A Kind Man (10 page)

‘Tommy!’

But he was already at the gate.

‘Tommy, what are you doing?’

Then he was through the gate and closing it. He wore his old trousers with the belt he had had to notch in so many times, and the jacket that hung off him like an old garment on a scarecrow.

‘Let me be.’

‘You can’t … Where are you going?’

He looked at her, his face grave and kind and pale.
But his eyes were bright. The sunken look of the last weeks had quite gone.

‘I’ll be back in a while.’

She looked at him helplessly. ‘Did the doctor –’

‘The doctor said nothing. What was there to say?’

He smiled at her and turned away and Eve watched him walk steadily along the track, his stride careful, as if he was still not sure of his footing and whether his body would bear him. He did not look back. She watched him until he was way off, going towards the peak. It was a cool, grey morning and a thin cloud wreathed over it. She went to look at the chickens, bent to pull up a clump of dock leaves. Perhaps Bert or Mary was at one of the windows, watching her, watching Tommy, and as bewildered as she was. Was he bewildered himself? He had said almost nothing and Dr McElvey too, who had come down the stairs at last and slowly, his face furrowed, and gone out without a word other than ‘Goodbye, Eve’.

She felt as if a door had been slammed in her face. Something strange or terrible had happened – for she could not think of it in any other way, at least not yet – something that had thrown her into a confusion so that she was unsure even of the ground beneath her
feet. It was as though Tommy had wanted it hidden even from her.

She went in and saw the broken china in the sink and stared at it.

She doubted her own name.

Neither of them had slept. Tommy had not been able to lie still but had sat up, stood, paced about, gone down the stairs, and all the time, touching his hand to his stomach and then to his neck, his eyes huge, face pale.

She had asked what had happened over and over again and all he had said, once, was, ‘I was hot. There was the heat, like a furnace.’

‘But why should that take all the pain and swelling away? The medicine the doctor left –’

‘No.’ He spoke abruptly, as he had never done to her before. ‘It hasn’t to do with the medicine.’

She had not known what else to say. But when he had asked her to touch the swelling on the side of his jaw and to press her hand into his stomach she had done so. The swelling had gone, not leaving any shrunken skin or roughness, leaving nothing, as if it had never been there and his stomach was flat and smooth and the skin a healthy colour. When she had pressed and pressed even more firmly, he had not flinched.

‘I don’t understand what’s happening.’

Tommy had not replied.

She had cooked and he had eaten, more than he had eaten for a long time, though not as much as he used to put away, and drunk four cups of tea. He had been withdrawn and silent, not exactly his old self nor yet the one she had grown used to and had to look after. She ate a little though she had no appetite.

More than anything, she longed for something to be familiar and to be able to get a grasp on life. More than anything, she was frightened.

She wondered now how she could face the Ankerbys, what she might say that would make sense, and she decided there was nothing and so she hid from them. Yet she wanted someone to be with her so that she did not have only her own thoughts for company, thoughts that led to a sort of madness, for what else was all of this but a madness? Tommy had been sick to death. He had had a vast tumour in his stomach, a swelling on his jaw, pain and sickness. He had been wasted and exhausted, he had been unable to eat or drink. She had prepared herself for his dying, yesterday, today, not wanted him to die, but somehow needing to accept that it would happen. She had been so unprepared for the death of Jeannie Eliza that the shock had scarred her for the rest of her days, but this time she had some warning.

But what would happen now? Was he well after all? Would he be ill again tomorrow or next week? Was he still going to die soon? She did not know what she was preparing for, if anything, if anything. She poured a glass of water and sat at the kitchen table, staring into it, not thinking, not feeling, just staring, while Tommy had gone walking across the track that led to the peak and she could not know if he would return.

She half thought of going to see Dr McElvey, for perhaps he would be able to explain it all to her, would have an understanding of what had happened. But even as she stood up and went to comb her hair and get into her coat, she knew she could not go because the doctor knew nothing, understood nothing, or why had he run from the house that morning, ducking his head for fear of having to confront her, say something?

She sat down again.

In the house next door, Mary Ankerby said again that something had happened, something was not right. Bert did not reply, for what could be said?

Between the two houses was a strange fog of silence and bewilderment and neither the Ankerbys nor Eve could bring themselves to try and reach one another through it.

TOMMY WALKED
. His body felt light. He could lift his feet without effort and he had no pain or even much sensation in him. He did not think, but only exulted in his own steady, even pace across the track towards the peak and round the base to the other side.

His clothes felt loose upon him. The air touched the skin of his face and was cool.

He knew where he was going but not why. Eve was the one who went there now and had understood why he did not, even before the illness, but his legs would have taken him there today if they had been tied together.

He expected to be alone but as he approached the last few yards leading to the church he saw that two women were there, going among the gravestones and
peering at the inscriptions. Tommy stopped. He did not want to be pried upon, felt an odd shame for having come here, though he was angry at himself for there was no reason.

‘Tommy Carr?’

He remembered her dimly, though not her name, a friend of his mother’s from years back. She had sometimes come round.

He wanted to duck away but instead just went on standing until she came right up to him, a stout woman with a turn in her eye.

She stared into his face. ‘It is Tommy.’

‘It is.’

‘Well.’

She called out, without turning her head. ‘Come here, see who it is.’

He felt like one of the gravestones, being such an object of their attention. When the other woman approached, he knew her at once, Ivy Matlock, whose husband had been crushed by the steel beam coming loose from its winch and who had run all the way to the factory barefoot and screaming so that she had to be held back by three men, though she fought and even bit them.

