by H. E. Bates
‘Oh, he’s just my watch-dog,’ she said. ‘Did you see the way he sits and looks at me?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
She laughed. ‘He reminds me more than anything in the world of a watch-dog. It’s wonderful how people change, isn’t it?’
‘Not everybody changes,’ I said, and I stooped to kiss her goodbye.
This time she turned her lips to me. As they brushed my face there was a dry flakiness about them and for a single unbearable moment I wanted to hold them there, deeply and for a long time, but she whispered:
‘Off you go, now. Nurse Simpson will be chasing you. She’s severe. You will come again, won’t you?’
I smiled. ‘And still she wished for company,’ I said.
‘What’s that?’ she said. ‘One of your quotations?’
‘Goodbye,’ I said.
She looked suddenly tired from exertions of over-gaiety and conversation. As she lay back on the pillows she gave me a distant smile.
‘You haven’t changed at all,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you have.’
Some minutes later I went into a world of departing visitors, dispersing either on foot or by taxi, to hear Blackie Johnson, at the sanatorium gates, politely and stolidly refusing two anxious elderly fares who wanted to catch the down-express to Leicester.
‘I’m very sorry,’ Blackie said. ‘I’ve got another job.’
The old Chrysler limousine was standing in the road, with Blackie solid and Sundayfied in the driving-seat. As he saw me he called:
‘Here you are, Mr Richardson. Thought you were never coming. Jump in.’
Mystified I got into the front seat. He leaned over and shut the quaking upholstered door with a bang.
‘I hoped I’d catch you,’ he said. He grated in the clutch and the Chrysler growled heavily down the hill. ‘Is there somewhere I can take you? Can I run you home?’
‘I wasn’t going anywhere,’ I said.
‘Do you mind if I run you round in the country for half an hour?’ he said. ‘If you can spare the time? There’s something –’ He broke off, fumbling at the gears, big and nervous, unable to frame the words for a situation that was clearly the greatest trouble to him.
We drove on for some miles in silence, out of the town, into bright sunlight, past trooping Sunday walkers, and gradually into lanes of rising wheat behind hedgerows of emerald and snowy may-cloud. The air was humid behind the closed glass of the Chrysler, and at last he partly opened a window and said:
‘What do you make of her, Mr Richardson? What do you think of her?’
‘I think she looks well,’ I said.
‘Do you?’ he said in agitation. ‘You do really?’
‘I think so –’
‘I don’t know what to make of her,’ he said. ‘Sometimes –’
He pulled up the car with harsh abruptness in a side lane along which children had strewn, in broken sheaves, numberless naked bluebells, the blanched white sockets limp in the hot sun. He opened the window a little wider. I could smell the rising summer in the scent of grass, in the clotted vanilla of masses of hawthorn and in the sweetness of bluebells still alive in small oak copses.
‘You think she’s all right?’ he said. ‘I keep trying to get hold of Dr Baird to ask him – but you know how they are – doctors –’
‘Well, if Nora’s anything to go by –’
‘Nora’s different,’ he said. ‘Nora’s not the same. You can’t go by Nora.’
‘Baird seems confident,’ I said.
He sat staring down the road. A cuckoo, breaking from a copse, called its way over dark-green sunlit wheatfields, pursued by another. I watched them for some time, out of sight, before Blackie said:
‘The first time I saw her I couldn’t sleep all night – I couldn’t get to sleep for thinking of her. She couldn’t speak to me that time. They let me have three minutes with her, with a nurse there – that’s all – and she couldn’t speak to me.’
I stared down the road, not speaking. It seemed to me that he had waited a long time for the chance to lift a private troubled load of something off his chest, and now that he had begun he could not stop himself:
‘You didn’t see her then, Mr Richardson,’ he said. ‘You didn’t see her before that, either. You didn’t see it all coming on, last winter and last summer and the winter before that. After Mr Holland – that’s when it started – after that –’
I let him go on, staring through the dusty windscreen of the car at golden clarified sunlight steeping like warm liquid the wheatfields, the copses, and the high hedgerows of hawthorn. His voice unwound itself from light coils of recollection that hurt him as distinctly as if he had been unravelling a tortured knot of veins inside himself.
