzzily, like a blot, in the mists of the night. A faint wind in the upper branches shook down heavy drops that flashed into suddenly extinguished diamonds as they passed the circle of the headlamps; he could hear the hiss of unseen water flung outward by the tires.
As he stepped out of the car the front door was opened by a girl in a Chinese-blue dressing gown of quilted silk. She looked smaller than she was in the high hall, with its stagheads ten feet up and still far from the ceiling, the towering carved coat-stand, the assegais and the palms; small but concentrated, the silk of her gown and dark red sheen of her hair focussing the light like spar in a cave. For a moment her unexpectedness linked itself in Kit’s mind with the colours of the night, and the place looked different, as if he were seeing it for the first time. Its dusty oddities drew together into a mood, a powerful strangeness; against this the present business of his mind passed like the first waking thoughts against the background of the last dream, scarcely aware of what had tinged them.
“How quick you’ve been.” She spoke with ordinary, pleasant courtesy; but her voice was hushed because of the stillness of the house, and the slight words took from this a reasonless significance.
“Has there been any change since you rang me?” he asked.
“Yes. She looks so much better that I’m ashamed to have got you out of bed.”
“Oh, that’s all right.” He scarcely knew that he had smiled as he spoke, so that her answering smile seemed sudden and surprising. Her face in repose was compact and grave; square-boned, but clear in outline; with eyes widely spaced, the brows slanting up a little. He had thought it unrevealing; but her smile was as open as a small boy’s, a personal enjoyment rather than a social gesture. Her eyelids looked drowsy, and her skin, unpowdered, had a childish bloom of sleep. She had on a white silk nightgown which showed a little at the hem of her wrap but was too low to show at the neck.
Kit said, “Well, I’d better take a look at her, anyway,” in his hospital voice. As she led the way to the door he felt he had been loitering a long time, though Pedlow would have delayed him minutes longer.
Miss Heath was awake. Propped in her high pillows—she had difficulty with her breathing if she lay flat—she had reached for the heavy Bible with its brass clasps and embossed black boards, which lived at night on the table beside her bed, and was reading the Second Epistle to the Corinthians. She was still panting with the effort of lifting it onto her knees. When Kit came in she marked the place carefully with her finger before she looked up.
“Why, is this Dr. Anderson? Christie, my dear, you don’t mean to tell me you’ve been sending for poor Dr. Anderson at this time of night? Why, it must be after twelve o’clock.” She moved about in the bed, trying to peer at the alabaster and gilt clock on the mantelshelf, which said fifteen minutes to four. The Bible slid sideways out of her lap, and Kit and the girl moved forward at the same moment to catch it. They got it between them just as it reached the edge of the bed; the girl’s fingers became caught for a moment between Kit’s hand and the book. He had forgotten about her when he entered the sick-room, and found himself caught back into a confusion of impressions, sharp, but too rapid for definition; a light warm scent of bath powder just too complex to be the scent of a flower; a smooth wrist, the bones scarcely traceable; the texture of the blue satin slipping against his sleeve. He relieved her of the book with the slight brusqueness he would have used to a probationer who had done something clumsy.
Miss Heath had clutched feebly at the thing as it fell; her breathing made a little fluttering sound in her throat.
“This is really too heavy for you, you know,” Kit said; and, over his shoulder to the girl, “Surely there must be a lighter one somewhere in the house?”
“You mustn’t take that away from me,” said Miss Heath. “That was my mother’s Bible.” For the first time Kit saw in her wide placid face a contraction of fear. “All her marks are in it; and all mine since I was confirmed. Yes, my dear mother gave me this Bible for my confirmation. I could never get used to another one. It wouldn’t read the same; though perhaps it’s wrong of me to say that.” Her lips were bluish grey and shrunken, crossed by fine deep furrows; her voice had the shake of old age. Kit reassured her, and took his stethoscope out.
The girl had walked away to the other end of the room, where she was almost drowned in the shadows. There was a faint clinking as she put something away, the medicine and glass perhaps, in a cupboard. Kit fumbled perfunctorily with the ribbon of Miss Heath’s bed-jacket and said, “Now we’ll just have this back,” in the manner accepted for recalling a nurse to the sense of her duties. The girl came back unhurriedly and bent over the bed. The stooping loosened the edges of her gown a little. He widened the gap in Miss Heath’s pale-blue crochet with a half-jerk of impatience, and laid the rim of the stethoscope against the limp old body underneath.
