So for two years he was entirely happy. She could do no wrong for him. Her moods and caprices, the small slights and snubs, rebuffs and disappointments, by which she sought to make herself more precious to him, all seemed part of her; he scarcely distinguished between her melting and her stony moods. But then something in him became sensitized and if she was unkind to him it began to hurt. Now there were two Deirdres instead of one; and the second made him suffer. In vain he told himself that she had always been like that; it was unreasonable that something he had always taken for granted and not minded should suddenly become a grievance. He blamed himself more than her for his resentment, and was miserable until, at whatever cost to his pride and sense of fairness, he had made it up with her. He tried to make these tiffs and reconciliations into a habit, part of his emotional routine; an item on his experience account; but it didn’t work out so. His feelings, instead of toughening, grew more tender; his eyes had a hurt, anxious look, which his other women friends, on the few occasions when he saw them, remarked upon. How quick they were to notice changes in him! He couldn’t conceal from himself that he was unhappy; the joys of reconciliation and forgiveness (forgiveness of himself rather than her) became of shorter duration; soon, as an anodyne, they hardly counted. He was forced into making a distinction, which he had never made before, between her acts and her: Deirdre was one thing, what she did was another, so he told himself; but try as he would he couldn’t keep them apart. It wasn’t only the smart of the disappointments, which she was so expert in inflicting, that made him miserable; it was the nature that prompted them, his sense of which was like a smell that persisted even through her most fragrant and most yielding moments, and had something frightening about it: the smell of cruelty.
One evening at a party, a rather smart party that he had taken her to at her request, though not quite sure she would fit in, he suddenly felt ill—food poisoning or gastric flu—he didn’t know what it was. He caught sight of his face in a looking-glass, and it more than confirmed what he was feeling. It wasn’t easy to detach Deirdre from the young man she was talking to, but at last he did, and told her of his plight as well as he could, for by now the room was spinning round.
‘I don’t want to go now,’ she said, ‘I’m having a good time. You’ll be all right. Get a hot-water bottle and go to bed.’
‘Oh, do come back with me,’ he begged her. ‘I feel so odd, I don’t know if I shall be able to get home.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘You know what an old fusspot you are. I’ll look in and see you on my way back, if it isn’t too late.’
He lay awake shivering and sweating, with his bedroom door open, hoping to hear her key turn in the lock, but he hadn’t heard it when, towards three o’clock, he fell asleep.
His daily help was busy in the room when George woke up. He had had a dreadful night with bouts of vomiting and diarrhoea, sometimes alternating, sometimes simultaneous; and the blackness before his eyes, as he plunged across the passage to relieve them! Once he had to crawl. He didn’t always get there in time, as his bedclothes bore witness.
‘Never mind,’ said the daily help, ‘I’ll change them for you. Don’t try to get out of bed—I’ll change them with you in it.’
He rolled from one side to the other, and somehow the distasteful task was done.
He could have had a servant living in, but most of his spare cash went to Deirdre, to keep her flat and her; for he had persuaded her, as much for his sake as for hers, to give up her secretarial work. With this she sometimes taxed him. ‘You’ve taken away my livelihood,’ she said.
She said, she said . . . Something that Deirdre had once said, and which he couldn’t remember, was vexing George’s throbbing brain when the telephone bell rang.
‘Perhaps you’d rather I went away?’ the daily woman suggested. ‘It may be something private.’ He nodded weakly.
‘Hullo, is that George? I didn’t recognize your voice, you disguised it.’
‘I’m laid up in bed.’
‘Speak a little louder, can you?’
George repeated it.
‘Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll come round and see you. I couldn’t come last night—it went on too late.’
‘When will you come?’
‘In half an hour or so.’
The morning passed; the daily help, who usually left at twelve o’clock, went out to buy some fish for his lunch—‘I’ll boil it for you,’ she said.
George protested that he couldn’t eat it.
‘You must get something inside you,’ she said, ‘after all that vomiting.’
How kind she is, he thought, but the thought made him uneasy—she was doing something for him, meeting what she believed to be a wish of his—she was putting him in her debt, making him dependent on her. Receiving a favour, he felt uncomfortable. But Deirdre would be here any minute now, and for her he could do something—but could he, bedridden? He heard the click of the key turning—Deirdre at last! But no, it was the daily help again, for sounds came from the kitchen. At last the telephone bell rang.
‘Darling, how are you feeling?’
‘A bit better, thank you, but not much. When will you be round?’
‘Isn’t it too bad, I’ve been asked out to lunch, I may not get to you till tea-time. I’ll make you some tea, but you’ll have to tell me where you keep it.’
‘I’m not sure if I know myself.’
‘Oh, well, I’ll find it. I must dash now.’
Presently the daily help came in, bringing the boiled fish on a tray, laid out very neatly. ‘And I thought you might like some peas and potatoes.’ His mouth watered at the sight of the food, but his stomach warned him, and he put the forkful down, while he tried to decide how serious the warning was. ‘Hadn’t you better have the doctor?’ she asked. ‘You don’t look any too good.’
‘Oh, I don’t think so, you see my temperature is normal.’
‘Well, try to eat a bit, and then have a nap and I’ll come in and give you your tea.’
‘It’s very kind of you,’ he said, ‘Mrs. Buswell’—suddenly remembering her name. ‘But Miss O’Farrell’s coming in to do that. By the way, where is the tea kept?’
She always left the tea-tray ready when she went away.
‘In the cupboard beside the fridge, on the second shelf. Well, bye-bye for now, sir, and I’ll come later on and give you your supper.’
‘How good of you,’ he said. . . . But he didn’t feel quite happy about the arrangement. He ought to have been giving her her supper.
Struggling with nausea he swallowed down some fish, picked at the peas, nibbled the potatoes; after an initial revolt, his stomach seemed to tolerate it, and, as often happens after eating, he felt better—well enough, in fact, to take the nap that Mrs. Buswell had recommended. (Was she taking one? He hoped so.) But when he woke he felt feverish and his sense of touch was out of order. Warm things felt cold; cold things felt colder; getting out of bed, wondering whether to be sick or not, he shivered in the August warmth. No matter, it was past four o’clock. Deirdre would soon be here.
Just at the moment when expectation had reached its peak, the telephone bell rang.
‘Darling, it’s me. I hate to disappoint you—if you are disappointed—but I’ve gone down to the country—it is so heavenly now, we’re going to have a bathe—so I shan’t be there to give you your tea. And I was so looking forward to it. But you’ll be able to get it for yourself, won’t you? And I’ll come round in the evening.’
‘What time?’ George asked.
‘Oh, any old time, but well before your bedtime. So long, my dear. Think of me taking a header. Ugh!’
She rang off.
George wrestled with his disappointment, but again and again it reared itself and struck at him, thriving on successive decapitations like a hydra. Even more than his body, his mind was troubling him, and if he tried to play off one against the other they united and made common cause against him.