Pilotage by Pilotage

Author:Pilotage [Pilotage]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-06-03T19:06:48+00:00

Chapter 7

It seemedthat Antony was ill. That was not an infrequent event and Sheila would probably have heard nothing about it until it was all over but for the loquacity of her cook. As it was the news was exact and recent, coming direct to Cook from the mother of the housemaid at the Vicarage. Mr. Antony was laid up again and was in bed at Oxford with a cold in his chest. His mother was very upset about it, and suspected that it was caused by his landlady neglecting to air the sheets.

At the time the news did not appeal very much to Sheila.

Antony was always getting ill, and Sheila had enough anxiety of her own to occupy her mind at this time. Since Dennison had left her she had had no word of him; that was nearly two months before. She knew that she must wait upon events; in all her trouble she was quite sure that he had given up Hong Kong. But—if only she could hear something of him. As the weeks went by she grew more anxious and more miserable; small inanimate objects seemed to combine together to irritate her, a conspiracy of pinpricks. The centre of this conspiracy was in her bedroom where things got in the way so that she trod on them and hurt herself. In some mysterious way her bed grew harder and coarser, so that she lay awake at night listening to things rustling and creaking about the room that had never rustled or creaked before. She realized that the trouble lay with her, and commenced to take a tonic.

But she had little thought for Antony and his ailments.

Gradually, however, the news of Antony's illness began to appeal to her. It was bad luck on him, just as the weather was getting nice, to be laid by the heels by a cold that would not go away. She knew how much he had been looking forward to the summer term, and now he was missing it all. In her loneliness, she recalled what good company he had been for the week after she had sent Dennison away; she began to think more of him. Antony was ill in Oxford, only eighteen miles away. She could quite easily drive over and see him.

"I'm sure I wish you would," said his mother. "He gets so tired of bed, and his friends come and sit on his bed all day so that the room is always full of tobacco smoke. Idontthink it's right of them to smoke in a sick room, do you? And they bring him such horrible things to read. . . ."

So she had lunch and took the big car and drove herself over to Oxford. She knew the town fairly well and had sometimes visited her brother when he had been up after the war. Immediately she reached Carfax she noticed a great change in the type of undergraduate. The bronzed and cheerful men that she had been accustomed to were gone and were replaced by pink-cheeked youths, callow and arrogant upon the pavements.

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