He somehow extracted from this tangled mess of his own pain the story of the two winters and the summer, of the long binge about which she had spoken. Several times he got it, as Tom had had a habit of doing under extreme emotion, in disorder, backwards, turned in on itself, hopelessly repetitive, so that he had to start again. I didn’t interfere with him; I suppose he talked for about an hour. He spoke of Nora sometimes, but never of Lydia: only, with an awful sort of respect that had the effect of making his distraction about her more troubled and sometimes most poignant, of Miss Aspen. It was Miss Aspen ordering the car every night, Miss Aspen crazy to go to new places, to try new dances, to go farther and farther, later and later, and more and more often. It was Miss Aspen, wild and hungry for company, who would never stop and never tire. Through it all ran the word ‘business,’ like the beat of an unnecessary justification.
‘I was very glad of the business, Mr Richardson, when it started I was very glad of the business. She had tried to be very kind to me before that – you remember that, don’t you? She tried to put business in my way – she tried to lend me money and all that. I couldn’t see it then – I’m a bit pig-headed. It takes me a long time to see a thing like that. Then when I did see it I was sorry. I wished I hadn’t acted like that. But I didn’t see her. I didn’t get a chance to explain. And then she rang me up one day and it started and I was glad of the business. I was very glad of the business.’
From time to time he would break off, saying: ‘I wish I hadn’t done it now. I wish to God I’d never started it.’
All through the two winters and the summer there would hardly be a night, except Sundays, when she and Nora did not hire the car. Besides the dances there were a number of clubs, opened mostly by dubious colonels and their wives or mistresses up and down the river, offering some sort of food and drink and high-pitched company and a brittle, searing brand of fun. They found them all, beat their way hungrily through them, exhausted them and went farther away for others. He did not say much about men. He supposed there must have been men, in the same way as there was a good deal of drink and rowdiness and such idiocies, popular at the time, as games of stripping down to brassières on dance floors. But the thing that stuck in his mind, troubled him most, was the deadliness. An awful deadliness. There was no joy in it; only a deadly, awful pointlessness. The two girls went through everything with the same, wearing hunger. They even brought it to a thoughtless brand of insolence, leaving him alone in the car for five and six and seven hours at a time, until three or four o’clock in the morning, which in summer meant the break of day.
Then one day he found he had had enough of this; after several months of it he was getting worn out himself. Most nights he managed to get a little sleep in the car, but it was never enough and always, next day, he began to feel drowsy and brainless and incapable of doing the work he wanted. His business – ‘I’m not all that hot on it anyway. I’m no business man’ – began to fall off. His accounts fell behind and got into a mess. Then one night after crawling home for hours in a river-fog and narrowly missing the river at one point he found he was really frightened. A queer idea of impending disaster stuck itself into his head and he could not get it out. It haunted him all next day, and that same evening he said to her:
�
�Miss Aspen, I’m afraid I can’t take you any more. I’m afraid I shall have to give it up.’
She didn’t answer that – there was no protest or anger or remonstration or question about it at all. But that night, when she at last came out of one of the dubious colonels’ clubs, he saw her stagger about sightlessly in the lights of his car, half-supported by Nora, until she suddenly lurched forward and fell down.
He wasn’t shocked by the fact of seeing her drunk. He picked her up in his arms, and it was more as if she were sleeping. He even felt a sense of relief about it. He tucked her up with rugs, beside Nora, who was in a state of stony suspense, at the back of the car. Then he drove carefully home. It was a little foggy again, in dangerous patches, but in places there were stars. Then as he drove his sense of disaster came back. He found himself appalled by the idea that she might have fallen and hurt herself or wandered stupidly about and got lost in the river.
‘So I knew if she was going on with it I had to go on,’ he said. ‘I was frightened about her.’
