1
But Virginia didn’t die. Ian Black saw to that. But he told Ivor, downstairs in the waiting-room of the Wimpole Street nursing-home where Ivor spent many distressed hours, that his patient wasn’t “resisting” very, very much.
“I don’t mean that she’s giving way,” Ian Black said, “or that she seems to want to collapse. But she’s too busy analysing the pain—and herself—and me, too! Of course the pain is terrible, terrible....”
Ian Black was a chubby little man of very neat appearance and a round, boyish face, on which an expression of pleased or anxious surprise was always dominant. But he was the most restful man in the world to be with, for he had no gestures and made no little fusses with the things of his body, hands and eyebrows and hair and feet and the like, while he talked. He stood before you and stared up at you—he always had to look “up” to every one except when he was operating on them—with round eyes, his hands clasped on his funny little belly, and said what he had to say very gently, very gently and convincingly. To see him, it was too difficult to imagine that he was the most famous surgeon in London: to listen to him, it was easy.
“I think you might see her for just a minute this morning,” Black suggested. “Buck her up a bit....”
This was the third morning after the operation, and Ivor had not yet seen her. He had not asked to. She was in great pain, he was told. She had asked to see him several times, but it had been thought it might upset her as yet.
Now, at ten o’clock in the morning, he went into her room. Very dark and dim it was with its curtains drawn, and about it was that aggressively clean smell of a very serious sick room. Virginia’s eyes were closed. The nurse whispered to Ivor that she would go out for a moment, leaving the door a little ajar....
Ivor stood by the bed, stealthily, wondering what to do. He felt ashamed, somehow.... Virginia wasn’t asleep, she was in pain. In great pain. Her face was thin and gray and it was somehow screwed up, and her eyes were tightly screwed up. Then she opened them and stared at him, and he saw that her eyes were wet. His were, too. She moistened her lips with her tongue, staring at him with terribly hurt eyes. He murmured something.
“It hurts,” she whispered. “Frightful....”
Her forehead, where his lips touched her, was damp and hot. So damp....