Now there’s nothing wrong. Rodney’s upset. Who wants some apple pudding? she said.
Apple pudding, sighed George.
She put her hand to her chest. She must speak to Oliver about the boys. Rodney had bronchitis that last winter in Sydney. He said the shutter banged and woke him up. He looked like Oliver sitting up in bed, as the troopship, and she stood on the wharf with Aunt Jane, and they said the War would be over soon and it was. The country doctor’s wife showing patients to the waiting-room, only they hadn’t a waiting-room. She must tell Oliver about Miss Browne. About her cough. She must not think about it, because it made her cough, she could not eat apple pudding, but cough, and a handkerchief.
Mother’s coughing, said George.
Hilda Halliday recovered her breath. It left her uncertain. You did not know what to do next. There was nothing you could put your hand on with any certainty, except marrying Oliver, she had waited and he came back and he brought her a scarf from Paris and a paste pin. When they were married she wore the scarf. She felt safer being married to Oliver. They were very happy, she said. Six years did not make any difference, because their interests were the same, and she appreciated him, she had ideals, and she wanted to help him, if he would let her, and anyway there was a lot she could do, and he sat in his chair and told her about the patients at night. That is why it would be so terrible if anything happened. She must be careful of her health.
Oliver Halliday came into the dining-room. He was tired. His face was shadowed with the first stages of a beard.
Well, here you are at last, said Hilda.
He bent and kissed her. His face was very cold.
Yes, he sighed, here I am at last.
Father’s back, said George, dropping an apple ring on the floor.
Hilda began to carve the mutton.
You look tired, she said. How is the poor woman?
She’s all right.
And the child?
No.
She wrinkled her face in sympathy over the mutton. She would not penetrate any farther, not before George, asking about the child that…If it had been Rodney or George. She thought she would have died when George, and that poor woman up at the hotel. She was intimately connected with the publican’s wife by a link of pain.
Here’s your lunch. You must be hungry, she said.
He was hungry, and his muscles ached from the skis and his fall, wrenching his toes like that, as he sat down on the chair. But he was back, he was home. The dining-room table was a round mahogany pond with the sauce-boat pushing whitely into port. You sat and ate. Just to eat mutton was good, Hilda sitting there with folded arms, but pale as if she had not slept. She smiled, or at least she moved her face in the way that she always did when she caught him looking at her. It was a sign of intimacy and encouragement, or a symbol of what either of these ought to be. He was fond of her, that was what made it difficult, desperately difficult, when you were fond of a person and tried to grope behind the fondness and bring out something else. There is something so passive and taken-for-granted about the state of being fond. And he did not think he had ever been anything else.
Where’s Rodney? he asked, with an onion on his fork.
Poor Rodney, sighed Hilda. He’s…
Then she thought better.
He’s finished. He’s in his room.
Then why poor Rodney?
I don’t know. He seems to be out of sorts.
She would not tell him now. He was tired. But later she would speak to him about Rodney and the boarding-school, and the fowl feed, and the sick hen. She would not tell him about the sheet Mrs Woodhouse tore because he might be annoyed. Detail irritated Oliver.
Rodney’s been crying, said George.
Run along out and play, said Hilda. Look, it isn’t raining any more.
The fire burnt with the intimate crackle of a wood fire when the heat has almost dried the wood. Oliver did not look at Hilda. He ate. You knew she was keeping something for later on. You ought to be grateful for all these little subterfuges. You were in a way, only, only there was something both irritating and pathetic in a perpetual cosseting that was only so much time squandered in the face of the final issue. Hilda tried not to see this, or would not, was afraid to see. She built herself a raft of superficialities and floated down the stream. She tried to drag him on to her raft, and when he almost upset it she did not complain. I must be nice to Hilda, he said. I am growing morose and introspective. It’s the climate, or age. Those evenings going to Professor Birkett’s and talking over beer, the inner life provided a series of formulas for pleasant solution, and you came away with a mind neatly docketed for future reference. Nothing could jostle a theory, it was cut and dried. Then you lost the labels in time, and you started again, or tried to start, and it was a case of order out of chaos, and you wanted to tip the whole lot overboard, only that was impossible, because Hilda and Rodney and George clung to the fragments, were founded on something that you thought had existed before. And why had Rodney cried? He went on cutting up the mutton, listening to the fire. It was peaceful, and he was glad it was peaceful. His legs ached. He was very tired.
Oh dear, said Hilda suddenly. I’d quite forgotten, Oliver. Miss Browne is waiting in your room.
She can wait a little longer, he said flatly.
Perhaps you ought…She must have been there three-quarters of an hour. She said she had cut her hand.
Oliver put down his knife and fork. He went down the passage towards the room that he used as a combined dispensary and consulting-room. When he went in he was still finishing a mouthful of food.
Good morning, she said, getting up out of the chair. I didn’t want to disturb you at your lunch. I could go away, she said, or, or just as you like.
Because he frowned it put her off, taking away the words. She saw that his eyes were blue, not grey. She saw that he had not shaved. But of course he had been away all night. He looked rather gaunt, like a saint with a beard in that book of saints, or not a saint at all, just tired and unshaven. But she wished she had not come at all, the way he frowned, she blamed the sudden spirit of panic that had made her long for company.
Let’s see, he said. You’ve cut your hand.
She took off the handkerchief.
There’s not much wrong with that, he said. I thought it sounded like six stitches at least.
Oh no. I hope not. I should hate stitches. Don’t they hurt?
He had taken a bottle of iodine and a swab of cotton-wool.
Of course they hurt.
He said it almost between his teeth, she thought, as if… Then the iodine plunged down into the cut, and suddenly she was hot behind the knees, and she laughed rather stupidly, holding her wrist as hard as she could. She wanted to walk about, and bite her lip, she could feel the breath mount in her throat, pushing to form itself into a moan. Then she looked at him. He was looking at her. He was very detached. She had shrunk to the significance of something pinned to a sheet of paper or writhing underneath a lens. Then he was not looking at her, she saw, it was her imagination, or he had been looking and suddenly withdrew into some world of which she may or may not have been, and probably not, some possible indication. He turned away and brought a bandage and some lint.
That hurt quite enough, she said.
He did not answer. He bound her hand. His fingers were cold. He manipulated her hand as if it were a parcel of bones and tissues, detached from the body, no connection with this. She did not feel there was any necessity to be quite so professional, it reached a point where it became rude, and she found herself thinking of Mrs Stopford-Champernowne, the old lady whose tatting she used to pick up, and whose mind and body had the soft, comfortable texture of an eiderdown. She did not like Dr Halliday, because he did not like her, and she grew ashamed of a whole lot of things, half-formed thoughts connected with Dr Halliday, how she had imagined as she sat alone in the room that she would ask him if he had read this or that, and perhaps he would have thought she was distinguished. Because in her more private moments Alys Browne wanted very badly to be thought distinguished, and that is why she read Anna Karenina and played Schumann in the late afternoon.