Later, after he had taken Nora home, he drove to the park with Lydia. She was still asleep in the car when he stopped by the gates. He tried to wake her by gently calling her name. ‘Miss Aspen, Miss Aspen,’ he kept saying to her, ‘Miss Aspen, you’ll have to wake up. We’re home now – you’ll have to wake yourself, Miss Aspen. Come on.’
Like this he tried for about half an hour to coax her into wakefulness. Then he decided to drive the car across the park, to the house, and try to get her indoors and settle her for the rest of the night in a chair. He drove the Chrysler quietly to the door of the house. Then he shut off the engine – and it was the shutting off of the engine, at last, that woke her.
She stirred among the rugs and opened her eyes and looked at him, not knowing what had happened or where she was. She looked very confused and she touched his face. She asked him where had they been and where was Tom? Wasn’t Tom with them? She had some sort of idea that they had left Tom behind somewhere, alone and forgotten.
It was when she touched his face again that she remembered. She began crying quietly, deeply, out of a terrible emptiness. She begged him to take her home. He said gently: ‘Miss Aspen, you are home. We’re here. This is home,’ and she simply shook her head, crying desperately.
Finally he lifted her out of the car, still in the rugs, and took her into the house, picking his way with a torch from the car. She hid her face in her hands as he carried her, sobbing deeply, not speaking again until he laid her on a chair in the drawing-room. He got an impression of her suffering from a strange gap in her memory. She seemed too to be trying to fill it, because she said:
‘Where am I? Where have we been? Who was with us?’ and she asked him again if Tom was there.
He shaded the torch with his hand, and her face seemed grey in the diffused light of it, only her eyes, as he said to me, yawning at him, black and lonely – ‘awfully lonely,’ he said several times, ‘awfully – terribly lonely.’
Then he asked her, ‘Will you be all right, Miss Aspen, if I leave you here now? Do you think you’ll be all right?’
Suddenly she sprang into a single bright moment of wakefulness and said:
‘Yes. I’ll be all right. You go now.’
All the time his fear of leaving her was growing into the creed of anxiety that I had heard him state that afternoon. He was desperately frightened of leaving her there, in the dark house, alone, and he said again:
‘You’re sure you’ll be all right, miss? You’re sure?’
‘I’m all right. Come for me tomorrow, won’t you? You said you couldn’t come for me again, didn’t you?’
‘I’ll come for you,’ he said.
Then she leaned forward and kissed him on the face, thankfully, in a rather confused sort of way. ‘Just as if she thought I was somebody else,’ he said. Then she fell asleep again, and he quietly got himself out of the house by the aid of the torch.
‘She frightened me that night,’ he said. ‘And I’ve been frightened ever since. That’s why I wanted to ask you – you know – if you thought –’
A cuckoo flew with bubbling throaty calls across the wheat-field, disappearing beyond the copses. In the still air I caught again a great breath of grass and hawthorn and bluebell and earth beating through new pulses of spring loveliness to the very edge of summer.
For some time I watched his hands clasp and unclasp themselves nervously on the driving-wheel and then at last flick at the ignition key.
‘You think she’ll be all right?’ he said.
He started the car almost involuntarily, and the sound of it startled a blackbird from the hedges and sent it squawking down the hedgerow with fear.
‘Yes. She’ll be all right,’ I said.
His hand seemed to quiver on the gear-lever as he let in the clutch.
‘Because every time I go up there I’m frightened,’ he said. ‘I’m frightened she won’t be there any more.’
Chapter Three
But whenever we went to see her she was there. She remained in the sanatorium all that summer, and in fact for the rest of the year, and I saw her whenever I could. Sometimes, in the beginning, on Sundays, because I knew that Blackie Johnson would be there, I stayed away from her, but whenever I did so she attacked me with not very serious reproaches that were part of her growing strength.
‘You never know,’ she said, ‘I might be up when you come one day. And if I am I want you to be the first to see me. I want to do Nora’s trick for you. I’ve got legs too. You used to think they were rather nice ones.’
