Kind Are Her Answers: A Novel

by Mary Renault

  All that remained with him was the satisfaction that springs from having passed a test of strength. It had all seemed quite straightforward at the time, his happiness for hers. But a confused thought was breaking in on him that what was gone could not be divided into hers or his; it was a life beyond them, with rights of its own, a light that had been put out; a soul, different from their separate souls in its weakness and its strength, which had been torn from its body and dispersed into the wind.

  He brushed the tangled images aside. He had done the evidently decent thing. There was always his job. The only difference was that once he had looked forward to its intervals when he could be alone with himself.

  Early in July, the Telegraph announced the forthcoming marriage of Christina Heath, daughter of the late Reverend Lucas Emmanuel Heath and of Mrs. Heath of 14a Park Drive, Edgbaston, Birmingham, to James Burford, second son of Colonel and Mrs. Burford, of the Grange, Winthrup, Hertfordshire. It was to take place at the end of the month.

  Kit clipped out the announcement; he need not have troubled, however, as Christie sent him a copy. She was worried, she said; everything seemed different when she hadn’t got him there to talk to. She was staying in her mother’s flat, preparing her trousseau. The place (she added) was lousy with lingerie, and with hens she had never met in her life coming to stare at it. They seemed to expect her to have made the stuff. She felt like a horse being done up for a show. She wanted to talk to Kit. Couldn’t they possibly meet just for an hour or two—for half an hour? She wouldn’t be a nuisance. She just wanted to talk to him. She supposed she ought not to, now she was engaged; but somehow it didn’t seem to make any difference.

  He did not answer the letter for two days. As long as he kept it in his pocket, it was as though Christie were on the other side of a door in the same house. He had thought that by now the current would have carried her too far for a backward glance.

  Even now he could get her back. If she had made it less plain, he could hardly have kept himself from going to her. It would not matter what they talked about—Jimmie, the bridesmaids’ presents, her wedding nightgown. Why not? They would be together and themselves. But evidently that was what must not be allowed to happen yet.

  He wrote back saying that it was too bad he couldn’t get away; he had a lot of work on hand. Perhaps a bit later. Meanwhile, he would always like to hear the news.

  He paused a moment before he added the last sentence, distrusting any concession to himself. It would be a good moment to snip off the last thread. But again he had the feeling that violence was being done to a living thing, and a kind of fear restrained him. He let the letter go as it was.

  The Frasers were going to the Isle of Wight for August. They went to the same hotel in Ventnor every year, but Fraser always discussed it judicially, as if he had made the decision after long doubt and comparison. Kit wished he had decided to go sooner; he looked tired and old nowadays, his digestive trouble had recurred several times. Kit, who suspected that he ate scarcely enough to keep himself going, made several tentative suggestions about taking on a little more of the work. But Fraser’s natural obstinacy was becoming complicated with the irritable temper of the gastric subject; it was impossible to insist.

  It was a hot July. A few cases of diphtheria broke out; Kit was summoned to every one in the practice who complained of a sore throat, and did endless inoculations. He had so little time to himself that it always seemed next day would produce the little extra which would make it impossible to think at all. But thought was developing a knack of intruding upon action; every routine mechanical job gave him long enough to see a poky little flat in Birmingham, and Christie staring, her eyes clouded with formless doubt, at heaps of lace and crêpe de Chine. He turned the handle of the door, and saw her face clear—certainty and truth spring by themselves, untended, like weeks in sudden sun.

  What’s the use, he thought. It was all so obvious. She’ll thank me in a few years’ time.

  On the twenty-third of the month he woke very early. Either from the end of a dream, or some sudden leap of waking thought, Christie was as present with him as if she had been in the room. Everything was very quiet. The thought of her possessed him; not longing, nor imagination, but a contact, as if she had just spoken, or were standing just beyond the range of his eyes. He remembered that she would be married a week from to-day.

