Homecomings (43 page)

‘Light hurts.’ He was still pointing to the window.

‘Will you turn light off? Light hurts. Turn light off. Please. Please.’

As I heard, I drew the curtains. Without speaking, he laid his face away from me. I waited beside him in the tawny dark.

SOON after Margaret returned, the child vomited. As she cleaned him, I saw that his neck was stiff, strained like a senile man eating. The flush was crimson, his fingers pushed into his eye sockets, then his temples.

‘Head hurts,’ he cried angrily.

He was crying with a violent rhythm that nothing she said to him interrupted. In the middle of it, a few minutes later, he broke into a new fierce complaint.

‘My back hurts.’

In the same tone, he cried: ‘Stop it hurting. It is hurting me.’

When either of us came close to him, he shouted in irritation and anger: ‘What are they doing?’

The regular crying hooted up to us; neither she nor I could take our glance from him, his face fevered. We watched his hands pushing unavailingly to take away the pain. Without looking at Margaret I knew, as of something within one’s field of vision, that her expression was smooth and young with anguish.

We were standing so, it was just on two o’clock, when Charles March came in. Impatiently he cut short what I was telling him; he glanced at the child, felt the stiff neck, then said to me, in a tone heavy, brotherly, and harsh: ‘It would be better if you weren’t here, Lewis.’

As I left them, I heard him beginning to question Margaret: was there any rash? How long had his neck been rigid?

I was dazzled by the afternoon light in the drawing-room; I lit a cigarette, the smoke rose blue through a gleam of sun. The child’s crying ululated; I thought I noticed that since I first entered the gleam of sun had moved just perceptibly along the wall. All of a sudden, the ululation broke, and there came, pressing like a shock-wave, a hideous, wailing scream.

I could not bear to be away. I was just on my way back to the child, when Charles March met me at the drawing-room door.

‘What was that?’ I cried.

The scream had died down now.

‘Oh, that’s nothing,’ said Charles. ‘I gave him penicillin, that’s all.’

But there was nothing careless or even professional in his voice now, and his face was etched with sadness.

‘If it could have waited I wouldn’t have done it, I’d have left it for Hollis,’ he said.

He added that I did not need telling that his diagnosis had been wrong. He did not explain that it was a reasonable mistake; he could not get over what he felt he had brought upon me. He said in a flat tone: ‘I’ve done the only thing for him that we can do on the spot. Now I shall be glad to see Hollis arrive.’

‘He’s seriously ill, of course?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Will he get over it?’

‘He ought to stand a good chance – but I can’t tell you much–’

He looked at me.

‘No,’ he said, ‘if we’ve got it in time he ought to be all right.’

He said: ‘I’m desperately sorry, Lewis. But what I’m feeling doesn’t exist by the side of what you are.’

He had been an intimate friend since we were very young men. At any other time I should have known that, both because of his tender-heartedness and his pride, he was ravaged. But I had no attention to spare for him; I was only interested in what he had done for the child, whether he had taken away any of the suffering, whether he was being any use to us.

In the same animal fashion, when at that moment I heard Geoffrey Hollis arrive, I felt nothing like embarrassment or remorse, but just a kind of dull hope, that here might be someone bringing help.

As we all four of us gathered in the hall, it was Geoffrey alone who seemed uncomfortable, the others were too far gone. As he nodded to me his manner was off-hand, but not as certain as usual; his fair head looked as unchangingly youthful, but his poise was not as jaunty. It was with something like relief that he listened to Margaret’s first words, which were: ‘It’s worse than I told you.’

Once more I stood in the drawing-room, staring at the beam of sunlight along the wall. There was another scream, but this time it was minutes – I knew the exact time, it was five past three – before they joined me, Geoffrey speaking in an undertone to Charles March. The child’s crying died down, the room was as quiet as when Charles had given us his opinion there less than forty-eight hours before. Through the open window came the smell of petrol, dust, and summer lime.

