Doting

by Henry Green

  He was seated beside the girl but rather too far off. Also this trolley, between the two of them and that fire, was hard by his knees. It seemed he could not move over easily. So he went on pulling, and, as she tilted towards him, he put his far hand round her chin to turn this in his direction. She quietly rubbed this chin against his palm. Then she gently subsided on the man’s shoulder.

  They kissed.

  “Darling,” he murmured. “So beautiful. Delicious.”

  “Oh Arthur,” she said in just that expiring sigh she used to bring telephone conversations to an end.

  They kissed again.

  Then, probably because he was uncomfortable, for by the looks of it he had too far to reach to get at her, he dropped the far hand under her legs to lift these over his knees. He drew them unresisting to him, but must have forgotten the trolley. For the slow sweep he was imposing on her legs engaged her feet with that trolley and the coffee pot came over on to both.

  “My dress!” she exclaimed in a loud, despairing voice.

  “Damn,” he said.

  The girl at once jumped to her feet. The trolley almost went into the fire and that coffee pot rolled off their laps on to the floor.

  “Hot boiling water,” she cried out.

  “Oh God, and to think Mrs. Everett’s gone home,” he yelled. They started together, fast, for the passage. Once outside, he shouted “in here” throwing open his and Diana’s bedroom. There was a bathroom opened out of this, but, because the space was small, a basin with hot and cold water had been fitted by Diana’s bed. It was to this that Miss Paynton ran. Turning the hot tap on, she zipped off her skirt, and stood with her fat legs starting out of lace knickers. “Here, let me,” he said, and knelt at her side.

  She picked the handkerchief out of his breast pocket, drenched it in that basin, and then, putting her hand inside the skirt she had discarded, she began to rub at the stain.

  And it was at this moment Diana entered.

  She stood at the door with a completely expressionless face.

  “Arthur,” she said “when you’ve done, could you come outside a minute.”

  After one scared glance, Annabel went on rubbing.

  Mr. Middleton left the bedroom immediately, closing the door behind him.

  “What on earth do you think you are doing?” she demanded of her husband in a low voice, then went on. “It’s about Peter,” and she seemed to choke. “A taxi smash. He’s in hospital, Arthur! On the way to that beastly train!”

  “Hospital? Taxi smash? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “We never caught it, you see. Oh, he’s all right. But, poor sweet, he was unconscious. I thought why bother you when the doctors said he was in no danger—before the X-ray. Though if I’d known how you were behaving—I must say!” All this Diana said in a level, hurried voice. Then she slowed down. “Now they’ve seen the prints, nothing’s cracked and he’s conscious again. Oh my dear!”

  “Peter?” he stammered. “On the way to the station? But why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Would it have made any difference?” she replied. “Though he has an awful head, now,” she added with a smile. “The poor darling!”

  “Well what are we waiting for?” he demanded. “Let’s get to him!”

  “And how about that little bitch in there?” Mrs. Middleton asked, in the same level tones.

  “She’s just getting a coffee stain from off her dress,” her husband told her.

  “Quite so, Arthur, but I saw your hand.”

  “Damn my hand. Now about Peter . . .”

  “I saw your hand,” she repeated in an awful voice.

  “What about my hand, don’t be so childish . . . ?”

  “We won’t discuss this any more, if you please,” she calmly interrupted him.

  “I wasn’t doing nothing,” he protested.

  “Never mind about that now.” His wife raised her voice. “Are you going to stand here all night with your son in hospital?” Then she added, most severely “I saw you.”

  “Oh God!” he cried.

  He opened that bedroom door a crack so he could not see the girl inside, and announced “Oh Annabel, Peter’s been in an accident but he’s quite all right, and we’re off to the hospital.” To this he got no reply. He shut the door. “Come on!” his wife insisted with great impatience, and they hastened off together.

  •

  Mr. Middleton, next morning, did no business at all before he had persuaded his friend Addinsell to throw over a previous engagement to lunch.

  “I’m in trouble, Charles,” he said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Well Diana was taking Peter in a taxi to catch the train for Scotland when they had a smash and Peter was knocked out. The boy’s all right now, though, no bones broken, or even a fractured skull, as we feared at first.”

  “I say, I am sorry. What a rotten thing to happen!”

  “Yes, and that’s not the whole of it, as a matter of fact. To tell the honest truth, I’m in a spot of bother with Diana, Charles.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, of course, all my silly fault,” Mr. Middleton explained. “I’d asked this Paynton girl alone to dinner.” At this point Mr. Addinsell laughed. “Don’t do that,” Arthur Middleton exclaimed. “I told Diana; in fact she ordered the meal. But what happened was a stupid accident.” Here he paused.

  “Your wife came back to find you tucked up in bed together,” the other man suggested.

  “For God’s sake don’t be so foul,” Mr. Middleton appealed. “There was nothing of that sort. No, we had a slight accident. Ann spilled some coffee over her dress. God, I don’t like to think of it, even now!”

  Again he paused.

  “And so what?” Addinsell demanded.

  “And so Charles, Diana came in while Ann was dealing with this stain I told you about.”

  “Well come on, Arthur.”

  “As a matter of fact, Ann had whipped her skirt off,” Arthur Middleton explained in a peculiarly shamefaced way.

  “You old devil!” his companion commented.

  “Oh there was nothing of that sort,” the husband protested. “Well, to be truthful, I won’t pretend there mightn’t have been, but only, so to say, thirty minutes later. If you know what I mean. No, all this was as innocent as the day, at the time I’m talking of. Then here’s Diana all at once in the room when she should by rights have been steaming past Rugby at sixty miles an hour and so upset about Peter, as was only natural . . .”

  “Did she herself get hurt, at all?”

  “In the smash? No, thank heavens. But she decidedly cut up rough over Ann’s skirt being off.”

  “Not to be wondered at, Arthur, really.”

  “No, I know, and in her own bedroom, too. Yet Charles, I’ve never been a jealous husband. Even my worst enemy would grant me that.”

  “So if you came back unexpectedly,” Mr. Addinsell opposed “you’d ignore her dinner guest who’d happened to find himself without his trousers.”

  “Well I don’t know about overlooking it, but surely to goodness I wouldn’t make the scene Diana made!”

  “You forget she was naturally upset about Peter.”

  “That’s what I told her this morning, Charles, when we went into the whole thing again.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She wouldn’t bite.”

  “Great mistake to hold inquests, Arthur. Greatest mistake there is, in life.”

  “You wait until you’re married again! You’ll find you have no choice.”

  “All right, all right.” Mr. Addinsell admitted. “Well, what do you want me to do?”

  “You see, I’ve a dinner to the general managers Tuesday,” Mr. Middleton said, almost in the voice of conspirator. “And I was wondering if, for old sake’s sake, for my sake, you’d ask Diana out to dinner that evening. With any luck she won’t discuss it. But if she does, just remind her, will you, old man, there’s never been anyone else in my whole lif
e, really! You know that! You know me almost as well as I do . . .”

  “OK” Mr. Addinsell said, “I’ll try. Though it’s a bit of a tall order!”

  •

  Later that same afternoon, when he got back to the office, he was just in time to take a call from Miss Paynton.

  “Oh Arthur,” she sighed, in her signing-off voice.

  “Peter’s absolutely all right,” he said quickly. “Of course he’s got a stupendous headache, but there’s nothing broken, and they’re even getting him up tomorrow.”

  “Splendid,” she said with a doleful tone.

  “Yes, isn’t it,” he hesitantly agreed.

  “And darling Diana?” she breathed.

  “There’s been a spot of bother, there,” he admitted. “In fact I’m in bad odour for the moment. But it was mainly the shock. She was in the taxi too, you know. She escaped by bracing herself back on the seat.”

  “It’s too awful,” Miss Paynton exclaimed, with a firmer voice. “One never knows where one’s safe these days.”

  “Yes,” he admitted.

  “And is she still very cross with you?” she enquired.

