The Hollow

CHAPTER 4

In the dining-room of the flat above the consulting room Gerda Christow was staring at a joint of mutton.

Should she or should she not send it back to the kitchen to be kept warm?

If John was going to be much longer it would be cold—congealed, and that would be dreadful.

But on the other hand the last patient had gone, John would be up in a moment, if she sent it back there would be delay—John was so impatient. ‘But surely you knew I was just coming…’ There would be that tone of suppressed exasperation in his voice that she knew and dreaded. Besides, it would get over-cooked, dried up—John hated over-cooked meat.

But on the other hand he disliked cold food very much indeed.

At any rate the dish was nice and hot.

Her mind oscillated to and fro, and her sense of misery and anxiety deepened.

The whole world had shrunk to a leg of mutton getting cold on a dish.

On the other side of the table her son Terence, aged twelve, said:

‘Boracic salts burn with a green flame, sodium salts are yellow.’

Gerda looked distractedly across the table at his square, freckled face. She had no idea what he was talking about.

‘Did you know that, Mother?’

‘Know what, dear?’

‘About salts.’

Gerda’s eye flew distractedly to the salt-cellar. Yes, salt and pepper were on the table. That was all right. Last week Lewis had forgotten them and that had annoyed John. There was always something…

‘It’s one of the chemical tests,’ said Terence in a dreamy voice. ‘Jolly interesting. I think.’

Zena, aged nine, with a pretty, vacuous face, whimpered:

‘I want my dinner. Can’t we start, Mother?’

‘In a minute, dear, we must wait for Father.’

‘We could start,’ said Terence. ‘Father wouldn’t mind. You know how fast he eats.’

Gerda shook her head.

Carve the mutton? But she never could remember which was the right side to plunge the knife in. Of course, perhaps Lewis had put it the right way on the dish—but sometimes she didn’t—and John was always annoyed if it was done the wrong way. And, Gerda reflected desperately, it always was the wrong way when she did it. Oh, dear, how cold the gravy was getting—a skin was forming on the top of it—she must send it back—but then if John were just coming—and surely he would be coming now.

Her mind went round and round unhappily…like a trapped animal.

*

Sitting back in his consulting-room chair, tapping with one hand on the table in front of him, conscious that upstairs lunch must be ready, John Christow was nevertheless unable to force himself to get up.

San Miguel…blue sea…smell of mimosa…a scarlet tritoma upright against green leaves…the hot sun…the dust…that desperation of love and suffering…

He thought: ‘Oh, God, not that. Never that again! That’s over…’

He wished suddenly that he had never known Veronica, never married Gerda, never met Henrietta…

Mrs Crabtree, he thought, was worth the lot of them. That had been a bad afternoon last week. He’d been so pleased with the reactions. She could stand .005 by now. And then had come that alarming rise in toxicity and the DL reaction had been negative instead of positive.

The old bean had lain there, blue, gasping for breath—peering up at him with malicious, indomitable eyes.

‘Making a bit of a guinea pig out of me, ain’t you, dearie? Experimenting—that kinder thing.’

‘We want to get you well,’ he had said, smiling down at her.

‘Up to your tricks, yer mean!’ She had grinned suddenly. ‘I don’t mind, bless yer. You carry on, Doctor! Someone’s got to be first, that’s it, ain’t it? ’Ad me ’air permed, I did, when I was a kid. It wasn’t ’alf a difficult business then. Couldn’t get a comb through it. But there—I enjoyed the fun. You can ’ave yer fun with me. I can stand it.’

‘Feel pretty bad, don’t you?’ His hand was on her pulse. Vitality passed from him to the panting old woman on the bed.

‘Orful, I feel. You’re about right! ’Asn’t gone according to plan—that’s it, isn’t it? Never you mind. Don’t you lose ’eart. I can stand a lot, I can!’

John Christow said appreciatively:

‘You’re fine. I wish all my patients were like you.’

‘I wanter get well—that’s why! I wanter get well. Mum, she lived to be eighty-eight—and old Grandma was ninety when she popped off. We’re long-livers in our family, we are.’

He had come away miserable, racked with doubt and uncertainty. He’d been so sure he was on the right track. Where had he gone wrong? How diminish the toxicity and keep up the hormone content and at the same time neutralize the pantratin?…

He’d been too cocksure—he’d taken it for granted that he’d circumvented all the snags.

And it was then, on the steps of St Christopher’s, that a sudden desperate weariness had overcome him—a hatred of all this long, slow, wearisome clinical work, and he’d thought of Henrietta, thought of her suddenly not as herself, but of her beauty and her freshness, her health and her radiant vitality—and the faint smell of primroses that clung about her hair.

