For years past Lady Ashbrook had walked in the Square gardens in the afternoon. She was not willing to break this habit, and on the Wednesday, the day after she had talked to Humphrey, she was to be seen, upright, stalking slowly on the path between the trees. Over her head she held a parasol, but soon lowered it, not sustaining the effort. The sky was cloudless, the sun burned down, the heat did not waver.
There was no one else in the garden. It was usually empty, for it was private and only the householders had keys. The Square was as quiet as a deserted village. Cars were parked in front of some of the houses, but they, too, were still, and cars were quieter than horses or children, once part of the population. No children now. Families were not brought up here, and nearly all the women in the Square went to work. This meant that no one would call on Lady Ashbrook between breakfast-time and evening, though Paul and Celia had already done so that morning, and so had Kate Lefroy, who had heard the news from Humphrey.
Humphrey, one of the few people there at leisure in the afternoon, from his drawing-room window watched Lady Ashbrook promenade and, reluctantly, felt obliged to join her. She did not keep him long. She was polite in a stately fashion, discussing the weather and the flowers in the garden-beds. He wasn’t welcome, because he had listened to a confidence she had not wished to make. She was distant from him because, just for that short while, she had given herself away.
Pretty stark, Humphrey thought as he went away. Courage came with different faces. He had known soldiers, as brave as she was, who insisted on embarrassing one in precisely the opposite fashion, by confessions of exaggerated timidity.
Lady Ashbrook had been sitting down when he spoke to her. She had done enough to maintain her afternoon ritual, and soon returned home. It was about an hour afterwards that Humphrey noticed her doctor walking down the Square, away from the direction of Lady Ashbrook’s house. Humphrey went downstairs and intercepted him.
This was Ralph Perryman, Lady Ashbrook’s ‘little doctor’. As Humphrey had reflected the previous evening, he wasn’t little in any but a Lady Ashbrook sense. He was appreciably taller and larger than Humphrey himself. He was a good-looking man, or at least a striking-looking one, with very light blue eyes, transparent, such as one saw in Scandinavia. They were quite unshadowed, as though unprotected, in deep orbits. Humphrey had heard the doctor well spoken of professionally, and he had something of a private practice in the district. Humphrey hadn’t often met him, but had sometimes wanted to know him better.
‘Can you spare a minute?’ Humphrey asked.
Perryman seemed simultaneously over-willing and over-elusive. No, he hadn’t any patients to see just then. No, but he had a long night’s work ahead. Yes, he had been visiting the old lady, as he referred to Lady Ashbrook, using the phrase as a kind of nickname.
‘Tell me what you can.’
‘You know, there isn’t much to tell, Colonel.’
Humphrey had not been a regular soldier, but Colonel was a rank that had stuck to him. To use it or let others do so was not in his style. He stopped it at once, but affably, since he wanted Perryman at ease. He suggested sitting in the Square gardens and led the way.
‘What do you think of her?’ Humphrey asked, and as he was speaking realised that he had been too direct. As with others used to concealment, he got rid of it when he could. Then he sometimes sounded obtuse and blunt, which he was far from being. This man didn’t like it, and had shied away.
‘Oh, I’ve treated her for quite a long time, you know.’
‘Yes, I did know. She’s often talked about you.’ Humphrey had become emollient. ‘I’m by way of being a connection. But I don’t suppose she’s mentioned me.’
The doctor gave a superior smile. ‘Oh, I’ve had to ask for names to get in touch with. In case of emergencies. I always take these precautions with elderly patients. Just professional precautions, of course.’
‘Of course. Look, Doctor, I’d be the last man to want you to do anything unprofessional. If you can’t answer, just let it go. But it would ease my mind a little. Can you give me an idea of what her chances are?’
The transparent eyes were gazing into the middle distance, not focused on Humphrey.
‘I can’t give you much of an idea. No one knows. No one can possibly know until they have seen the plates.’
‘It really is as unpredictable as that…?’
‘Sometimes one has an intuition. But you could have an intuition yourself.’
‘Would it be the same as yours?’ Humphrey wasn’t getting far with this fencing.
‘That would depend on whether either of us looked on the bright side, wouldn’t it? I don’t know whether you’re an optimist or not.’
Humphrey said, casting round for another lead: ‘She has come through a good deal in her time. I don’t know whether that’s here or there.’