‘All of you was nice,’ I said.
‘Oh! don’t say that,’ she said. ‘I think I shall cry if you say that.’
‘You were very nice,’ I said. ‘You were the first one –’ And then I could not finish what I had to say.
‘Don’t reproach me,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear it if you reproach me.’
She looked at me piteously; and after that, as she struggled up and down through the confusing graph of growing strength, waiting for the time when they would let her walk, too gay sometimes and then too much in despair, I tried as much as possible not to see her alone. It seemed much simpler, and in a curious way much more inevitable, to have Blackie there.
Then I began to be aware of the fact that Blackie liked to have me there. His stiffness and his fear about her were lessened because of me. And gradually, as two people sometimes do who began with violent dislikes of each other, we began to be friends. I knew I had misjudged him. I liked it when I found him there; I felt I began to understand him. He used to sit by the bedside on Sunday afternoons, all through the summer, in a dark-blue serge suit sweating in the oppressively hot little hut, patient and tortured, awkwardly staring at her and waiting for her to get well. Except for discarding a waistcoat, he did not dress any differently all that summer. He wore his peaked blue chauffeur’s cap and sometimes, out of pure habit, he brought his brown leather driving gloves with him. Then he would sit with the cap on his knees and the driving gloves in the cap, nervously playing with first one and then the other, unaware that he was doing so. I would see her go through phases of amusement, irritation, dispair, vexation, and even anger about this until she could stand it no longer. I could see her hands picking with rising disquiet at the coverlet until finally she would snap at it with desperate impatience, as if she felt like tearing it to rags, and say:
‘For goodness’ sake, Bert, stop playing with your hat and gloves and take your jacket off and be cool. It makes me boil to look at you.’
Then he would put his hat and gloves on the floor. He would take off his jacket. With self-conscious care he would fold it up and put it on the hat. Then she would say: ‘Don’t fold it like that. You’ll crease it all up. Hang it on the chair,’ and he would hang it on the chair. Then he would sit back in the chair, hotter, more sweating, more awkward than ever from his exertions, and she would say:
‘Can’t you take your collar off? It’s your collar that makes you so
hot. It looks as if it’s choking you.’
‘I’m all right,’ he would say. ‘I’m all right.’
Then she would invite him to look at me.
‘Why don’t you dress sensibly like that?’ she would say. ‘Just shirt and trousers and no tie? You’d be so much more comfortable.’
‘I’m comfortable,’ he would say. ‘I’m quite comfortable.’
Into his starched Sunday collar his thick Adam’s apple would beat like a gulping piston. Sweat would stream down from the black side-panels of his hair and soak, with bluish stains, into the armpits of his shirt. He would run a dark hairy finger along the inner rim of his collar and painfully extract it, scooping sweat. And she would cry in despair:
‘Oh! You’re so stubborn! You do irritate me so!’
But he was not stubborn; and if he irritated her it was only because he was trying, desperately hard, to do exactly the opposite.
Then her nurse, the blonde Miss Simpson, muscular and candid, would bring tea on a hospital trolley. And Lydia would laugh at Blackie and say:
‘Come on now. You can make yourself useful. You can pour.’
He would make a slow, bungling, clattering mess of this. His big engineering hands, into which oil seemed to have soaked with a stain of permanent shadowy brown made more greasy by sweat, would grasp at cups and plates and teapots with the kind of excessive care that ends in shattering clumsiness. Lumps of sugar would be dropped into the tea from considerable height, like bombs. Tea would squab sordidly into saucers, from which he would drain it noisily back into cups.
Somehow, finally, he would get cups and plates distributed; and then would begin the business, really the performance, of having his own tea. He elaborately prepared for himself clumsy mountains of bread and jam. He balanced his cup on his knees and then set it on the floor; then took a vast mouthful of bread and jam and then a vaster drink of tea, washing it down, stirring and sucking and clattering loudly. Food and drink and china were pieces with which he made a series of terrible laborious moves, ended by her crying from the bed: