Briskly, the door of the bathroom was flung open, and out rustled a white figure, plump and crisp, across her path. Nurse. Ah, there it was, the lurking symbol, the menacing reassurance … It was here, large as life, blocking the light, the efficient white flag of danger.
“Good-morning.” Through the open bathroom door she saw bottles, white enamel vessels, and, on the floor, the shape of an oxygen cylinder, sinister … Yes, it was here, all around …
“Good-morning.” The nurse held out a cool dry hand. “Are you the other daughter I’ve heard about?”
“Yes, I am.” Eager, ingratiating, feeling sick all of a sudden … Compact, short shape, broad face in its frame of white, clear full blue eye appraising her, fresh cheek, good teeth, lips strongly modelled, pale: a nurse’s face, lesbian face. She devoured all in one glance. We are delivered into your hands.
“It’s nice you could come. Your mother will be ever so glad to have you.” Cool voice, with an edge of sub-nasal gentility.
“How is he?”
“Oh, he’s quite comfortable. He’s having a little snooze just now. I expect you’ll be wanting to peep at him later.”
“Oh, yes … please … if I might.” Placate her, be obedient.
“I expect you could.”
“Is he—I suppose he’s—is he awfully ill, d’you think?”
“Well—pneumonia’s always a nasty thing, isn’t it? And at his age.”
“Yes, of course …”
“Still, we must hope for the best. He’s a good patient, I must say. Not like some. Of course he’s been used to illness, hasn’t he?—Makes a difference.”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t it a glorious day? I was just going out for a little stroll round.”
“Were you? Good. It’s too lovely out now. I expect you’re longing for some fresh air. You must be so tired being up all night …”
“Oh, not too bad. Just a bit stale, you know.”
“I’ll see you later, then.”
“Yes, that’s right. Bye-bye.”
Used to illness. Pneumonia’s a nasty thing. We must hope for the best.
In the schoolroom, Kate was already bending over the table with pins in her mouth, the cutting-out scissors in her hand, and portions of blue material and paper pattern spread around her. She murmured through the pins, without looking up:
“I’ll just slash about and she can do the rest. I’m damned if I’ll fit turquoise satin over her fat bottom.”
“Fat bottoms to you, Mrs. Emery—Don’t trouble yourself, I beg. There’ll be many only too pleased …”
Kate spun round with a jerk.
“God! I thought for a moment … How d’you know how she speaks?”
“I’ve just been chatting in the passage.”
“You nearly made me swallow ten pins.” She bent once more over the table, and added: “Idiot.”
Olivia flung herself down in the basket chair by the fire and lit a gasper.
“Still smoking like a chimney?” said Kate, through pins, beginning to cut.
“Rather, more than ever.”
“How many do you get through a day?”
“Donno. It varies. Sometimes I do knock off for a day or two—if my morning cough gets too disgusting. Or if I’m short of cash.”
“You simply choke up your inside with those foul fumes. No wonder you haven’t any appetite. I believe that’s what it is.”
Cigarettes for supper, and a cup of coffee. Surprising how adequately they took the edge off one’s hunger … how often, by oneself, when one couldn’t be bothered to cook anything, or wanted to afford a movie instead … Wouldn’t Kate scold if she knew …
“I suppose so. That, and the booze.”
Above the scissors, Kate stole her a surreptitious glance. Nowadays it was apt to be a tricky business questioning Olivia. She was as touchy as could be. For the most part her immediate reaction was a sort of defiant irony, extremely boring. Anything would set her off, flaunting the no-lady pose, cracking low jokes—really awful ones—and God knows I’m no prude about language, not after eight years of Rob: but it does not suit females. Or else she’d simply hoot with laughter. Once, twice, dreadfully disconcertingly, she had burst into hysterical tears.
“We sex-starved women have cravings you comfortable wives and mothers don’t dream of,” remarked Olivia, blowing smoke-rings.
“And vice versa,” said Kate tartly. She guided the crisp scissors in one unbroken line from edge to edge of the stuff.
After a pause, Olivia said:
“She seems to be bearing up all right.”
“Who, Mother?”
“Mm. Full war paint.”
Kate reflected. The words, the tone, conforming as they did to a filial convention of ribaldry for normal private occasions, wouldn’t do just now—not in this crisis. Olivia showed a lack of sensibility. She said with seriousness, though without reproach:
“She hasn’t had any sleep this week—not more than an hour or two. She’s in and out of his room all night. She’s simply amazing. I don’t know how she does it. I haven’t seen her fussed once.”
“I suppose neither of you thought me worth informing till this morning?”
“Mother didn’t want to take you away from your work if it could be helped. It was you she was thinking of.”
“Oh, how very kind of her.” She takes Mother’s side nowadays.
“Of course we wanted you to come …”
“I suppose it didn’t occur to either of you I might have liked to see him before … I might have liked …” She stopped and bit hard into a thumb nail. “He and I’ve always got on all right …”
“I know … Of course …” Kate was reasonable, irritated, distressed all at once. “Only you’ve said so often … You’ve often said it was difficult for you to get away, you were alone in the office or something.”
