Джеймс Хилтон - So Well Remembered

It was all spoken with a twinkle that made it inoffensive and not quite serious, but George would not have been offended in any case. He was already too interested in what promised to be an argument.

“Aye,” he answered. “I’m on good terms with anyone who’ll help me make Browdley better. Romans, Church of England, Methodists, Atheists, Agnostics —they’re all one to me if they’ll do that.”

“So religion has no place in your better Browdley?”

George appreciated a nicely laid trap, especially when he was in no danger of falling into it. He smiled as he had so often smiled across the Council Chamber or a meeting-hall. “Nay—I’d rather ask you if MY better Browdley has a place in YOUR religion? Because if it hasn’t you’ll not do so well at St. Patrick’s. I’ve got a lot of supporters there.”

“Is that a threat, Mr. Boswell?”

“No—just a tip. I’ve no hell-fire in my armoury. All I can tell folks is that diphtheria comes from bad drains, but of course if they’re more interested in pearly gates that’s their look-out.”

Wendover’s smile broadened. “If I were old-fashioned I’d probably say that God would punish you for blasphemy. But my conception of God isn’t like that. I doubt that He’ll find it necessary to strike down you or one of your family just to prove a point.”

George grunted. He had an idea that Wendover was enjoying the encounter as much as he was, and already he recognized an agile mind. Agile minds were useful, and it might be that Wendover would take the progressive side in many of the town’s controversial issues. George also realized that priests and parsons had to stand on some ground of their own, not merely on what they could share with every liberal-minded thinker, politician, or social worker. All this weighed against his impulse to continue the argument combatively, so he replied: “I assure you I didn’t intend to be blasphemous, and I hope you’re right about God. I don’t think I know enough to agree or disagree with you. So I’m sticking to what I do know something about, and that’s Man. Seems to me Man could give himself a pretty good time on earth if only he went about it the right way, but he just won’t. You’d almost think he didn’t WANT a good time, the way he carries on.” But that looked like the beginning of another argument, so he shook hands with a final smile and left the priest wondering.

A few days later Wendover wondered afresh when news spread over the town that Councillor Boswell’s baby had been stricken. But being honest he did not exploit the situation. Nor did he actually believe that the hand of God was in it. He just thought it an extraordinary coincidence, which it was, and wrote George a note that merely expressed sympathy and hoped the child would be well again soon. For he liked George.

During those dark days Livia and George hardly spoke, except when she asked him to do this or that; and he obeyed her then, blindly as a child himself.

They hardly spoke because there was simply nothing to say after the one sharp, inevitable, and rather dreadful argument.

When George came home late after a meeting and found Livia sitting up with Martin, who was ill and had a temperature, he was concerned, but not unduly so; and when he guessed that the thought of diphtheria was in her mind, he told her confidently not to worry, since the boy had been immunized. She just looked at him then and shook her head.

Over the small tossing body and whilst waiting for the doctor, they thrashed the matter out.

The fact was that when the free immunization scheme had gone into operation and he had told her to take Martin to the municipal clinic, she simply had not done so. And she had lied to him about it afterwards.

He kept pacing up and down the bedroom, trying to grasp the situation. “So you DIDN’T do it? Oh, Livia, WHY didn’t you? How COULD you not do what I asked about a thing like that? Did you forget and then tell me a lie to cover it?… Oh, Livia… Livia…”

She answered: “I didn’t forget, George. I went to the clinic once and saw the crowd lined up outside. I didn’t want to take Martin to a place like that.”

His anger mounted. “Why not? For God’s sake what was wrong about it?”

“I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the people there—I mean the other people with their children.”

“SNOB!” He shouted the word. “Weren’t they well-dressed enough for you?”

“Most of them were as well-dressed as I could afford to be.”

Yes, he knew that; he had let his anger tempt him into an absurdity as well as a side issue. “Then why—WHY?” he reiterated. “Why didn’t you have it done?”

