by H. E. Bates
‘Why don’t you put your cup on the trolley, you poor man!’
Then at last she would turn to me:
‘You pour me a cup, will you?’
And I would try to pour it not too efficiently, not too delicately, in order not to touch him with acuter embarrassment; but she would be sure to say:
‘There you are – that’s more like it. That’s something like service –’
Then perhaps as I took away her cup she would press my arm and smile and say:
‘Thank you. You’re awfully sweet to me.’
I knew that this would embarrass him, and I would try to play it off by mocking her:
‘Does madam wish anything else?’ I would say.
‘You can put my pillow straight. Sit me up a little higher –’
She would let herself sink into the pillows a little, so that I could lift her up. She would make it necessary for me to put my arms under her body as I lifted her. Then she would laugh, or the scalloped front of her nightdress would fall away, showing her breast, or her hair would get tangled and she would make me reach for the mirror and her comb and then hold the mirror in front of her so that she could comb her hair into place again.
Sometimes I would not be able to resist a desire to tilt the mirror or move it away, so that she could not see herself. Then she would slap my knuckles with the comb and say:
‘Hold it still. I can’t see myself! Hold it still, can’t you? – I shall hate you – hold it still –!’
‘“Now hate me if thou wilt –”’
‘You’re an awful torment. You always did torment me so, didn’t you? I believe you love to torment! Hold still –!’
‘How can I if I’m trembling?’
‘You idiot! – hold it still so that I can see myself – I can only see one side of myself –’
‘Let’s hope it’s the right side – the nice, true, kind, right side,’ I would say, and we would laugh together in the small private world of former acquaintance, exclusive, unkindly, where he could not follow.
Exactly what pain this gave him I could not tell. He had already been so pained and frightened by the thought of her dying that it is possible it gave him no pain at all. He was so absorbed in the idea of her walking again that I do not think he ever noticed, with envy or malice or even unkindliness, all that summer, that she began to show her growing strength by growing fonder of me.
One Sunday I could not go to see her. The next week he was sitting in the limousine waiting for me, eager, relieved, touched by gratitude, when I walked up to the gates. He leaped out, scrambling together with cap and gloves a bunch of violent gaillardias that were like stabbing orange and crimson suns against the plain dark serge of his suit. He kept saying, as we walked into the gardens:
‘I’m glad you could come. I’m glad you could come. It was queer last week without you. She didn’t talk much – we had a job to find something to talk about. She always seems brighter somehow when you’re there. You know what to say to her.’
It was humid, thundery weather after a spell of drought.
‘No flowers this week?’ he said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not this week.’ I said the drought had parched everything up, and he said:
‘That’s what I found. I went all over the place to find something for her. I thought I was never going to find a thing for her – I couldn’t think of coming without finding a flower or two to bring.’
As we branched off towards the huts, out of shade into open sun, Dr Baird bore down the path towards us, signalling with big hairy hands:
‘Not today, not today,’ he said. I felt a chilling sensation of sickness. Blackie stood spectral, hunched, pinned down, on the path. ‘Well, not the both of you. Just one, if you like. And then only for three minutes. That’s all.’
‘What is it?’ I said.
‘No need for alarm,’ he said. ‘She was naughty, that’s all, the day before yesterday. She put herself back a week or two.’
From Blackie there was no reaction but a spectral stare.
‘Don’t worry,’ Baird said. ‘We expect these things. They can’t always get on. The weather isn’t easy either. Which one of you would like to go in?’
‘He’ll go,’ I said. ‘He has the flowers.’
Blackie stood staring, shaking his head.
‘No. I’ll wait,’ he said. ‘I’ll sit down somewhere – I don’t like to see her if – it upsets me to see her –’ And I knew that all his fear for her, blinding and inarticulate, had come back.
She was lying without a pillow, very flat, staring with dark eyes at the ceiling of the hut, when I went in. I stood over her with the flowers. They glowed more than ever like fiery suns in the shadow of the hut. The luminous figure of Nurse Simpson hovered in the doorway. My shadow fell on Lydia’s face and I did not know what to say.
‘It was nice of you to bring the flowers,’ she said. Her voice was empty. Her lips were crusty and colourless, without makeup, and I could not see her hands.
‘Blackie sent them.’
‘Didn’t you bring any?’ Her voice seemed hurt.
‘The drought has withered everything up,’ I said.
‘Including me.’ She gave me a smile, small, prolonged, indeterminate, that was troubled. ‘Blackie always remembers, doesn’t he?’
‘He’d rather die than not remember,’ I said.
The pain of my idiotic words shot across her face before I could check them. She gave a little sob and the nurse, swift and admonitory, bore down on me from the door. ‘I expected this. I expected this. No crying now,’ she said. ‘Come now. We’ve had enough of tears.’
‘I’m very sorry,’ I said.
‘You’d better go,’ she said.
‘I’m terribly sorry.’ I laid Blackie’s flowers awkwardly on the bed from which the starched fins of the nurse’s apron, turning stiffly, knocked them suddenly off. I picked them up again and laid them on a chair before I turned and went away.
