Part 14 (2/2)
”Darling-darling, what is it-?”
She looked back at me with the tears still running down her cheeks. She said, miserably: ”I can't do it, Mike. It won't work.”
She looked mournfully at the written pages. I sat down beside her, and put an arm round her.
”Never mind, Sweet, it'll come...”
”It won't, Mike. Every time I try, other thoughts come instead. I'm frightened.” She gave me a curiously intense look. I tightened my arm.
”There's nothing to be frightened about, darling.”
She kept on looking at me closely. ”You're not frightened?” she said, oddly.
”We're stale,” I said. ”We stewed too much over those scripts. Let's go over to the north coast, it ought to be good for surf-boards today.”
She dabbed at her eyes. ”All right,” she said, with unusual meekness.
It was a good day. The wind and the waves and the exercise brought more colour into her cheeks, and neither of us pecked at our lunch. We reached the stage where I felt that I could hopefully suggest that she should see a doctor. Her refusal came pat. She was feeling a whole lot better. Everything would be all right in a day or two.
We idled the rest of the day away on a leisurely course which brought us back to Rose Cottage about nine-thirty in the evening. While Phyllis went to warm up some coffee, I turned on the radio. With a touch of disloyalty I tried the BBC first and got in on the early lines of a play in which it seemed likely that Gladys Young was going to be a possessive mother, so I turned to the EBC. I found it engaged in putting forth one of those highly monotonous programmes that it unblus.h.i.+ngly calls variety. However, I let it run.
A plugged number finished. Somebody I had never heard of was introduced as my ever-popular old friend, So-and-So. There were a few preliminary runs on a guitar, then a voice began to sing: Oh, I'm burning my brains in the backroom, Almost setting my cortex alight- It was a moment before my surprise registered, then I turned and stared incredulously at the set: To find a new thing to go crack-boom!
And blow up a xen.o.bathite!
There was a crash behind me. I turned to see Phyllis in the doorway, the coffee things on the floor at her feet. Her face was puckering, and she sagged. I caught her, and helped her to a chair. The radio was still going: ...
technical journals, And now I'm just starting to pray.
I leaned over and switched it off. They must have got the song somehow from Ted. Phyllis wasn't crying. She just sat there shaking all over.
”I've given her a sedative, so she'll sleep now. What she must have is a complete rest and a change,” said the doctor.
”That's what we're having,” I pointed out.
He regarded me thoughtfully.
”You, too, I think,” he said.
”I'm all right,” I told him. ”I don't understand this. She had a shock, and she was hurt, but that was right at the beginning of it. After that, she was unconscious. She seemed to get over it quite soon, and she really knows no more of the rest than anyone else who has seen the films. Though, of course, we have been rather steeping in it.”
He continued to look at me seriously.
”You saw it all,” he remarked. ”You dream about it, don't you?”
”It has given me a few bad nights, ”I admitted.
He nodded. ”More than that. You've been going over it again and again in your sleep?” he suggested. ”Particularly you have been concerned with somebody called Muriel, and with a man who was torn to pieces?”
”Well, yes,” I agreed. ”But I haven't talked to her about it. I'd rather forget it.”
”Some people don't easily forget things like that. They arc apt to break through when one is asleep.”
”You mean I've been talking in my sleep?”
”A lot, I gather.”
”I see. You mean that's why she-?”
”Yes. Now I'm going to give you the address of a friend of mine in Harley Street. I want you both to go up to London tomorrow, and see him the next day. I'll fix it up for you.”
”Very well,” I agreed. ”You know, it wasn't the thing itself that worried me so much as the pressure of getting the scripts out afterwards. That's relaxed now.”
”Possibly,” he said. ”All the same, I think you should go and see him.”
There was something wrong, and I knew it. I didn't admit to the doctor, though I did to the Harley Street man, that it was more often Phyllis than Muriel that I saw being dragged along by her hair, and more often her than an unknown man that I saw being pulled to pieces. As a quid pro quo he told me that Phyllis had been spending most of her nights listening to me and dissuading me from jumping out of the window to interfere in these imaginary happenings.
So I agreed to go out of circulation for a time.
