The Backward Shadow (15 page)

When we were all in bed, I was tired enough to want to drop off at once; but Dottie was terribly restless and kept tossing and turning in the narrow bed, waking me up with
every movement, until at last, getting exasperated, I asked her if anything was the matter.

‘Is there no decent way I could change places with Toby?' she whispered.

‘Oh, Dottie, really! I'm far too tired anyway. Go to sleep.'

… I woke somewhere near dawn. Something had wakened me. Had it been nothing but Dottie getting out of bed and leaving the room? Anyway she was gone. But somehow I didn't feel it was that. I still felt half-doped with sleepiness and I had to force myself to lie awake for a few minutes, wondering hazily if I could have heard David cry. I felt I should go and have a look at him, but I was so heavy-limbed and thick-headed I didn't want to move; the whole cottage was quiet now; I had leapt out of bed so many scores of times, my heart in my mouth because I thought I had heard a whimper or, at the beginning, that perhaps he was suffocating in his blanket or something, and I was compelled to go and check that he was all right. He always had been … I rolled over and plummetted back into the depths of sleep, scarcely even asking myself where Dottie could have gone …

When I next woke up, Dottie, looking radically different, was bending over me.

‘Jane, you must wake up. David's ill.'

I literally fell out of bed onto all fours; when I stood up, my head spun and Dottie had to steady me.

‘Look, don't panic. It may be nothing much … he's been sick in the night …'

I didn't wait for the rest, but ran into his little room. It stank of vomit and the deeper, more frightening smell of baby's diarrhoea. He and his bed were clean, but the soiled sheets were bundled into a corner. He wasn't crying, just lying there looking awful; he actually looked as if he'd lost weight off his face in the night. His eyes were big and he gazed up at me; when I touched him, he was damp and hot.

‘Thank you for—cleaning up—have you taken his temperature?'

‘I didn't know how to, but Henry did. It's 101.' My blood congealed, but just then Henry came in, neatly dressed and shaved, and said calmly, ‘It sounds a lot, but it's nothing much for a baby with salmonella. Don't be unduly alarmed. Just give him lots to drink. The main thing is not to let him get dehydrated.'

I simply stared at him.

Dottie gave a little strained laugh. Even in my state of near-panic (David had never in his life been really ill) I registered that laugh—it was so different to her laugh the night before. ‘Isn't he amazing,' she said. ‘Just like a doctor. You should have seen how he took over.'

‘How do you know it's—what you said?' I asked thinly at last.

‘It's going the rounds just now. Amanda's just had it—my step-mother's. She nearly went out of her mind—my step-mother, I mean, not the baby of course. But it was all over in two or three days. Antibiotics. You need to call a doctor and get him started on them right away.'

Dottie turned to me, horrified. ‘Oh, but you mustn't give him that stuff! It'll poison his system—set up immunities—then if he ever really needed them—'

‘Don't be so daft. He really needs them now. He's been crapping and spewing half the night. Go on, Jane, you give him more to drink while I go for your sawbones—what's his address?'

It was so long since I'd needed a doctor that I couldn't remember, but fortunately I'd had the sense to write it down in an address-book in my desk. There was a few moments of stifled terror as I scrabbled for it but it turned up mercifully quickly and in a very few moments Henry's car was bucketting down the road. It was raining, and I remembered, as I held David up to drink and it all came spouting out again in an evil-smelling fountain, that it was Christmas morning. My mind was quite dark with guilt and despair. To think of him, losing liquid like that for God knows how many hours of the night, while I slept like a fat pig in its sty, oblivious … I was
sure he felt lighter … patiently I coaxed more sugar-water into him. Dottie had disappeared, taking the soiled clothes, and reappeared quite quickly with cups of tea.

‘Where's Toby?' I remembered to ask.

‘I don't know. I suppose he's still asleep.'

I thought,
How could he
! But that was ridiculous.