  “Yes,” he said. “And with you a bit, too, as a matter of fact.”

  “Me?” she fluted. “But why ever over me?”

  “Well, of course, she’d just been in rather a nasty smash,” Arthur Middleton explained. “Poor darling. And she was worried stiff about Peter.”

  He paused.

  “Arthur!” Miss Paynton said. “D’you think I could see you for say five minutes, after work. I’m fussed.”

  He did not answer at once. “Well” he at last replied. “I’m not sure that would be an altogether good notion, Ann. Just at the moment,” he added.

  “I see,” she said.

  A click then told him she had rung off.

  •

  Mrs. Middleton was having her third conversation with her husband on the subject of Annabel Paynton. The attitude she adopted appeared to be one of pained surprise, of grieving bewilderment. “No, Arthur, I shall never understand,” she said. “Just when Peter was lain like dead in the ambulance and there was I imagining him gone.”

  “You’re not to give this another thought,” he murmured in a reassuring voice.

  “But I can’t help myself, Arthur!”

  “Now, my dear, you’ll make yourself ill if you go on visualizing Peter unconscious.”

  “I’m not,” she objected, as if to a child. “Arthur, I saw your hand!”

  “My darling, we’ve been into this so often,” he implored. “To my last breath I’ll always maintain I’d done nothing with my hand.”

  “I saw.”

  “Then, come on now, which hand was it?”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “Tell me, Diana,” he begged. “The left or the right?”

  “Oh no,” she broke out “this is too brutal. Why must you torture me so?”

  “I didn’t bring the subject up, darling.”

  “But you see,” she said, her eyes very wide “I smelled you, Arthur!”

  “You smelt me? This is something new! And what d’you mean by that?”

  “Why the powder she had on, or the scent she used, Arthur!”

  “Now my dear, which? You know you’ve always prided yourself on your sense of smell. If this is right, what you’re saying, you ought to be able to tell one from the other.”

  “Don’t try and dodge,” she informed him in the same sad voice. “I did, I tell you.”

  “I can’t make this out at all. What am I supposed to have done now?”

  “You’d put your hand on her leg, Arthur, and I can’t, I shan’t, ever, get over it.”

  “Look darling,” he said, most reasonably. “Will you believe me when I say I have absolutely no recollection of anything of the kind.”

  “Are you trying to tell me, then, that you didn’t?”

  “Well, really, I’d say I might remember a little thing like that!”

  “But Arthur, I smelled you!”

  “Oh damn this famous sense of smell of yours,” he exclaimed with warmth. “I can’t help it, can I,” she suggested, in a voice of resignation. “I was born that way.”

  “Look darling,” he said and seemed to whip himself almost into a sense of eagerness “be reasonable about this, don’t let’s get carried away. You can’t call to mind which hand of mine it was, and you don’t know what I’m supposed to have smelt of.”

  “Why, of that horrible little Annabel, of course, Arthur!”

  “Now darling,” he said again “let’s just face things. Coffee does get spilt you know.”

  “Yes, but how? You’ve never even once told me.”

  “Oh, in the way coffee always does get spilt.”

  “There must have been something happened to make it, Arthur.”

  “Well, you see, darling, I’d drawn the sofa out across the fire . . .”

  “Yes, and what for, thank you?”

  “I simply thought we’d be more cosy; then . . .”

  “You’re never to turn the furniture round again,” she raised her voice at last. “It’s my house—”

  “I live here too,” he broke in.

  “I’m in all the time,” she expostulated.

  “So I only wish you could have been present, Di, and seen with your own eyes how truly innocent the whole thing was.”

  “D’you suppose I wanted to be at that awful hospital?” she demanded in a calmer voice.

  “Good heavens no, darling! No, in getting my coffee I stupidly, clumsy fool that I am, just jogged her elbow.”

  “Well then?”

  “Well then, I don’t suppose she has much of a dress allowance, if there is still such a thing these days, and she called out, ‘hot boiling water’ was the phrase she used, and of course I lost my head and rushed her into our bedroom, meaning to get her in the bath.”

  Mrs. Middleton at this moment let out a laugh in which there was very little fun. “Well, as a matter of fact, she may have been first, before me,” Mr. Middleton corrected himself. “Because once Ann had seen the basin she wouldn’t go any further, she peeled off her skirt at once.”

  “But, Arthur, what could have made you kneel?”

  “My dear, can’t you see? I was in an agony of embarrassment.”

  “Not at her fat legs, I don’t suppose?”

  “Now look here, my dear, there’s no need to be insulting, is there? How d’you suppose it would look, to Paula, if at my age I bought her girl a new dress.”

  “There are such things as cleaners and I’ve got no clothes,” his wife told him in an expressionless voice.

  “Then I give up,” he said wearily. “All I did was for the best, darling. I seem to have made a complete ass of myself and there it is.”

  “She did of you, you mean,” Mrs. Middleton corrected him. “Well darling,” she added with a tired smile “don’t bother your old head too much. You see, I love you. There . . .”

  He came over. They kissed as though they had been parted a long time.

  “I do love you,” she repeated. “And I’ve been upset. But don’t let me ever catch you, even once, again . . .”

  “Now darling!” he protested.

  “All right, we won’t talk of it just now,” she ended. She then told him Addinsell had asked her out to dinner. When he expressed a sort of resigned pleasure, they animatedly discussed Peter’s splendid progress out of his concussion.

  •

  “What’s the matter with Arthur these days?” Mr. Addinsell asked Diana as he drove her away for the dinner they were to have together. “Lately he’s seemed a different fellow.”

  Mrs. Middleton laughed selfconsciously. “I’m afraid I may have been a bit difficult the last few days.”

  “In what way, may one ask?”

  “Well, there was that terrible accident Peter and I were involved in. You see, Peter has been kept in hospital with a bit of concussion, but we are getting him
back tomorrow, so things are looking up again.”

  “Yes, I was sorry to hear. Is Peter going to be all right?”

  “Oh absolutely! The doctors are delighted. But of course, as you can imagine, Charles, I didn’t know, not at first. In fact, I nearly worried myself out of my poor mind.”

  Mr. Addinsell had to draw up rather suddenly at some traffic lights. She put her hands against the dashboard.

  “Oh, do be careful,” she cried, then seemed to recover herself. “I’m terribly sorry. But I’ve been nervous ever since we were in that awful smash.”

  “Only natural!” he said.

  “Yes I’m afraid I’ve made myself such a bore to Arthur the last day or two,” she went on in a nervous voice. “Of course he can be maddening sometimes, who isn’t, ever, in married life? And I only say this to you because you are Arthur’s oldest friend.”

  “Go on,” he said when she paused.

  “Well, maddening is not quite the word I should have used, perhaps. But, Charles, although it’s natural, after so many years of being married, it is sad, isn’t it, when the man begins to look elsewhere?”

  “Old Arthur? My dear, I can assure you . . .”

  “No Charles,” she said “I’ve had proof. And I never intended to say a word of all this. So dull for you!”

  “Why!” he exclaimed, and drove with great caution. “You two are my greatest friends. Nothing dull where you’re both concerned.”

  “You are sweet, Charles. Still, this is not a topic to go out to dinner on, is it? Let’s talk about you, for a change. Why did you never marry again?”

  Mr. Addinsell accelerated past a taxi.

  “I honestly don’t know,” he replied. “Never found anyone who would have me, I suppose.”

  “Now that’s just not true. It can’t be! But there are times I lie awake, Charles, and wonder, and think how terribly wise you’ve been.”

  “Me?” he asked, with what seemed to be genuine amazement. “My dear I seem to have done nothing but lose money all my life.”

  “No, don’t joke about this,” she reproved him. “Just think of it all. There are the children. Sometimes I thank Providence we’ve only one. They get ill, they nearly die and you’re almost out of your mind, Peter has this terrible affair, and, the whole while, your husband is getting tired of you.”