He told us, once more antiseptic, that we could telephone the ward sister at any time, but there was no point in doing so before that night. If it was any relief to us, he himself would be glad to see us at the hospital the following morning.
After the ambulance drove away, my sense of time was deranged. Sitting in the early evening with Margaret and Maurice, I kept looking at my watch as though feeling my pulse in an illness; hoping for a quarter of an hour to have passed, I found it had only been minutes. Sometimes I was so much afraid that I wanted time to be static.
All the time I was watching Margaret look after her other boy. Before he came in, she was so sheet-pale that she had made up more than usual, so as not to alarm him. She had explained how Charles had been taken away with a bad cold, and how she would have to take his own temperature and fuss over him a bit. Then she sat with him, playing games, not showing him any anxiety, looking very pretty, the abnormal colour under her cheekbones becoming her; her voice was level, even full, and the only sign of suffering was the single furrow across her forehead.
She was thankful that Maurice’s temperature was normal, that he seemed in the best of health.
Watching them, I resented it because she was so thankful. I took my turn playing with the boy: though I could not entertain him much, I could stick at the game and go through the motions: but I was resenting it also that he could sit there handsome and untouched, above all that he should be well. With a passion similar in kind to my mother’s, who in an extreme moment of humiliation had once wanted a war to blot it out and destroy us all, so I wanted the danger to my son to hang over everyone round me: if he was not safe, then no one should be: if he should die, then so should the rest.
When she took Maurice to bed I sat in the drawing-room doing nothing, in that state of despondency and care combined, which tied one’s limbs and made one as motionless as a catatonic, reduced to a single sense, with which I listened to the telephone. Without either of us speaking, Margaret came and sat down opposite to me, on the other side of the fireplace; she was listening with an attention as searing as mine, she was looking at me with another care.
The telephone rang. She regarded me with a question on her face, then answered it. The instant she heard the voice on the wire, her expression changed to disappointment and relief: it was a woman acquaintance asking her to dinner the next week. Margaret explained that the little boy was ill, we couldn’t go out anywhere because of the risk of letting our host down: she was as gentle and controlled as when she played with Maurice. When she returned to her chair, she mentioned the woman’s name, who was a private joke between us, hoping to get a smile from me. All I could do was shake my head.
The vigil lasted. Towards nine o’clock she said, after calling out my name: ‘Don’t forget we should have heard if he were any worse.’
I had been telling myself so. But hearing it from her I believed her, I clutched at the comfort.
‘I suppose so.’
‘I know we should. Geoffrey promised—’ she had reminded me of this already, with the repetitiveness with which, in the either-or of anxiety, one repeats the signs in favour as though they were incantations. ‘He’d be utterly reliable about anything like this.’
‘I think he would.’ I had said it before: it heartened me to say it again.
‘He would.’
She went on: ‘This means he’s got nothing to tell us yet.’
She said: ‘Look, there can’t be anything much to hear, but would you like to ring up the nurse and see what she says?’
I hesitated. I said: ‘I daren’t.’
Her face was strained and set. She asked: ‘Shall I?’
I hesitated for a long time. At last I nodded. At once she went towards the telephone, dialled the number, asked for the ward. Her courage was without a flaw: but I took in nothing, except what her expression and tone would in an instant mean.
She said she wanted to inquire about the child. There was a murmur in a woman’s voice, which I could not catch.
For an instant Margaret’s voice was hard.
‘What does that mean?’
Another murmur.
‘You can’t tell me anything more?’
There was a longer reply.
‘I see,’ said Margaret. ‘Yes, we’ll ring up tomorrow morning.’
Simultaneously with the sound of the receiver going down, she told me: ‘They said that he was holding his own.’
The phrase fell dank between us. She took a step towards me, wanting to comfort me: but I could not move, I was incapable of letting her.
54: ‘Come With Me’
IN the middle of the night, Margaret was at last asleep. We had both lain for a long time, not speaking; in the quiet I knew she was awake, just as I had listened and known years before, when Sheila was beside me in insomnia. But in those nights I had only her to look after, as soon as she was asleep my watch was over: that night, I lay wide awake, Margaret’s breathing steady at last, in a claustrophobia of dread.
I dreaded any intimation of sound that might turn into the telephone ringing. I dreaded the morning coming.
I should have dreaded it less — the thoughts hemmed me in, as though I were in a fever or nightmare — if I had been alone.
It had been easier when I had just had to look after Sheila. Of the nights I had known in marriage, this was the most rending. Margaret had been listening too, lying awake, until she could be sure I was safe out of consciousness: it was only exhaustion that had taken her first: she wanted to look after me, she was thinking not only of the child but of me also.
She wanted to look after me but I could not let her. In this care and grief I had recessed, back to the time when I wanted to keep my inner self inviolate.
As a child I had not taken a sorrow to my mother, I had kept my sorrows from her, I had protected her from them. When I first loved I found, and it was not an accident, someone so self-bound that another’s sorrows did not exist.
But with Margaret they existed, they were at the core of our marriage: if I kept them from her, if I did not need her, then we had failed.
In the darkness I could think of nothing but the child. The anxiety possessed me flesh and bone: I had no room for another feeling: it drove me from any other person, it drove me from her.
I thought of his death. In the claustrophobia of dread, it seemed that it would be an annihilation for me too. I should want to lose myself in sadness, have no one near me, I should not have the health to admit the claim of the living again. In sadness I should be alone: I should be finally and at last alone.
I thought of his death, as the light whitened round the curtains. The room pressed me in; I had a picture, sudden and sharp as an hallucination, it might have been a memory or a trick with time, of myself walking along a strip, not of sand but of pavement, by the sea. I did not know whether I was young or an old man: I was walking by myself on the road, with the sea, leaden but calm, on my right hand.
I slept a little, woke with an instant’s light-heartedness, and then remembered. Margaret was already dressing. As she looked at me, and saw the realization come into my face, hers went more grey. But she still had her courage: without asking me this time she said that she would ring the ward. Remaining in the bedroom I heard her voice speaking, the words indistinguishable, the cling of the bell as she rang off, the sound of her feet returning: they were not light, I dreaded to see her eyes. She told me: ‘She said there’s no change to speak of.’
All I could make myself reply was a question about our visiting Geoffrey at the hospitaclass="underline" when would she be ready to leave? I heard my voice deaden, I could see her regarding me with pity, with injury and rejection, with her own pain.