What he heard was very much what he had expected. The acute phase of the attack was over; the murmur of the regurgitating valves was a little, but not very much, more audible than before. Kit was
interested in hearts, and even played sometimes with a secret ambition to specialize. He moved the stethoscope about, unconsciously happy in a single-minded concentration.
“Now the back, please,” he said crisply. The girl took the weight of Miss Heath’s body, raising it forward from the pillows against her shoulder. She was close to Kit as he leaned forward to listen. The light warm scent of the powder reached him again; her hair too had a delicate aura, of itself or of some wash that she used, different but having somehow the same personality.
Miss Heath began to say something. Her shaking voice boomed and rumbled at him through the tube. “Do you know, Dr. Anderson—” Kit was filled with a violent unreasonable irritation.
“Just a moment, please,” he said sharply.
Miss Heath’s voice trailed away: magnified in his ears Kit could hear the startled acceleration of the labouring heart. He felt, without seeing, the quick movement of the girl’s head as she turned to look at him. He took the instrument away and pulled down the garments he had displaced.
“I’m so sorry, I was rather—” he began, just as Miss Heath said, “I beg your pardon, doctor.” When he smiled, Miss Heath always noticed his hair; her wandering memory supplied to it a background of flags, cheers and naval uniform. She forgave him, although she had been quite shocked at his speaking to her in that tone. He was always so courteous, so unlike the young people of to-day.
“Now there’s no occasion to worry,” he told her as he always told her at these times. “Everything’s settling down very nicely. Just try to get off to sleep, and send for me at once whenever you need me. But mind, no lifting heavy books about by yourself, or anything of that kind. Will you?”
Her old lama’s smile spread smoothly over Miss Heath’s grey face.
“I’m well cared for, doctor. I’m waited on far too much. I’ve my little Christie to look after me.” She laid a hand, with the skin like fine yellow crêpe, over the hand of the girl resting on the eiderdown beside her.
The door opened behind Kit; a smooth sound, for the old lock was the work of a leisured craftsman, beautifully made.
“I beg your pardon, madam. I thought I heard—”
It was Pedlow, though it took Kit a second or two to recognize her. Her tight rigid uniform had been so much a part of her that her emergence from it was slightly shocking, as if she had shed part of her skin. She had, in fact, in her haste left her teeth behind, and lisped a little. She was wearing a white calico nightgown, with a buttoned frill in front and a little round collar, and was holding bunched round her a dressing gown of dark crimson wool. Her faded hair, dragged into two thin plaits, showed the pink scalp between its strands. Kit had not noticed before that the puffs which supported her cap were false. He saw her for the first time as a woman, and felt a faint shock of repulsion; it was as if something that had lived for years underground had been disturbed into daylight.
The girl looked up at her, and smiled.
“It’s all right, Pedlow. Don’t worry. Dr. Anderson says Miss Heath will be all right now. You go back to bed again. There isn’t anything more to do.”
Pedlow stood still for a moment. Her lips, drawn back a little from her shrunken gums, showed a tiny black hole in the middle. Her eyes were like narrow black spaces too, as they shifted, travelling past Kit, to the girl. They passed over her face and body and the triangle of white skin where the lapels of her gown crossed, narrowing while the little gap of her mouth tightened.
Kit had, for a moment, a creepy feeling. His life had freed him almost entirely from squeamishness of the simple kind; but the very naturalness of this made him more sensitive to certain kinds of undertone. They showed up against the well disinfected surfaces of his mind, like a thumb-mark on clean enamel. Looking away, he occupied himself with coiling his stethoscope and returning it to his pocket. When he straightened himself, Pedlow had gone.
“Poor Pedlow,” said Miss Heath. “She’s always so distressed if she thinks I’ve been unwell. But she sleeps so soundly. She was always a poor riser as a young girl. I remember it well, and the trouble it gave my dear mother. Fancy her waking like that to-night. Now, Dr. Anderson, you’ll take something, won’t you, before you go? A glass of sherry? Christie, my dear—”
Kit thanked her, and declined. He was feeling tired, vaguely disturbed and irritable, and looked forward to making up the rest of his night’s sleep.
The girl saw him out. They crossed the antlered cavern of the hall in silence.