‘Shall I begin or will you?’ said Geoffrey to Charles March, in a manner informal and friendly: there was no doubt of the answer. Geoffrey was speaking without pomposity, but also, even to Margaret, quite impersonally.

‘The first thing is,’ he said, ‘that everything has been done and is being done that anyone possibly can. He’ll have to be moved as soon as we have checked the diagnosis and my people have got ready for him in the isolation ward. You’ll be able to drive round with the sample straightaway?’

Charles inclined his head. He was a man of natural authority and if they had met just as human beings he would have overweighted this younger man. But now Geoffrey had the authority of technique.

‘I might as well say that the original diagnosis is one which we should all have made in the circumstances two days ago. The symptoms were masked to begin with and then they came on three or four hours ago, after that intermission yesterday, which is quite according to type, except that they came on with a rather unusual rush. If I had seen him on Saturday, I should never have thought this was a serious possibility myself.’

Charles’ face, drawn and pallid, did not move.

‘And I shouldn’t yesterday, and it’s out of the question that anyone would. We ought to thank our lucky stars that Dr March got the penicillin into him when he did. We may be glad of that extra half hour.’

It was, I remembered later, impersonally cordial, a little patronizing, and scientifically true. But at the moment I actually heard it, I was distracted by this wind-up. I said: ‘What has he got?’

‘Oh, neither Dr March nor I think there is much doubt about that. Don’t you agree?’ He turned to Charles March, who nodded again without his expression changing.

‘It’s a meningitis,’ said Geoffrey Hoffis. ‘A straightforward one, we think.

‘Mind you,’ he said to me, not unkindly, with a curious antiseptic lightness, ‘it’s quite bad enough. If this had happened twenty years ago I should have had to warn you that a large percentage of these cases didn’t recover. But nowadays, with a bit of good fortune, we reckon to cope.’

It was after Charles March had left, and Geoffrey had rung up the hospital, telling them to expect him and the case, that he said: ‘That’s all we can do just now. I’ve got to see another patient. I’ll be back to take the boy along in a couple of hours.’

He spoke to Margaret.

‘You must stop Maurice coming here until we’ve got things straight.’

‘I was going to ask you,’ she said.

He was businesslike, he said that he did not intend them to take even a negligible risk: Maurice had already been exposed to infection; she was to watch him for a vestige of a cold, take his temperature night and morning: at any sign, right or wrong, they would inject him.

As she listened, he could not have doubted that all he said would be carried out. He gave a smile of relief, and said that he must go.

I longed for him to stay. With him in the room, the edge of waiting was taken off. It did not matter that he was talking to her about their son. I said, hoping against hope that he would stay with us, that I had better go in and see the child.

‘I’ll do that myself on the way out,’ he said, again not unkindly, ‘but I don’t see the point of it for you.’

He added: ‘I shouldn’t if I were you. You’ll only distress yourself, and you can’t do any good. It’s not pretty to watch. Mind you, we don’t know what they feel in these conditions, possibly nature is more merciful than it looks.’

In the hours when Margaret and I sat alone by the cot, the child did not cry so regularly: much of the time he lay on his side, moving little, muttering names of people, characters from his books, or bits of nursery verses. Frequently he complained that his head hurt, and three times that his back did. When either of us spoke to him his pupils, grossly dilated, confronted us as though he had not heard.

He seemed to be going deaf: I began to think that he no longer recognized us. Once he gave a drawn-out scream, so violent and rending that it seemed as though he were not only in agony, but horribly afraid. During the screams Margaret talked to him, tried piteously to reach him: so did I, my voice mounting until it was a shout. But he did not know us: when the scream was over, and he was babbling to himself again, his words were muddled, his mind had become confused.

When Geoffrey came back to us at a quarter to five, I felt an instant’s dependence and overmastering relief. He glanced down at the child: his long, smooth, youthful face looked almost petulant, he clicked his teeth with something like disapproval.

‘It’s not working much yet,’ he said.

He had a nurse waiting outside, he told us: they would take him at once: he looked again at the child with an expression not specially compassionate or grave, more like that of someone whose will was being crossed. He said that he would give him his second shot of penicillin as soon as they got him into his ward; it would be early, but worth trying. He added casually: ‘The diagnosis is as I thought, by the way.’