  He lay listening to the noises beginning in the street, as wakeful as if it were noon. His whole mind and body were tuned to alertness. Perhaps, he thought, an urgent case was coming in. He had had, sometimes, this odd feeling of expectation. But the only summons that came was the postman’s ring. At once, without wondering why he did it, he put on his dressing gown, and went, for the first time in a couple of months, to take the letters from the hall.

  It was there, as he had known it would be without knowing that he knew. It was the longest letter Christie had ever written him, and the most confused. It contained nothing of urgency, nothing but trifles. No separate sentence held the message which reached him from the whole. It was entire, like an animal with a small clear voice uttering a single note of fear.

  Suddenly, his own mind answered it with a like simplicity.

  He did not attempt to think any more. The arguments he had used for weeks seemed to lie about in his brain, functionless, like the crutches of a man who discovers, all in a moment, that he can walk alone. He would never know, he thought, why he was going to her, whether in the certainty of wisdom or self-will. Bill or Shirley, he supposed, would have been quite happy about it. They would have called it guidance, and if it led them where they wanted to go, that would only lend it agreeable confirmation. He had no such trust in his own processes. But he was going.

  It would destroy his peace, he knew, for the rest of his life, even if nothing came of it; much more if it ended as it was bound to end. He could justify it endlessly; and without meaning, because his choice, right or wrong, had been entangled in desire. It was a choice that ought only to be made in a moment of freedom from oneself. When he looked back on this he would remember, not that he had done well or badly, but that he had not been free.

  It made no difference. He was sure. He would rather have known why, but still he was sure. Whatever it was, was too strong for him, and he would go.

  It wanted two days to his free afternoon, the only time when he could possibly make the journey. He sat down, still in his dressing gown, and wrote to her on a couple of leaves of a notebook he had in his room. He would meet her in the public art gallery, in the room upstairs where the Burne-Joneses were. He did not know Birmingham very well, and it was the only safe place he could think of on the spur of the moment. In a postscript he added that it might happen in the end he couldn’t get away; if so he would be thinking about her, and hoped she would understand. He hardly knew why he put this in; he supposed it was a last loophole, in case some conviction came to him that he could trust. He posted the letter on his morning round.

  Most of next day he wondered, and sometimes dreaded, whether the clear moment would come. But it was imagination, not thought, that grew clear. By the time it came, he had ceased to open his mind for a revelation. He wanted what he wanted.

  Next morning there was no need to think. Expectation penetrated everything, like a coloured light. He began the morning surgery, seeing through it the faces of the patients and the instruments he used.

  He was letting the second patient out of his consulting room, when he saw some one standing in the doorway. It was Mrs. Fraser; he hardly knew her for a moment—she had always been a red-faced woman, and young for her age.

  “Oh, Dr. Anderson. I’m so sorry—in the middle of surgery. Could you come? John’s been taken ill.”

  “Of course. Where is he?” The words formed themselves; he felt dissociated from them. He himself was saying, “No; I’ve been had like this before. Not this time.”

  “He’s in his room. We just managed to get him there—the maid and I. It came on in the morning
room, just after breakfast. I thought at first it was simply another gastric twinge, but then when he went such a terrible colour, and couldn’t move, I knew it must be something serious. He makes light of everything, as a rule. He seems to have less pain now. … So thankful you were in.” He did not hear everything she said. She trotted beside him on her thick stocky legs, wheezing a little as she kept up with his longer strides.

  He was thinking, The old fool’s had this coming to him for months. I knew it all along. Why couldn’t he get himself seen to? Why should I pay for his pig-headed heroics? Not this time. His voice, separately animated it seemed, spoke soothingly to Mrs. Fraser and asked what her husband had had for breakfast.

  “I—really, I don’t think I can remember. Just our ordinary breakfast.” She was a sensible woman, as a rule. He did not ask her anything more. They had reached Fraser’s room, and he had all the information he needed.

  Fraser lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling, breathing quickly from the top of his chest. His hands were clasped behind his head, and his knees drawn upward. His skin looked grey and shrunken, and his eyes were deep cavities ringed with blue. He turned his head as Kit came in, and his face flickered in the way of one who is unwilling to labour the obvious. With a caution that sat grotesquely on her solid frame, Mrs. Fraser began to tiptoe from the room. Kit followed her to the door to ask for hot-water bottles.