“I told you—I didn’t like the place. Some of the children looked dirty, and they had bad colds—”

“And Martin might have caught one! Or a flea perhaps! So to save him from that you let him catch diphtheria—”

She interrupted in a dead-level voice: “I don’t want to quarrel, George. But don’t you remember I asked if it couldn’t be done by a private doctor? And do you remember what you said?”

Yes, he remembered. There had been a wrangle, though a less bitter one, about that also. Couldn’t she realize, he had asked her indignantly, that for months he had been making speeches all over the town in favour of free public immunization? What would it look like if, after all that, he took his own child to a private doctor? Couldn’t she see what a fool and a hypocrite it would make him appear? So Martin MUST go to the clinic. “Livia, I wouldn’t insist if it meant that the child would be getting anything second- best. But the free immunization’s just as good—just the same, in fact— as anything a private doctor could give. The only difference is in where you take him to get it. Don’t you see we have to set an example to the town in these things? If we don’t use the new facilities ourselves, if we behave as if we thought them not good enough for our own children, how can we expect anyone else to trust them?”

Thus the argument when Martin was six months old. George had thought it ended in his own victory; now, six months later, he realized that the end was neither victory nor defeat, but just post- dated disaster.

He cried out, desperately: “I know all that, Livia… And I don’t want to quarrel, either—it’s no good now—it’s too late. But why… whatever you did… why didn’t you do SOMETHING? Why DIDN’T you take him to a private doctor if you absolutely refused to do what I wanted? Oh, anything —ANYTHING rather than this… Or why didn’t you let ME do it?… Why didn’t you TELL me, anyway? Why did you LIE to me?”

He saw her hurt, stung face, and knew she was suffering so profoundly that his accusations made little difference. But she could sting back and make HIM suffer more, as when she answered with deadly irrelevance: “I did tell you one thing. I said we ought to leave Browdley.”

“Oh no, that’s not the point—”

“It is and always will be. If we hadn’t stayed here, nothing like this would have happened.”

Even that wasn’t certain, he knew, but he saw the certainty in her eyes, and knew also that she would never believe otherwise, however much he went on arguing.

The arrival of the doctor interrupted them. His visit lasted an hour, and when it ended there was nothing more to argue about, only a dreadful possibility to face.

The local hospital was already overcrowded, so Martin lay in the spare room above the printing-office. Livia shared it with him, while George slept on his study couch—so far, that is, as he could sleep at all. Becky, banished from upstairs, curled mournfully under the desk. George had not realized till then the depth of his affection for the child. He was like that with all his affections—they grew, and then lurked, and then sprang to give him pain. He was torn unutterably by remorse at having been so busy those past few months, so busy with the affairs of the town, too busy to look after the physical safety of his own household. He should have made sure that the immunization had taken place, instead of just mentioning the matter to Livia and taking it for granted that she had done it. It was HER fault —and yet it was HIS fault too, for leaving everything of that sort to her. It was the streak of unreasonableness in her cropping up again, and this time tragically—he should have been prepared for it, in all vital matters he should have watched for it. He wished… he wished… and one of the things he did wish now, but dared not wish aloud, was that he HAD left Browdley. He almost dared not wish it in thought, lest there should pass some spark between his eyes and hers, some spark to set off a conflagration, or —even worse—to indicate a mood which she would take to be surrender. So it had come to THAT—that he thought of her as an enemy, or of his love for her as an enemy? Which—or both? He puzzled over it, far too modest to think his own emotions unique, but wondering if there were outsiders who would understand them better than he did— novelists, say, or psycho-analysts. Or that fellow Wendover, if ever he got to know him well enough? Though how could a priest… and yet, after all, it WAS a spiritual matter in some ways. Thus he argued with himself, and as the days passed and Martin did not improve, it occurred to him that the greatest single difference between Livia and himself was that she was too utterly fearless to be reasonable, while he was too reasonable to be utterly fearless. And at a certain level of experience there was simply no compromise between them.