by Francis King
‘‘Tomorrow afternoon,’’ Karen said, with no more than an appearance of equanimity. ‘‘All right. The address?’’
He once again repeated it.
She and Max did not mention Frank until she lay in bed. Then, as he brushed his teeth while she turned over the pages of a book which she had no intention of reading, she said: ‘‘What do you make of him?’’
‘‘Of whom?’’
‘‘Frank Ross.’’
Max took the toothbrush from his mouth and spat before he said: ‘‘ Now that I’ve met him, I think they were probably right, the journalists. He must have had a sort of genius.’’
‘‘Oh, I don’t mean-as a soldier,’’ Karen said irritably.
Max looked surprised. ‘‘But that’s the most important part of him.’’
‘‘The war is over.’’
‘‘Exactly. And that’s why he can settle to nothing else. A man like that is never really himself except during a war. One can see he’s not happy.’’
‘‘I don’t understand him,’’ Karen said.
‘‘You said that the first day you met him.’’
‘‘Did I?’’ she asked in astonishment. ‘‘Funny your remembering that. He’s—so totally unlike all the other men I’ve ever known, doesn’t care about the same things—money, a career, family life.’’
‘‘He cares about nothing,’’ Max said. ‘‘To me that’s rather frightening. It gives a man so much power.’’ Methodically, he rinsed his toothbrush, wiped it on a towel, and placed it in the rack: the whole routine, repeated night after night, made Karen want to shout at him.
But: ‘‘Power,’’ she mused. ‘‘Yes, one does feel that. And the power is the greater for being so curtailed. One feels that if the switch were turned on, anything might happen. Anything.… Oh, this is a stupid, boring book,’’ and she threw the copy of Vanity Fair, one of Colin’s prizes, on to the floor. It fell, open and face downwards, in a tangle of India paper pages. Max stooped to pick it up and straighten it, as she asked: ‘‘ What did you two talk about?’’
‘‘Nothing. The war.’’
‘‘Oh, the war,’’ she laughed, ‘‘that dreary old war. I believe we only have wars every twenty years in order to give you men a topic of conversation. Heaven knows what you would do without it.… Damn!’’ She threw back the bed-clothes and said: ‘‘Bring me my dressing-gown, would you? And my slippers.’’
‘‘What’s the matter?’’
‘‘I promised Mother to put Nicko on his pot. She wanted to go to bed early because she was tired, and it’s the girl’s night out. I’d almost forgotten. Not that it’s any use,’’ she went on, as he helped her into the dressing-gown. ‘‘ He does it all the same. It’s such a beastly habit. I wish I knew what to do about it. Mother believes it’s our fault.’’
‘‘Our fault?’’
‘‘She never says so in so many words, but I know it’s what she thinks. She’s had those sort of theories ever since I can remember. There was a boy who used to steal at the school.… Strange, her being so much more modern than any of her children.’’
She went into the child’s darkened room and said ‘‘ Blast’’ loudly when her foot kicked a table.
‘‘Granny,’’ a voice said, on the edge of hysteria.
‘‘It’s me—Mummy.’’
‘‘Oh, Mummy.’’ All at once there was the sound of noisy weeping.
Karen continued to grope for the light as she said, more cross than alarmed: ‘‘Nicko, what on earth is it? What’s the matter? … And where’s the light?’’
‘‘I’ll turn it on.’’ No less abruptly the tears ceased.
A pillow had fallen to the floor, and the sheet and blankets had bidden up so high that the child’s feet stuck out from beneath them. His face was scarlet under a criss-cross tangle of fine blond hair, his thumb was in his mouth.
‘‘Well!’’ said Karen. ‘‘You have got yourself into a mess. What was the matter?’’
‘‘I couldn’t sleep.’’ He put out his tongue and licked the tear which trembled by his mouth. ‘‘So hot. I was waiting for you,’’ he accused. ‘‘ Waiting and waiting. Never come.’’
‘‘Don’t be silly, how could you have been waiting? Look at your pyjama-jacket.’’ Karen straightened it and began to do it up, her fair hair brushing the child’s face. ‘‘You didn’t know I was coming. Granny didn’t ask me until you had gone to bed.’’