‘Did you hear him being sick? Was that why you got up so early?' I was prepared to be horrifyingly angry with her if she had failed to waken me; but my fog of wretchedness was pierced by her sudden look of confusion as she said, ‘No … I got up because I was restless and I wanted to wander about.' I let it go, though later I wondered: where does one wander to, on a pouring wet night, in a five-roomed cottage of which every one except the kitchen contains somebody asleep?

The doctor came. It was Christmas Day and he had a large family and was a good deal more grumpy than the plumber had been, but he did come, and my respect for Henry sky-rocketted when the official diagnosis proved to agree in every respect with his. ‘Don't try to give him milk. Just sugar-water, or weak sweet tea—whatever he'll take. Plus a teaspoonful of this three times a day for ten days.' He gave me a bottle of thick yellow medicine which was the antibiotics. Dottie curled her lip at it, but I grabbed it gratefully and stuffed the first dose into him as quickly as I could. ‘Liquid, liquid and more liquid,' said the doctor. ‘If he seems prostrated, get him to hospital. I'll come in again this evening.' He sighed as he said this, and I knew then how serious it was.

When he'd gone, I suddenly said, ‘But the car's not working. How could I get him to hospital?' I looked desperately at Henry, who hesitated only a moment and then said, ‘I'll stick around. My people will understand.' I felt as if he were my dearest, closest friend, the most reliable, kind and beloved person in my life. I wanted to hang round his neck and kiss him and thank him. I suppose something of this must have shown in my expression, because he became quite embarrassed and said it was nothing at all, absolutely nothing.

IT
was an unspeakable, unforgettable Christmas, the worst of my life. I don't know how I'd have got through it at all without Henry. It wasn't so much what he did; he did very little, other than sit in the living-room keeping the fire going and steadily reading his way through all the previous Sunday's papers. It was his calm words of reassurance, which he had the patience to repeat every time I reappeared downstairs on my way to the washing-machine with a new bundle of soiled clothes—as often as not, my own, for David was sick on me every time I fed him or picked him up, and the insertion of the thermometer inevitably produced an even fouler jet which frightened me so much that I stopped taking his temperature and just guessed at it from feeling him.

‘Don't worry. It's always like this the first day. How many times is that? Only four? That's nothing. Amanda was sick four times in an hour on her first day. The weight simply fell off her, until the old cynto-mitsetin got cracking on her. They put it all back amazingly quickly when they get the bug out of their systems.'

Dottie drifted about, half being a great help and half getting in the way. I had been overtaken by the most violent attack of possessiveness about David, probably as a reaction to my guilt-feelings; I didn't want to depute even the meanest tasks to Dottie or anyone else, and even resented it when she wanted to help me change the bed-linen. In the end she kept her distance, looking hurt—almost dazed somehow—but clearly trying to understand, and contented herself with doing the cooking and tea-brewing.

As for Toby … What can I say about the way I behaved to him? There was nothing he could have done, yet I perversely found the fact that he found nothing to do extremely irritating, and held it against him. It was so unfair, yet I couldn't help it. Henry's sitting downstairs like a tweedy Buddha, far from
exasperating me, had a most soothing and comforting effect; he knew what this was all about, everything he said was consoling, his very casualness reassured me. Also, his presence, relaxed as it was, was purposeful—he was my means of getting David to hospital if he had to go. But when Toby dared to sink into a chair for a few minutes and reach tentatively for a paper, it was as much as I could do not to shout at him: ‘How can you sit there and read? Don't you know what David's going through, what I'm going through?' I didn't say it, but I looked it, and he dropped the paper and got uneasily to his feet, asking for the fifteenth time if there was anything he could do. There was nothing—except somehow share in my anguish of mind, as only a father and a husband could have done, instead of merely standing there, limp and depressed, as helpless and empty-hearted as any casual by-stander.

By evening the tension I was generating had exhausted us all. The doctor returned, examined David very carefully, with particular attention to the skin on his stomach. Henry had already explained that there was nothing to be really worried about until the skin there began to lose its elasticity from dryness. In my eyes David looked terrible, as if he really might be going to die; but it was, I suppose, only because he looked different from his normal smiling active self. Anyway the doctor said he wasn't any worse, that the first day was always a trial, tomorrow might be very little better but not to worry because the third day would show an improvement. I privately thought another day like the one just past would be the finish of both of us, but after the doctor had gone, Henry ambled upstairs and said, ‘What did I tell you? Now come down and have a strong drink, you need it. Dorothy, make some coffee, she'll want to stay awake with him most of the night to give him a drink every time he wakes up.' He took me by the hand like a brother and led me downstairs; leaving Toby to keep watch by the cot. I had the prescribed drinks—whisky followed by coffee—and they both did me good in their respective ways; sitting by the cot did Toby good, and making
the coffee did Dottie good. I became more and more sure that Henry was one of the most wonderful men I had ever had the luck to meet.

A little later we were all sitting in the kitchen for a few minutes. Henry was talking in his flat, matter-of-fact, faintly off-voice about the rate at which Amanda had put her lost pounds back on again, still holding my hand in an unemotional, almost medicinal grip, when I interrupted him to say suddenly: ‘Henry, I've ruined your Christmas—I'm so sorry—' and burst into tears. Henry rather awkwardly put his arm round me and said, ‘There you go, have a bellow, it won't hurt …' Dottie stood up abruptly and left the room. Toby stood up too, his face a queer mixture of feelings frozen into a sort of angry mask. The sight of it made me stop crying very quickly and sit there staring at him. Henry took his arm from my shoulders with a little cough. I felt a most peculiar atmosphere in the room, of which Dottie's absence was a component; but I was too wrought-up to even attempt to unravel it.

Both the men left that evening. Henry was going to his people, and Toby asked, in a cold crisp voice I didn't recognise, if he could have a lift as far as the nearest large town from which to get a train back to London. I watched the two of them off the premises and was appalled—even frightened—to find myself saying goodbye to Toby quite coolly while having to restrain myself forcibly from kissing Henry and thanking him with the utmost effusion of warmth for the simple fact of his presence during the past twelve hours. Dottie was not around for the leave-takings, but called a remote goodbye from the kitchen. Henry seemed inclined to hang around a bit, as if expecting her to appear, but quite soon he and Toby were both climbing into his car and driving away. I had the distinct impression, as I looked at their two heads side by side in the front seat, both facing forward, that despite their cordiality with each other the previous evening they would not find two words to exchange on the journey.

What had happened?

David had been taken ill—that was all that had happened as far as I was concerned. But as Dottie and I sat down to a scratch meal on trays at the top of the stairs, just outside David's room, both just as gravelled for words as I had imagined the men being, it was borne in upon me that a lot had been going on for other people which had passed me by. I had assumed, for instance, that the extraordinary difference I had noticed in Dottie's appearance early in the morning when she'd woken me, had been solely due to her concern for David. Now as I looked at her, her head bent over her tray, picking desultorily at her supper and avoiding me as completely as if she had left with the others, I realised I'd been wrong.

I tried to make conversation: I'm afraid I've been awful today—I hope you understood—you see, he's never been ill before, and—I wasn't there when it started—' But it petered out for lack of a reaction. Dottie stopped eating, stood up with her tray and started downstairs without so much as a word. I got the clear impression she was crying, or trying not to. I looked in on David and, finding him safely asleep, hurried down after her. I felt an unspecific renewal of guilt. Was my touchy manner all day really responsible for this withdrawal?

Dottie was in the kitchen putting dishes in the sink, but almost ran past me into the living-room as I came in. She looked quite strange—white and wretched. I knew she didn't want me, but I couldn't stop myself following her.

She stood with her back to me, both hands gripping the mantelpiece. As I came into the room she said in a high-pitched nervy tone, ‘My God! I hate living in other people's houses! There's no escape!' Her voice squeaked and scraped on the edge of tears.

‘Dottie, what is it? What's the matter?'

‘Nothing!'

‘Is it something I've done?'

‘No, for God's sake, no!' She sounded so distraught I was taken completely aback. It couldn't be my fault, I really
hadn't done or said anything which justified this. I tried once more: