Four-Part Setting

by Ann Bridge

  “I’d better see”—and Antony went off, leaving Henry sitting rather thoughtfully over his plate. It was rather odd, the way old Antony had somehow installed himself as Rose’s nurse and guardian, instead of him, Henry—in lots of ways it would have been so much less embarrassing for her, poor darling, to be looked after by himself. He wasn’t quite sure how it had happened, except that of course old Ant was a sort of amateur medicine-man, and Tasia had somehow arranged it before she rushed off. It was all done in such a hurry. Probably it was best like that—he didn’t know a lot about illness, and she seemed pretty bad. But in spite of his naturally philosophical attitude, a faintly uncomfortable sense of there being something odd about it persisted in Henry Hargreaves’ mind. It was funny that she didn’t ask for him to sit with her a bit, between all these nursing doings; that at least he could have done. Perhaps she was being careful—or perhaps, as Ant said, she was really feeling too ill to think of anything at all. Poor love, poor precious—it was wretched for her to get laid out like this. Altogether this trip hadn’t been such fun as they’d expected, he and she; those perishing t’ao-pings half the time, and that fellow Hillier with his highbrow conversation —though he had been better just lately—and somehow they’d been very little together, one way and another. In fact from the time they got to La Trappe you would almost have said that she was avoiding him, if you hadn’t known anything. But then she’d got that cold coming on, of course, and all women were hopeless with colds: colds made them ugly, and they knew it, and it took all the stuffing out of them.

  Antony came back and finished his supper, but immediately afterwards he went through to the schoolhouse again, explaining that though Rose didn’t mind thunderstorms, with all that noise he wouldn’t hear her call. Henry, after a whisky and soda, put on his Burberry, took a torch, and went off up the village street. He knew where the donkeys were stabled, and wanted to make sure that the boys had stuck a Union Jack up outside, to warn off Tu’s men. Yes, they had; three, in fact—and he could hear that they were there all right. Returning, he took a candle lantern into his tent, got into bed, and settled down to a volume of Gaboriau. He didn’t undress, so as to be ready in case of emergencies, such as the advent of Tu’s divisions; but the rain made the air chilly, and it was warmer in bed.

  In Rose’s room Antony stood, frowning with worry, looking at the thermometer which he held to the light of a small oil lamp borrowed from the schoolmaster. It had not gone down at all; it was higher—103. Rose still gave that cough at intervals, but now it was more violent, and seemed to tear at her chest. Obviously she felt extremely ill. “If only I could sweat, I know I should feel better,” she said, in that small hoarse weary voice—she had very little voice at all, now.

  Antony, washing and putting away the thermometer, considered anxiously. Asta had said more aspirin at nine, and it wasn’t eight yet; but obviously they must get the temperature down. He sent for a kettle, brewed some more black-currant tea, and gave her two more aspirins. While she sipped the tea in which he put some whisky to encourage the aspirin in its task, he re-filled her bottle, wrapped the sweater round it, and sent the kettle out to be boiled up again. Then he chopped up some more Freezoclone and put it ready in the jug. When she had drunk most of the tea—to which he urged her with constant gentle encouragement—he rubbed her chest again with the carbolated vaseline, muffled the woolly over it, shouted for the kettle, and gave her another inhalation. When that was over he said firmly—“Now, Rose, whether you feel sleepy or not, lie on your side and shut your eyes and pretend to go to sleep.” He pulled her pillows out, patted and shook them, and put them back under her head. “Lying quite still and well covered may help you to sweat,” he said. And Rose, miserably, did as he told her. “Do you think I shall sweat?” she asked anxiously, turning her face, disfigured with the cold and the steaming, up to his.

  “I feel pretty sure you will,” he said, reassuringly. “And you’ve had your senna. Now just lie quiet and think of something nice—some place you know at home. Call out if you want anything—I shall be here.”

  “Aren’t you going to lie down?” she asked.

  “Presently—yes, I am. If you get off I shall go to sleep too. I shall hear you though; and be sure to yell if you get into a sweat,” he said, smiling at her.

