Dying in the Wool (22 page)

He averted his eyes, mouth dry. ‘Thank you for sending the horse.’

‘Will you come into the water, Gregory?’

‘You have the advantage of me.’

‘I hoped I would.’

‘I don’t know your Christian name.’

‘Evelyn.’

‘Isn’t the tarn very cold, Evelyn?’

‘Bitterly.’

Monday, 21 August 1916

Gregory Grainger couldn’t sleep for thinking about
Evelyn Braithwaite, and their time together the day before. He was awake early enough to catch the first notes of the dawn chorus.

He had never known a woman like Evelyn, the way she glided from the water towards him, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, no rush or hurry about her. She had placed a picnic rug on the ground and stretched out on it to dry herself, drops of water from the tarn glistening on her pale body in the afternoon sunlight. She was slender. When she leaned forward, he noticed every sensational vertebra.

He’d said something clumsy and silly. ‘Are you a naturist?’ She seemed so at ease in her own skin.

She draped the towel around her shoulders and closed her eyes. ‘Yes. I’m a naturist. I believe myself to be completely alone. I’ve no idea that someone is watching me, and wondering …’ She hugged her knees.

Even then, fool that he was, he hesitated.

‘Your husband …’

‘This has nothing to do with him. I saw the way you looked at me in the Mechanics’ Institute, when you came to talk about the work of the hospital. There was an instant connection between us, a kind of magnetism. Don’t let it disappear in a smoke of words.’

He took a step towards her, and another.

She stretched out her hand and touched his thigh. ‘There will be only one rule.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Take off your bloody boots, man.’

He laughed then, and somehow knew it would be all right. Sitting down beside her, he tugged off his riding boots with difficulty, feeling awkward, like a boy. She moved her hand along his spine and, distractingly, hooked her thumb in the waist of his trousers. He placed his boots neatly, side by side, a little way off from the picnic blanket.

When he turned to look at her she lowered her eyes, just for a second, and the length of her lashes against her cheeks struck him as extraordinary.

She unbuttoned his shirt. ‘You and I will have a lot to learn from each other.’

He kissed her, tasting her mouth, then loosed his braces and took off his shirt. Her head rested against his chest so that he only had to lower his head to feel her hair against his cheek.

Her fingers touched the flies of his trousers, with an almost innocent lightness, as if she were checking the number of buttons. Even then, he could not stop the thoughts. How could she? With a son dead, and a husband about to be charged with attempted suicide.

‘Is this what’s meant by magnetism?’ she asked in a dreamy sort of voice.

‘That involves an electric charge, attraction and repulsion.’

Her fingers touched him again. ‘I think I can feel the electric charge.’

Moments later, they were naked, wrestling, struggling, in a hurry for their mouths to meet, for their bodies to be as close as it was possible to be.

She moaned as he penetrated her too quickly. And once was not enough. She made him lie beneath her, teasing him, coaxing him into submission until he could bear it no longer.

She kissed him gently, with a softness that did not seem meant for him.

When she broke free, she dressed quickly, with a shiver, telling him that he must give her a five-minute start so they would not be seen together.

He called after her as she galloped away, asking when he would see her again. The wind carried his words back to him. As he watched her ride to the horizon, he thought, she’s keeping emptiness at bay, just for a short while.

*

When he returned to Milton House, Grainger learned that Joshua Braithwaite had partaken of a small meal of soup and bread. He braced himself to see the man and tapped on his door. When no answer came, Grainger tapped again and called, ‘Mr Braithwaite! May I come in?’

Braithwaite was slumped in the chair, as if he had been dozing. He jerked into wakefulness.

‘Are you ready to talk yet, Mr Braithwaite?’ Grainger asked, feeling more kindly towards the man than he had earlier.

In the hospital uniform, Braithwaite appeared benign but when he spoke it was with controlled anger. ‘Aye, I’m ready to talk. Where’s my wife?’

At the very mention of Evelyn, a shudder ran through Grainger with such power that he half-expected Braithwaite to read his thoughts, to see the longing. ‘She did visit earlier …’

‘No she didn’t. I’ve seen no one but that daft copper and your dim orderlies.’

‘She called, but thought it best to leave you be.’

Braithwaite winced. ‘Did she now?’ His jaw tightened. ‘I might have known.’

Grainger had come further into the room. He wanted to sit on the end of the bed but that was not the right thing to do. If he was to have a consultation with Braithwaite, it should be done properly, and notes made.

‘I want to speak to my solicitor.’

‘I’ll speak to Constable Mitchell tomorrow. I’m sure contact can be arranged first thing in the morning.’

‘I want to speak to him now.’

‘It’s Sunday.’

Braithwaite did not know what day it was, but hid his surprise, saying, ‘Do you think I don’t know what day it is? You must have me down for a barm pot.’ He stood up. ‘Let me get to a telephone. I pay Murgatroyd enough that he’ll speak to me, Sunday or no Sunday.’

It seemed to Grainger to be a reasonable request. The man was first a suspected felon and only secondly a patient.

‘There’s a telephone in the hall.’

Without another word, Grainger led Braithwaite onto the landing and down the stairs. The telephone stood on a table, just near the consulting room door. Grainger went into his room, leaving the door ajar.

He listened as Braithwaite asked for a number, and waited, and waited. Braithwaite muttered a curse, clicked for a fresh line and asked for another number. This time, he was successful.

‘Put Miss Braithwaite on,’ he demanded. Then, ‘What do you mean, she’s not there? Where is she?’ After a pause, he said, ‘Yes. Yes. I forgot. If she comes, say her father needs to speak to her.’

He replaced the telephone.

Grainger came back into the hall, making it clear that he would escort Braithwaite upstairs.

‘If my daughter telephones …’

There was something almost plaintive in Braithwaite’s voice, and in the way he said ‘If my daughter telephones’, and not ‘when’, that Grainger simply nodded.

‘I’ll give instructions that you’re to be brought to the telephone straight away.’

‘I’d forgotten she’s off with the VAD. She sometimes gets home on Sundays. Such a mess,’ Braithwaite murmured to himself as he mounted the stairs, ‘such a damn mess and muddle.’

Grainger called after him. ‘Mr Braithwaite, you don’t have to talk to me today, but perhaps I could give you a physical examination – just to check that everything is all right.’

‘Everything’s not all right is it? Far from it. And you prodding and poking me won’t change that.’

*

That was Sunday. Now it was Monday morning. Grainger checked his clock. It was too early to call the servants. He went downstairs to the enormous kitchen. A scullery maid knelt by the range, setting chips of wood on rolled-up newspaper.

The orderly, Kellett, sat at the deal table drinking tea and smoking a cigarette. He stood up as Grainger entered.

‘Anything wrong, sir?’

‘I could murder a cup of tea.’

‘I’ll bring you one.’

‘I’ll have it here.’ Grainger sat down.

Kellett fetched a cup and poured. Grainger remembered that he had been on duty during the night.

‘Any disturbances?’

‘Peaceful as babes, doctor. Except for Mr Johnson having one of his bad dreams.’

Kellett was a man who did not need encouragement to talk. Grainger only half-listened, and then not at all. He was wondering how soon he could see Evelyn again, and how they would manage it.

He rang the Braithwaite house. A housekeeper or whoever answered the telephone put her on.

‘I wanted to thank you for yesterday, for sending the horse.’

It was important to be careful, he thought. You never knew what operator may be listening.

‘It was my pleasure,’ she said softly. ‘Did you enjoy the ride?’

‘Immensely.’

He should tell her that Braithwaite wanted to speak to her, but now he was conscious that the operator may be listening and if he started to speak about his charge in the same breath as a ‘thanks for the horse’, it could be misconstrued. As if she guessed his thoughts, she simply said, ‘I’m glad, Doctor. Thank you for telling me.’

In one more second, he would be cut off from her. All
in a rush he said, ‘Would it be possible for you to call at Milton House today?’

‘Of course.’

‘Say, three?’

‘Three.’

Kellett came to him moments later, saying that Mr Braithwaite needed to use the telephone and was complaining about his door being locked.

‘Escort him to the telephone,’ Grainger said. ‘And unlock his door.’ He would telephone Constable Mitchell and tell him that Milton House was a hospital, not a prison. If Mitchell wanted Braithwaite locked up, let him do it. But before he had time to do that, Johnson tapped on his door, agitated and wanting to talk.

Captain Johnson had dreamed vividly from childhood. He had a memory of being made to stay alone in the nursery while the family prepared to set off on holiday.

‘Get that child from underfoot,’ he remembered his father saying.

Last night Captain Johnson dreamed himself back in the nursery. Filthy mud turned his nursery to a trench. As guns roared above him, Johnson heard his family leaving the house, shutting the front door, going on holiday without him, and he knew that he would be left – abandoned and suffocating – in a trench whose sides were collapsing in on him, filling his mouth and nose with mud, blood and death.

Grainger listened. He made notes. He wished he hadn’t offered Johnson the chair that Evelyn had sat in. Was he being a fool? Johnson’s dreams held no great mystery, but Grainger could not resolve the meaning of his own yesterday. What meaning should he, would he, place on yesterday? She had seduced him, but was that because of what she called the magnetism between them, or was that her way of punishing Braithwaite?

She had said, ‘Don’t ask me to talk.’

Talking was what he dealt in, but she was right. Talk
would muddy the waters between him and her. Grainger had read
The Rainbow
. He and his fellow medics talked of D H Lawrence and of free love – sitting in the pub by St George’s. Women weren’t like that, at least not in Grainger’s experience. Now he had met Evelyn, he would never think that way again. She would colour the way he viewed the world, and womankind.

‘What did your mother say when your father said “Get that child from underfoot”?’ Grainger asked Johnson. It amazed him how it was possible to move in parallel along two quite discrete strands of thought.

Kellet was in the hall when Johnson went back to his room. Grainger saw him hovering by the door. He called him in.

‘How is Mr Braithwaite this morning, Kellett?’

‘Very quiet, Doctor.’

‘Is he asking to use the telephone?’

‘He has already.’

‘And?’

‘I believe he telephoned his solicitor but found him not available.’

‘I see. And any communication with his family?’

‘No, Doctor.’

‘Thank you.’

Grainger felt a pang of pity for the man, and annoyance with Constable Mitchell for leaving the matter in such an unsatisfactory way. He called Kellett back. ‘Ask Mr Braithwaite to come and see me in the consulting room.’

After a few moments Kellett returned.

‘He’s feeling distinctly down in the dumps, Doctor, and asks to be left alone. He’ll speak to no one until he can contact his solicitor.’

‘Very well.’

He had tried. No one could say he hadn’t tried.

At five minutes to three, he looked out of the window.
The garden wall was already casting a shadow on the vegetable plot. Evelyn Braithwaite would come to the front door of course, not this way.

Three minutes to three; one minute to three; three o’clock; she would not come. All the same, he closed the blind, to keep the sun from the room and to shade against prying eyes.

At five minutes past three, an orderly came to announce Mrs Braithwaite.

‘Please show her in.’

It seemed an age before the orderly returned, ushering her in, carrying something.

‘Stand it just there if you would,’ she said to the orderly, waving her hand towards the wall.