  He went up to the bed, searching for words of reassurance, and feeling the usual diffidence of one medical man in the presence of another. The running, thready pulse, when he found it, was of a piece with everything else.

  “This is too bad,” he said quietly. “No, don’t worry, I can manage.” He loosened Fraser’s clothes.

  In a voice that seemed to form itself on his palate, Fraser said, “Almost—waste of time. I should say—a classic perforation. I’m afraid—been a little unwise.”

  Kit had felt the board-like rigidity of the abdomen, and refrained from uttering euphemisms. Fraser still had an intelligence to be insulted.

  “I’ll get on to Harbutson right away. You’d like him, I expect? Just time to catch him before he starts for the hospital.”

  Mrs. Fraser came in with her bottles and blankets. He helped her to pack Fraser in them; she sat down beside him, and took his hand under the clothes, murmuring, as if she were encouraging a little boy, all those heartening platitudes which Kit had avoided. Fraser gave her a smile which made his face look more sunken than ever, and closed his eyes.

  The call to the surgeon did not take long; Kit had been Harbutson’s houseman at the hospital. He suggested that Fraser be got into a private ward at once; he would look at him there.

  An interval followed in which Kit seemed to be in several places at once: explaining to Fraser; telephoning for an ambulance, then for a locum; finding his house-keeper (a small brisk woman who was everything the agency had claimed for her) and sending her off to help Mrs. Fraser; weeding through Fraser’s patients and his own, asking the urgent ones to wait and the less urgent to come back in the evening. It was not till he had repeated this formula for the third time that he remembered.

  For a moment all the interlocking wheels of activity seemed to stop together. The chain of mental and physical habit snapped. Two opposites became self-evident at once. The only difference between them was that what he was doing here could have been done by any one of several hundred men with the same qualifications. His qualifications for what he had meant to do were unique.

  Even as he thought it, the chain linked up again, the wheels revolved; his mind returned to Fraser, the ambulance, the locum, the patient in front of him. She was saying that she was so sorry to hear about Dr. Fraser, that her little trouble would do to-morrow just as well. The clock on the mantelpiece had not moved.

  The wheels of the ambulance sounded in the drive; Kit went up to see Fraser put on the stretcher. His pulse was weaker, but he was still conscious.

  “Everything’s all right. Locum on the way. It’s Garrould—you had him the year before last.”

  Fraser’s grey-white face made a faint movement of assent and satisfaction. Kit saw, because he was trying to steady his diaphragm with his hand, that he wanted to speak.

  “Then—possibly—” (his voice was so shallow that he needed a breath almost for every word) “—you might—manage—give the anaesthetic. Always felt—utmost confidence—” His voice faded.

  Kit said, “Of course, if you want me to. I was hoping Harbutson might see his way to letting me. I don’t think he’ll mind.” The stretcher was ready; he helped the porters and the nurse to lift Fraser onto it.

  The negotiation of corners and steps was a longish business; but to Kit it seemed that immediately after he had spoken he was standing alone in the hall. The clockwork had slowed down. Suddenly, there seemed to be a great deal of time. He stood staring at a salver with visiting cards on it, thinking of Christie, who an hour ago had been on the other side of an unlocked door. He could hear her voice, saying something familiar. “You know the way things happen.” At the time he had pitied her incompetence, and wondered how it felt.

  He looked at his watch. There would just be time to deal with the urgent cases before they had the theatre ready for Fraser. He went into the consulting room, and found the place in the day-book.

  CHAPTER 25

  “IS HE DEEP ENOUGH?” asked Kit.

  Harbutson nodded. His scalpel traced its first delicate line across the skin. Kit pulled the gas-and-oxygen cylinder an inch or two nearer. Fraser had become anonymous, reduced to an incision between sterile towels, a faint pulse beating in the carotid under Kit’s fingertips.

