by Ursula Bloom
A nurse was installed by the head of his bed, and Dinah, passionately contrite, fluttered at the bottom. She, who loved him so much, felt desperately guilty at having been the one who had caused all this.
‘I’m all right,’ he kept saying, ‘you go out and enjoy yourself; I hate to keep you at home, and Nurse will see after me.’
She could not make him understand that going alone was not amusing. Without him at her side she did not want to go, she only wished to linger here. Max’s illness had widened the gap which was already beginning to show itself between her and Piers. She felt that in some way this was her own fault and she should be ashamed of herself. Because she felt so criminally guilty about Max, she had not the time to keep in touch with Piers; other matters occupied her.
‘What ought I to do about going out?’ she asked the doctor.
He looked at her with some concern. She was so very young that it seemed cruel to relegate her to the position of nurse in chief to this old man. He remembered that once in hospital the pathologist had told him how futile it was to sympathise with patients, or to interest oneself in their private calamities. That was why he had become a pathologist, he explained, it did not call for sympathy, and one did not get misunderstood. The doctor felt acute sympathy with this girl, but all the time he kept prompting himself that she had chosen this role of her own free will.
‘You ought to give up going about,’ he said, medical experience overcoming the desire to sympathise, ‘haven’t you somewhere in the country where you could live quietly, so that your husband would not get so much excitement?’
‘There is the cottage in Buckinghamshire.’
‘Why not close up this place and go down there for a little while?’
She thought of it with distaste, even though she knew that the doctor was right. It was not only that living in the cottage meant being buried alive, it also meant reviving all the acuter memories of Piers. The thought terrified her. The nearest dissipation would be market day at Aylesbury, or a most dull cinema to see stale films. Max loved the garden and they had mutual interests in the cottage which they had reclaimed and furnished together; but the whole idea of life there was too static for her. She could go into the country when she was seventy, she could sit there and knit; it was a tragedy to sit there knitting now, when she was young and vigorous.
‘It would be awful at the cottage,’ she said quickly before she thought what the doctor would deduce from such an assertion.
‘I dare say,’ said he; ‘but you asked me what was the thing for him to do, and I’m telling you.’
Dinah was a brave girl. She thought it over and decided that it was the wise course for Max’s sake. She made arrangements and would not admit that it hurt her badly to tear up her roots in the Hampstead home, and go away maybe for years. She wrote about it to Piers.
‘There is something in this move which is almost more than I can bear, and oh, my dear, although I am happy in my conscience, I do feel desperately miserable about it in my heart. I wonder if we did make the right decision at Devonport? I wonder if we ought not to have thought a little more of ourselves and less of others? Max is a dear, I can never emphasise sufficiently how good he has been to me, but lately he seems to have grown so much older.’
Anyway by going to the cottage she could not reproach herself.
Dust sheets screened the Hampstead home, and Lisa fussed about. One by one Dinah visited the rooms saying good-bye to them; she looked out at the view across the Heath with London beyond in the blue dimness, and the fire of gorse blossom, and the loving couples young and hopelessly in love, who sat on the benches, or sprawled outrageously on the grass, so wholly happy in the moment that they did not care what the morrow brought.
It was banishment.
‘I feel that you must hate leaving all this,’ said Max as they drove away from Hampstead together.
She had kept it from him with surprising courage, and because he had felt too ill he had not noticed very much. This illness had dimmed his powers of perception; he was aware of it and was annoyed with himself.
‘I love the country, you know,’ said Dinah.
‘Yes, we’ll see about getting the cottage really nice, all our own way …’ And he was content to sit back, holding her hand whilst she stared out of the windows, and saw London slipping away from them. She had the morbid, and quite foolish, idea that youth went too.
2
The village was so small.
At the rectory, flanked by seedy laurels and set well back beside the depressing outlook of the overgrown churchyard, the Stephens lived. They were an amiable couple with one daughter, and they took P.G.s to eke out the stipend, whilst during the summer months they let the rectory through the medium of a fashionable periodical and let it surprisingly well. In spite of these means of supplementing the living, they were always in a state of perennial hard-upness, and always searching for some new method of bringing grist to the mill.
He was a rubicund little man, bald, with a beam and a suit as shiny as his head. She was pale, an anaemic maypole who undoubtedly wore wool next to her skin all the year round. Muriel, the daughter, only came for occasional week-ends. She was working hard to become a pianist, and always insisted when she visited the home folk that she must give them a piano recital. Her father felt that Sunday parties were a bad example to the parish, and made protests invariably disposed of by his wife, who believed that Muriel was a genius.
Mrs. Stephens was sick to death of having married a country parson, and at forty-nine could not think how she had ever been such a fool. She had been twenty when she was led (not unwillingly) to the altar, and had had the chance to marry a man who was going to India, and who shot elephant. The prospect of marrying a man who shot elephant, lived in a bungalow, and kept innumerable ‘boys’ was a horizon so dazzling that now she could not think why she had ever been such an idiot as to throw it aside.
Disappointed in her own career, she had pinned an abiding faith in her daughter Muriel, who, she believed, would redeem the seedy fortunes of the rectory and would undoubtedly become a rival of Paderewski.
