Our relationship, though close and cordial, was only intermittently renewed. Five or six miles is not much of a drive, but you have to prepare for it: get the gig out or saddle a horse, and as I have no telephone—what would I do with one?—one can never be sure that one is not taking a lot of trouble for nothing. We generally dropped a line to invite one another or to announce a forthcoming visit, no more than twice or three times a year. Numerous friendships are fed on absence; and we thus preserved an old affection which had succeeded the one that had linked my father to him: they had been to the same public school, near Taunton.
Dr. Sullivan had been widowed early in life; his wife died in giving birth to their first child, a girl whom he called Dorothy after the departed. With the years, he has come to look more and more like some eighteenth-century figure straight out of Rowlandson’s caricatures. He has always worn, and still does, a loose black jacket, a waistcoat that mounts right up to his stiff white collar, stovepipe trousers that are tight around his knees and ankles. In fact, he looks like a bishop in mufti. He has the big nose of a fat vulture, a forehead which, for lack of hair, climbs halfway up his shiny skull; and this carries aft a frill of soft white, curly, almost fuzzy hair which shivers like foam in the wind.
His daughter is the same age as I, more or less. At twenty, she contracted a very bad marriage. Fortunately she was hardly given time to suffer from it: her husband got himself knocked on the head in some disreputable place in Chelsea. A rather mysterious murder, in circumstances that were probably more than a little sordid. He was found unconscious in some fetid alleyway where the murderer had shoved him behind some dustbins. He died on his way to the hospital.
The marriage had been a blow to me. I had been pretty much in love with her. But I was still a greenhorn, quite powerless to compete against the enticements of a glib adventurer. Once he was dead, I had hoped the young woman would come back, so I might try to win her heart, on the rebound from her disappointment and grief. But she did not come back. She found a job and stayed on in London. And gradually I forgot her—I mean that with absence and the passage of time my feelings changed, and when next I saw her again, a few years later, my love had dissolved into friendship. I went to see her in her little flat at the far end of Fulham, to take her a message from her father; and though we fell into each other’s arms, we did so like two childhood friends, who know each other too well to entertain anything more vivid than an old mutual tenderness. At least so I believed.
Nevertheless, when Dr. Sullivan and I met, two or three times a year, we would avoid talking of his daughter. He too had been distressed by her marriage, and later deeply hurt that she should prefer to stay in London. Nevertheless he would go and look her up there, from time to time. I have no idea what made him think he had guessed that I was still in love with her. I did not know how to undeceive him. So that it was probably to spare my feelings that he made an effort not to mention her, whereas I did likewise to spare his.
Now on that Thursday morning, I was busy straightening the accounts for the annual audit when I heard the gravel of the drive crunch under the wheels of a carriage. And getting up to have a look I recognized Dr. Sullivan alighting from it.
He waved a long, black-sleeved arm, laughing and shouting:
“Just thought I might have a look-in!”
While I was helping him park the carriage behind the elms, I was wondering and worrying what he had come to “look in” on. Had he already heard about Sylva? He wouldn’t for a second believe the myth of my sister in Scotland. I am an only child and he knows it well.
“I am on my way back from old Trilling,” he explained. “He had the wind up for a mere chill. I thought I’d find you in. I know you rarely leave the estate at this time of year.”
We went into the drawing room. He flung his greatcoat over an easy chair and walked across to the fireplace.
“I seized the chance of being in the neighborhood to tell you a great piece of news. Dorothy will be back on Sunday.”
“She’s coming back to Dunstan’s Cottage? You mean she’s leaving London? For good?”
“I hope so. I’m getting old, and she’s a good girl after all. She worries about my being all on my own.”
He rubbed his hands in front of the fire with cheerful vigor, his long, ruddy old clergyman’s face beaming with pleasure.
“Moreover, the job she had in London held no future for her. She never really got used to city life.”
“I’ve often wondered why she stayed on.”
The doctor’s face clouded over. He made a vague motion with his hand. “Pride, I suppose. Let’s say self-respect, if you like. She didn’t want to return as a prodigal, I imagine.”
But the tone was as vague as the gesture had been. It seemed to me not so much an answer as an evasion.
“This is great news indeed,” I said with less assurance in my voice than I would have liked.
I did not know what to think of this return. Quite simply I ought to have been glad of it, but for some reason I could not explain, some disquiet mingled with my gladness.
The old doctor must have ascribed my confusion to more obvious motives. He gazed at me with a broad grin and said:
“It was she who asked me to let you know.”
“Do thank her. Does she expect me to meet her at the station on Sunday?”
“You’d have to get up too early; the night train gets in just after six. No, don’t. Just come to Dunstan’s whenever you like, later in the day. We’ll have dinner together.”
I told myself it would have been more friendly to insist on meeting her. But I devoted my Sunday mornings to Sylva. It would have seemed to me cruel, for her as well as for me, to give up the only morning we still had together since Mrs. Bumley had taken over.
“Actually,” I said, “it wouldn’t be very easy to make myself free. Do ask Dorothy to excuse me, give her my love and tell her I’ll drive over at teatime.”
He picked up his coat, but on the doorstep he seemed to hesitate. It was obvious he would have liked to talk to me at greater length about his daughter of whom we had spoken so little during the past ten years. But I dared not retain him for fear of seeing Nanny and her protegée appear at any moment at the top of the stairs. What would I say, how would I explain? I had not yet prepared anything, and I reproached myself for my lack of foresight.
“Don’t talk to Dorothy of her marriage,” the old man said at last, with some embarrassment.
Strange advice: he knew very well that I had seen his daughter several times in London.
“I never have,” I reassured him nonetheless, accompanying him back to his carriage. I was increasingly afraid that he might linger a little too long.
“She was eighteen at the time… a chunk of juicy young flesh for that wolf in sheep’s clothing. I’ve been racked with remorse and regret that I didn’t unmask him when there was still time.”
We had reached the dogcart. He untied the horse. Before climbing onto the seat he grasped my hand in his for a moment, one foot on the step.
“If my blindness turned out to have spoiled Dorothy’s life, I’d never forgive myself,” he said, looking at me with moist eyes and an insistence that embarrassed me.
“She is still very young!” I stammered.
“Not as young as all that,” he murmured, then dropped my hand and hoisted himself onto the step. “That isn’t the point, anyway,” he muttered into his scarf, without turning around.