‘I agree with you entirely, Mr Leigh. She has a very strong will, of course she has.’ Dr Perryman was now speaking with animation; he could escape the topic of Lady Ashbrook now. ‘The trouble is we know very little of how the mind affects the body. We know shamefully little; I’ve often wished I could do some work on it. But it’s difficult. We really don’t know where to draw the line between the mind and the body – that is, if there is a line at all.’ Eager, fluent, enthusiastic, Perryman expanded on the mind–body relation. He was intelligent, he had read and thought. In another place and time Humphrey would have been interested; but just then it was a distraction. It was not what he had come for.
At the end Humphrey said: ‘Well, if the worst comes to the worst…’
‘Yes.’
Humphrey found himself half-echoing what Celia had said the night before: ‘If it does happen, then it would be an unpleasant way to die.’
‘There are a great many unpleasant ways to die, Mr Leigh,’ said Dr Perryman.
‘I’ve seen some, but I hope I don’t finish up this way. I must say, I should expect my doctor to ease me out.’
‘Should you now?’ Perryman gazed straight at him. After a pause Perryman went on: ‘You’re not the first patient who has said that, you know.’
‘And I take it you’re not the first doctor who’s listened.’
Perryman didn’t reply.
It had been a curious interview and, back in his drawing-room, Humphrey was sure that he had handled it badly. The man was sensitive, not to say prickly: it should have been easier to soothe him. He must have his own foresight – or had he heard the first words from the hospital?
Humphrey was restless. There was a telephone call from a friend of Lady Ashbrook, and another from Kate Lefroy. News about Lady Ashbrook, and impatience at the absence of news, was going round among her acquaintances. In spite of her pride, she seemed to have been quite unreserved in telling about her tests, and the verdict she was waiting for.
In some of those who knew about her, there was concern. But there was also excitement. Calamities to others raised the emotional temperature, and people, including kind and honest people like Kate and young Paul, found that fact of life difficult to accept with candour. Candour was somewhat lacking those blazing summer days among Lady Ashbrook’s circle, though excitement wasn’t. Humphrey was a man of fair detachment. He was capable of saying that the disasters of others, unless they belonged to one with animal ties, bedmates or children, were singularly easy to endure; but even Humphrey didn’t like thinking that to himself.
Kate Lefroy had asked Humphrey if he would go across to her house. He was glad to be asked. He was fond of Kate. There it was easy to be candid. If she had been free, he would have wanted her; as it was, he hoped that with patience he could get her free.
When, on the other side of the Square, he arrived in her front room (here the original division had been preserved, and there were two smallish sitting-rooms, with sliding doors between), he was confronted by another disaster which was arousing excitement among their friends, with a similar absence of candour. This was not a disaster to Kate, who looked well, but relieved to receive some support. She had, it was obvious, been trying to comfort a girl sitting beside her on the sofa. This was the girl whom Lady Ashbrook had described so scornfully as totally unsuitable for her grandson, perhaps adequate for a bit of slap and tickle. This evening she did not look adequate for that. Lady Ashbrook had conceded that she possessed some elements of prettiness, but her face was dense and dark with crying, and Humphrey, who scarcely knew her, that evening would have thought her plain. She was the daughter of Tom Thirkill, the MP and entrepreneur. So far as Humphrey could make out, this was part of the misery. For that week Private Eye, the modish journal of the day, had produced another of its half-muted attacks. That had been followed by a respectable daily, saying there was a rumour that Opposition members were calling for an enquiry into one of Thirkill’s enterprises. There hadn’t, as it had happened, been much in the way of other news, except for the slide on the Stock Exchange in the value of the pound. Tom Thirkill’s affairs thus became the object of some journalists’ attention, along with the heatwave.
The girl, whose name was Susan, was expressing loyalty to her father. Still half-crying, underlids puffed out as though they had been injected, she swore that her father was honest.
‘Of course, he’s a businessman,’ she told them. ‘His sort of business doesn’t always look straightforward if you don’t understand it. But, you must believe it, he’s kept to the rules. He’s kept to the rules. He’s much too clever not to. And, you’ve got to remember, money matters to him, of course it does, but his political career comes a long way first. He’d never take the slightest risk with that.’
Kate had told Humphrey before that the girl was no fool. That was just about the correct line for her, he thought. Whether she was right or wrong, he had no conception and no way of making one. He could see that, unfortunately, Kate did have a conception, and a powerfully negative one. Kate would look after anyone in trouble: she was fond of this girl, and felt responsibility for her, since she worked in Kate’s office at the hospital. Not that the girl had the faintest practical need to work. Her father lavished money on her, cars, horses, anything she asked for, or even didn’t ask for. Yet, in the modern fashion, she needed to have this job – at which, Kate had told Humphrey, she perversely didn’t show maximum concentration or energy. In any case, Kate had to protect her. She was doing so, not effusively, but with a kind of astringent warmth.