Making that the excuse for not coming home, or cutting a visit short … Oh, well … That’s enough of that.
“Is James coming?”
“No. Not at present, anyway. Mother didn’t know what to do, but I advised not unsettling him if we could help it. She hasn’t even told him. You know what he is … Any excuse to be off …”
What was James? He was a problem. The only male Curtis of this generation was rebellious, not inclined to conform, to settle. After the most brilliant conceit-inducing start at school, he had progressively disappointed; had failed to win the university scholarship which would have enabled him to defer the question of career for a time. Dispatched after this grave set-back to a mill-owning acquaintance of Mr. Curtis in Bristol to learn the business he had left without farewells at the end of six weeks; arriving at the front door at 1 a.m. after three days on the road, blistered, feverish, sullen. Naturally that was the end of the Bristol experiment. Naturally his wounded employer washed his hands. As for James, he explained nothing; and, though briefly bitter, not to say insolent, about mills, voiced no preferences. At home he was disagreeable and spotty, refused all invitations to tennis parties and dances, avoided everybody’s eye, burst forth for day-long solitary walks. In the evenings he sat in his bedroom, playing Delius on his portable Decca and reading poetry: perhaps writing it—nobody knew for certain: but he was known to possess a thick furtive black copy-book. It was only a phase, of course: boys did go like that. But it had seemed best, while waiting for him to come on again, to send him to a French family for a while. French was always useful; and then there was a dark implication of the advantage of removing him from the neighbourhood of Uncle Oswald, for whose society he now showed an odd mingled distaste and fascination. And then the discreet mixture of foreign emancipation and home influence provided by Monsieur et Madame Latour of Fontainebleau might be just what was needed to soothe and settle him. Certainly madame’s elaborately eulogistic, maternally sympathetic
, exquisitely penned letters about him appeared to justify such a hope. As for James’s own letters, though scanty and reticent, they arrived regularly, contained no disquieting P.SS. and altogether appeared the products of a normal English youth accepting life as it was ordered for him.
But now and then Olivia remembered him that week-end after his tramp from Bristol: sitting in the bathroom with his trousers rolled up, soaking his swollen feet in a large bowl of hot water and lysol; submitting to female ministrations, silent, inhaling eucalyptus, drinking hot lemon, his masculinity cast down, made ludicrous; his expression that of a performing dog in a circus. He had made his gesture of independence, and in the act of making it, he had let it crumble and be ridiculous. Whatever savage amorphous plan for freedom had illumined him at the start and driven him forth, he had, after all, come home. He could do no other, he saw with incredulous rage. He had proved nothing but his own futility, his servitude. He would do no more. He would go into the mill. He would rot. They had been tactful after the first shock; after the first questions, they had attempted to conceal their profound dismay. Nobody had brought him to book. He had been left alone with his stubbornness and his hatred and his streaming cold. To whom went the letters that he locked himself up to write and took secretly to post? When the replies came, always in the same small cramped hand, back deep, deep beneath its surface his poor face had shrunk all day, so naked, so concealed, fixed in a rigid frenzy, an agony of self-protection. He had been alone. No friend had come with love and understanding to cast forth his dumb spirit.
In the night, in London, unwillingly Olivia had thought about him, banished him, seen him again; struck suddenly by a crazy notion: that he now had no eyes. He had closed them, sunk them; there were cobwebs over them. As a child he’d had large eyes, intensely blue, of a notable shape and wild brilliance … Could I have helped him? … hit somehow on the right word? …
Going once to his bedroom, on an impulse, the others all out … But he was not there. And oh, the room, so burdened with him, stricken, sensual, poignant with his penned-up mysterious youth, his harsh male unhappiness; the tidiness of concealment everywhere, the locked drawers of the writing-desk, the densely scribbled blotter, the poems of Eliot, Yeats, Hopkins, Owen, the Elizabethan dramatists by his bed; the Van Gogh landscape pinned up on the wall opposite, to comfort him … I didn’t help …
If Dad dies, they’ll push him straight into the mill …
“Kate, what do they think really? I mean, will he get better … or not?”
“I don’t know. I think he may.”
“And we may know quite soon … to-day …?”
“Probably.” Kate went on pinning a piece of pattern to a length of material. “In pneumonia, good nursing counts for a lot, and he’s certainly having the best of that. But of course it mostly depends now how his heart holds out.”
“Have you seen him?”
“Oh, yes. These last two afternoons I’ve made Mother go out for half an hour, and sat with him.”
“How does he seem? Is he dreadfully—uncomfortable?”
“Well, he’s restless—and his cough hurts—but not too bad.”
“Does he—does he talk to you?”
“Not much. Just occasionally. He wanders a bit.”
“Does he …?” She bit her thumb hard again. What does he talk about?—giving himself away … I don’t want her to tell me.
“I’ve nursed pneumonia before. Rob had it, don’t you remember? … the year after we were married,—when Priscilla was six weeks old?”
“I’d forgotten.”
“And I fed her just the same all the time.”
Kate laid down her scissors for the first time, smiled faintly, reminiscently.
