Kind Are Her Answers: A Novel

by Mary Renault

  The truth, she thought—and the truth should be faced however unwillingly—was that Kit was growing hard. She had felt this several times lately, though never so strongly as to-night. To-night for the first time he had been cold to her. It was the only word. She had met him, as she always tried to, with sympathy and understanding; one must make allowances for men, whose standards were necessarily so different from one’s own; and he had been utterly unresponsive, snubbing her with cold kindness. She asked so little, she thought; only some affection and warmth, and to know that he minded about her. He had always showed that he minded, till to-night.

  For Kit to grow hard seemed so wrong. It didn’t suit him. He was egotistic, of course, as all men were: it was something to do with sex that made them so, and women, being more perceptive, learned to make sacrifices quietly and to expect no thanks. But he had never been hard. That was what she had liked about him when they first met, a freshness, something romantic and unspoiled. He had had such beautiful thoughts about her. She had been careful of his illusions, taking pains always to be gracious in his presence, to be soignée, avoiding anything undisciplined or crude. But it had gone for nothing. Well, men were more physical; one learned not to expect too much.

  She put out the light again, but began to be sure now that she would not sleep. She wondered whether to go across to his room and ask him to give her something from the dispensary after all. Perhaps he would guess then that he had upset her, without being told. He would be in bed, she supposed, by now. She had a sudden vivid picture of him, switching on the light half in his sleep as he did when a night call came, and sitting up with his fair hair silkily tangled and his pyjamas falling off—he was not an obviously restless sleeper, but always contrived partly to detach himself from his clothes. She remembered how his grey eyes darkened with sleep; his brows and lashes were a kind of tarnished-gilt colour, almost brown and did not disappear against his skin like those of most fair men. She had noticed them again to-night, while he was writing out the name of the book. Reaching again for the lightswitch she picked up the pad and looked at it; large round letters, not like his, as if he had been writing for a child. But she had always complained about his writing; illegibility, she maintained, was a form of bad manners.

  It would be tragic, she thought, for Kit to become coarsened and spoiled, as, if she lost her influence on him, he might. This was the first time she had thought explicitly that she might not hold him; he had always been so unalienably there. But to-night there had been a moment as he stood over her—tall, flexible like a boy with the kind of grace that is just over the border from awkwardness, smelling familiarly of Pears soap and toothpaste—when she had newly, piercingly imagined life without the certainty of him; the cold, dull reflection of herself that everything would give back without the interposition of his love; the dreadful narrowing of herself if he ceased to be an extension of her. She had wanted, for a moment, at any cost to keep him there, to find out what he was thinking about that made him so unlike himself, so sufficient and self-contained. But he had not understood, and that of course was best. Men ceased to respect you if you abandoned your reserve. She had always been careful about that.

  She sat up and turned her pillow, which felt hot and tumbled, and put out the light again. But she still found herself remembering his hair, soft and shining under her fingers, against her shoulder, and his sleepy weight for which, when she woke him, he would apologize. Perhaps last year, if she had pretended a little … but when she knew it could not give her a child she had hated it all. And he had said it should make no difference to his loving her. He had promised.

  What could have changed him? A suspicion began to grow on her that this deterioration was due to the influence of some one else. She had never cared very much, for instance, for his friend McKinnon. He belonged to the Left Book Club and was always bringing over their bleak, frightening books, which she hated, for Kit to read. He looked at her too in a way which made her feel sure he was cynical about women, no doubt because he knew the wrong ones. Did he ever introduce them to Kit? Kit was so simple about women, so naïvely generous in his judgements. He didn’t see through people.

  The hall clock struck twelve. She had been lying awake for more than half an hour. She wished she had not told Kit that she was sleeping better. Kit was forgetting, among McKinnon and his friends, how sensitive she was, how acutely she felt small coldnesses and failures in response that most women would never even notice. He had been so sympathetic when she was ill, sitting on the edge of the bed when she couldn’t sleep and talking and holding her hand. Perhaps if she were to be ill again—as she easily might be, with the cold weather ahead and all this worry—he might realize. She noticed, now, that her head was beginning to ache.