It was clear to Humphrey that Kate had the lowest opinion of the girl’s father, and that she accepted all that his enemies were saying. To Susan, she showed a little temper and impatience spontaneous enough, like a slap in the face to rouse one who wouldn’t fight, but that helped conceal what her judgment really was. Well, Humphrey thought, she was perceptive, she was often in the Thirkill home, she knew the man. She might well be right. On the other hand, Humphrey had to remind himself that Kate, so willing to devote herself to anyone who needed it, and despised by Lady Ashbrook in consequence, was not impartial about political personages. Kate could be funny, sharp-tempered, warm-natured, but in politics she made Lady Ashbrook look wishy-washy, a lukewarm sitter on the fence, too ready to give the Labour Party and the Government, anyone connected with them, the benefit of the doubt. Kate didn’t do so. It would seem to her in the nature of things that Tom Thirkill was corrupt. For sheer unqualified Toryism you had to go to women of her class, Humphrey thought. Kate came from a military family, a line of officers in a county regiment, not a smart one. She had their virtues, and just occasionally, in the midst of her worldly sense, their beliefs. She couldn’t understand why Humphrey should be sceptical and uncommitted. He found it endearing that for once her charity deserted her. She found him endearing, but didn’t budge.
Susan broke out with another grief, or maybe the same one in another shape. Lady Ashbrook’s grandson was coming home for a few days’ leave. He would hear this new mutter, menace, against her father. Was it going to spoil things between them?
‘It mustn’t,’ said Kate.
‘Will he hold it against me?’
‘Not if he’s any good.’ Kate’s tone was hard and tough.
‘I don’t know what he’ll think,’ cried Susan.
‘I’d have thought he’ll take it pretty lightly.’ Humphrey dared not overdo it; but he had to help Kate out. ‘He knows about the Press. After all, he’s lived in this world.’
‘Not in Daddy’s world.’ Another of Susan’s flashes of realism.
She wanted to talk about the young man, and that enlivened her, perhaps giving the comfort within a love affair when just talking of the loved one seems for mirage-moments to make them all well. Kate hadn’t really had the chance to speak much to Mister, had she? Mister was much more unusual than he seemed. He was artistic, but he kept it dark. He wasn’t sure that he ought to stay in the Army. Perhaps he was wasted. She didn’t want to see him getting bored. He did get bored easily. That was a weakness, and she had to watch it.
Mister was a curious name to hear a girl utter so possessively. It was what his family called him, except for his grandmother with her trenchant Loseby. As a nickname it seemed inexplicable to nearly everyone, except to a very few familiar with certain tribal customs: to them it conveyed two messages, which told that he had once had an elder brother now dead and, second, where Mister had been to school. No one around would have picked up these messages, except Humphrey who was bred to those tribal customs and, surprisingly, a close friend of his living nearby, an American psychologist of scholarly perseverance and a sardonic fascination with the relics of aristocracy.
With Susan temporarily in better heart, once or twice giving secretive smiles, Kate took charge, ordered her to wash her face and make up again, and then go home. Had she anything to put her to sleep? She kissed Kate, thanked her, managed a challenging smile as she said goodnight.
‘Poor girl,’ said Kate, as they heard the downstairs door bang.
‘Poor girl indeed.’
‘What do you think of the boyfriend?’
‘He’s very amiable. Also fairly lightweight.’
‘He’s had too much love. He’s had too much love from her.’
‘Of course. She’s doing it all wrong.’
The two of them were speaking the same personal language, as though they were more intimate than in fact they were.
‘You realise that she’s been sleeping with him for a couple of years?’
‘It seemed a fair guess,’ said Humphrey.
‘You realise that she has slept with quite a few men and it has always gone wrong in the end?’
‘That I shouldn’t have guessed,’ he said. ‘I might have thought she longed for it and was sad at what she was missing.’
Kate grinned. ‘It surprised me a bit,’ she said. ‘But whatever she’s missed, it isn’t that.’
The room in which they were sitting was like Kate herself, well groomed, tidy, roses on one table, sweet peas on another. She did her own gardening, her own housework, as well as being the second in command of administration at a large hospital. She wasn’t tall, she wasn’t heavy but had strong shoulders, strong hips, firm flesh on shoulders and thighs. It was a physique made to wear, made to work. It was also a physique which had a special attraction for Humphrey. He was one of those men to whom some physical disparities were in themselves attractive. He liked, more than liked, the contrast between the strong active body and the face above. The face might have belonged to a different woman. It was fine and delicate. She hadn’t Celia’s small-featured prettiness, her forehead was broad, eyebrows arched, eyes piercing grey, nose aquiline, narrow, long. It was a face which could look high-spirited and younger than she was (she had just turned forty), but it also told to those who studied faces that she lived in touch with her own experience.
