The Hollow

He’d got a plain secretary and he’d married a plain wife. That was what he wanted, wasn’t it? He’d had enough of beauty, hadn’t he? He’d seen what someone like Veronica could do with her beauty—seen the effect it had on every male within range. After Veronica, he’d wanted safety. Safety and peace and devotion and the quiet, enduring things of life. He’d wanted, in fact, Gerda! He’d wanted someone who’d take her ideas of life from him, who would accept his decisions and who wouldn’t have, for one moment, any ideas of her own…

Who was it who had said that the real tragedy of life was that you got what you wanted?

Angrily he pressed the buzzer on his desk.

He’d deal with Mrs Forrester.

It took him a quarter of an hour to deal with Mrs Forrester. Once again it was easy money. Once again he listened, asked questions, reassured, sympathized, infused something of his own healing energy. Once more he wrote out a prescription for an expensive proprietary.

The sickly neurotic woman who had trailed into the room left it with a firmer step, with colour in her cheeks, with a feeling that life might possibly after all be worth while.

John Christow leant back in his chair. He was free now—free to go upstairs to join Gerda and the children—free from the preoccupations of illness and suffering for a whole weekend.

But he felt still that strange disinclination to move, that new queer lassitude of the will.

He was tired—tired—tired…

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.’

CHAPTER 5

In the dining-room the child Terry made another scientific statement.

‘Lead salts are more soluble in cold water than hot. If you add potassium iodide you get a yellow precipitate of lead iodide.’

He looked expectantly at his mother but without any real hope. Parents, in the opinion of young Terence, were sadly disappointing.

‘Did you know that, Mother?’

‘I don’t know anything about chemistry, dear.’

‘You could read about it in a book,’ said Terence.

It was a simple statement of fact, but there was a certain wistfulness behind it.

Gerda did not hear the wistfulness. She was caught in the trap of her anxious misery. Round and round and round. She had been miserable ever since she woke up this morning and realized that at last this long-dreaded weekend with the Angkatells was upon her. Staying at The Hollow was always a nightmare to her. She always felt bewildered and forlorn. Lucy Angkatell with her sentences that were never finished, her swift inconsequences, and her obvious attempts at kindliness, was the figure she dreaded most. But the others were nearly as bad. For Gerda it was two days of sheer martyrdom—to be endured for John’s sake.

For John that morning as he stretched himself had remarked in tones of unmitigated pleasure:

‘Splendid to think we’ll be getting into the country this weekend. It will do you good, Gerda, just what you need.’

She had smiled mechanically and had said with unselfish fortitude: ‘It will be delightful.’

Her unhappy eyes had wandered round the bedroom. The wallpaper, cream striped with a black mark just by the wardrobe, the mahogany dressing-table with the glass that swung too far forward, the cheerful bright blue carpet, the watercolours of the Lake District. All dear familiar things and she would not see them again until Monday.

Instead, tomorrow a housemaid who rustled would come into the strange bedroom and put down a little dainty tray of early tea by the bed and pull up the blinds, and would then rearrange and fold Gerda’s clothes—a thing which made Gerda feel hot and uncomfortable all over. She would lie miserably, enduring these things, trying to comfort herself by thinking, ‘Only one morning more.’ Like being at school and counting the days.

Gerda had not been happy at school. At school there had been even less reassurance than elsewhere. Home had been better. But even home had not been very good. For they had all, of course, been quicker and cleverer than she was. Their comments, quick, impatient, not quite unkind, had whistled about her ears like a hailstorm. ‘Oh, do be quick, Gerda.’ ‘Butter-fingers, give it to me!’ ‘Oh don’t let Gerda do it, she’ll be ages.’ ‘Gerda never takes in anything…’

Hadn’t they seen, all of them, that that was the way to make her slower and stupider still? She’d got worse and worse, more clumsy with her fingers, more slow-witted, more inclined to stare vacantly at what was said to her.

Until, suddenly, she had reached the point where she had found a way out. Almost accidentally, really, she found her weapon of defence.

She had grown slower still, her puzzled stare had become even blanker. But now, when they said impatiently: ‘Oh, Gerda, how stupid you are, don’t you understand that?’ she had been able, behind her blank expression, to hug herself a little in her secret knowledge… For she wasn’t as stupid as they thought. Often, when she pretended not to understand, she did understand. And often, deliberately, she slowed down in her task of whatever it was, smiling to herself when someone’s impatient fingers snatched it away from her.

For, warm and delightful, was a secret knowledge of superiority. She began to be, quite often, a little amused. Yes, it was amusing to know more than they thought you knew. To be able to do a thing, but not let anybody know that you could do it.

And it had the advantage, suddenly discovered, that people often did things for you. That, of course, saved you a lot of trouble. And, in the end, if people got into the habit of doing things for you, you didn’t have to do them at all, and then people didn’t know that you did them badly. And so, slowly, you came round again almost to where you started. To feeling that you could hold your own on equal terms with the world at large.

(But that wouldn’t, Gerda feared, hold good with the Angkatells; the Angkatells were always so far ahead that you didn’t feel even in the same street with them. How she hated the Angkatells! It was good for John—John liked it there. He came home less tired—and sometimes less irritable.)

Dear John, she thought. John was wonderful. Everyone thought so. Such a clever doctor, so terribly kind to his patients. Wearing himself out—and the interest he took in his hospital patients—all that side of his work that didn’t pay at all. John was so disinterested—so truly noble.

She had always known, from the very first, that John was brilliant and was going to get to the top of the tree. And he had chosen her, when he might have married somebody far more brilliant. He had not minded her being slow and rather stupid and not very pretty. ‘I’ll look after you,’ he had said. Nicely, rather masterfully. ‘Don’t worry about things, Gerda, I’ll take care of you…’

Just what a man ought to be. Wonderful to think John should have chosen her.

He had said with that sudden, very attractive, half-pleading smile of his, ‘I like my own way, you know, Gerda.’

Well, that was all right. She had always tried to give in to him in everything. Even lately when he had been so difficult and nervy—when nothing seemed to please him. When, somehow, nothing she did was right. One couldn’t blame him. He was so busy, so unselfish—

Oh, dear, that mutton! She ought to have sent it back. Still no sign of John. Why couldn’t she, sometimes, decide right? Again those dark waves of misery swept over her. The mutton! This awful weekend with the Angkatells. She felt a sharp pain through both temples. Oh, dear, now she was going to have one of her headaches. And it did so annoy John when she had headaches. He never would give her anything for them, when surely it would be so easy, being a doctor. Instead he always said: ‘Don’t think about it. No use poisoning yourself with drugs. Take a brisk walk.’

The mutton! Staring at it, Gerda felt the words repeating themselves in her aching head, ‘The mutton, the MUTTON, THE MUTTON…’

Tears of self-pity sprang to her eyes. ‘Why,’ she thought, ‘does nothing ever go right for me?’

Terence looked across at the table at his mother and then at the joint. He thought: ‘Why can’t we have our dinner? How stupid grown-up people are. They haven’t any sense!’

Aloud he said in a careful voice:

‘Nicholson Minor and I are going to make nitroglycerine in his father’s shrubbery. They live at Streatham.’