  Yes, it really was aching. She felt cold, too. She must not let herself be ill again, for Kit’s sake. She would ask him for the tablet after all. He would hardly be asleep yet. Or, if he were, he was so used to being called up that he would soon drop off again; how lucky men were to have no nerves!

  She put on the light, and bent for her quilted green satin slippers.

  CHAPTER 2

  ON THURSDAY MORNINGS, AS near twelve o’clock as possible—for she liked regularity—Kit used to visit Miss Heath. He noted the day with a certain pleasure; calling on Miss Heath was rather like re-entering one’s childhood as a grown-up visitor. Miss Heath, her maid, Pedlow, and her cook, lived in six of the twenty-six rooms of Laurel Dene. It was a smallish Victorian-Gothic castle, walled away at the end of a cul-de-sac in what had been, sixty years before, the best part of the town. Now the Keble-ish houses on each side of the road had all been turned into offices or maisonettes; but behind the wrought-iron gates and spiked brick wall of Laurel Dene nothing had altered much, except that little Amy Heath, with her fluffed fringe and button-boots and pinafore and round cheeks like a worshipping child in The Peep of Day, had grown into Miss Heath, a very deaf old lady with chronic heart trouble. Amy’s kind Nannie had died about thirty years before, and been rewarded with an up-pointing marble angel and “Blessed is that servant whom the Lord when he cometh”; but her place had been taken at once by Pedlow, the still-room maid, whose functions by now were almost exactly the same.

  Kit, as he turned into the mossy drive, thought how implacably hideous the grounds must have been in their youth, when the gravel and geraniums and lobelia were paint-fresh. Now the flower-beds held only lush tangled perennials, the month-high lawns were powdered with daisies, and the white paint was flaking from the conservatory and the garden seats. To-day, the leaves of the poplars were beginning to fall wetly in a mild damp wind and to settle, with faint sounds, in the clumps of Michaelmas daisies. There must be a gardener somewhere whose almost invisible efforts just kept the place from becoming a jungle; but one never saw him. Noticing the poplar leaves plastered moistly to the bonnet of his car, Kit had the year’s first feeling of autumn, and said to himself, “Of course, she’ll never go through the winter.”

  The thought made him look about, as he got out of the car, with a keener, regretful appreciation. The Virginia creeper, turning fìg-purple and red, dropped its swinging beards over the windows and dripped from the pointed arches of the porch; in the middle of the lawn a wagtail was perched on a solitary croquet-hoop which decades had reduced to a thread of rust. He wondered what the place would be like next summer; more offices, he supposed, or a dreary private hotel.

  He tugged at the brass bell-pull, whose pattern had been smoothed by palms and fingers to a, soft ripple like ebb-tide sands; and thought about conversation, which was important. Ten years ago, Kit’s predecessor had explained to Pedlow that Miss Heath was not to be worried, and Pedlow had taken it to heart and remembered it every morning when she read aloud from the Times. Every new visitor had to be told, under the stuffed alligator in the hall, that Miss Heath had not heard about Hitler, and had better not know that there were any Communists in England because some one had told her about Russia and it had upset her. Al
l this was easy, but the Royal Family was tricky going, because Miss Heath was devoted to royalty and supposed the Duke of Windsor to be still on the throne. The Abdication would have upset her terribly, so Pedlow had never mentioned it. There were several large photographs of the Duke in various uniforms as Prince of Wales: Miss Heath always referred to him as The Dear Boy. Once she had complimented Kit on having hair of the same colour (it was several shades fairer, but her sight and memory were both growing dim) and he had decided that this was probably her chief reason for liking him.