‘Yes,’ said Margaret. Then she asked: ‘Can we come with him now?’

Geoffrey looked at her deliberately, without involvement, without memory, competent with his answer as if she had been nothing but the mother of a patient.

‘No,’ he said. ‘You’d only be slightly in the way. In any case, when we’ve got him settled, I couldn’t let you see him.’

‘You’ll ring us up if there’s any change,’ she said steadily, ‘for better or worse?’

For once his tone was personal. ‘Of course I shall.’

He told us, once more antiseptic, that we could telephone the ward sister at any time, but there was no point in doing so before that night. If it was any relief to us, he himself would be glad to see us at the hospital the following morning.

After the ambulance drove away, my sense of time was deranged. Sitting in the early evening with Margaret and Maurice, I kept looking at my watch as though feeling my pulse in an illness; hoping for a quarter of an hour to have passed, I found it had only been minutes. Sometimes I was so much afraid that I wanted time to be static.

All the time I was watching Margaret look after her other boy. Before he came in, she was so sheet-pale that she had made up more than usual, so as not to alarm him. She had explained how Charles had been taken away with a bad cold, and how she would have to take his own temperature and fuss over him a bit. Then she sat with him, playing games, not showing him any anxiety, looking very pretty, the abnormal colour under her cheekbones becoming her; her voice was level, even full, and the only sign of suffering was the single furrow across her forehead.

She was thankful that Maurice’s temperature was normal, that he seemed in the best of health.

Watching them, I resented it because she was so thankful. I took my turn playing with the boy: though I could not entertain him much, I could stick at the game and go through the motions: but I was resenting it also that he could sit there handsome and untouched, above all that he should be well. With a passion similar in kind to my mother’s, who in an extreme moment of humiliation had once wanted a war to blot it out and destroy us all, so I wanted the danger to my son to hang over everyone round me: if he was not safe, then no one should be: if he should die, then so should the rest.

When she took Maurice to bed I sat in the drawing-room doing nothing, in that state of despondency and care combined, which tied one’s limbs and made one as motionless as a catatonic, reduced to a single sense, with which I listened to the telephone. Without either of us speaking, Margaret came and sat down opposite to me, on the other side of the fireplace; she was listening with an attention as searing as mine, she was looking at me with another care.

The telephone rang. She regarded me with a question on her face, then answered it. The instant she heard the voice on the wire, her expression changed to disappointment and relief: it was a woman acquaintance asking her to dinner the next week. Margaret explained that the little boy was ill, we couldn’t go out anywhere because of the risk of letting our host down: she was as gentle and controlled as when she played with Maurice. When she returned to her chair, she mentioned the woman’s name, who was a private joke between us, hoping to get a smile from me. All I could do was shake my head.

The vigil lasted. Towards nine o’clock she said, after calling out my name: ‘Don’t forget we should have heard if he were any worse.’

I had been telling myself so. But hearing it from her I believed her, I clutched at the comfort.

‘I suppose so.’

‘I know we should. Geoffrey promised–’ she had reminded me of this already, with the repetitiveness with which, in the either-or of anxiety, one repeats the signs in favour as though they were incantations. ‘He’d be utterly reliable about anything like this.’

‘I think he would.’ I had said it before: it heartened me to say it again.

‘He would.’

She went on: ‘This means he’s got nothing to tell us yet.’

She said: ‘Look, there can’t be anything much to hear, but would you like to ring up the nurse and see what she says?’

I hesitated. I said: ‘I daren’t.’

Her face was strained and set. She asked: ‘Shall I?’

I hesitated for a long time. At last I nodded. At once she went towards the telephone, dialled the number, asked for the ward. Her courage was without a flaw: but I took in nothing, except what her expression and tone would in an instant mean.

She said she wanted to inquire about the child. There was a murmur in a woman’s voice, which I could not catch.

For an instant Margaret’s voice was hard.