When I got out into the sun I found myself trembling so much that I turned and walked back to the long perimeter of open huts farther into the gardens, away from Blackie. A few convalescent patients in deck chairs were sitting in the shade of trees; and one of them, a girl, rose and came across to me as I went past them.
‘Nora,’ I said.
‘I thought it was you,’ she said. ‘How is she?’
I stood confused by surges of relentless heat.
‘Come and sit down in the shade,’ she said.
‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘What happened to start all this?’
‘Oh! it’s a relapse – Dr Baird says it’s normal in this type of case.’
‘Anything that happens more than once is normal,’ I said. ‘Is that it?’
‘You should ask Lydia that,’ she said.
There was something oddly enigmatical about this remark. It struck coldly through my confusion. When she left me after a few moments and went away to her deck chair under the trees, I walked slowly round the remainder of the path. There was no sign of Blackie but from the direction of the huts the luminous, candid Nurse Simpson came swiftly rustling.
‘Is she all right, nurse?’ I said.
She regarded me with blanched severity.
‘You should never have come in. Dr Baird should never have permitted it.’
There was something withering about the word ‘permitted’.
‘I’m terribly sorry if I did anything that –’
‘If you’d been sorry before it needn’t have happened,’ she said.
I felt once more bludgeoned by waves of relentless heat that seemed to become part of my own stupidity. She looked at me with what I thought was harshness and said:
‘I suppose you wouldn’t grasp what I meant by that.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘She worked herself up into a state because you didn’t come in last Sunday. That’s what I meant. And now you come this Sunday and start it all over again.’
I did not answe
r. I turned and walked down the avenue, in and out of stabbing August sunlight, a little sick from sunlight and not really thinking, to where Blackie was sitting in the front seat of the limousine, waiting for me.
‘How was she?’
He leapt out of the car, distraught and eager, his face drawn.
‘She’s all right,’ I said. ‘She’s rather tired, that’s all.’
‘And the flowers?’ he said. ‘What did she say to the flowers?’
There seemed, I thought, no choice between truth and anything less brutal that I could tell him. I could not tell him, partly because I was not sure of it myself, partly because I did not want to give him pain, that she really hardly noticed the flowers. I could not explain to him that she was touched and amused and charmed by his kindliness; but that it meant no more than that. I could not tell him, again partly because I was not really sure of it myself, partly because I was half afraid, that I thought her love for me was coming back. And what was worst of all, I could not tell him, because it rose from the deepest of my perplexities, creating entirely new bewilderment in me, that I did not know, now, if I had any love to offer in return.
I only knew that he stood there in solid, naïve eagerness, his face perplexed and troubled as he waited for me to answer and then alight, as I did answer, with the sort of joy I could not feel.
‘She thought they were very lovely,’ I said.
‘What did she say?’
‘Not much. She was very tired.’
He stood there mutely, hoping that I should be able to remember something she had said. I could not remember, but in a moment of acute pity for him, not knowing what else to say, I told him she had cried.
‘Cried?’ he said.
He seemed to leap across a final chasm of doubt. His face, softening, became immensely relieved and happy. I thought I caught a glint of tears in his own eyes and I knew, at last, that torrid afternoon, I had somehow succeeded in saying the right thing to somebody. Out of my own perplexity I had somehow managed to conjure the things he wanted, above all, to hear.
‘It was damn good of you to go in,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I could have stood it by myself – I couldn’t bear it, I know.’ He became aware, suddenly, of the realities of the afternoon. ‘Can I drop you somewhere, Mr Richardson?’
‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll walk.’
He got into the car and said: ‘See you next Sunday. You’ll come, won’t you?’
‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘Yes: I’ll come.’
‘I appreciate that,’ he said. ‘I appreciate that. I can’t tell you how I appreciate that – you know – I can’t explain –’
In his gratitude he could not finish what he was saying. In his happiness he drove unexpectedly fast down the hill, blind with joy.
She got well very slowly. I had some idea that the summer would be good for her. I had forgotten that Evensford, lying in an enclosed segment of valley out of which there is no road downhill, produces in summer an enervating pressure of heat that saps the body and meshes the mind in a damp, exhausting net. The summer air cannot rise from the hollow. The streets, in dry years, are drab and dusty, blown about with gritty papers. In wet years rain streams down steep tawdry yards, dark-stained with leather, over old high causeways, into gullies and gutters of blue brick that add to the soft depressive vapours.
It was some time before it occurred to me – mistakenly – that it was because of this that she did not improve. She lay every Sunday in the little hut, prostrate and relapsed, staring at myself and Blackie. There began to be something transfixed, almost embalmed, about her.
Blackie brought to her all this time the same inarticulate, growing affection, the same continuous anxiety to see her well. He continued to pour the tea which a muscular and affronted Nurse Simpson brought to us on the trolley. He was always there with his flowers. When under some breath of encouragement from Lydia he found it possible to break into a few minutes of articulate response the only thing he would tell her was about the old Chrysler limousine: how he was taking it down, decoking it, fitting new rings, replacing shock absorbers, doing something about the crankshaft, treating the upholstery with some patent cleanser that would bring it up, as he said, like new, so that she would not know it again.
