“I’m sorry, Mr. Barras, sir.” He looked genuinely distressed. “I am afraid we can do no more.”
Barras did not speak. Dr. Lewis, looking at him, saw the hard pounding of his temporal arteries, the dusky suffusion of his brow, and mingling with his sympathy came the instinctive thought that Barras’s blood pressure must be high. “We have done everything possible,” he added.
“Yes,” Richard said in a strange voice.
Another wave of sympathy rushed over Dr. Lewis. He gazed at Barras with sorrow in his eyes. He did not know of course that he was, to all intents, looking at Harriet’s murderer.
SEVENTEEN
Even Hilda was distressed. For weeks after Grace and she had returned to hospital from attending their mother’s funeral at Sleescale she remained taciturn and brooding. Now she admitted the abnormal atmosphere at the Law. Because she was worried she snapped at the patients, was rude to Ness, went through her work with a tireless efficiency. And towards Grace she was again possessive, jealously affectionate.
It was the end of their half-day off and they were walking slowly along Regent Street, making for Oxford Circus to take a bus from Knightsbridge. Hilda, concluding a bitter diatribe on the humiliating complications of family life, glanced towards Grace sarcastically:
“You’re always on about wanting to straighten things out. Now’s your chance to go back home and try it.”
“Well,” Grace said quietly, “I wouldn’t be much use now.”
“How do you mean?”
Here their bus swung into the kerb.
Grace waited until they had taken their seats. Then, the minute they sat down she broke the news that she was going to have a baby.
Hilda flushed horribly. She looked as if she were going to be ill. She remained absolutely still while the woman conductor came and took their fares; then in a low, wounded voice she said:
“As if it wasn’t bad enough getting married. As if we hadn’t had enough trouble lately. You’re a fool, Grace, a ghastly little fool.”
“I don’t think I’m a fool,” Grace answered.
“Well, I do,” Hilda jerked out, very pale now and bitter. “War babies aren’t amusing.”
“I never said they were, Hilda, only mine might be.”
“Just a silly little fool,” Hilda hissed, staring hard in front of her. “Losing your head with that Teasdale and now this. You’ll have to leave the hospital. It’s sickening. I’ll have nothing to do with it. I’ve kept out of the family complications up till now and I’ll keep out of this. Oh, it’s so silly, it’s so beastly ordinary, it’s what silly ordinary beastly little nurses are doing all over the country. Having war babies to war heroes! O God, it’s… it’s disgusting. I’ll have nothing to do with it, nothing; you can go away and have your beastly infant by yourself.”
Grace said nothing. Grace had a simple way of saying nothing when to say nothing was the best answer in the world. She and Hilda had never really come together again since her marriage with Dan. And now this! That Grace, whom she had petted and protected, dear little Grace, who had slept in her arms, should be having a baby, a war baby, shocked and nauseated Hilda and made her swear that she would keep herself clear of the whole disgusting affair. Tears stood in Hilda’s eyes as she rose stiffly at Harrod’s and marched out of the bus.
So Grace had to make her own arrangements. Next morning she went to see Miss Gibbs. Traditionally, Miss Gibbs should have been kind, but, like Hilda, Miss Gibbs was not kind. Miss Gibbs said, with a glint of teeth and temper:
“I’m sick and tired of this sort of thing, Nurse Barras. What do you think we have you here for — to nurse the wounded or propagate the race? We’ve taken the trouble to train you and educate you to a certain usefulness. This is how you repay us! I’m afraid I’m not very satisfied with you, Nurse Barras. You are not the success your sister has been. She doesn’t turn round and say she’ll have a baby. She stops in the theatre doing her job. This last month you’ve been three times reprimanded for carelessness and talking in the corridors. And now you come with this story. Things are very difficult. I am not pleased. That will do.”
Grace felt almost as if she were not married at all, Hilda and Miss Gibbs had made it sound so indecent. But Grace was not easily cast down. Grace was simple and artless and careless, the most unassertive person in the world, but she had a quiet way of keeping up her heart even although, as Miss Gibbs said, things were difficult.
In her individual way Grace went ahead with her plans. Since her mother’s funeral her dread of returning to the Law had increased. She wrote to Aunt Carrie and Aunt Carrie’s reply, full of suppressed fears and pious premonitions, and ending with a fluttering postscript, twice underlined, made Grace feel that she could not go home.
She thought a little over Aunt Carrie’s letter, then she decided what she would do. Somehow it was easy for Grace to make a decision; matters which would have worried Hilda for a fortnight never worried Grace at all, she hardly seemed to consider them but just made up her mind. Grace had the capacity of making molehills out of mountains. It was because she never thought about herself.
On the first Saturday of January when she had a whole day off from the hospital, Grace took the train into Sussex. She had an idea that she would like Sussex, that it would be warm and sunny there, different from the inhospitable bleakness of the North. She did not know a great deal about Sussex but one of the nurses had once spent a holiday at Winrush, near Parnham Junction, and she gave Grace the name of the woman, Mrs. Case, with whom she had stayed.
The train bowled Grace down into Sussex and bowled her out on the platform of Parnham Junction. It was rather uninspiring, the junction, a few corrugated sheds, empty cattle pens and stacks of dented milk cans. But Grace was not put down.
She spied a signpost on which was written the word Winrush, and as the distance marked down was only a mile she set out to walk to Winrush.
The day was windy and fresh and green. There was a most beautiful smell of moist earth in the wind mixed up with the salty smell of the sea. It struck her with a kind of pain that, when the world could be so lovely a place as this, the war should go on, mutilating the face of nature, wrecking beauty, destroying men. Her young brow clouded as she walked along. But it cleared slightly when she came to Winrush. Grace felt that Winrush was wonderful the minute she walked into it. Winrush was a very small village, just one little street with the country at one end and the sea at the other. In the middle of that one little street was one little shop which bore a very home-made, very hand-painted notice: Mrs. Case — Grocery, Drapery, Chemistry. There was not much sign of chemistry, except for a packet of seidlitz powders in the window, but Grace liked that little shop very much and she looked in the window a long time making out all the things she had known in her youth. There was a sweet called Slim Jim, rather thin and rationed-looking to be sure, and another called Gob Stoppers, big beautiful red and white balls, which were built only to deceive, because you thought there was a nut inside and there wasn’t. Altogether Grace entertained herself a good deal at the window, then she took an impulsive breath and walked into the shop. She went into the shop so impulsively she stumbled and nearly fell, for it was dark in the shop and there was a step which she had not seen. As Grace fetched up with a bump against a barrel of nice seed potatoes, from behind the counter a voice said:
“Oh, my dear… that wicked old step.”
Clinging to the barrel Grace looked at the person who had called her my dear. She decided that it must be Mrs. Case. She said:
“I’m quite all right. I’m always clumsy. I hope I haven’t damaged the barrel.”