  Pedlow opened the door. She was a subterraneous-looking creature with a cachetic skin, and moved with faint crepitations which Kit could never certainly assign to her black alpaca dress, her corsets or her bones. She still wore the little round cap, like a frilled doily, of two generations back, and the trefoil-shaped coiffure—two lumps of hair in front and one behind—necessary to support it. In her presence Kit felt transported into a world whose receding colours had dimly tinged his infancy; she suggested gas lighting, tea-urns, baths in mahogany frames, and the soap-smelling lace supported on whalebone which had encased his mother’s neck.

  Because Miss Heath so often misheard his questions, or rambled on about something else instead of answering them, Kit had reduced them to a formality and always collected his real report from Pedlow in the hall. He could tell at once, from the way she fiddled with the bib of her apron, that things were not going so well. Miss Heath, it seemed, had been taken quite bad during the night.

  “Well, I wish you’d sent for me,” Kit said. “Don’t hesitate if it happens again. Miss Heath’s in a condition, you know, when it’s impossible to be too careful. What exactly happened?”

  A blush, brownish and dim like sawdust, crept into Pedlow’s sallow cheeks. “That’s what I can’t forgive myself, doctor; I never knew anything about it till morning. Miss Heath rang the handbell by her bed for me, but I sleep so sound. I have from a child and I can’t break myself. And Miss Heath doesn’t like the idea of any one sleeping in the room with her. I’ve kept thinking all morning how I might have come in and found her passed away. And so good she was about it. When I didn’t come, she said to herself—so she told me—no doubt it was the will of God.” A rim of moisture formed round her pale eyes.

  “Well,” said Kit hastily, “I don’t think there’s any need to assume that. The solution seems to be that Miss Heath should consider getting a nurse this winter. It’s been in my mind for some time, and this morning I’ll suggest it to her.”

  Pedlow’s face underwent a curious setting and buttoning process, and the joints seemed to lock with an almost audible click all over her body. She explained that Miss Heath didn’t like the idea of a nurse. She had had one some years ago, and the arrangement hadn’t answered, it hadn’t answered at all.

  Kit sighed inwardly. He might, of course, have known. Pedlow was just of the class and period to whom trained nurses were an upstart kind of domestic servant, giving themselves airs above their station, and demeaning to wait upon. If he imported one there were obviously going to be ructions, as shattering in this millpond quiet as burglary or homicide and probably as lethal to his patient as influenza.

  “Sooner than have Miss Heath upset like she was that time,” Pedlow said, “I’d sit up with her myself and just take a little nap in the day. That’s what I’d been meaning to do.”

  “I hardly think that’s an ideal arrangement. We shall be having you ill too. Perhaps Miss Heath has some relative who could come for a time. Well, I’ll see what she thinks about it.”

  He crossed the hall to what had been the morning room, but was now Miss Heath’s bedroom because of the stairs; trying as usual not to feel like a small boy in the presence of the towering wrought-brass bed, with its crochet counterpane representing as many years’ work as an altarcloth; the rusty silhouettes of Miss Heath’s parents at its head; the thunderous steel engraving of Moses on Sinai; and Miss Heath herself, throned in her great plush armchair in the bay window, her dropsical legs tucked away under a red and green wool rug; the thin silver hair parted and combed back from her pale moon-face, which was like the face of an old Buddha who had outlived his wisdom with undisturbed calm. Beneath her stuff dress were visible the superimposed ridges of many woollen garments, conjectural in function and in form. Her hand, whose plump beringed whiteness she still displayed rather from unconscious habit than design, lay on a round mahogany table beside a large black Bible, the Parish Magazine, and the tray of sherry and Bath Olivers which she always had ready for him.

  He talked to her about a companion, but she did not seem much impressed: and he refrained from bullying her in the matter, having perceived, as soon as he saw her, how little difference it could really make.