‘‘I was waiting,’’ he said stubbornly.
‘‘Now, don’t be silly. How could you have been waiting? Don’t suck your thumb, dear. Boys of six don’t suck thumbs.’’ Inexpertly she began to remake the bed.
‘‘But I was waiting, was, was, was!’’ In a sudden tantrum the child began screaming until his face became purple and someone in the next bedroom banged on the wall.
‘‘Nicko! Stop that! Nicko!’’
All at once the child became silent. ‘‘Was, was, was!’’ he hiccoughed; and turning over, he began to sob quietly into the pillow.
At last Karen was touched. She sat beside him, and eased his reluctant body round; kissed his forehead, his cheeks, his hands; rocked him from side to side as she asked: ‘‘But what is it? What’s the matter, darling?’’
But Nicko did not answer. He pressed himself against her, his sturdy body nestling against her breast, and lay still except for an occasional sob which shook him all over. Karen, being unsentimental, had never before looked for resemblances; but at this moment she thought how like his father he was, and she hugged him still closer. Her breasts ached as if someone had struck them.
Soon the child’s body went limp, his head slipped sideways, and he gave a small snort. He was asleep and she had not fulfilled the purpose for which she had come. But she had not the heart to wake him. Nor, as the morning proved, was it necessary that she should do so.
When she returned to her own room, she climbed into bed without saying a word.
‘‘All right?’’ Max said. He was still fiddling with his preparations for the night.
‘‘Oh, yes,’’ she said. She lay on her back, her hands outside the sheet, like a patient in a hospital, as she repeated: ‘‘Oh, yes. I’m all right.’’
‘‘You look done in,’’ Max said, going across to the bed and looking down at her.
‘‘Do I? You know I never want you to tell me how I look.’’ But if she said the words it was only from force of habit; she had said them so often before. ‘‘I feel perfectly well. And I’m not in the least tired.’’
He shrugged his shoulders at this rejection of his sympathy. ‘‘Blinds down or up?’’ he asked. He put the same question every night, because while Karen said that it was impossible to sleep with the blinds down, he himself always woke at dawn if the blinds remained up.
‘‘Up,’’ came the inevitable answer; and yet again the blinds remained up.
‘‘Light off?’’
‘‘I’ll do it.’’ She fumbled for the switch, her head still on the pillow, and at last managed to find it. The room was in darkness now except for three blades of moonlight, one of which grazed her face.
Max undid his dressing-gown and threw it across his bed, took off his slippers, and pulled back the sheet; then, on an impulse, he crossed the two yards that separated them and sat down beside her. He kissed her hair, her throat and forehead, and she suffered him to do so; but when he attempted to kiss her mouth, she drew away, not as she usually did, with an exclamation of disgust, but with a light sigh. He tried again, and her hands pushed him from her. A tear trickled out of one of her eyes, and others slowly followed; but she made no sound and her face did not move.
He climbed into his own bed, turned his back to her, and drew the sheet to his chin; it was a warm night but his teeth had begun to chatter. He wondered if he were going to have another attack of malaria. Suddenly she said:
‘‘Oh, all right. But get it over quickly.’’
He did not move, except as the fever made him sh
udder; and Karen did not repeat the invitation.
Chapter Twenty
FRANK ROSS pulled off his boxing-gloves and threw them at the sixteen-year-old Italian with whom he had been sparring: ‘‘That’s enough for one day.’’ He patted his shoulder. ‘‘Run along now.’’
‘‘Better?’’ the boy queried hopefully.
Ross stuck out his lower lip. ‘‘ You’re still leaving yourself wide open whenever you use your left.’’
‘‘ Tomorrow?’’ the boy asked, attempting to conceal his disappointment.
‘‘No, not tomorrow.’’
‘‘The next day?’’
‘‘All right, Wednesday. The same time. Ten o’clock. Now beat it.’’
