Casting about, she mentioned the general election of the past winter, and then the one she thought must soon follow.
‘I should have thought,’ said Davidson, ‘that one had to be a morbidly good citizen to find the prospect beguiling.’
‘I don’t think anyone does,’ said Margaret.
‘I should have thought that it would lack picturesque features to a remarkable extent.’ He was making an effort to keep up the conversation now.
‘No,’ he added, ‘there would be one mildly picturesque feature as far as I’m concerned. That is, if I had the strength to get as far as voting, which I must say seems improbable. But if I did manage to vote, I should be voting Conservative for the first time in my life.’
I was thinking how most of those I knew, certainly eight out of ten of my professional acquaintances, were moving to the right.
Margaret, taking advantage of the chance with Davidson, broke in.
‘Going back to your voting,’ she said, ‘it would have seemed incredible thirty years ago, wouldn’t it?’
‘Quite incredible,’ he replied.
‘You and your friends didn’t have much idea of the way things would actually go, did you?’
‘By and large,’ he said, ‘they’ve gone worse than we could possibly have imagined.
‘Thirty years ago,’ he added, ‘it looked as though they would turn out sensibly.’
‘If you had your time again,’ she said, ‘how would you change what you were all thinking?’
‘In my present form,’ he was not speaking dully now, she had stung him, ‘the thought of having one’s time over again is fairly near the bone.’
‘I know it,’ she said: her tone was as sharp. ‘That’s why you’ve got to tell us. That’s why you’ve got to write it down.’
‘I don’t trust the views of a man who’s effectively done for.’
‘For some things,’ she said, throwing all gentleness away, ‘they’re the only views one can trust.’
She went on: ‘You know very well, I’ve never much liked what your friends stand for. I think on all major issues you’ve been wrong. But don’t you see how valuable it would be to see what you think—’
‘Since the future doesn’t interest me any more.’ They were each being stark; she was tired with the effort to reach him, she could not go much farther, but his eyes were shining with interest, with a kind of fun.
‘On most major issues,’ he caught her phrase, ‘we were pretty well right.’ He gazed at her. After a pause he said: ‘It might be worth thinking about.’
Another pause, in which we could hear his breathing. His head was bent down, but in his familiar posture, not in dejection.
‘It might give me something to think about,’ he said.
With a sigh, she said that now she must go and find the children.
‘I’ll think about it,’ said Davidson. ‘Mind you, I can’t promise. It’d be a bit of a tax physically and I don’t suppose I’m up to it.’
He said goodbye to me, and then turned to Margaret.
‘I’m always very glad to see you,’ he said to her. It was a curious parting from his favourite daughter: it seemed possible that he was not thinking of her as his daughter, but as the only person who looked straight at him in his illness and was not frightened off.
We went into the drawing-room, where I had not been since the evening Margaret said she would come to me. In the summer afternoon, with Helen and the children playing on the floor, it seemed much smaller, as diminished as one of childhood’s rooms revisited.
In the contracted room, Helen was saying that Charles did seem a little out of sorts: perhaps we ought to take him home soon. The child, picking up most of the conversation, cried because he did not want to go; he cried again, in inexplicable bursts, in the taxi; in the nursery his cheeks were flushed, he laughed with a hysterical echo, but was asking, with a customary reasonableness, where Auntie Helen was and when he would see her again. Then he said, with a puzzled and complaining expression: ‘My feet hurt.’
There seemed nothing wrong with his feet, until Maurice said that he meant they were cold, and Margaret rubbed them between her hands.
‘Clever boy,’ Margaret said to Maurice, already ambivalent about being praised.
‘Shall we clap him?’ said Charles, but his laughter again got out of control. He cried, became quiet, and then, with a return of the complaining expression, said: ‘My head hurts.’
Under our eyes his cold was growing worse. His nose ran, he coughed, his temperature was a little up. Without speaking to each other, Margaret and I were thinking of his nurse’s influenza. At once, no worry in her voice, Margaret was arranging for Maurice to sleep in the spare room: still not hurrying, as though she were ticking off her tasks, she had a word with me alone before she put Charles to bed.
‘You are not to be too anxious,’ she said.
Her face, like many whose nerves are near the surface, was always difficult to read, far more so than the poker faces of Rose or Lufkin, because it changed so quickly. Now it was as calm as when she spoke to the children. Yet, though she was steady, and I was letting my anxiety go, I suddenly knew that for no reason — not because of any of his symptoms, nor anything she knew or noticed which I had not — her anxiety was deeper.
‘If he’s not better tomorrow, we’ll have Charles March in straightaway,’ I said.
‘Just to give you a decent night,’ she said, ‘perhaps we might as well have him in now.’
Charles March had arrived and was in the nursery before Margaret had finished putting the child to bed. Standing in the drawing-room I listened to their voices, insistent, incomprehensible, more ominous than if I could have picked out the words, just as their voices had been when I listened in this same room, the morning before he was born. It seemed longer than on that morning until they came to join me, but at once Charles gave me a kind, protective smile.
‘I don’t think it’s anything very terrible,’ he said.
Just for an instant I felt total reassurance, like that of a jealous man who has had the moment’s pretext for jealousy wiped away.
He sat down and, his eyes sharp and cautious, asked me about the nurse’s flu. What was it like? More catarrhal than usual? Had any of us had it? Yes, Margaret replied, she had, mildly: it had been going round the neighbourhood.
‘Yes,’ said Charles, ‘several of my patients have had it.’
He was thinking out what he could safely say. It caught my eye that his suit was old and shabby, fading at the lapels: he was seedier to look at than when I first knew him as a smart young man: but the seediness did not matter and he was wearing welclass="underline" his hair was still thick and fair, his eyes bright. This life he had chosen, which had once seemed to me quixotic and voulu, was suiting him.
‘Well, obviously,’ he said, ‘it would be slightly far-fetched to look for anything else in the boy’s case. I am a bit of an old woman, and with very small children I can’t help thinking of the rare things that might just possibly happen to them. But I can’t see any justification for suspecting any of them here. No, we may as well call it flu, this brand of flu that seems to be in the air.’
As he spoke, he was setting out to reassure me. But, as well as being a man of strong feeling, he had made himself a good doctor. He knew that he started by being both over-cautious and over-ingenious. With any child — more than ever with the child of a close friend — his temptation had been to spend time over remote dangers. It had meant alarm, it was bad medicines, it was a private irritation. For Charles was a devoted man, but he had an appetite, personal as well as professional, for being right.