Over her unconscious face spread the expression of her life, calm, yet half-rueful, just amused, just triumphant. Kate, that young, fresh, most virginal of virgins, was a shrewd matron, capable, experienced. What look is my life giving me? Any look? …
“I’ve never nursed any one. Once Ivor had a poisoned thumb, but I didn’t nurse him. He was in such a stew he summoned his mother.” She giggled. “So I went off to the seaside alone for the week-end. I stayed in a pub. It was late October, it was perfect. I didn’t let them know where I was, and when I came back—my hat!— How delicate he’d always been, and how he’d been a whole day alone in the house, and he might have had to have his arm off, and she knew someone who’d started with a boil on his nose and finally lost all his legs and arms and died raving. ‘Ivor won’t die,’ I said. ‘I’ll try neglect, starvation, anything to oblige. I know you’d love to lay his death at my door. But Ivor’s not the dying sort, though he does look so pale and wistful. He’s tough—jolly tough. Like you.’”
Kate looked at her.
“You didn’t really say anything of the sort, did you?” How hard her voice was,—unkind … Poor Olivia. But after all … her husband; she would marry him … She must have given him a time, despising him like that.
“No, I didn’t really,” said Olivia, after a silence. “I spend a lot of time devising these posthumous cracks.”
“I hope they give you satisfaction,” said Kate, and added, pinning busily: “D’you ever see him?”
“I saw him in Giulio’s about a month ago. He was with a very powerful-looking middle-aged woman with a black Bohemian fringe and a cigarette holder and a deep motherly bosom. I think he must have been telling her about his unhappy married life. She gave me such a look.”
“You didn’t speak to him, did you?”
“Oh, yes. He said he was just off to France to write a novel. I expect she’s got a villa there and she’ll give him nourishing food till he’s finished it. I said, ‘I suppose it’s about me,’ but he said no, the girl in his book was short, with red hair and green eyes.”
“Wasn’t he embarrassed?”
“He didn’t seem to be … I don’t know.” Olivia was silent. “I wonder if that was a joke of his about the red hair … I wouldn’t put it past him. Damn! It never struck me. Perhaps he’s one up.”
“He deserves to be, I must say.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, how could you?”
“How could I what?”
“Go up to him like that—in a public place—”
“Why not?” She flushed darkly. “We’re nothing to each other. Besides, it’s much more civilised, isn’t it? We haven’t got a death-feud just because we’re separated. Though I know you and Mother think we ought to have … Makes it more respectable, I suppose.”
Kate said nothing; and Olivia continued with bitter anger: “In a public place! … What a foul expression. You’re as bad as Mother: ‘Not in front of the servants.’”
Kate was a concentrated arc above the table and seemed not to have heard.
“Besides he knows Giulio’s is one of my places. He knows I often go there with Anna or someone. I dare say he did it on purpose to make me feel beastly—bringing that antique cart-horse to glare at me,—just to see what I’d do.”
“Keep your hair on, do. I’m not sticking up for him. I never could stand the man, as you know … There, that’s done, thank God.” Kate flung down her scissors and stooped to pick up shreds and fragments from the floor; adding quietly, with her head under the table: “Only I just couldn’t have done it myself, that’s all. No offence meant.”
Olivia sank back in her arm-chair and turned her face away. After a bit she said:
“Well, nor could I have—till I did it. So there. I can’t explain … but that’s just the worst of it.” …Kate with her conventional, her sheltered successful life, tied to her husband by children and habit and affection and respect She couldn’t possibly understand … “He developed my nastiness from a mere seed into a great jungle. He made me so mean and bloody … Well, I just am a bloody character, I suppose. And I always thought I was so nice.”
>
“You’re all right.” What an idiotic way to talk. “Here, drink your bovril, I forgot it. It’s getting cold.” She brought the tray over from the window-seat, put it on the floor between them and sat down in the other basket-chair. They picked up their cups and began sipping.
“Only,” said Kate, “as it was all so hopeless obviously from the start, I don’t know why you don’t want to snap out of it altogether …”
“Why ‘obviously’?” She fastened on the word—superior, smug-sounding—stiffened inwardly. It hadn’t been so obvious as all that, not by a long chalk. With his long-lashed greenish eyes, almond-shaped, his soft thick green-dark hair, the sweetness of his profile with its full lips and rounded chin, his pale-skinned, still-adolescent physical charm, his undergraduate’s blend of verbal liveliness, shyness, sensitiveness, conceit: with all that, he’d been a natural person anyway to fall in love with.
“Well, no idea of doing any work or having a home or anything.”
“He was too young.”
And he was to have devoted his life to poetry. No good saying that to Kate. Those early poems, too clever, obscure, but with an individual something—they had promised, everybody said so. But the weakness in them was the weakness of his nature, basic and irremediable. They, like him, could never branch and toughen; but narrow, but dwindle and deteriorate, after the first graceful flowery outbreaking. I didn’t help him. Nobody could, of course … At least … I think not … She said with a sigh:
The Weather in the Streets (The Olivia Curtis Novels) Page 4