From his tone, so much more intimate than teasing, I knew that he would not stop trying to persuade Mr March of what he felt.
‘You’ve never been able to trust your children to behave with reasonable decorum, have you?’ Charles went on.
‘That is so,’ said Mr March. ‘As I remarked recently, I ought to have been born in a different epoch.’
‘I think perhaps I ought to have been too,’ said Charles.
‘You’re better prepared to endure unpleasantnesses than I am,’ said Mr March. ‘Whereas I only require to pass my declining years in peace.’
‘I’m not as well prepared as you are, Mr L,’ Charles said. ‘And I don’t like the prospect of the future much more than you do.’
‘I never liked the prospect of any unpleasantness,’ said Mr March. ‘But that’s my temperament, I’ve told you before. I’m a diffident and retiring person.’
‘Don’t you see that our temperaments are very much alike?’ said Charles. His tone suddenly turned urgent and anxious. ‘Even though we seem to do different things. I may do things you wouldn’t have done, but we’re much more alike than most fathers and sons. I wish you’d believe it. At bottom, we’re very similar people. Father, don’t you know that we are?’
A smile forced itself, as though with difficulty, through to Mr March’s face, a smile that became delighted, open, and naïf.
While some of us felt a wave of relief, thought it was all over, felt a sense of relief overwhelming, tired and at the same time sparkling gay, Mr March seemed half-incredulous, half-happy.
He said, in a rapid mutter, that he would like to have a ‘consultation’ with Charles and Ann ‘not later than the end of the present week’.
Charles said yes.
Mr March deliberately changed the conversation, and talked happily to the rest of us, about subjects in which he and we were equally uninterested.
As Charles rose to say goodbye, Ann gave a gasp. As soon as I looked at her, I knew it was a gasp of pain. Charles went to her, asking with extreme anxiety what was the matter.
‘I’m not particularly well,’ she said.
‘You’ve not been well all night,’ he said. He put a hand on her forehead and felt her pulse.
‘Why haven’t you told me?’ he said, in a tone so distressed that it sounded harsh and scolding. He turned to his father. ‘I must get her home at once. Lewis, will you ring my partner and tell him that I shall want him to attend to her?’
Mr March stood up and went to him.
‘Is she ill?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Charles.
‘Is it undesirable to move her?’
Charles hesitated, and before he replied Mr March said in a loud voice: ‘I insist that she stays in my house. I refuse to accept responsibility if you subject her to unnecessary movement.’
‘She would rather be at home,’ said Charles.
‘I cannot regard her inclinations as decisive. I believe that you would make her stay if it were not for previous circumstances. I cannot accept your recent assurances if you find it necessary to remove her from my house now.’
They looked into each other’s eyes. Their faces were transformed from what they had been half an hour before, when Charles made his ‘assurances’ to his father. They were heavy, frowning, distressed.
‘I think I had better stay,’ said Ann, who was lying back below them in her chair.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘Will you tell them to be quick? She ought to be in bed at once,’ said Charles curtly to his father.
Mr March rang for the butler, and said to Charles: ‘If you have no strong objection, I should prefer to send for my practitioner. He is competent as those fellows go, and he can be available without so much delay.’
Before Charles replied, Ann said: ‘Yes, let him come.’
The servants worked at speed. Within five minutes Ann and Charles were out of the room; within ten the car of Mr March’s doctor drew up outside. The rest of us stayed there. We talked perfunctorily. Once or twice Mr March startled us by speaking with animation: then he relapsed into his thoughts.
It was a long time before Charles came back. His face was drained of colour, and he spoke straight to his father. His voice was quiet and hard: ‘It may be a pneumonia. She’s ill.’
A look of recognition passed between them. Mr March did not speak.
38: Desires by a Bedside
I called to ask after her on each of the next two afternoons. On the first day I found Mr March alone, distracted and restless, telling me it was beyond doubt pneumonia, inventing one service after another that he might do for Ann. His car shuttled between Bryanston Square and Pimlico, fetching her belongings; he kept questioning the doctors and nurses; he went out himself to buy her flowers.
On the second afternoon Mr March and Charles both came to see me in the drawing-room. Mr March was still fretting for things that he could do. He behaved as though any action was a relief to his mind: but, when he asked Charles three times in ten minutes what else was needed, he got cold replies. Those replies did not spring simply from suspense. They were cold because of the tension present in the room between them.
In a short time Mr March went out. At once Charles’ whole expression changed; his face became at once less hard and more ravaged. He spoke without any pretence.
‘It will be days before we know that she’s safe. Orange — Mr March’s doctor — says that he wouldn’t have expected it to take hold of her like this.’ He cried out: ‘Lewis, I wish I had her courage.’
‘I’ve often wished that,’ I said.
‘It’s the sort of courage I just can’t compete with,’ Charles said. ‘She won’t stop thinking about this affair of the Note. She told me that it was on that account she must know exactly how ill she is. She wouldn’t ask me, but she did ask Orange. She just said that her father and her husband were both doctors, and she wanted to be discussed as though she were a case in front of the class. Mind you,’ he said, with an automatic smile, ‘intelligent people often ask one to do that. It doesn’t prevent one from lying to them.’ He went on: ‘But so far as a human being can, she meant it.’
‘Did he tell her?’
‘He told her that she was dangerously ill.’
He had mentioned ‘this affair of the Note’ almost with indifference. I wondered, didn’t he think of connecting it with her illness? She could not have fallen ill at a more critical time; if she had been a stranger, wouldn’t he have said that perhaps it was not entirely a coincidence?
Yet he spoke of ‘this affair of the Note’ as though it did not matter: even when he went on to say:
‘He told her that she was dangerously ill. When she knew that, she asked to see you before tonight. She wants to tell you something in private — it must be the same business. She wants to see you very much, Lewis. Do you mind going in? Can you spare the time? Are you sure it won’t make you late?’
The strain sharpened his courtesy and for an instant he was genuinely worrying about my comfort. On the stairs, going towards Ann’s room, he said: ‘Do what she asks. Do what she asks — whatever it is.’
As he opened the bedroom door he forced his manner to change.
‘Here is Lewis,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t speak for very long. You can let him have his share of the conversation, can’t you?’
Mr March’s wife had once occupied this bedroom, the largest in the house. The bed itself was wide and high, and was overhung by a canopy; it drew my eyes across the great room, to the figure lying still under the clothes.
She was lying on her right side. Her face was flushed and her eyes bright, and her expression was constricted with strain. She gave a short dry cough, which made her give a painful frown. Her breathing was quick and heavy. There was sweat on her upper lip, and what looked to me like a faint rash.