Under the clearer light of the porch her hair looked crisp and shining with life. It grew strongly back from her brows, falling in deep waves behind the temples and covering her neck. She had brushed it back without fastening of any kind, and a strand of it was beginning to stray down over her forehead. He wondered how she wore it during the day. At the inner door of the porch they both paused, in the kind of silence when people seek not for something to say but for some excuse to separate without saying anything. At last the girl said, “I hope this wasn’t too unnecessary.”
“Certainly not.” He spoke with a needless emphasis, as if she had said something highly controversial. “If she has similar symptoms again, please send for me immediately.” There was another pause. Kit said, “Well—,” made a movement to the door and stopped again. “Are you a relative of Miss Heath’s?” he asked.
“I’m her great-niece.” She showed no disposition to elaborate this. Kit, with his hand on the door, said, “I’m afraid this is rather anxious work for you. You realize, of course—”
“Of course,” she said. “That’s why I had to come.” She spoke impersonally, as if her choice had not been exercised.
“I hope you get proper rest,” said Kit a little abruptly. “Where do you … how do you manage about waking up?”
“I sleep in the old drawing room, on the other side of the hall.” She added, like an afterthought, “There’s a bell fixed up from her room to mine. The end’s fixed to her bed.”
“Well, that sounds effective. … Don’t you find it rather eerie? It’s a very large room.” Once or twice, on early visits, he had been put to wait there.
“No. I like it.” Her face lightened with one of its sudden simplicities of enjoyment. “I can have the big doors open straight on to the garden.”
Kit had been brought up by a careful mother and wife. He started to say, “But some one might get in,” and stopped in the middle. He began to talk quickly and clearly, addressing himself chiefly to the stag’s head on the wall behind her left shoulder. “It’s a responsibility that should really be taken by a trained nurse. You mustn’t think I don’t fully appreciate that. But there were objections, as you know, and it was difficult to insist. One has to avoid any possibility of shock, or of inducing symptoms. You see, the heart is to a great extent under nervous control, and if the patient is led to anticipate—”
“Yes,” she said. “I see.”
Kit’s eyes returned to hers, which were smiling. He had not known till then that he was blushing, transparently, as fair people do, to the roots of his hair. It had been a trouble to him at school, but it was ten years since he had grown out of it. Her small, unconscious smile, revealing it to him, made him feel suddenly and blazingly angry; with his own sensations, the night, the house; with Miss Heath; with her.
“I’ll look in some time to-morrow,” he said, “if I can manage it. I shall be busy. Send for me if you think it necessary. Good night.”
He heard her answer and thank him as he swung through the outer door to his car.
The drive, planned for the sweep of broughams and victorias, embraced three sides of the house with its curve. As he rounded the apex of the bend Kit turned his head: a glimmering space of lawn, pale with dew and the long straight strands of low-lying mist, ended in the deep windows of the drawing room and the blank gap of its open doors. In a top-floor room a thin wedge of light divided the edges of the curtains; Pedlow, he supposed, performing whatever her preparations for bed might be. Poor old Pedlow, he thoug
ht; she’d have a fit if she knew those doors were left open all night. There was a jar as one of his front wheels mounted the turf beside the drive. Kit swore, and returned his eye to the road.
He put the car away, and crossed the garden to the house. It still wanted an hour to daybreak, but the darkness had the unreal, transitory feel of morning. A light wind was coming up; blown wet leaves struck his face, and the hidden spaces were full of the whisper and soft impact of their fall.
He crossed the landing quietly; but just as he reached his room he heard the click of a switch, and saw the line of light show sharply under Janet’s door. He stood still for a moment with his hand on the knob of his own. As he passed on he reflected suddenly that only a few months, perhaps weeks, ago, if this had happened, he would have stood irresolute on the landing, wondering if he might knock at her door, whether she would be pleased to see him or would make him feel that his coming had been an intrusion. He knew how glad he was that it had all ended. Never again, he thought.
It surprised him to find his bed scarcely cold; he seemed separated from the moment of waking by many hours. He thrust his head down into the pillow to shut out the noise of the wind; it was rising and beginning to whine among the chimney-stacks. She won’t be able to keep those great doors open, he thought, on a night like this. For a moment before he slept he saw her throwing back the coverings of the bed and moving like a swimmer through the stream of the wind, her hair lifted, gasping and laughing at the sweep of it past her sides.
CHAPTER 3
A FEW MORNINGS LATER, Janet looked up from a letter at breakfast and said, “What conference is it that’s being held here next week?”
“None that I know of. Nothing medical, anyway.”
“Peggy Leach says she’s coming over for it, and wants to know if we can put her up.”
