They heard the jingle of the coach, its lights flickering through the trees before it crunched on the gravel.
'When may I visit my sister?'
'Whenever you wish. We'll keep her in bed for a bit, until we see what tricks her temperature's playing. Remember, the disease is catching. Don't stand in the way of her cough.'
'Why don't you catch it?'
'We and the nurses seem immune. Familiarity breeds contempt, I suppose.' He added off-handedly, 'I finish here with the end of summer. I've work waiting in London. What was the name of that American doctor?'
'Dr Crippen.'
'I could look him up for you. He's probably a quack. Your rushing to England would be worse than a fool's errand. It would raise your sister's hopes cruelly.'
Nancy had stepped into the coach. Eliot shut the door and turned to the sanatorium entrance, without glancing back.
4
Eliot was a shy young man. Reared among the rich but never of them, he had no graces to soften his resentment when thrust among them socially. The patients were easy. He had the bluff, kindly, infinitely confident and uncontradictable manner which carried the English doctor into the heart of the English family, in a nation which venerated commonsense as much as it distrusted cleverness. Their relatives he generally found boring and petulant. Nancy intrigued him. She was neither pretentious nor patronizing. She answered him back with intelligence instead of arrogance. But he distrusted his ability for small talk, he knew the likelihood of seeming rude and provoking anger. He avoided her. Rich people anyway frightened him. He had viewed too intimately their power.
When the July sun glared from the gravel forecourt and shortened the shadow of the flagpole, Baby was allowed up for lunch.
The dining-room shared the first upstairs floor with the patients' lounge, which had a grand piano, a gramophone with a horn, crettone-covered furniture and scattered small tables with magazines in half-a-dozen languages. They ate between white walls on white chairs off linen fresh every meal. Even the food seemed white-minced chicken, cream sauces, potato soup, Gruyere cheese, served by maids in white dresses whose scarred neck or limp displayed their own escape from the disease which would eventually kill many of their patrons.
Baby's day repeated itself to the minute. The monotony was deliberate. Energy of body and mind were preserved for the cure. At eight, Nurse Dove took her temperature. The morning she divided between novels from the sanatorium library and laboriously creating a spray of red roses on an embroidery frame-the clinic employed a sharp-nosed Parisienne to instruct their lady patients, the gentlemen enjoyed instead fifteen minutes' pounding from a Swedish masseur. There was an English breakfast and an English tea, with hot toast and Swiss cherry jam. On Sundays, her dinner-tray was decorated with a vase of bright wild flowers, which the previous week she was mystified to find replaced by the Stars and Stripes. It was July the Fourth, and all national days were monitored by _la direction,_ as all birthdays were marked by a huge cream cake and a bottle of champagne with the clinic's compliments.
'I've still got _rвles _at my apex, but they don't signify much,' Baby told Nancy brightly. 'And dullness of my infraclavicular fossa, here.'
She tapped below her right collar-bone. She wore a white silk blouse and a white flannel skirt secured with huge gold safety-pins, white stockings and white kid boots. A broad-brimmed straw hat was secured on her piled fair hair with a wide ribbon of Cambridge blue. She wore the same outfit the year before, for tennis parties at Oyster Bay.
She was on the steamer chair with an open parasol, which she twirled gently over her shoulder. The balcony had a parquet floor and a white ceiling with 62 squares boxing a leaf design, which she counted everlastingly. It was afternoon rest time for everyone in the sanatorium.
'And I've cog-wheel respiration,' Baby continued. 'Can you imagine? Dr Becket says it sounds like a cogwheel jerking round, right there in my chest. But no bronchial breathing,' she ended proudly. 'And that's awfully good, you know.'
'You are becoming well educated.' Nancy smiled, sitting on a chair beside her.
'Oh, we all know quite as much as the doctors. And my temperature this morning was nearly normal! Wonderful, isn't it? Everyone's crazy about their temperature. The thermometer's our clock, isn't it? It measures how much longer we've got to spend up here.'
'I had a cable from papa this morning.' Mails were disregarded. Every morning, Nancy handed a telegram to the guard of the departing train, which the Geneva post office transmitted to New York to arrive on her father's breakfast table. She tried hard to vary her messages, generally as unexcitingly repetitive as military communiquйs from a long-drawn siege. 'He's making the trip.'
'The angel! When?'
'When he can. You know how it is with Papa.'
'Oh, business!' Baby wrinkled her nose. 'Sometimes I wonder if he thinks we're just a part of it. Look at my nails! Aren't they awful? Real parrots' beaks, as Dr Pasquier said. I'm going to send for the best manicurist in New York the moment I step off the boat.'
Loud knocking came on Baby's left. The balconies were divided by screens of folding white-painted iron panels, six feet high with a decorative scroll on the top. 'Darling, can I visit?' said a girl's eager voice.
Baby whispered, 'Lady Sarah Pledge. She's the daughter of an earl, and the only thing she's crazy about in the whole world is fox-hunting. She's moved into the next room. We're already as close as an Indian hug. Oh, sure,' she called. 'My sister's here.'
Lady Sarah pushed aside the screen. She was Baby's age, unnaturally slender, her eyes large and grey, her skin waxy like a lily petal. She wore a cream silk blouse and a crimson-striped cotton skirt.
'She's got a pneumothorax,' Baby introduced her.
'They pump air into one's chest through a needle,' Lady Sarah explained light-heartedly. 'It collapses down one's lung to a little lump, so's it can heal better. You need only one lung to breathe, you know. My room still stinks of that fumigating stuff.' She added to Nancy, 'The Russian count snuffed it two days ago. Absolutely torrential haemorrhage, according to Nurse Dove, though she does so exaggerate in her relish about such things.'
Nancy felt her stomach tighten. It was the Russian she heard coughing the day they arrived. She could not assume the inmates' easygoing mockery of death. For that, death must intrude into every day's action and thought. It was the relationship of marriage.
'I've news for you, old thing,' Lady Sarah continued. 'They're going to see through us. The Rцntgen rays.' Baby was excited. She was always eager for a new experience, and anything breaking the sanatorium's monotony was a gala. 'I heard from Nurse Dove. It's quite weird down there, one sees the diapositives with one's skeleton looking like something out of a ghost story.'
She broke off, coughing, her sharp shoulders shaking, her skin taking a tinge of blue. She covered her mouth with her hands, turning her back on the others in obeyance of sanatorium etiquette. As the paroxysm subsided, she took from her skirt pocket a round blue bottle, into which she spat slimy green mucus.
'What a bore,' she wheezed. It was the condemnation of the English for any annoyance, from a late train to a mortal illness.
Nurse Dove shortly fussed Baby back to bed. Cards, recitals, amateur concerts in the lounge filled the evenings, but Baby had to wait like a child impatient to stay up for adult enjoyments. That evening was hot, the red cross flag dangling lifeless from the masthead. The carriage was waiting on the gravel, a white linen cover to cool the roof, the horse in a straw hat with holes for its ears. At the foot of the steps, Dr Beckett in his tweed jacket and poet's tie was chatting to the blue-bloused driver.