I was resting in the afternoon. They had drawn the curtains and put me to sleep, but I was not asleep. I heard the front door bell, and heard the door open, but I did not know it was Hugo, and they sent him away.
They did not know him, of course, they did not know who he was; and they told him I was resting and could not be disturbed; it was too soon too to see visitors, the nurse said, he must come again in a few days.
And Hugo went away.
‘Tell her that I came,’ he said. ‘Give her my love.’
He did not come again in a few days, for he was down at Yearsly all that week and half the next, and then he was sent for to go back to France; his leave was cut short by four days, and he could not come again.
XIX
I must have been in a foolish state those first weeks after Rachel was born. I don’t believe I was ill really, but I felt very ill; and things worried me that should not have worried me at all.
I got bothered again about the bathroom; about the paint coming off the bath, and the wall that was dirty where the cedar mop hung up. I kept thinking about that bathroom over and over again; I could not get away from it. I thought how nice it would be to have another bathroom; all white tiles with nickel taps and glass shelves, like bathrooms I had seen in shops. I had never lived with a bathroom like that, for at Yearsly the bath was a big old-fashioned one in a wooden casing, and at Campden Hill Square it was the same. I don’t know why this got into my head, or why it stayed there, but it became an obsession. I kept planning how it would be, and where the glass shelf would be, and how many white tiles would be needed, though I knew, of course, that it could not be done; even if we had the money to spend, our bathroom was not big enough to be like the one I planned; but it kept me from thinking of the War, and about Hugo, and Guy, and George; it kept me also from thinking about getting up again with two babies to look after instead of one, and Mrs. Sebright gone away.
Walter found me crying one day when he came in to see me, and he asked me what was the matter, and I said that I did not like the bathroom, and the paint peeling off the bottom of the bath. That sounded so silly, that it made me cry more.
‘And the wall is all grey behind the mop,’ I said.