‘Then I’m going to respray it,’ he said. ‘A nice blue, I thought. Do you think blue would be nice? I’m going to see to the windows too,’ he said once, ‘so that it won’t be so draughty.’
One Sunday he got carried away on a wave of rambling technicalities. He became lost for some time in the obscure mysteries of gaskets. There had been some curious leak in the packing or something that had baffled him. He shed his inarticulate shyness completely as he rambled about, explaining this to her in repetitive mechanical terms. For a week he had struggled to get it right and now he went over it again and again with the awful laboriousness of enthusiasm she could not share.
As he talked I saw a dark skin of boredom close over her eyes, until at last she shut them. I saw her body stir several times, with scarcely perceptible restless writhings, on the bed. He went on without noticing this. I got bored too, until I grapsed at length that he was speaking out of a vision amazingly enlarged by love for her. I grasped that he could not express the depth of himself except like this, in the only terms, the obscure, mechanical boring terms, he knew: that this tenderness for her could release itself only through a tortured technical language of things like gaskets.
He crowned it all by saying: ‘Anyway it’ll all be finished in a fortnight – and then you’ll be able to come for a drive.’ A curious hypnosis caught and held him in a suspense of anticipatory delight, and I knew that he was building a chariot for her.
She eventually turned on the bed and said to him, opening her eyes:
‘I think you’ll have to go now, Bert. I’m getting awfully tired.’
He came out of the maze of his obscure enthusiasms with a shock. He realized with lacerating self-consciousness that he had tired her out with his rush of talking. He grabbed his cap, incapable of any other reaction but some stumbling remark that he had been a terrible fool.
‘No you haven’t. You’ve been very sweet,’ she said. ‘Only I’m very tired.’
He mumbled again something about how sorry he was and how he hadn’t meant to do all this and then, in a renewed laceration of a fear that he might have set her back a week or two, blundered out of the hut before I could stop him.
‘I ought to go too,’ I said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Stay with me. A little while.’
I had got up in readiness to go. She held out her hand. I took it and she said:
‘I was going to be walking by the summer, wasn’t I? – but here I am. I don’t get on very fast, do I? Not like Nora.’
‘Dr Baird has been wonderful with Nora,’ I said.
‘They’ll probably be engaged,’ she said. ‘Did you know that?’
‘No.’
‘They want to announce it at Christmas – or the New Year. There’ll be a dance then. Nobody knows but Nora and me –’
‘Not even Dr Baird, I take it.’
‘Oh! he knows in a vague sort of way. He has a vague idea – sit down again. Don’t go – I don’t want you to go –’
‘Blackie will be waiting. He always waits for me.’
‘Yes, but don’t go yet. Not for a minute,’ she said. ‘Do you think he’ll always come up to see me? – every Sunday, like that? As long as I’m here?’
‘As long as you’re here,’ I said.
She looked at me with a puzzled reflective way. Her lips were momentarily parted, as if she were going to say something: to ask me a question, perhaps, about Blackie and his inevitable devoted comings and goings; or of something else that was on her mind, perhaps about myself.
She actually did begin to say ‘Do you –’ and then broke off. I thought for a moment, uneasy and a little troubled, that she was going to ask me if I loved her; and I knew, if she did so, that I should n
ot know the answer.
But she said again, ‘Must you go?’ and I said again that I must, because of Blackie.
‘Won’t you please kiss me before you go?’ she said.
As I stooped and kissed her she caught my face lightly in her hands.
‘That makes me feel better,’ she said.
She smiled quietly and I felt myself dry and anguished and unable to give a part of myself that was shut away from her. She needed a great deal of love from me that afternoon, and the pain of not being able to give it to her hurt me more than if I had given it and she had turned it away.
‘You’d better go now,’ she said. ‘You were always the same, you were never in one place five minutes before you wanted to go to another.’
When I went away and across the grounds it was not Blackie who was waiting for me at the near end of the avenue, but Dr Baird.
He looked at the watch on his hairy wrist. ‘You’re early away,’ he said, ‘aren’t you?’
‘I didn’t know I was early,’ I said.
‘There’s no need to keep to the clock,’ he said, ‘if you don’t want to. She’s the sort of person who needs a little flexibility. She needs a little company.’
I remembered, as he suddenly asked me to walk across the grounds with him, how he had made the same remark before. We walked for a few minutes across lawns where dark groups of rhododendrons were already budding a light yellow-green in the October sun.
‘You could come up every day if you felt inclined,’ he said. ‘Every afternoon. She’s at that stage –’
It seemed to me that there was a troubled ambiguity about what he said.
‘Every afternoon?’ I said. ‘Aren’t you pleased with her?’
‘It isn’t that.’
He went on to talk for some moments, guardedly, with professional reticence, and yet troubled, as if he were holding something back, about how it was not that, how they had got over the organic troubles, at least the worst of them, and how it was now a question –
‘Wouldn’t you tell me the truth?’ I said. ‘Isn’t she going to get out of this?’
He gave me a jolted sort of look that was piercing and unpleasant. Rather sharply he said:
‘You don’t seem to understand what’s the matter with her – you don’t seem to grasp that she’s terribly lonely, do you?’