  Janet had read F. M. Alexander and ten or twelve other books in the last fortnight. She had taken to reading voraciously, indiscriminately and, apparently, without any unifying personal taste or even much enjoyment. She read what was being talked about; good or bad, light or heavy; but nothing she read seemed to undergo a digestive process. Yet she did not read apathetically; the most diverse things could leave her in a state of defensive indignation. Kit, who had been accustomed to take refuge in this kind of discussion when things were difficult, now found it as full of pitfalls as any other. It was as if the walls of her ego were closing in on her; she seemed incapable of disengaging any idea from its personal attachments. She had a naturally quick intelligence, and could wrest even from moderately difficult works just enough of their purport to find some application to herself or him. She never began by stating this directly, but would open some seemingly abstract discussion with a strung-up insistence that gave her away at once. Under such conditions conversation ceased to exist, and became, as far as Kit was concerned, simply a series of exercises in passive defence. He often made efforts to conquer his caution or ignore it; he found the constant contraction of his mental muscles tiring; but it was no use. He could feel behind all she said the tension of something waiting to pounce, and it was impossible to relax while one watched to see where the spring was coming from.

  There was very little room in their home for getting away from one another. They had chosen it without reference to this need, as people in love will, unless one at least of them has pronounced habits of solitude already. In any case, they had little choice. They shared with the Frasers a solid, two-storey Georgian house, taking the upper floor and the front garden. The rooms were well proportioned and lit with fine square windows; but there were very few of them. Kit slept in the room which had been meant for the nursery; a fact which Janet, he knew, always silently remembered; she seldom entered it. They had only one guest room, a living room and a small dining room, not adapted for anything else. There remained his consulting room downstairs; it was cramped and rather bleak, containing chiefly a roll-top desk, examination couch and steel filing cabinet; but it was useful as a last resource. Unluckily, Janet knew, by now, the times when he really needed to be there. Even when it had evidently averted a break of control on one side or the other, his disappearance really hurt her. Kit knew that this at least was genuine, because she often tried to hide it; and it left him at a loss.

  He hated to hurt her, partly because he disliked hurting anything—a fact which sometimes made his work more wearing than it need have been. Besides, he always had more knowledge of her moods than she of his, being less concerned to fit them to a preconception; and the mere fact of minding about them died hard.

  That evening an extra heavy surgery, which he spun out as far as possible, gave him a decent excuse for working late. At dinner she was subdued; and Kit, who felt tired, was glad enough to be quiet. Over the coffee she said, “Whatever were you doing to that poor little boy who was screaming downstairs?”

  “Just feeling her tummy over. It was a girl.”

  “She must have been in terrible pain. What was the matter with her?”

  “Half a pound of liquorice allsorts.”

  “Really, I think children
should only be taken to women doctors.”

  “Very likely.”

  “She sounded absolutely terrified.”

  “She was. Her mother had been telling her for years that if she wasn’t good the doctor would come and take her away in a black bag.”

  Janet stirred her coffee in silence. Her head bent lower, and presently he saw that she was struggling with tears. For a moment he felt simply an exhausted refusal to cope with it; then he came over and sat on the arm of her chair.

  “I’m sorry, Janie. Honestly I am.”

  She took out her handkerchief and said, half under her breath, “You find me easy to score off now, don’t you, Kit?”

  “Why do you let yourself be?”

  “I don’t know. It’s so—unfair. Men have everything.”

  “Have they?” said Kit. In their courting days he had found her generalizations about “men” and “women” faintly exciting, because of their purely personal implications; besides, he had been a few years younger and more prone to make them himself. Now his mind had ceased to move, except clinically, in these channels, and his response consisted mainly of patience. But her grief troubled a loyalty in him which had little to do with the obligations of marriage. He had never examined its sources, or reflected that it came from a kind of personal coherence woven into his self-respect. He had loved her, and, in fact, betted his life on being right about them both. If he had not foreseen her response to this or that it was as much his responsibility as any one’s.

  “How do you mean?” he asked.

  “Well, you’ve got your work; it never stands still; always something new being discovered. You never have to think that everything will be the same for you in ten years, except that you’ll be older.”