The week-end recitals were frightful. Muriel came home and was an unprepossessing girl. Too small. Too squat. Her red hair was of the lank kind, which should have been straw, but had never achieved the dignity of supporting harvest. Muriel wore terrible clothes, terribly. Once a month the village could be practically certain that one of these wretched musical parties would materialise, and knew that they would have to go to them. Dinah found that too. If she refused, she pleased herself but the Stephens became hurt, and she did not want to hurt them on purpose.
He was a kind-hearted little man who would never willingly have hurt her, and Mrs. Stephens meant well, and if she had an unkind tongue she matched it to a generous heart, which made it difficult to be hard on her.
Every time that she went to a party Dinah promised herself that this would be the last, yet every time she accepted again. Max pleaded ill-health. He could not bear the martyrdom of sitting about in the Stephens’ Edwardian drawing-room listening to Muriel maltreating the piano, with a soulful expression on her face.
‘Music isn’t really in my line, my dear,’ he would insist, ‘you had better go for me.’
The other members of the village community who were, as the locals expressed it, ‘their class’, were old Miss Tite and her brother Wally, and Dr. and Mrs. Wellby.
The Tites were charming. She was so old that she wore a lace bonnet tied demurely under her chin, and ample skirts fronted by an alpaca apron. She would never see the meridian of the eighties again. Her brother was twenty years her junior; though she thought of him as a boy, he was quite an old man. Years ago they had bought their old-fashioned home, with the creeper pleasantly green in summer, and glowing red in autumn. There was the sitting-room where the old lady sat and knitted away the last remaining years of her life, which opened on to a garden of rosemary and lavender, in which one forgot there was such a thing as time.
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br /> ‘It’s curious about those two,’ Dinah said, ‘but when I am there in that lovely little house and garden of theirs, I feel time stands still, and there isn’t such a thing. It’s the most attractive illusion.’
‘I feel that too. It is the atmosphere of the place. There you think there is plenty of time to do all you want to do with your life, and not be rushing around.’
‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’
She went over to him and laid her face tenderly against his. She liked the village but it was so hard to fill the hours, whilst Max maintained that he found time pass too quickly. It was the sad delusion of a man grown old, who had once been busy, and who liked to think that ‘busyness’ still dogged him. He flattered himself that he must hurry, and then would break down, admitting that it was a foolish pretence, which made her sorrier than ever for him.
Because her world had narrowed she found herself taking an unwholesome interest in Mrs. Wilkes’ house, and in the Dodds’ post office scandals. Going to buy a stamp, she would linger among the acid drops and the shoe laces and the rubber heels for boots, and chatter about nothing.
‘Ever so nice she is,’ Mrs. Dodds said in her absence, ‘but too young for him, of course. Such a pity!’
‘What you’d call a real lady,’ said Mrs. Wilkes, who had her own opinion of the other sort who came sometimes to the Four Feathers in trousers, with lipstick-stained cigarettes, drinking all sorts of things that ‘regular ladies shouldn’t know about’.
They all liked Dinah.
‘The village is so dull,’ she wrote to Piers. ‘I cannot bear to tell you how trying I find it, and I’d scream if I thought that I’d have to end my days here. Three years will be too long, and what will happen at the end of those three years, I dare not think. It is all quite horrible, because when you come back, I may not be brave in sending you away again. Write and tell me all about yourself, and what you are doing. I was so interested in the races at the Marsa, it all seems very different from here. I think I’d like the goats, even if they do smell frightful. I wish you wrote more often; as you warned me, you really are a very bad correspondent.’
She got the answer a month later, with profuse apologies for the delay, but they had been at the rifle range, which meant that everything was topsy-turvy; now they were off for a summer cruise, which would be appalling; because if there was anywhere more ghastly than the Greek islands, he would be glad not to know of it. His postscript thrilled her.
‘I may be a bad correspondent, but I can assure you that I intend to be the very dickens of a successful co-respondent.’
3
Over a year had gone by.
Dinah could not believe that so long had passed and that she was standing at the window of the cottage staring out at the laurels, heavy with frost, and the first snowdrops peering out of the ground, their dead whiteness against the silver whiteness of ice. She could not believe that all last winter and the following summer and the autumn had come and had gone again, and now, here she was on the very threshold of the new spring with only five more seasons to live through before Piers would be back again.
His letters had lessened considerably; she tried to convince herself that they could only keep open the wound, and that it might be better if the correspondence was limited; he said that there was a great deal of work to do in the ship, and she knew that sport interested him, and that he was constantly ashore for dances, where he insisted the ‘old man’ had told him to go. He was a flag lieutenant, which naturally meant a lot of parties. This was an honour which had been thrust upon him unwanted, he said, and it meant that he never had a spare moment, which was infuriating; but, wrote he gallantly, if he did not write so much as before, he was thinking of her a great deal more; he was in fact thinking of her all the time.
She stood staring out at the snowdrops.