‘I suppose you’ve no news of Lady A – you can’t have?’ he asked.
‘You can’t have, either, can you?’
He told her that he had had a talk with the doctor, irksome, inconclusive.
‘I rather like him. You don’t.’
‘I don’t react as strongly as you do,’ Humphrey said. ‘Either way.’
She smiled, and said that she would telephone Lady Ashbrook that evening. ‘It’s not exactly a treat, talking to her,’ she remarked. ‘All she wants is to get me off the line.’
‘Don’t bother about ringing her,’ he said. ‘You do enough for duty. Much more than enough.’
‘Oh, one can’t leave her alone. You can imagine what it must be like.’ She gave a rueful diffident grimace. ‘Of course, she hasn’t any use for me.’
Humphrey knew that Kate was painfully honest when others didn’t like her. She even seemed to expect it unless proved otherwise. He said that Lady A had about as little affection to spare as anyone on earth, but that didn’t encourage Kate. So he left it, and asked: ‘How is Monty today?’ Monty was her husband.
‘He’s resting,’ she replied, without expression.
Monty was fifteen years older than she was, and they had been married for nearly as long. Humphrey, not pretending to himself that he was disinterested, had tried to find out about the marriage. She was as loyal as Susan to her father, but Humphrey had discovered something, though not all, from other sources. It seemed to have been a curious history. At the time that Kate first met him, Monty appeared to have had a high reputation as a philosopher – to be precise, as a researcher in mathematical logic. What he did, or was trying to do, was entirely incomprehensible to Humphrey, and must have been so to Kate. So far as Humphrey could understand from academic friends, Monty had an ambition to lay down the foundations of mathematics from the inside, proving them to be a man-made construction. It was a megalomaniac ambition, said one of the academics. There had never been anything in it; the man was wasting his time. But Kate had been ready to adore a genius, Monty had the aura of a genius, and was ready to be adored.
It seemed strange to Humphrey that Kate’s shrewdness and insight hadn’t saved her. Maybe he didn’t realise, or didn’t want to, that she also had a longing to worship – when she was a young woman, possibly even now. Humphrey did realise that there must have been physical charm for her, too. With a marmoreal head, abstracted, stately in his movements, Monty was still an impressive-looking man.
Kate had duly married and cherished her genius. He had retired from his academic post in order to have all his time to think. They had probably (Humphrey’s information wasn’t certain about this) bought this house together. Since then she had brought into it the money they lived on. There was her salary from the hospital. With her excess energy, she taught courses in personnel management at a technical college not far away. Even so, their income was low, by the standards of the Square, and she had to eke it out. Fortunately Monty believed that living meagrely would prolong his life. He had taken excessive care about his health. When she had told Humphrey that he was resting, that was the most frequent answer she gave to enquiries about Monty. So far as Humphrey’s academic friends recalled, Monty hadn’t published any kind of paper for years.
‘Couldn’t you do with a rest yourself?’ Humphrey asked, though he had to do it carefully, tentatively.
‘No chance of that.’
‘Aren’t you rather tired?’
‘Not too tired to give you a drink.’
Unlike Lady Ashbrook, Kate enjoyed being hospitable, though how she afforded the liquor she was ready to pour out Humphrey couldn’t begin to imagine. She gave him a considerable whisky and took one herself. They were able to forget about others outside that room, and there was happiness quivering in the air. There was also strain, a not unpleasurable, but pervasive strain. They had not exchanged a word of love, not ever, nor of desire, scarcely even of affection. If either had given an indication of wishing to go to bed, it would have happened. Humphrey knew it; so, he was sure, did she.
He didn’t move, and tried to keep his voice quite steady. He wanted more. Whether she did, there he couldn’t trust his own hopes. He hadn’t defined how much she was bound to her husband. She certainly took her duty seriously, but she might feel more than duty. If so, Humphrey would do better to withdraw at once. A light come, light go affair would be a relief for a while, but no good to either of them.
Yet they were happy. Just before the crystals of recognition were beginning to form, it was good to sit there, the sun streaming in, a hot and sharp-edged beam falling across her lap. It was she who had to answer to herself – to conscience, if that was dividing her, or to something deeper than that. For him there was no struggle. So the initiative had to come from her. Through that glowing evening, she didn’t take it, and in time Humphrey went away.