  But all the time that Antony was rubbing Rose’s chest, and filling bottles, and mixing inhalants, indeed after he had sat down in the rookhi chair, put the lamp on the floor, and begun to realise that he was very tired, there were two things going on at the same time in that small rather dirty village schoolroom. One was his battle with Rose Pelham’s illness, but the other, which no less filled that small space, was the thing that lay between him and her. Antony was aware of this: he knew now that he loved Rose, and running parallel with his ceaseless efforts to get her better was his constant preoccupation not to betray what he felt. But that, though he did not know it, was only half of the secret thing that was going on below the surface of his sickroom activities. Since she had lain thinking about Antony in her small room at La Trappe, only twenty-four hours before, Rose too had known something. She had realised then that to be loved by Antony would be the most wonderful thing in the world, and to love him the easiest; though she believed that all this was inevitably reserved for somebody else. Such a frame of mind is only a very short step from loving oneself.

  There are discoveries made without the use of speech, things that rise to the surface almost of themselves, helped by other and humbler means than words. All the small uninspiring tiresome services that Antony was performing for Rose, practically and unemotionally as they were done, were having an effect on her. They seemed to her only his general faithful kindness—and indeed they had that intention; but even in her own wretchedness she was strongly affected by them. She was already clinging to him for moral support in the revision of her life, after her false start, based on half-comprehended theories and leading, as she now saw, to what was really a dead end in her affair with Henry—now, in these hours of illness and weariness, she was turning to him for everything. He was tending her, giving her what she needed, making her do what she ought to do, and in the urgency of her need she looked to him for these things with the simplicity of a child. And during the next few hours, before the longed-for sweat came and the fever broke, he did more than that—he really did put out that sustaining power which is a vital part of nursing. There come times in most illnesses when the nurse must morally carry the patient, bear him up, by her own strength of heart and will keep courage and resistance alive; it is often as much a moral as a scientific battle that is fought out by a sick-bed. And though Rose was not desperately ill, was not in actual danger—whatever Antony’s terrified imagination might suggest to him—she was quite ill enough, and the circumstances of her illness quite disagreeable enough for this element to be very present. When at last she had fallen asleep, towards midnight, and was lying with a blessedly damp forehead, and Antony finally ventured to lie down on the second bed and prepare to sleep himself, he found that he was fairly exhausted.

  But it was not till the next day that the hidden thing came out into the light, and the hidden truth stood known. Rose woke in the morning, after some hours of sleep, with a lowered temperature—under 100—and more easy breathing. Antony roused as soon as she stirred, sent for a cup of tea for her, and went out and washed; as soon as he came back he resumed his ministrations. Yes, she was better, but she was not well yet; they had got to get her temperature right down, get her chest really clear. He was in fact desperately anxious to get her fit to move; they had had an unhoped-for respite in that Tu’s troops had left them in peace during the night, but their coming could not be long delayed. No doubt the rain had kept them somewhere. Chinese soldiers hate rain as much as cats—Antony, knowing the Chinese, had noted with sincere and almost passionate regret that the sun was shining, when he woke and pulled the rug curtain aside at the schoolhouse door.

  So he rubbed and inhaled Rose again,
and dosed her with lemon and honey, and ordered a soft-boiled egg for her breakfast, and went and ate his own with Henry. Then he came back and took away her breakfast things, and asked if Henry could come and see her again? In his simplicity and inexperience, preoccupied with his anxious desire to do all the nursing part right, Antony had entirely forgotten that Rose might like to make some sort of toilet—at the mention of a visit from Henry she said—“Oh, make him wait a little. Couldn’t I wash my face and hands?” Calling for “K’ai Hsui” (hot water), he went back to the t’ai and told Henry not to come just yet—he would call him—and then returned to Rose, and gave her her tchilumtchi and sponge. Rose was now fully awake, and restored by the first solid food she had taken for some twenty hours—she felt very much better, though still weak and rather congested: it was as if she had come alive again. And when, with some pleasant word, he put the enamel basin on her lap, she realised—suddenly, but with a quiet simple certainty, like light coming into a room, that she loved him. Yes, it was like light coming into a room, as in old days at dusk the lamps were brought in in the house of her childhood. Now everything was clear. As then furniture, pictures, mirrors stood out in sudden prominence and shapeliness, after looming shadowy in the uncertain firelight, so now she saw what everything had meant—her sense almost of panic at Ch’ang T’sao, when she watched him doctoring the sick Chinese, and knew that he was good, her doubt and uncertainty that night at Shih Chia Ying, her distress and confusion of mind, then and later, over Henry. She paused, with the sponge half-way to her face, in a sort of wonder, and looked at him standing there, with a towel in his hands—tired, lined from the night, stooping a little; she saw him so clearly—as all hope and goodness and completion for her. She looked and looked, as if she could never see enough, as if the wonder would drown her.