And he had gone to Henrietta straight away, sending a curt telephone message home about being called away. He had strode into the studio and taken Henrietta in his arms, holding her to him with a fierceness that was new in their relationship.

There had been a quick, startled wonder in her eyes. She had freed herself from his arms and had made him coffee. And as she moved about the studio she had thrown out desultory questions. Had he come, she asked, straight from the hospital?

He didn’t want to talk about the hospital. He wanted to make love to Henrietta and forget that the hospital and Mrs Crabtree and Ridgeway’s Disease and all the rest of the caboodle existed.

But, at first unwillingly, then more fluently, he answered her questions. And presently he was striding up and down, pouring out a spate of technical explanations and surmises. Once or twice he paused, trying to simplify—to explain:

‘You see, you have to get a reaction—’

Henrietta said quickly:

‘Yes, yes, the DL reaction has to be positive. I understand that. Go on.’

He said sharply, ‘How do you know about the DL reaction?’

‘I got a book—’

‘What book? Whose?’

She motioned towards the small book table. He snorted.

‘Scobell? Scobell’s no good. He’s fundamentally unsound. Look here, if you want to read—don’t—’

She interrupted him.

‘I only want to understand some of the terms you use—enough so as to understand you without making you stop to explain everything the whole time. Go on. I’m following you all right.’

‘Well,’ he said doubtfully, ‘remember Scobell’s unsound.’ He went on talking. He talked for two hours and a half. Reviewing the setbacks, analysing the possibilities, outlining possible theories. He was hardly conscious of Henrietta’s presence. And yet, more than once, as he hesitated, her quick intelligence took him a step on the way, seeing, almost before he did, what he was hesitating to advance. He was interested now, and his belief in himself was creeping back. He had been right—the main theory was correct—and there were ways, more ways than one, of combating the toxic symptoms.

And then, suddenly, he was tired out. He’d got it all clear now. He’d get on to it tomorrow morning. He’d ring up Neill, tell him to combine the two solutions and try that. Yes, try that. By God, he wasn’t going to be beaten!

‘I’m tired,’ he said abruptly. ‘My God, I’m tired.’

And he had flung himself down and slept—slept like the dead.

He had awoken to find Henrietta smiling at him in the morning light and making tea and he had smiled back at her.

‘Not at all according to plan,’ he said.

‘Does it matter?’

‘No. No. You are rather a nice person, Henrietta.’ His eye went to the bookcase. ‘If you’re interested in this sort of thing, I’ll get you the proper stuff to read.’

‘I’m not interested in this sort of thing. I’m interested in you, John.’

‘You can’t read Scobell.’ He took up the offending volume. ‘The man’s a charlatan.’

And she had laughed. He could not understand why his strictures on Scobell amused her so.

But that was what, every now and then, startled him about Henrietta. The sudden revelation, disconcerting to him, that she was able to laugh at him.

He wasn’t used to it. Gerda took him in deadly earnest. And Veronica had never thought about anything but herself. But Henrietta had a trick of throwing her head back, of looking at him through half-closed eyes, with a sudden tender half-mocking little smile, as though she were saying: ‘Let me have a good look at this funny person called John… Let me get a long way away and look at him…’

It was, he thought, very much the same as the way she screwed up her eyes to look at her work—or a picture. It was—damn it all—it was detached. He didn’t want Henrietta to be detached. He wanted Henrietta to think only of him, never to let her mind stray away from him.

(‘Just what you object to in Gerda, in fact,’ said his private imp, bobbing up again.)

The truth of it was that he was completely illogical. He didn’t know what he wanted.

(‘I want to go home.’ What an absurd, what a ridiculous phrase. It didn’t mean anything.)

In an hour or so at any rate he’d be driving out of London—forgetting about sick people with their faint sour ‘wrong’ smell…sniffing wood smoke and pines and soft wet autumn leaves… The very motion of the car would be soothing—that smooth, effortless increase of speed.

But it wouldn’t, he reflected suddenly, be at all like that because owing to a slightly strained wrist, Gerda would have to drive, and Gerda, God help her, had never been able to begin to drive a car! Every time she changed gear he would be silent, grinding his teeth together, managing not to say anything because he knew, by bitter experience, that when he did say anything Gerda became immediately worse. Curious that no one had ever been able to teach Gerda to change gear—not even Henrietta. He’d turned her over to Henrietta, thinking that Henrietta’s enthusiasm might do better than his own irritability.

For Henrietta loved cars. She spoke of cars with the lyrical intensity that other people gave to spring, or the first snow-drop.

