‘Oh, I know that!’ she exclaimed. The man looked exhausted with the effort of explanation. He took a deep breath before saying:
‘But I’ve a feeling this evening will be different. We’ll get off the subject. Why not? It was an accident that it ever got into the picture at all. He will forget.’ He dropped his eyes to the bowling-green. They both stared at the heart. Engraved as it was out of a substance which might vanish at any instant, it had kept its shape. It seemed innocent and at the same time bold – a peaceful, yet a childishly stubborn shape. In the absence of initials, arrows, prints of any kind, there was no message to be read. But emptiness gave it power. It was no longer strange. Already it was part of the surroundings. It was a harmonious shape, and the woman decided it was benign. But she wondered how the man saw it now. As a deliberate disfigurement? A shape, meaningless and gross, perhaps, set there to try the endurance of his son and himself.
It had begun to snow slightly again at the evening visiting hour, but the corridor was crowded as usual for Saturday was a popular day for family visits. There were plenty of new faces and tonight even the regulars were in good form. The snow had put fight into them. They were not prepared to make a mystery out of this building. It was something to get in from the cold, and they expressed some envy for the patients in their snug beds. There came a point when even illness must be kept in its place. There was a big difference between being alive and being dead and it had better not be forgotten. At any rate, ribaldry, in place of awe, was long overdue in the place. It was a night for comparing fat and thin sisters, for stripping doctors of the laundered coat. Surgeons were scrutinized as either wilder than the wildest maniac or staid as councillors, and the immaculate matron in her virgin pie-ruff must be sacrificed to one or other of them before the night was out. There were few doctors around just now. It was not the time for doctors. But when one did appear as though by accident, going slowly past looking neither to right nor left, the relatives stared boldly after him. They were controlling the desire to spring forward and wrench an answer out of him – an explanation, a diagnosis, or even a plain yes or no. The stray doctor was aware of this. He kept his eyes fixed on a distant mark at the end of the corridor in an effort to maintain dignity and keep his footing on the spotless floor when on every side the endlessly questioning eyes threatened to topple him up.
The young man’s father was not among the earliest arrivals tonight. He came on the dot of seven and disappeared immediately in the direction of the wards. This time the woman was ahead of him but she looked back once and got a quick response. He waved. His smile was cheerful, as though he’d quickly caught the mood of the evening and had no intention of being odd man out. The woman waited for him in the corridor when the hour was up. It was not an evening for formalities or reserve.
‘And how was he?’ she asked at once as he came up. ‘Did you manage to get off that subject?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I did not. And we are back to square one.’
‘The bowling-green?’
‘Oh, I thought that at any rate was over and done with. But he’d thought of something else. How am I to put it to you?’
‘Tell me then.’
‘He was upset, to put it mildly, brooding now on the fact that the heart down there has nothing inside it, none of the usual appendages. No words or signs. Not a mark. If it’s to be properly denounced it must conform, and this one has not come up to expectation. It says nothing. It gives nothing. It is not even a lasting blot on the landscape. This empty heart is not enough for him it seems!’ The man had forgotten to subdue his voice to the required hospital mildness. It got louder as he went on and ended on a note of pain. One or two people glanced sympathetically at him in passing. One or two looked annoyed. He had become a threat to the hard-won mood of cheer.
The woman didn’t move or speak for a long time. She was looking straight in front of her out of the window. It was still snowing and there was a slight wind. It was hard to see how the fine flakes would ever touch ground. At one moment they formed spirals in the air and at another, slanting lines which shifted, or on sudden gusts blew upward higher and higher until the widely separating flakes disappeared into darkness overhead. All the same, the thin layer of snow had already altered things below. The two lines of footsteps on the bowling-green were almost obliterated. The centre of the heart, shining in the light from the hospital windows, was softly padded out with new white snow. It still proclaimed itself, but gently. Now that even the footsteps were gone, this smoothing and rounding had given it a feeling of completeness and an absolute calm.
‘Do you know,’ said the woman, rousing herself at last to speak. ‘I think I shall put it to my daughter – your son’s problem, I mean. Just as a matter of interest I’d like her opinion. How would that be?’
‘Certainly. Please tell her anything you like,’ said the man politely.
‘In my opinion she’s got insight as well as common sense.’
‘I’m sure,’ said the man, keeping himself from moving off with an effort.
‘And then, of course, she is young herself.’
The man answered by making a weary obeisance in the direction of the wards. It was done without irony. He acknowledged youth while admitting that he himself was absolutely played out. Finished. Right now there was only one thing he wanted and that was to get home. He had talked so much about his son, however, and asked so little about her daughter it was up to him to stay on the spot. But the woman was moving off herself. ‘Then I’ll see you tomorrow,’ she said.
Their meeting next day came at the end of the afternoon visit. It seemed casual, almost accidental. The woman was standing at the window with her back to the light, studying herself in a small handbag mirror. The absorbed, disapproving regard of the middle-aged woman for her own face disappeared as he came up. But she turned back for one more caustic glance at her left cheek.
‘Well, I’ve seen my daughter,’ she said, forcing the mirror back into her handbag’s jungle. ‘She thought about it for a long time. And I may say she has the greatest sympathy for your son’s point of view. Indeed she shares it. She understood perfectly his irritation, his frustration … But as for the heart – well, she takes a more straightforward view of that. Why worry? Why fuss about what is or isn’t inside it? It was never meant, she says, to have letters, words, signs, or anything else. That is not the style of the thing. On the other hand, it is not an empty heart.’
‘No?’ said the man.
‘I’m simply repeating her words,’ the woman said, looking at him impatiently for the first time. ‘Not an empty heart, but an open one. For anyone and everyone. One can take it or leave it, but there it is. It is fabulous, she says. It is fantastic. It is an outsize super-heart. And there is absolutely nothing more to be said about it.’
The man said nothing more about it, but he thought for a long time. ‘I shall pass on the message,’ he said at last, bowing his head, ‘… and how on earth I will manage …’
‘You’ll make nothing of it, I hope.’
‘I’ll certainly try to make it nothing. I am tempted to scoff a bit at your daughter’s view.’
‘Oh, she’s tough enough to take it! In that way – your son and my daughter – aren’t they both tough enough? And that they’ve never met and never will meet has absolutely nothing to do with it. They stand together.’
‘Indeed I hope so,’ said the man. He turned quickly away and went on past her towards the stair.
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