‘There are other first-class children’s doctors.’
‘He’s the best I’ve seen.’
‘There are others as good and better.’
My anger was sullen, hers on the flash-point. But it was she, more violent than I was, who controlled herself first.
‘This is a good time to quarrel,’ she said in the darkness.
‘We mustn’t quarrel,’ I said.
‘Let me try and come out with it.’
But she could not make a clear explanation. She had been thinking, she said, just as I had been thinking, what it would be like if he got worse. And there was Maurice, she wanted to be sure that he was looked after. If Charles got worse, it would be too much to bear, unless she had complete confidence in a doctor. Her voice was shaking.
‘Would it have to be Geoffrey?’
‘I should know we’d done the best we could.’
For each of us, the choice was dense with the past. I was jealous of him, yes: jealous as one can be of someone one has misused. Even the mention of him reminded me of the time I had lost her, my paralysis, the period in my life that, looking back, I liked the least. I had avoided seeing him since Margaret came to me. It was part of his bargain, in letting her keep Maurice, that he should visit him when he wanted. He made a regular visit each week, but on those days I had not once been there.
On her side, although she liked Charles March, she felt for him a fainter jealousy, the jealousy for parts of my youth that, except at second-hand, were for her unknown and irrecoverable.
There was something else. In a fashion that seemed right out of character, but one I had noticed in older women, she liked to hero-worship her doctor, make a cult of him; perhaps because of the past, she could not manage to do that with Charles March.
‘All that matters,’ I said, ‘is that he is looked after. We can forget everything else.’
‘Yes.’
‘If you should need Geoffrey, then you’d better have him.’
Very soon, not more than five minutes after, she was sleeping for the first time that night, but it was a long time before I got to sleep again.
In the morning, when we went in together to see the child, that anxiety in the darkness seemed remote. He looked as he had done the day before, he greeted us, his temperature was the same. As soon as Maurice had gone to school, the two of us sat beside the cot all the morning, watching him.
His cough had slackened, but his nose was still running. Otherwise he did not grumble, he lay there being read to, at times apathetic. At other times he became impatient with reading, stopping us when we were half-way through a book, demanding that we start again. It was a trick, I insisted to myself, that he often did.
Just after midday, looking down at him, I could not keep back the question — was he more flushed than ten minutes before?
For an instant I glanced at Margaret; our eyes met, fell away, turned back to the cot; neither dared to speak. Twice I took my eyes away from the child, to the floor, anywhere, while I counted the instants, in the hope that when I looked again I should see it had been an illusion.
Since my first alarm — not more than a few minutes past — I had not looked at Margaret. She was gazing at him. She too had seen. When our eyes met this time, each saw nothing but fear. When we looked back at the child, his expression was also strained with something like fear. His cheeks were flushed, and his pupils were dilating.
I said to Margaret: ‘I’ll ring up Charles March. If he’s not already on the way, I’ll tell him we want Geoffrey too.’
She muttered thanks. As soon as I had returned, she would get on to Geoffrey.
Charles was on his rounds, so his wife told me. He would be calling at his house before coming to us, so I could leave a message. As I was re-entering the nursery the child was crying resentfully: ‘His head hurts.’
‘We know, dear,’ said Margaret, with the steadiness in which no nerve showed.
‘It hurts.’
‘The doctors will help you. There will be two doctors soon.’
Suddenly he was interested: ‘Who are two doctors?’
Then he began crying, hands over his eyes, holding his head. As Margaret went to the telephone, she whispered to me that his temperature was right up; for a second she gripped my hand, then left me with him.
Crying with his head turned to the pillow, he asked where she was, as though he had not seen her for a long time. I told him that she had gone to fetch another doctor, but he did not seem to understand.
Some minutes passed, while I heard the trill of telephone bells as Margaret made calls, and the child’s whimpering. Whatever I said to him, he did not make clear replies. Then, all of a sudden, he was saying something feverish, urgent, which seemed to have meaning, but which I could not understand. Blinking his eyes, his hand over them, he was pointing to the window, demanding something, asking something. He was in pain, he could not grasp why I would not help him, his cries were angry and lost.
Myself, I felt lost too, lost, helpless, and abject.
Once more he asked, imploring me in a jumble of words. This time he added ‘Please, please’, in anger and fever, utterly unlike a politeness; it was a reflex, produced because he had learned it made people do things for him.
I begged him to speak slowly. Somehow, half-lucid, he made an effort, his babble moderated. At last I had it.
‘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.
53: Act of Courage
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.