‘All Sydney? Well, now! Is not that a slight exaggeration?’
‘My dear Edith,’ said Mr Palethorpe, ‘if a person is not allowed some occasional latitude, where will he find his recreation?’
His wife sighed agreement. She did invariably agree, because she was so pleased with him.
Then the Palethorpes continued to sip their tea, themselves a superior milky white, like the cups they had brought out from Home. No coarse stuff. They sat and listened to the rather melancholy accompaniment of their stomachs, and were soon walking in the rain in the neighbourhood of Fulham, their spiritual environment.
No one could take exception to the Palethorpes, which made them the more exasperating, as Mr Bonner realized upon that occasion when he had been hoping for advice. Palethorpe sensed this, he always did, and accordingly was quick to soothe.
Palethorpe said:
‘I do trust the young lady’s health will benefit by a short course of salt-water baths.’
‘It is not her health, Palethorpe,’ answered the merchant. ‘That is, it is, and it is not.’
‘Ah?’ hinted his inferior, with that inflection which derives from superior knowledge.
‘Altogether, I do not know what to make of it.’
Then the merchant went away, disappointed, and leaving disappointment behind.
Mr Bonner took the brougham, which was waiting for him, as always at that hour. After composing his legs for the journey, he unfolded them, and asked to stop at Todmans’, where they robbed him over three pears, beautifully nesting in their own leaves, in a little box. So he sat in the gloom of the enclosed brougham, holding the box of expensive pears, surrounded by their generous scent, gradually even by their golden light, and hoped that the material offering he intended making to his niece would express that affection which might be absent from his voice and looks. He was rather lonely in the brougham.
When they were entering the stone gateway of the house at Potts Point, which was no longer so very agreeable to him, he would have stopped the vehicle, and walked up the drive to postpone his arrival, but his attempts to attract attention were muffled by the upholstery; his voice fell back upon him, and he had not the will to raise the little lid through which he might have communicated with the driver. So he was carried on, unhappily, until there they were, clopping under the portico.
The door was already open.
‘Oh, sir,’ said Betty, the most recent of the girls who had replaced the dead Rose, ‘Miss Laura is taken proper sick.’
The merchant, to whom the effort of extricating himself from the brougham had given a congested look, was still holding his pears. It was a grey, gritty afternoon.
He did not consider it desirable to stimulate the flow of intelligence from this girl, a thin thing in her inherited dress, so he confined himself to uttering a few sounds that could not possibly have been construed as human.
‘Ah, Mr Bonner,’ said his wife, upon the stairs, and less avoidable, ‘I was on the point of sending. It is Laura. She is desperately ill. I brought Dr Bass. He left but a moment ago, most unsatisfactory. That young man, I will have it known amongst all our acquaintance, turned the pages of a book in my presence, to diagnose, if you please. When anyone of experience, when even I know, it is a brain fever. Mr Bonner, I must confess I am distracted.’
Indeed, her rings were scratching him unpleasantly.
Mr Bonner mounted higher on the spongy stairs. The ripe fruit had become dislodged inside the little box, and for all its sensuous perfection, was jumping and jostling as if it had been cheap and woody. He no longer cared for this house; it was since Belle had gone, Belle the golden, who would smell of ripe pears — or was he confused? — on those untroubled days between hateful summer and vicious winter.
‘Well, then, we will send for Dr Kilwinning,’ Mr Bonner heard his strange voice.
‘Oh, dear, you are so good, we have always known.’ His wife was mopping her eyes with a shred of cambric and a handful of rings.
No one of all Mrs Bonner’s acquaintance was ignorant of what Dr Kilwinning would dare to charge, and that he was become accordingly the best physician in town.
But the Bonners were not a great comfort to each other as they went towards their niece’s door. Life was exceeding their capacities.
Laura was lying in her handsome bed, looking at nothing and at everything. During the crisis, which no one had explained very well to the perplexed merchant, the aunt had unbraided her niece’s hair. Now, the dark, hot hair appeared disagreeable to the uncle, who disliked anything that suggested irregularity. Nor could he remember when he had last entered his niece’s room, which gave him the impression of being littered with fragile secrets, so that he was forced to walk delicately, his every step an apology, and his thick, fleshy body looked quite grotesque.
Laura had to turn her head. She said:
‘I am sorry to be such an inconvenience to you.’
It was difficult, but her rather thin lips had managed that ridiculous sentence.
Mr Bonner sucked his teeth, and was moving even more delicately to atone for his deficiencies.
‘You must lie still,’ he whispered, imitating somebody he had once heard in a sick-room.
‘It is really nothing,’ said Laura. ‘But one of those stupid indispositions. That are difficult to explain.’
How gravely her jaws contended with speech. Her stiff and feverish form, inside which she could move about quite freely, was by now of little importance; it was, truthfully, nothing. Yet, between bouts of fever, she was idiotically comfortable, and could even enjoy the fumbling sympathies of her uncle and aunt.
‘Oh, dear, dear, dear Laura,’ Aunt Emmy was crying, ‘that we should suffer this. I cannot bear not knowing whatever it may be, but your uncle will bring the good doctor, who will explain everything.’
In times of stress Mrs Bonner transferred her own simplicity to those about her, and would address them as if they were, in fact, little children.
‘You will see,’ she added.
She was touching, and touching her young niece. To cover her up. Or to discover a reason for their suffering.
Looking at those two children from her tragic distance, Laura Trevelyan felt intolerably old. If she could have done something for them, but she could not. Even restored to full health, there would be nothing she could do, she realized, for her uncle and aunt.
Then Mr Bonner cleared his throat. Rescued by his wife’s words, he said in a young man’s voice:
‘Yes. The doctor. I will send Jim round. He will be here in two shakes. Yes. I will write a note.’
‘And if he should be at his dinner?’ remembered his wife.
‘I will make it worth his while to leave any dinner,’ said the merchant.
Given favourable circumstances, he was a man of power and influence.
Now he went about this business, after abandoning on a console table in the shadows of the room the unfortunate pears. These soft, innocent fruit seemed to proclaim a weakness that he would have liked to keep secret.
There the pears were, however, even if they remained temporarily unnoticed by Laura Trevelyan and Mrs Bonner. The latter continued desperately to tend her niece, bringing in succession a little toast-water, a good, strong broth that had slopped over while being conveyed from the kitchen, and a milk jelly in a pretty shape. When all these had been refused the aunt cried out passionately:
‘What more can I do? My dear, tell me, and I will do it.’
As if there had been a grudge between them.
‘I do not ask you to do anything,’ said Laura Trevelyan.
She had closed her eyes, and was smiling a smile that Mrs Bonner would have liked to interpret, but the girl was, in fact, so suffused with fire and weakness that she could not have borne her aunt even an imaginary grudge.