Retracing without intention the way Lufkin had driven me, I came to the mouth of St James’s Street. It was empty now, and not one of the club windows was alight; all of a sudden I stopped repressing the disquiet that had seized me in Lufkin’s car. For, looking into those windows from the car, I had not dared to think of another evening when I had dined out without my wife — when I had dined with Gilbert Cooke, and simultaneously Sheila was dying. Now I could let the past come back blank and harmless, so that, going slowly down the street, I did at last credit my reason for happiness.
It was not until I saw Margaret next morning, however, that I felt happy. Suddenly the sight of her in bed, her hair straight as a schoolgirl’s, her collar-bone plain where the bedjacket and nightgown had fallen away, made the tear glands smart, and I cried out. I said that I had not seen her look like that; then when I let her go and gazed at her again, I had to ask: ‘How are you?’
‘What century do you think you’re living in?’
She was tired, she spoke with the indulgence of not concentrating. She went on: ‘I wish I could have another for you.’
I interrupted her, and then she said, inspecting me: ‘What do you think you’ve been doing?’
‘Walking about.’
‘If you’d listen to me—’ but she could not go on teasing me. When had I heard? What exactly had I been doing when I heard? Who told me? What did I say? She cried out: ‘He’s a dear little boy and I love him very much.’
Sitting up, she turned her head on the bank of pillows and looked out of the window into the clinic garden. The cloud-cap was still dense, ominous over the trees. She said: ‘The room where I first saw you — it must be somewhere in the wing over there.’
It was part of the same establishment; until that morning I had not been near it again.
‘It must have been about four in the afternoon, but it was earlier in the month, wasn’t it?’ she said, exact in her memory because she was happy.
She added: ‘I liked you. But I don’t believe I thought I should ever be your wife.’
She said, in a tone relaxed and both diffident and proud: ‘At any rate, I’ve done something for you now.’
Soon afterwards she rang and asked the nurse to bring the baby in. When she did so, I stood up and, without finding anything to say, stared at him for what seemed a long time. The nurse — she had a smooth and comely Italianate face — was saying that he was not a whopper, but a fine boy, ‘all complete and perfect as they say’: I scarcely listened, I was looking at the eyes unfocused, rolling and unstable, the hands waving slowly and aimlessly as anemones. I felt utterly alien from this being in her arms: and at the same time I was possessed by the insistence, in which there was nothing like tenderness, which was more savage and angry than tender, that he must live and that nothing bad should happen to him.
As the nurse gave him to Margaret his head inclined to her, and I saw his side-face, suddenly transfigured into a cartoon of an adult’s, determined, apprehensive. Grasping him, Margaret looked at him with an expression that was no longer youthful, that held responsibility and care, as though the spontaneous joy with which she had spoken about him had been swallowed up in pity.
I stood and watched her holding the child. Partly I felt I could not get used to it, it was too much for me, it had been too quick, this was only a scene of which I was a spectator. Partly I felt a tug at the fibres, as though I were being called on in a way I did not understand; as though what had entered into me could not yet translate itself into an emotion, into terms of anything I could recognize and feel.
49: A Child Looking at the Moon
WHEN, fifteen months after the child’s birth, I received a letter from Mrs Knight saying that her husband had been very ill and wished to see me, I did not think twice before going. They were staying, so she told me in the letter, at Brown’s Hotel — ‘so as to get him to the seaside by easy stages. Of course, he has such a sense of duty, he says he must get back to his parish work. But I trust you not to encourage him in this. He is not to think of returning to the Vicarage until the summer.’
Apparently he was not to think of retiring either, it occurred to me, though by this time he was nearly seventy: they had never needed the stipend, it was negligible beside her income: but that did not prevent Mr Knight from clinging on to it. As for his cure of souls, for years he had found that his ill-health got worse when confronted with most of his daily tasks, except those, such as preaching and giving advice, which he happened to enjoy.
When I first caught sight of him in the hotel that afternoon he looked neither specially old nor ill, although he was lying stretched out on his bed and only whispered a greeting. Mrs Knight plunged straight into the drama of his illness. They were doing themselves well, I noticed: they had taken a suite, and I walked through a sitting-room lavish with flowers on the way to their bedroom. By Mr Knight’s bed stood grapes, books, medicine bottles, and tubes of drugs: by Mrs Knight’s stood magazines, a box of chocolates, a bottle of whisky and a syphon of soda. It had an air of subfusc comfort, of indulgences no longer denied, that I had seen before in elderly couples travelling.
Mrs Knight sat on her bed, describing her husband’s symptoms: in a dressing-gown, his coat and collar off, Mr Knight lay on his, his eyes closed, his clever petulant mouth pulled down; he lay on his back, his legs relaxed, like a figure on a tomb or one in a not disagreeable state of hebephrenia.
According to Mrs Knight’s account, he had for a long time past been starting up in the middle of the night with his heart racing.
‘I take his pulse, of course,’ she said energetically to me. ‘Ninety! A hundred! Sometimes more!
‘I decided,’ she looked at me with her active innocent eyes, ‘that I ought to keep a diary of his health. I thought it would help the doctors.’ She showed me a quarto day-book, two days to the page, and in it some of the entries in her large hand…
‘L woke up as usuaclass="underline" pulse 104. Quietened down to 85 in twenty minutes…’ ‘Better day. I got his heart steady for twenty-four hours…’
It sounded to me like the physical condition of a highly strung and hyperaesthetic man, but it would not have been profitable to tell Mrs Knight so. Apart from ‘good afternoon’, she had said nothing to me since I arrived that did not concern her husband’s health.
‘It was always the same, though,’ she cried. ‘We couldn’t stop it! Him waking up in the middle of the night with his heart pounding away like this—’
Sitting on the bed she moved both her thick, muscular arms up and down, the palms of her hands facing the floor, at the rate of hundreds a minute. For the first time, the silent figure on the other bed joined in: Mr Knight used one arm, not two, and without opening his eyes flapped a hand to indicate the rapid heart-beats, but not so quickly as his wife, not in time.
‘And I couldn’t get him to be examined properly,’ she said. ‘He’s always been frightened of his blood pressure, of course. He wouldn’t let the doctors take it. Once I thought I had persuaded him to, but just as the doctor was putting the bandage round his arm he shouted “Take it away! Take it away!”’
Mr Knight lay absolutely still.
‘Then one night three months ago, it was in September because he was just thinking about his harvest thanksgiving sermon, it was a nice warm night and he’d had a couple of glasses of wine with his dinner, I woke up and I didn’t hear him at all, but I knew he was awake. As a rule, of course, he calls out to me, and I knew — it was just like second sight — I knew there was something wrong because he didn’t call out. Then I heard him say, quite quietly, just as though he were asking me for a glass of water: “Darling, I think I’m going.”’