  Antony saw the pause, but did not look with any attention at her face—he was rather careful how he looked at Rose. “Get on,” he said, in a cheerful playful tone. “What is it?”

  She started at his words, and the sponge dropped back into the basin, sending the water slopping over the rim, wetting everything. Antony darted forward, snatched away the basin, and shook and mopped the blanket. “Clumsy!” he said, still lightly. “What did you want to do that for?”

  The shock, the silly accident, the whole thing was too much for Rose just then; the colour swept up in her face, she turned her head away, helplessly, onto the pillow; tears began to slide down her cheeks. Antony, who had pulled off the top blanket, and was rubbing her sweater with the towel, could not help seeing this—he was forced to look at her now. “Oh, don’t cry,” he said, distressed. “It doesn’t matter” And as she went on crying—“Rose dear, what is it?” he asked, dropping the towel and involuntarily taking her hand. “Do tell me what’s wrong?”

  She caught up the towel with her other hand, dabbed her eyes with it, and turned towards him. “It’s nothing,” she said faintly. But she looked at him again, then—at his tired concerned face, his eyes that had so much sweetness in them; and this time he looked at her, too. Slow, full, certain, like a melody emerging from the general rhythm of instruments, the truth came to stand between their eyes, in all its wonder and sweetness and unbearable power. First with astonishment, then with awe, they recognised it as they looked at one another—and then with something for which there is no word, it is so innately mixed of pain and rapture. And that, in her weakness, broke Rose down. Tears began to run down her face again. “Oh,” she said, with a great sob, “I love you so—and it isn’t any good!”

  With a movement as slow and involuntary as a sleepwalker’s, Antony put an arm round her, and with inevitable naturalness her head went down on his shoulder. “Oh my love,” he murmured, stroking her hair—“Oh Rose, my darling love.”

  His voice and his touch carried her into a deeper heaven—of reassurance, of protection, of divine peace that had the very accent of joy; and his heart and spirit, his whole being rested for a moment on the full tide of his love, on their deep reciprocal bliss. So much, for a few moments, they had of this utter fulfilment. But they really recognised their heaven only to know that they could not stay in it. Slowly, as mutual in this recognition as in the other, she drew out of his arms, he let her go; for a moment longer they looked in one another’s eyes again, in a sort of bewilderment, like people waking in a place they have never seen. Then Rose said, uncertainly—“I must wash my face. We can talk another time, can’t we? But we shall have Henry here in a minute.”

  He rose slowly, like a man who is heavily tired, and took up the enamel basin from where he had set it on the floor. He said nothing—he hardly felt he could speak yet, could come back into that forgotten and irrational world where Rose must wash her face for Henry. As he handed her the basin for the second time she looked up at him and said gently—“Antony, dear—I’m sorry!”

  At that he was suddenly filled with a fierce and lucid anger against Charles Pelham. So that was what he had done to her—to make her feel the need to apologise at a moment like this! He bent down and kissed her on the forehead with most grave and passionate tenderness; then took up her hands, one after the other, and kissed them. “I’m not,” he said. Then he stood up and pushed his hand over his forehead.

  “Yes—we’ll talk later on,” he said. “What we’ve got to do now is to get you well. Where’s your brush and comb?”

  Hillier and Anastasia, meanwhile, racing back along the small track through the blue and silver meadows, and, bundling headlong down the steep path they had used on their first descent, had reached La Trappe soon after 7.30. There Hillier banged on the main door and demanded speech of the Father Prior or the Abbot, while Anastasia wandered round to the guest-house. She wanted breakfast badly, and was sure she would get it—and though the grilled gate leading into the small courtyard was locked, she sat down contentedly at the edge of the path under the espaliers to wait.

  Naturally she thought about Roy Hillier. She was a little puzzled by his démarche up at the hut—she did not know quite what to make of it. Last night he had been detachment personified, the very embodiment of considerate commonsense—this morning, on the other hand, came this gay and yet somehow deliberate attempt at making love to her. Was it just that their unconventional night had made him “go all primitive” as she had said? At one moment she thought so; but his words as he stood outside the hut contradicted that impression—still more, the way in which they were spoken. There had been no ring of irresponsible complacency about them, whatever she might have thought of his kiss. But the alternative theory, that he was in any sense seriously in love with her, she found it hard to credit. Her remorseless realism about herself made Anastasia Lydiard slow to think that men were falling in love with her. Some had, of course—and she had long ago recognised, with a certain amused resentment, that she was the sort of person who got kissed. She supposed it was being so small and round—apple-y little women did get kissed, by a certain type of man; and by that type of man Anastasia herself, in England, when she was younger, had regularly been kissed in taxis and other appropriate places. (This was one reason why she had been so short with Roy.) No, on the whole she was inclined to discard that theory too. Roy liked her now, she realised; was and wished to be on good terms with her—confidential terms, even. But being in love, marrying—no! It couldn’t be that. It must have been some sort of spasm of general affection, she decided, expressed in the only way he knew how—a very natural way, when all was said.

  The little gate behind her rattled; a latch clicked; it groaned on its hinges. She looked round. There stood those familiar figures the serving brother and the Père de Réception, Father Damien; behind them the Father Prior, beaming, and Roy.

  Over breakfast Anastasia expounded to her old friend the Father Prior Mrs. Pelham’s symptoms, and what she thought was needed for her treatment. The Father Prior beamed, and agreed; he guessed what Friar’s Balsam was from her description, a brown fluid that turned yellow and aromatic on the top of hot water,
and gave her the name—Tincture of Benzoin. And he made a useful suggestion—Ipecacuanha wine, given on lumps of sugar, to cut the phlegm. Anastasia having stressed the need for a swift return, he tore himself away, the dear old man, with manifest regret, from the charming presence of his fellow-beekeeper to go and get what was necessary. By 8.30 they were off again, Hillier carrying the neat little package in his pocket, after warm farewells from the two Fathers, and last instructions about treating bronchitis called after them by the Père Prieur. “Surtout beaucoup de vapeur, Mademoiselle—la vapeur c’est la clef!”

  “I was glad of that coffee,” said Anastasia, as they swung across the valley in the fresh morning light. “I feel I could do anything now. It’s rather awful, isn’t it, how dependent one is on these things?”

  “You seem to me to be at least as well able to do without them as most people, on yesterday’s showing,” he said. “You must be very strong.”

  “Strong but lazy!” she said. “I have to be forced into energy—I’m never energetic on my own motion, like Rose. I’m rather glad when I have to be.”

  “That sounds to me almost ideally restful,” he said. “I have an aversion from bustling women.”

  She glanced at him a little curiously. Artlessness, or what? She made no response, as they walked steadily on towards the further slope of the valley. While there was nothing so pronounced as awkwardness between them, they were in fact not talking a great deal that morning. The need for speed gave an excuse for silence of which both were quite glad to avail themselves, in order to pursue their own thoughts.

  Hillier’s thoughts were at once more concrete and more complicated than Anastasia’s, which as we have seen were really not much more than the competent assessment, by a sensible and experienced young woman, of what a particular demonstration by a young man amounted to. It is the sort of assessment that intelligent and responsible women are bound to undertake from time to time, in order, in the charming phrase of the English countryside, to know “how to go on”. But Hillier was doing something much more revolutionary than that. He was contemplating marriage—from a distance, it is true, but nevertheless marriage was what stood at the end of the vista down which his mind was now looking.