Just at this particular moment, although she had managed to get through over a year of it, she had reached one of those half-way exhausting depressions, and felt that she could go no farther. She was so tired of the smallness of the village; she was so frightened of the snowdrops leading to the crocuses, and the daffs, and the narcissi with their ecstatic scent, and the roses. That full high tide of spring, which only accentuates loneliness and fans desire into a consuming fire. The cuckoo singing. Lush ditches brimming over with cobwebs of cows’ parsley. She could not bear to think of the spring, because there again the world was young with the youth that she coveted so much in Piers, and tried so hard to stem within herself.
She felt Max’s hands on her shoulders. ‘What are you thinking about?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You know that isn’t true; you must have some idea of what it was.’ Since his attack he had been a trifle hasty; he hated being put off with excuses, and would turn irritable if she tried fencing.
‘I was thinking about the spring,’ she said with an effort, ‘it always makes me sad.’
‘It’s because this place is so stagnant. You ought to have some young friends with you, why not ask somebody down to stay?’
‘I had thought of asking Aunt Lydia.’
‘No,’ said Max with a firmness that he would not have adopted a year ago, ‘you don’t ask your Aunt Lydia. Last time Uncle Kenneth came he was continually in the Four Feathers, and heaven only knows what rubbish he talked there in his cups. Besides, your Aunt Lydia is too old, you might just as well ask your mother and be done with it.’
‘Mother does need a change,’ and she thought regretfully of her mother coping with the interminable difficulties of Dukeleys. These days she was quite vague, dithering from one place to another, apparently happy, but hopelessly ineffectual. Her father was still having affairs.
‘You want somebody young,’ said Max sharply, ‘somebody different from myself. Surely you went to school with a girl or two you liked? What about Daisy what’s-her-name?’
‘You sound like Mother. Daisy was rather a dear.’
At that particular moment she had a ridiculous impression of Daisy leaning out of the window, and the flower box falling with a crash, draping her lover tastefully in petunias and fuchsias. It made her laugh spontaneously.
‘Well, ask Daisy!’
She had been going to say that she did not know where Daisy was (which was not true, because every Christmas they exchanged letters, and Daisy’s last one had come from Godalming), but she saw that Max did not want argument. ‘All right.’
She did not want Daisy to come here. It would in a way be nice to see her again, pleasant to have a girl who was her own age in the house, but she was afraid of Daisy’s youthfulness. The worst of living quietly was that one got into a routine, and a visit from anyone meant breaking it.
‘I’d have to entertain her, and that would be trying,’ she said.
‘Oh, I don’t know, there are cinemas and dances round.’
‘Yes, but you don’t dance, and it would be awkward going alone. How could I leave you?’
‘That’s bosh!’ said Max quite sternly, ‘of course you could leave me.’
However, Dinah did not ask Daisy until long after Easter, because Max had another heart attack. It came on at mid-Lent, most conveniently on the eve of one of Muriel Stephens’ musical parties. Dr. Wellby said that it would be quite impossible for Max to attend it. ‘One lucky escape,’ he suggested glibly.
‘You mean he can’t go?’ asked Dinah.
‘Go? Of course he can’t! He’s down for a fortnight, and my wife insists that I’ve got to go. I wish I’d had this. Some chaps have all the luck, don’t they?’
Max lay in his small room with the old ivory brushes he had had since a boy and the daguerreotype of his mother, and the view beyond the windows of the field where the earliest lambs were shuddering for warmth against the old ewes.
Max said nothing that first day, but lay breathing heavily, hardly opening his eyes. Dr. Wellby had got in a nurse from Tring, one of the busybody type, who kept fussing round and would not let Max be. She had
nursed only in the very best families, and the scandals that she had learnt were surprising. She knew far more than she should, and would discuss it. Dinah was aghast at the prospect of what she would say when she got back to Tring, because here she would not be able to unearth a scandal and would therefore have to invent one.
The first thing that Max said when he recovered was ‘Send that nurse away,’ a fluttering, rather womanish tone of voice, but with definite purpose.
‘Don’t you like her?’ asked Dinah.
‘Like her? Does any man like old toast?’ he enquired, and she gathered by that that he was very much better.
In a fortnight he came downstairs again, but compelled to take life much more easily, and only too well aware that he must not make any effort. Dr. Wellby had impressed that on him; he had got to go gently if he was to go at all.
Dinah knew, although he said nothing about it, that Max had awakened to the fact that he had suddenly grown a great deal older. He walked more slowly; his head was a trifle bowed, always before he had held it high; he had difficulty in dragging his feet along, and he was so easily tired. Now he was content to sit in his chair, but he liked life to follow the system that he was used to, a routine which nothing and no one must break. That was why Dinah was additionally dubious about asking Daisy to stay with them. If Daisy accepted, she would have to be entertained, which would immediately change the routine, and she knew that Max would resent it.
‘I’ll ask her later on when it is more settled weather,’ she suggested.
Easter came and went. It was a country Easter with the squeaky voices of lambs in the fields, early morning service with bitter wine and the scent of lilies, and cowslips strung into clumsy wreaths about the altar rails. Max insisted on attending early morning service, and lay down in the afternoon whilst Dinah crept about the house feeling that these Christian festivals were something pagan. She wished she had said that she would go out, even to Muriel’s frightful party, anything to escape the boredom that came inside this house.