I felt better, hearing him so truculent — until I noticed Nora’s expression. At a first glance, she had looked, not cheerful, certainly, but settled; it was the set tender expression one sees in many wives by a husband’s sick-bed, but that some would have been surprised to see in Nora. But, as Luke shouted at me, pretending to be his old rude, resilient self, that expression changed on the instant to nothing but pain.
As I moved out of the sunlight I saw Luke. For a moment I remembered him as I had first met him, in the combination room of our college, when he was being inspected as a fellowship candidate ten years before. Then he had been ruddy, well fleshed, muscular, brimming with a young man’s vigour — and (it seemed strange to remember now) passionately self-effacing in his desire to get on. Now he was pale, not with an ordinary pallor but as though drained of blood; he was emaciated, so that his cheeks fell in and his neck was like an old man’s; there were two ulcers by the left-hand corner of his mouth; bald patches shone through the hair on the top of his head, as in an attack of alopecia.
But these changes were nothing beside the others. I said, answering his attempt to talk business: ‘We’ll go into that any time you like. You’ll get all the people you want.’
Luke stared at me, trying to concentrate.
‘I can’t think what we want,’ he said.
He added, in a sad, exhausted tone: ‘You’d better settle it all with Martin. I am a bit out of touch.’
He could not get used to the depression. Into his sanguine nature it seemed to grow, as though it was seeping his spirits away; he had never had to struggle against a mood before, much less to feel that he was losing the struggle.
Propped up by his pillows, his back had gone limp. His eyes did not focus on Nora or me nor on the trees in the hospital garden.
I said, hearing my voice over-hearty as though he were deaf: ‘You’ll soon get in touch again. It won’t take you a week, when you get out of here.’
Luke replied: ‘I may not be good for much when I get out of here.’
‘Nonsense,’ I said.
‘Are you thinking of that again?’ said Nora.
‘What is it?’ I said.
‘He’s worried that he might be sterile,’ said Nora.
Luke did not deny it.
‘Are you having that old jag again?’ said his wife.
‘The dose must have been just about big enough,’ he said blankly, as though he had nothing new to say.
‘I’ve told you,’ said Nora, ‘as soon as the doctors say yes we’ll make them have a look. I shall be very much surprised if anything is wrong.’
With the obstinacy of the miserable, Luke shook his head.
‘I told you that if by any miracle there is anything wrong, which I don’t credit for a minute, well, it doesn’t matter very much,’ said Nora. ‘We’ve got our two. We never wanted any more.’
She sounded tough, robust, maternal.
Luke lay quiet, his face so drawn with illness that one could not read it.
I tried to change the subject, but Nora knew him better and had watched beside him longer.
She said suddenly: ‘You’re thinking something worse, aren’t you?’
Very slightly, he inclined his head.
‘Which one is it?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘You’d better say,’ she said.
‘There must be a chance,’ he said, ‘that some of this stuff will settle in the bone.’
There was a silence. Nora said: ‘I wish I could tell you there wasn’t a chance. But no one knows one way or the other, No one can possibly know.’
Luke said: ‘If I get through this bout, I shall have that hanging over me.’
He lay there, imagining the disease that might lie ahead of him. Nora sat beside him, settled and patient, without speaking. Sawbridge coughed, over by the wall, and then the room stayed so quiet that I could hear a match struck outside. We were still silent when Mrs Drawbell entered. Martin had come to visit Dr Luke; only two people were allowed in the ward at a time; when one of us left, Martin could take his place. Quickly Nora got up. She would be back tomorrow, whereas this was my only time with Luke. I thought that she was, like anyone watching another’s irremovable sadness, glad to go.
With a glance towards Sawbridge, Martin walked across the floor towards Luke’s bed. As he came, it struck me — it was strange to notice such a thing for the first time — that his feet turned out, more than one would expect in a good player of games. He looked young, erect, and well. With bright, hard eyes he scrutinized Luke, but his voice was gentle as he asked: ‘How are you?’
‘Not so good,’ replied Luke from a long way off.
‘You seem a bit better than when I saw you last.’
‘I wish I believed it,’ said Luke.
Martin went on to inquire about the symptoms — the hair falling out, the ulcers, the bleeding.
‘That (the bleeding) may have dropped off a bit,’ said Luke.
‘That’s very important,’ Martin said. ‘Don’t you see how important it is?’ He was easier with illness than I was, ready to scold as well as to be gentle. But after he had learned about the symptoms — he was so thorough that I longed for him to stop — he could not persuade Luke to talk any more than Nora or I could. Luke lay still and we could not reach the thoughts behind his eyes.
Martin gave me a glance, for once tentative and lost. He said quietly to Luke: ‘We’re tiring you a bit. We’ll have a word with Sawbridge over there.’
Luke did not reply, as Martin, with me following, tiptoed over to the other bed.
‘I’m not asleep,’ said Sawbridge, in a scornful and unwelcoming tone. We stood by the bed and looked down on him; his skin in health had its thick nordic pallor, and the transformation was not as shocking as in Luke; but the bald patches of scalp shone through, his eyes were filmed over, half opaque. When Martin inquired about him, he said: ‘I’m all right.’
Martin was reading the charts — white blood counts, red blood counts, temperature — over the bed head.
‘Never mind that,’ said Sawbridge, ‘I tell you, I’m all right.’
‘The figures look encouraging,’ said Martin.
‘I’ve never been as bad as he was—’ Sawbridge inclined a heavy eye towards Luke’s bed.
‘We’ve been worried about you, all the same.’
‘There was no need.’ Sawbridge said it with anger — and suddenly, under the shroud of illness, under the familiar loutishness, I felt his bitter pride. He did not want to admit that he was ill or afraid; he had heard the fears that Luke let fall, he could not help but share them; but neither to the doctors nor his relatives, certainly not to his fellow sufferer or to us, would he give a sign.
It was a kind of masculine pride that did not make him more endearing, I was thinking; in fact that it made him more raw and forbidding; it had no style. Until this accident I had heard little of him from Martin. No one had mentioned the security inquiries, which I assumed had come to nothing; the little that Martin said had not been friendly, and at the bedside he was still put off. But he managed to keep, what Sawbridge could not have borne, all pity out of his voice.
Of the three in the ward, the two invalids and Martin, Luke and Sawbridge were beyond comparison the braver men. Like many brave men, they did not bear a grudge against the timid. But, like many ill men, they resented the well. Sawbridge was angry with Martin, and with me also, for being able to walk upright in the sun.
Martin could feel it, but he would not let silence fall. Both he and Sawbridge cultivated an amateur interest in botany, and he mentioned flowers that he had seen on his way to the hospital.
‘There’s a saxifrage in the bottom hedge,’ he said.