He thought she had closed her eyes, but pain gripped her suddenly again; she began whimpering and then screamed.
‘God!’ murmured Hilary. ‘Another touch, doctor, quick!’
The doctor injected morphia.
‘Leave us alone again.’
The doctor slipped away, and the child’s eyes came slowly back to Hilary’s smile. He laid his fingers on her small emaciated hand.
‘Now, Loo, listen!
‘ “The Walrus and the Carpenter were walking hand in hand,
They wept like anything to see such quantities of sand.
‘If seven maids with seven brooms could sweep for half a year,
Do you suppose,’ the Walrus said, ‘that they could get it clear?’
‘I doubt it,’ said the Carpenter, and shed a bitter tear!” ’
On and on went Hilary, reciting ‘The Mad Hatter’s Tea-party’. And, while he murmured, the child’s eyes closed, the small hand lost warmth.
He felt its cold penetrating his own hand and thought: ‘Now, God, if you are – give her pictures!’
Chapter Fifteen
WHEN Dinny opened her eyes on the morning after she had told her father, she could not remember what her trouble was. Realization caused her to sit up with a feeling of terror. Suppose Wilfrid ran away from it all, back to the East or further! He well might, and think he was doing it for her sake.
‘I can’t wait till Thursday,’ she thought; ‘I must go up. If only I had money, in case – !’ She rummaged out her trinkets and took hasty stock of them. The two gentlemen of South Molton Street! In the matter of Jean’s emerald pendant they had behaved beautifully. She made a little parcel of her pledge-able ornaments, reserving the two or three she normally wore. There were none of much value, and to get a hundred pounds on them, she felt, would strain benevolence.
At breakfast they all behaved as if nothing had happened. So, then, they all knew the worst!
‘Playing the angel!’ she thought.
When her father announced that he was going up to Town, she said she would come with him.
He looked at her, rather like a monkey questioning man’s right not to be a monkey too. Why had she never before noticed that his brown eyes could have that flickering mournfulness?
‘Very well,’ he said.
‘Shall I drive you?’ asked Jean.
‘Thankfully accepted,’ murmured Dinny.
Nobody said a word on the subject occupying all their thoughts.
In the opened car she sat beside her father. The may-blossom, rather late, was at its brightest, and its scent qualified the frequent drifts of petrol fume. The sky had the high brooding grey of rain withheld. Their road passed over the Chilterns, through Hampden, Great Missenden, Chalfont, and Chorley Wood; land so English that no one, suddenly awakened, could at any moment of the drive have believed he was in any other country. It was a drive Dinny never tired of; but today the spring green and brightness of the may and apple blossom, the windings and divings through old villages, could not deflect her attention from the impassive figure by whom she sat. She knew instinctively that he was going to try and see Wilfrid, and, if so – she was, too. But when he talked it was of India. And when she talked it was of birds. And Jean drove furiously and never looked behind her. Not till they were in the Finchley Road did the General say:
‘Where d’you want to be set down, Dinny?’
‘Mount Street.’
‘You’re staying up, then?’
‘Yes, till Friday.’
‘We’ll drop you, and I’ll go on to my Club. You’ll drive me back this evening, Jean?’
Jean nodded without turning and slid between two vermilion-coloured buses, so that two drivers simultaneously used the same qualitative word.
Dinny was in a ferment of thought. Dared she telephone Stack to ring her up when her father came? If so, she could time her visit to the minute. Dinny was of those who at once establish liaison with ‘staff’. She could not help herself to a potato without unconsciously conveying to the profferer that she was interested in his personality. She always said ‘Thank you’, and rarely passed from the presence without having made some remark which betrayed common humanity. She had only seen Stack three times, but she knew he felt that she was a human being, even if she did not come from Barnstaple. She mentally reviewed his no longer youthful figure, his monastic face, black haired and large-nosed, with eyes full of expression, his curly mouth, at once judgmatic and benevolent. He moved upright and almost at a trot. She had seen him look at her as if saying to himself: ‘If this is to be our fate, could I do with it? I could.’ He was, she felt, permanently devoted to Wilfrid. She determined to risk it. When they drove away from her at Mount Street, she thought: ‘I hope I shall never be a father!’