‘Isn’t he a beauty, John? Doesn’t he just purr along?’ (For Henrietta’s cars were always masculine.) ‘He’ll do Bale Hill in third—not straining at all—quite effortlessly. Listen to the even way he ticks over.’

Until he had burst out suddenly and furiously:

‘Don’t you think, Henrietta, you could pay some attention to me and forget the damned car for a minute or two!’

He was always ashamed of these outbursts.

He never knew when they would come upon him out of a blue sky.

It was the same thing over her work. He realized that her work was good. He admired it—and hated it—at the same time.

The most furious quarrel he had had with her had arisen over that.

Gerda had said to him one day:

‘Henrietta has asked me to sit for her.’

‘What?’ His astonishment had not, if he came to think of it, been flattering. ‘You?’

‘Yes, I’m going over to the studio tomorrow.’

‘What on earth does she want you for?’

Yes, he hadn’t been very polite about it. But luckily Gerda hadn’t realized that fact. She had looked pleased about it. He suspected Henrietta of one of those insincere kindnesses of hers—Gerda, perhaps, had hinted that she would like to be modelled. Something of that kind.

Then, about ten days later, Gerda had shown him triumphantly a small plaster statuette.

It was a pretty thing—technically skilful like all Henrietta’s work. It idealized Gerda—and Gerda herself was clearly pleased about it.

‘I really think it’s rather charming, John.’

‘Is that Henrietta’s work? It means nothing—nothing at all. I don’t see how she came to do a thing like that.’

‘It’s different, of course, from her abstract work—but I think it’s good, John, I really do.’

He had said no more—after all, he didn’t want to spoil Gerda’s pleasure. But he tackled Henrietta about it at the first opportunity.

‘What did you want to make that silly thing of Gerda for? It’s unworthy of you. After all, you usually turn out decent stuff.’

Henrietta said slowly:

‘I didn’t think it was bad. Gerda seemed quite pleased.’

‘Gerda was delighted. She would be. Gerda doesn’t know art from a coloured photograph.’

‘It wasn’t bad art, John. It was just a portrait statuette—quite harmless and not at all pretentious.’

‘You don’t usually waste your time doing that kind of stuff—’

He broke off, staring at a wooden figure about five feet high.

‘Hallo, what’s this?’

‘It’s for the International Group. Pearwood. The Worshipper.’

She watched him. He stared and then—suddenly, his neck swelled and he turned on her furiously.

‘So that’s what you wanted Gerda for? How dare you?’

‘I wondered if you’d see…’

‘See it? Of course I see it. It’s here.’ He placed a finger on the broad heavy neck muscles.

Henrietta nodded.

‘Yes, it’s the neck and shoulders I wanted—and that heavy forward slant—the submission—that bowed look. It’s wonderful!’

‘Wonderful? Look here, Henrietta, I won’t have it. You’re to leave Gerda alone.’

‘Gerda won’t know. Nobody will know. You know Gerda would never recognize herself here—nobody else would either. And it isn’t Gerda. It isn’t anybody.’

‘I recognized it, didn’t I?’

‘You’re different, John. You—see things.’

‘It’s the damned cheek of it! I won’t have it, Henrietta! I won’t have it. Can’t you see that it was an indefensible thing to do?’

‘Was it?’

‘Don’t you know it was? Can’t you feel it was? Where’s your usual sensitiveness?’

Henrietta said slowly:

‘You don’t understand, John. I don’t think I could ever make you understand… You don’t know what it is to want something—to look at it day after day—that line of the neck—those muscles—the angle where the head goes forward—that heaviness round the jaw. I’ve been looking at them, wanting them—every time I saw Gerda… In the end I just had to have them!’

‘Unscrupulous!’

‘Yes, I suppose just that. But when you want things, in that way, you just have to take them.’

‘You mean you don’t care a damn about anybody else. You don’t care about Gerda—’

‘Don’t be stupid, John. That’s why I made that statuette thing. To please Gerda and make her happy. I’m not inhuman!’

‘Inhuman is exactly what you are.’

‘Do you think—honestly—that Gerda would ever recognize herself in this?’

John looked at it unwillingly. For the first time his anger and resentment became subordinated to his interest. A strange submissive figure, a figure offering up worship to an unseen deity—the face raised—blind, dumb, devoted—terribly strong, terribly fanatical… He said:

‘That’s rather a terrifying thing that you have made, Henrietta!’

Henrietta shivered slightly.

She said, ‘Yes—I thought that…’

John said sharply:

‘What’s she looking at—who is it? There in front of her?’

Henrietta hesitated. She said, and her voice had a queer note in it:

‘I don’t know. But I think—she might be looking at you, John.’