  The warm air of the theatre hung motionless; its rubber flooring swallowed the sounds of shifting feet. Each rustle of the theatre Sister’s crisp gown was audible. From an anteroom the bubbling of a sterilizer came clearly through the quiet, like the humming of a single insect in summer calm.

  A faint click told Kit that Harbutson was being handed artery forceps. He did not look up. Just beyond the level of his eyes, four gloved hands came and went, stealthy in their silence and spare movement, but they were nothing to do with him. His field of attention was bounded by the throat where his fingers rested.

  “He’s a shade rigid; can you get him a little deeper?”

  “Sorry, sir.” Harbutson was an excellent surgeon, but not a rapid one. Kit looked at the gas-gauge, and moved the handle over. His senses were reduced to a fine point, concentrated in his finger-ends.

  “He’ll do now.”

  Yes, thought Kit, he’ll have to do; he’s got what he can take. He lifted his eyes for a second; Harbutson had got into the stomach at last. The Sister was extending a needle-holder. Kit thought, Why doesn’t he get a move on? I’d forgotten he was so slow. How many hours does he think he can take over a semi-collapsed patient of nearly seventy? Rigid, hell.

  Harbutson was clucking softly in his throat over the extent of the perforation. Why, wondered Kit unreasonably, does he waste time making damn-fool noises? He lifted Fraser’s eyelids; the limit was very close.

  “What’s he like now?”

  “Not too good, sir.” (What do you expect, pottering about as if it were a post-mortem? It will be, too, if it goes on much longer.)

  His irritability, the press of an extra sense of urgency, was the only personal trace of Fraser for which his concentration had room. One of the nurses dropped a dirty instrument on the floor. Its slight ring sounded shockingly loud. Fraser’s pulse was barely perceptible. He glanced at the emergency hypodermic on the glass trolley beside him. Catching his eye, the nurse who had brought Fraser down came forward and filled it.

  At last, at last, Harbutson was suturing the peritoneum. Repressing an audible noise of relief, Kit eased the flow of nitrous oxide. For the minutes that were left, Fraser’s chances had risen, perhaps, to fifty-fifty. But the words, “He’s not breathing, sir,” still formed themselves, ready, on his tongue. He saw, as if it were happening, the high-pressure machinery
they would set in motion.

  At last, like a shaken kaleidoscope, the smooth silent group relaxed and broke. Harbutson was stepping back, the assistant putting pads of gauze on the wound, the ward nurse hurrying forward with her wide rolled bandage, the theatre nurses whisking instruments away. It was over. Kit unstrapped the mask from Fraser’s face; the porters came in with the trolley to take him back to the ward. More instruments were produced, more sterile towels; by the time the trolley had disappeared, the theatre was already half prepared for the next case.

  Kit stood up, feeling as if something immensely heavy had fallen from his straightened back. Harbutson was having his tapes untied by a probationer while he peeled off his gloves. Kit glanced at the electric clock on the wall; after all, it had only taken a minute or two over the average time.

  Harbutson, scrubbing at the sink, looked round at him.

  “He should do, with luck. Must have been working up to this for some time, you know.” His voice was faintly reproachful.

  “Yes. I suppose he was treating himself; but he wasn’t fond of talking about it.”

  Harbutson clucked to himself; the sound probably indicated sympathy. “He ought to have an intravenous right away. I could ask the R.S.O. presently, but I was wondering whether you’d care to do it? We shall be rather pushed with the list to-day.”

  Kit said, “Certainly, I’ll be glad to.”

  He threw down his theatre coat in a corner of the anteroom (the trolley with the next case was there already) and took down the white one he had been wearing. He hoped the private ward would have the intravenous set ready. With a man in Fraser’s condition it would probably be a long job to get into the vein. The sense of time and urgency still pressed on him; the feeling that something must be done in a hurry or it would be too late. He wanted to get rid of the feeling; the operation was over, after all, and an intravenous saline was nothing desperate. But he hurried along the corridors, quickly getting rid of any one who wanted to stop and greet him, the longing for haste still thrusting him on.