‘If it could have waited I wouldn’t have done it, I’d have left it for Hollis,’ he said.
He added that I did not need telling that his diagnosis had been wrong. He did not explain that it was a reasonable mistake; he could not get over what he felt he had brought upon me. He said in a flat tone: ‘I’ve done the only thing for him that we can do on the spot. Now I shall be glad to see Hollis arrive.’
‘He’s seriously ill, of course?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Will he get over it?’
‘He ought to stand a good chance — but I can’t tell you much—’
He looked at me.
‘No,’ he said, ‘if we’ve got it in time he ought to be all right.’
He said: ‘I’m desperately sorry, Lewis. But what I’m feeling doesn’t exist by the side of what you are.’
He had been an intimate friend since we were very young men. At any other time I should have known that, both because of his tender-heartedness and his pride, he was ravaged. But I had no attention to spare for him; I was only interested in what he had done for the child, whether he had taken away any of the suffering, whether he was being any use to us.
In the same animal fashion, when at that moment I heard Geoffrey Hollis arrive, I felt nothing like embarrassment or remorse, but just a kind of dull hope, that here might be someone bringing help.
As we all four of us gathered in the hall, it was Geoffrey alone who seemed uncomfortable, the others were too far gone. As he nodded to me his manner was off-hand, but not as certain as usual; his fair head looked as unchangingly youthful, but his poise was not as jaunty. It was with something like relief that he listened to Margaret’s first words, which were: ‘It’s worse than I told you.’
Once more I stood in the drawing-room, staring at the beam of sunlight along the wall. There was another scream, but this time it was minutes — I knew the exact time, it was five past three — before they joined me, Geoffrey speaking in an undertone to Charles March. The child’s crying died down, the room was as quiet as when Charles had given us his opinion there less than forty-eight hours before. Through the open window came the smell of petrol, dust, and summer lime.
‘Shall I begin or will you?’ said Geoffrey to Charles March, in a manner informal and friendly: there was no doubt of the answer. Geoffrey was speaking without pomposity, but also, even to Margaret, quite impersonally.
‘The first thing is,’ he said, ‘that everything has been done and is being done that anyone possibly can. He’ll have to be moved as soon as we have checked the diagnosis and my people have got ready for him in the isolation ward. You’ll be able to drive round with the sample straightaway?’
Charles inclined his head. He was a man of natural authority and if they had met just as human beings he would have overweighted this younger man. But now Geoffrey had the authority of technique.
‘I might as well say that the original diagnosis is one which we should all have made in the circumstances two days ago. The symptoms were masked to begin with and then they came on three or four hours ago, after that intermission yesterday, which is quite according to type, except that they came on with a rather unusual rush. If I had seen him on Saturday, I should never have thought this was a serious possibility myself.’
Charles’ face, drawn and pallid, did not move.
‘And I shouldn’t yesterday, and it’s out of the question that anyone would. We ought to thank our lucky stars that Dr March got the penicillin into him when he did. We may be glad of that extra half hour.’
It was, I remembered later, impersonally cordial, a little patronizing, and scientifically true. But at the moment I actually heard it, I was distracted by this wind-up. I said: ‘What has he got?’
‘Oh, neither Dr March nor I think there is much doubt about that. Don’t you agree?’ He turned to Charles March, who nodded again without his expression changing.
‘It’s a meningitis,’ said Geoffrey Hoffis. ‘A straightforward one, we think.
‘Mind you,’ he said to me, not unkindly, with a curious antiseptic lightness, ‘it’s quite bad enough. If this had happened twenty years ago I should have had to warn you that a large percentage of these cases didn’t recover. But nowadays, with a bit of good fortune, we reckon to cope.’
It was after Charles March had left, and Geoffrey had rung up the hospital, telling them to expect him and the case, that he said: ‘That’s all we can do just now. I’ve got to see another patient. I’ll be back to take the boy along in a couple of hours.’
He spoke to Margaret.
‘You must stop Maurice coming here until we’ve got things straight.’
‘I was going to ask you,’ she said.
He was businesslike, he said that he did not intend them to take even a negligible risk: Maurice had already been exposed to infection; she was to watch him for a vestige of a cold, take his temperature night and morning: at any sign, right or wrong, they would inject him.
As she listened, he could not have doubted that all he said would be carried out. He gave a smile of relief, and said that he must go.
I longed for him to stay. With him in the room, the edge of waiting was taken off. It did not matter that he was talking to her about their son. I said, hoping against hope that he would stay with us, that I had better go in and see the child.
‘I’ll do that myself on the way out,’ he said, again not unkindly, ‘but I don’t see the point of it for you.’
He added: ‘I shouldn’t if I were you. You’ll only distress yourself, and you can’t do any good. It’s not pretty to watch. Mind you, we don’t know what they feel in these conditions, possibly nature is more merciful than it looks.’
In the hours when Margaret and I sat alone by the cot, the child did not cry so regularly: much of the time he lay on his side, moving little, muttering names of people, characters from his books, or bits of nursery verses. Frequently he complained that his head hurt, and three times that his back did. When either of us spoke to him his pupils, grossly dilated, confronted us as though he had not heard.
He seemed to be going deaf: I began to think that he no longer recognized us. Once he gave a drawn-out scream, so violent and rending that it seemed as though he were not only in agony, but horribly afraid. During the screams Margaret talked to him, tried piteously to reach him: so did I, my voice mounting until it was a shout. But he did not know us: when the scream was over, and he was babbling to himself again, his words were muddled, his mind had become confused.
When Geoffrey came back to us at a quarter to five, I felt an instant’s dependence and overmastering relief. He glanced down at the child: his long, smooth, youthful face looked almost petulant, he clicked his teeth with something like disapproval.
‘It’s not working much yet,’ he said.
He had a nurse waiting outside, he told us: they would take him at once: he looked again at the child with an expression not specially compassionate or grave, more like that of someone whose will was being crossed. He said that he would give him his second shot of penicillin as soon as they got him into his ward; it would be early, but worth trying. He added casually: ‘The diagnosis is as I thought, by the way.’
‘Yes,’ said Margaret. Then she asked: ‘Can we come with him now?’
Geoffrey looked at her deliberately, without involvement, without memory, competent with his answer as if she had been nothing but the mother of a patient.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You’d only be slightly in the way. In any case, when we’ve got him settled, I couldn’t let you see him.’
‘You’ll ring us up if there’s any change,’ she said steadily, ‘for better or worse?’
For once his tone was personal. ‘Of course I shall.’