As the boy leapt down the stairs Ross crossed the landing from the empty attic where they had been boxing to his own room. He dipped his sponge in the earthenware pitcher of water which stood in an enamel basin, slipped off his shorts, and began briskly to rub the sweat off his body. He had told the boy to come again on Wednesday and now he remembered that he had decided to look for another room. Something like regret came over him. He had so often thought Tonio and his sister nuisances for perpetually interfering in his life, but he wondered if he would really like to live somewhere where he would not have them near him. It’s my vanity, he thought. I like their admiration. I like it when Tonio stares at me in that strange way after I’ve got home a blow. I like it when Margaretta sits on the floor at my feet and I talk about Burma. I like their respect and their obedience and their obvious fear of me. And, yes, I like their love.
He had pulled on an open-necked shirt and, leaving it unbuttoned to his waist, he now sat himself at the folding card-table which stood before the window, a typewriter resting on its faded and moth-eaten green baize. He picked up a sheet to read what he had last written, but soon put it down. In the jungle someone unimportant, a lieutenant of twenty-three, had died of typhus in circumstances of extreme pain and ugliness, and to the last moment, when a noisy evacuation of the bowels had announced the boy’s death, Frank Ross had had to nurse him. He had begun by caring little for his patient since he had neither intelligence nor stoicism, and to Ross these qualities were essential in those whom he loved. Yet as, hour by hour, for two long days, he had listened to the boy’s grumbles, demands and feverish soliloquies, the thing which he had always feared once again happened. The snare had snapped shut; he had found himself committed. Before, he had wanted to get the whole beastliness over as soon as possible; better for all concerned, he thought, and he had speculated on hastening that end. But now he fought as with an implacable enemy, in a new war and against even longer odds. The old war was forgotten, in those two days he gave it not a thought. Indeed, in his patient’s last racking agony Ross’s desire for victory had been so strong that he had clutched to him what was now no more than a bundle of sweat, sores, vomit, pain and fear, in complete heedlessness to his own infection. Jacob wrestled with the angel—and Jacob lost. It was the central experience of his whole campaign.
He was trying to say this now, but somehow it would not come. What he had written seemed insincere, sentimental and over-literary; and yet it was an incident whose importance must be realized for the truth of the whole book. For, in a sense, he regarded those days of nursing the sick boy as a period when he had for the first time discovered the weakness at the heart of his own strength. Others suffered from such weakness, of course he well knew, mistaking the smaller contest for the greater, and caring more for the fall of a sparrow than the fall of a nation. And by such people little could be achieved. But he, too, it now appeared, was also ‘‘human”, and his humanity, like the bias in a bowl, had swung him from his aim. Temporarily, of course. But might it not happen again? That thought now obsessed him.
… He read another sheet, thinking: We all come to it in the end. After the cheers and the flags and the conference tables, we slink away, take up our pens and hope, if not to glorify, at least to justify ourselves. Lawrence did it best. And but for him, how different I might be! When I was fifteen, picking up Seven Pillars and reading of that horrifying beating, while the rain streaked the drawing-room windows and, in the conservatory, Aunt Lucy potted bulbs. The lawn so green, the branches rubbing incessantly against each other, and the sea, always the sea, thudding beneath the garden. A moment I have never forgotten. ‘‘What are you reading, dear?’’ I held it up. ‘‘Oh, General Mennen sent it this morning. It’s his subscription copy. It looked awfully boring.’’ ‘‘No, it’s not boring.’’ And after that his life was as if he were clumsily tracing a map on transparent paper, as he had learned to do at school.…
‘‘Come in!’’
Tonio’s head appeared. ‘‘There’s a lady to see you,’’ he announced on a note of astonishment. ‘‘Shall I send her up?’’
‘‘Yes, send her up,’’ Ross said, and began to thump at the typewriter, so that when Karen arrived, she had to apologize breathlessly:
‘‘I’m afraid I’ve disturbed your work.… Oh, what a climb!’’
‘‘I warned you. Seventy-six steps. It wasn’t really worth it, was it?’’
‘‘That’s to be seen.’’ She took off her cart-wheel straw hat and threw it on the bed, and then, inexplicably self-conscious, began to shake out her hair, at the same time glancing round the room. There was a single window, two feet by two, and she went to it and looked out. But there was nothing to be seen but innumerable roof-tops jostling to the sky. Next she examined the books which lay neatly piled on top of each other beside the camp-bed.
‘‘You have the books of an English master at a prep school,’’ she said. ‘‘All those Everymans and Oxford Standard authors.’’
‘‘Ever read a book twice?’’ he asked.
She did not answer but continued her scrutiny. It was one of those bare, cramped rooms in which she herself had often lived before she had married. All its possessions seemed to have been collected there for some express purpose, and she knew that the calendar which hung from a drawing-pin above the card-table had been placed there, not because of its twelve sepia views of the Thames valley, but because from time to time its owner might wish to know the date. Across one corner of the room a line had been stretched and from it were suspended a singlet, some pants and two pairs of socks. The floor was uncarpeted, and the plaster of the walls was pocked and cracked as if from a bombardment, but everything was scrupulously neat and clean. In another corner there was a primus stove, above which three nails supported a frying-pan, a saucepan and what appeared to be an old army billy-can.
‘‘You cook for yourself?’’
‘‘Yes. But they will insist on my eating with them. It’s embarrassing because they won’t let me pay my way. I go out sometimes, too—to a latteria round the corner.’’
‘‘Where do you keep your clothes?’’
‘‘My clothes?’’ He laughed. ‘‘There’s a spare pair of shorts, some grey flannels which I keep meaning to mend, and a sweater behind that curtain. The rest are in the rucksack.’’
‘‘Who’s this?’’ For the first time she had discovered something which had no practical use. Tucked into the heavy mahogany frame of the mirror above the wash-stand was a small, faded snapshot.
‘‘That? My sister.’’
‘‘Do you ever see her?’’
‘‘Sometimes.’’
‘‘Is she the only one?’’
‘‘Yes. She’s my twin. There weren’t any others.’’ An impulse to confide, such as he rarely experienced, made him add: ‘‘ She’s ill. I have to support her.’’
‘‘Ill?’’
‘‘Oh, they think she’s going to get better now, for a long time they were doubtful. They’re giving her some kind of shock-treatment.’’
‘‘How did it happen?’’
He shrugged his shoulders: he could not be expected to talk of his father, the discovery and the suicide. It was he, then only fourteen, who had first spoken to his aunt and he remembered her horrified: �
�‘What are you saying, child?’’ But she had clutched at the information as at a proffered weapon; even before her sister’s death, she had hated her brother-in-law.
‘‘She’s not like you,’’ Karen said. ‘‘Yours is a strong face, and hers is weak. But she’s beautiful.’’
‘‘Not now,’’ Frank said. ‘‘Look, suppose you stop being so inquisitive and sit down somewhere. I’ll make you a cup of coffee.’’
‘‘Give me your trousers and I’ll mend them for you.’’
He seemed doubtful about this suggestion, but going to the curtain, he raised it and brought out the trousers. ‘‘I can’t give them to you,’’ he said, ‘‘they’re absolutely filthy—covered with grease.’’
‘‘It doesn’t matter.’’ She took them from his reluctant grasp, and, as he fetched her a needle and cotton, ran her hands over them. They might have been worn by a mechanic, they were so stained, but strangely she did not care.
‘‘Oh, my God!’’ he exclaimed, when he brought her the cup of coffee. ‘‘Is that the best you can do?’’ Sewing on a button, she had drawn the flannel into a tight, ugly knot, and now, darning, she was circling the hole with a number of loose stitches, two or three times, as if uncertain what to do next. ‘‘Haven’t you ever been taught how to darn?’’
‘‘Of course I have.’’
‘‘You must have forgotten then. I could do better than that myself.’’
‘‘That’s gratitude for you!’’ She tugged at the thread, and when it wouldn’t snap, put it between her teeth. ‘‘If you’re so clever with a needle, you can finish it yourself.’’ She gnawed at the thread until it was soggy, and at last got it to break. ‘‘I shouldn’t have thought it mattered anyway with such a pair of trousers.’’
‘‘Drink your coffee before it gets cold,’’ was all he said. He took the trousers and the needle and thread from her, and then, fetching his own mug of coffee, sat beside her on the bed. ‘‘Nice dress,’’ he said, taking the flowered chiffon between his fingers. He gulped at his coffee, and then looking over the raised mug said: ‘‘You know, since we met you’ve begun to look much tidier. Is that because of what I said to you?’’