“I don’t see much sense in it,” Virginia said to the doctor and Ian Black, “being moved from a bed to a sofa—and a nursing-home sofa at that! Why can’t I sit up in a chair?”
“Taking no risks,” said Ian Black, who was going to Scotland that afternoon. The doctor nodded.
“You are being beastly to me,” Virginia told Ian Black steadily, “because you have a reputation to keep up. What would have happened to me, I’d like to know, if I hadn’t happened to be a rich woman and been able to afford all this care? Suppose I’d been very poor?”
“You’d have died,” said Ian Black. The doctor looked thoughtful.
August rained. It rained, in London, from its beginning until its middle, and then it hesitated a while. It was during that while that Virginia was moved to her house in Belgrave Square—“the mausoleum” which she so hated. But, at the nursing-home, they were glad of the August rain. “One always really knows,” Virginia said, “that one isn’t missing anything by not going away. But one likes to be certain.”
The gloom had passed off Ivor quickly. “Nerves,” he had explained to Virginia, and neither had referred to it since; each secretly feeling that they had walked into, and a little way up, a strange by-path, and had then come running out again. But now, as often as not, Virginia told her nurse to say she was asleep when Tarlyon called.
One day she told Ivor that she was to be moved to the “mausoleum” the day after next.
“I’m to be allowed to drive for an hour or so every day,” she told him. “But I mustn’t go out at night just yet, the doctor said, especially as it’s so damp. We have, however, our own ideas about that....”
“Having stayed in the mausoleum for ten days,” she said, “we will have a tremendous dinner at the Mont Agel. And then we will go away somewhere to get fat and strong. At least I will get all that and you will watch me.”
“And where, Virginia?” Places simply didn’t matter to Ivor: people were important.