Nirvana is for the few; nevertheless, the old minor house in Yorks.h.i.+re to which my advice led me managed to induce a pa.s.sable temporary subst.i.tute. The first few days without newspapers, without radio, without letters, had a purgatorially fretful quality, but after that came an almost physical sense of taut springs relaxing. As the feeling of urgency receded my values and perspective s.h.i.+fted. Exercise, open air, a complete change of pattern led to a feeling of having changed gear; the engine began to settle down to a more comfortable running-speed. There was a great simplification. One seemed to grow fresher and cleaner within, larger, too, and less pushable-around. There was a new sense of stability. A very comfortable, easy pattern it was; habit-forming, I imagine.
Certainly, in six weeks I had become addicted and might have continued longer had a twenty-mile thirst not happened to take me into a small pub close upon six o'clock one evening.
While I was standing at the bar with the second pint the land-lord turned on the radio, the archrival's news-bulletin. The very first item shattered the ivory tower that I had been gradually building. The voice said: ”The roll of those missing in the Oviedo-Santander district is still incomplete, and it is thought by the Spanish authorities that it may never be completely definitive. Official spokesmen admit that the estimate of 3,200 casualties, including men, women, and children, is conservative, and may be as much as fifteen or twenty per cent below the actual figure.
”Messages of sympathy from all parts of the world continue to pour into Madrid. Among them are telegrams from San Jose, Guatemala, from Salvador, from La Serena, Chile, from Bunbury, Western Australia, and from numerous islands in both the East and West Indies which have themselves suffered attacks no less horrible, though smaller in scale, than those inflicted upon the north Spanish coast.
”In the House today, the Leader of the Opposition, in giving his party's support for the feelings of sympathy with the Spanish people expressed by the Prime Minister, pointed out that the casualties in the third of this series of raids, that upon Gijon would have been considerably more severe had the people not taken their defence into their own hands. The people, he said, were ent.i.tled to defence. It was a part of the business of government to provide them with it. If a government neglected that duty, no one could blame a people for taking steps for its self-protection.
”It would be much better, however, to be prepared with an organised force. Since time out of mind we had maintained armed forces to deal with threats by other armed forces. Since 1829 we had maintained an efficient police-force to deal with internal threats. But it appeared that we had now become so administratively barren, so inventively infertile, so corporately costive that we were unable to produce the means of giving the dwellers upon our coasts that security to which their members.h.i.+p of this great nation ent.i.tled them.
”It seemed to the members of the Opposition that the Government, having failed to fulfil its election pledges, was now about to belie the very name of its party by its reluctance to consider means which would conserve even the lives of its electors. If this were not so, then it would appear that the policy of conservation was being carried to a length which scarcely distinguished it from n.i.g.g.ardliness. It was high time that measures were taken to ensure that the fate which had overtaken dwellers upon the littorals, not only in Spain, but in many other parts of the world as well, could not fall upon the people of these islands.
”The Prime Minister, in thanking the Opposition for its expression of sympathy, would a.s.sure them that the Government was actively watching the situation. The exact steps that would, if necessary, be taken would have to be dictated by the nature of the emergency, if one should arise. These, he said, were deep waters: there was much consolation to be found in the reflection that the British Isles lay in shallow waters.
”The name of Her Majesty the Queen headed the list of subscribers to the fund opened by the Lord Mayor of London for the relief-”
The landlord reached over, and switched off the set.
”Cor!” he remarked, with disgust. ”Makes yer' sick. Always the b.l.o.o.d.y same. Treat you like a lot of b.l.o.o.d.y kids. Same during the b.l.o.o.d.y war. b.l.o.o.d.y Home Guards all over the place waiting for b.l.o.o.d.y parachutists, and all the b.l.o.o.d.y ammunition all b.l.o.o.d.y well locked up. Like the Old Man said one time: his b.l.o.o.d.y-self, 'What kind of a b.l.o.o.d.y people do they think we are?'-”
I offered him a drink, told him I had been away from any news for days, and asked what had been going on. Stripped of its adjectival monotony, and filled out by information I gathered later, it amounted to this: In the past weeks the scope of the raids had widened well beyond the tropics. At Bunbury, a hundred miles or so south of Fremantle in Western Australia, a contingent of fifty or more sea-tanks had come ash.o.r.e and into the town before any alarm was given. A few nights later La Serena, in Chile, was taken similarly by surprise. At the same time in the Central American area the raids had ceased to be confined to islands, and there had been a number of incursions, large and small, upon both the Pacific and Gulf coasts. In the Atlantic, the Cape Verde Islands had been repeatedly raided, and the trouble spread northward to the Canaries and Madeira. There had been a few small-scale a.s.saults, too, on the bulge of the African coast.
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