‘Ivy.’

‘But you were dead – or at death’s door with it standing right ajar, Tommy Carr.’

‘And now look at you, walking out here.’ The other one spoke as if she were accusing him of some failing or even of a crime.

‘I’m fine,’ he said, and then moved to go past them, but they were not having it and blocked his way. He wanted to shove them aside with an anger he had rarely known. If he had moved he would have knocked them both down.

‘What, it was all lies then? And you perfectly fit?’

He did not have to explain anything to them and besides, he could not, he could not explain it to himself, yet he was stuttering something.

‘People will say anything.’

‘Why would I do that?’ he asked, amazed that they should think it. Why would he?

And then they let him pass them, though he felt their eyes on his back like needles, and all the time he was walking slowly to the grave he knew they had not moved but only went on watching him.

Jeannie Eliza Carr

Aged 3 years

Beloved daughter

He touched the stone tenderly. The wind blew across the hill with the sweet smell of the land on it.

Whatever he had wanted to find, he found it then.

The strangeness and bewilderment and confusion fell away and he was left as if he had been rinsed in clear water. He remembered the child pattering behind him down the path, taking his hand and laughing, remembered not with sadness but with a strange feeling of rightness and content. He could not understand any of it, but now that seemed not to matter. What had happened to them both had happened and that was all.

Something fell into place but he did not know what or where.

Something righted itself that had been out of true but he did not know how.

Behind him, the two women spoke in low voices but he no longer minded them.

The wind moved the grass beside the child’s grave.

In his surgery, the doctor attended to his patients diligently, listening, diagnosing, prescribing, bandaging, stitching, reassuring, and not one of them knew that his mind was elsewhere and not on them but on Tommy Carr. When the last woman and her children had trailed out into the street and he was tidying away the instruments and putting them in the steriliser, ordering the pharmacy shelves, setting the notes straight, he went over and over what he had seen,
what had happened, and faced only bewilderment. He had no doubt at all that Tommy had been days or even hours from death, that he had had a cancer eating away his intestines and seeding itself throughout his body and bursting out in another swelling on his neck. No doubt. He would have gone to his grave without doubt, gone before the Coroner without doubt, been judged on his own certainty.

Yet the man he had seen early that morning had no tumours and though still thin and a little weak, was no longer a few breaths from his death.

Such things did not happen. He himself did not make such mistakes. He had known improvement, even cure with this terrible disease, but not like this because this was impossible.

It troubled him greatly. It undermined his confidence, in himself and in medicine. He felt as if he were trying to walk on shifting sands and sinking.

He had visits to make and then another surgery. By early afternoon he had begun to be sure that Tommy Carr would fall ill again and that the swellings would be as they had been and death pushing open the door. If he had not been sure of it, he fancied that he would have gone mad.

The sense of rightness and quiet stayed with Tommy as he walked steadily back from the churchyard,
watched as far as they could see him by the two women, but quite unworried by that now.

He would make the tea for Eve, the first time he had been able to turn his hand to help her in the house for so long, and the next day he would be up and off to work early as always and perhaps there would be an end to it.

But when he reached the house he found it empty and silent. He took off his boots and called out but there was no one, until Eve came running to the back door, her face crumpled with anxiety.

‘Oh,’ she said, letting it out like a sigh, as if it had been pent up within her. ‘Oh.’

And then, ‘I was afraid you would never come back.’

‘Why should you think it? Of course I came back.’

‘I can’t ask you to go out again but I must, I need to fetch the doctor to Mary. She’s lying on the ground where Bert found her when he came in from the garden. He has to stay with her. I’ll tell him you’re back.’

Tommy followed her into 5 The Cottages. He saw Bert Ankerby first, his huge frame in the old flannel shirt bent over Mary, whose head flopped over to one side like a cloth doll, one leg bent.

‘Mary,’ Bert said. ‘Come on, Mary. Come on, girl.’

Tommy went closer.

‘Should we move her, lift her onto the settee, put
a cushion under her head?’ Eve said. ‘She’s on the cold stone, it can’t be right for her like that.’

‘Mary, come on, girl.’ Bert had one of her hands between his, chafing it. He looked up at Tommy but hardly seemed to see him.

Tommy bent down. He had seen death before and this was not death but she was pale as wax and very still.

‘She’s not one for fainting,’ Bert said, his voice full of bewilderment. ‘She’s a strong one, Mary.’

‘Should we try and lift her?’ Eve said again.

‘It might be best,’ Tommy said. ‘Lay her down more comfortably. She could come to harm there.’

He reached out his hand to touch Mary’s arm, but as he did so, he almost pulled it sharply back, as if electricity had shot through him. He felt the current of it coming from his hand and passing to Mary.

They lifted her onto the couch and Bert fetched a woollen rug and draped it carefully over her.

She pushed it away, her eyes wide open, struggling to sit up.

‘Mary,’ Bert said. ‘I said you were a strong one, Mary.’

‘You’ll make yourself faint,’ Eve said. ‘Put your head back again, Mary, you’re not well.’

Tommy stood watching. He did not know what had happened to Mary Ankerby, but it seemed like
a stroke or a fit and she had not been conscious, her face had been drained of blood. Bert said she had talked strangely, as if her words wouldn’t come out right and then she had fallen and not moved or spoken again. ‘I rubbed her hands and said her name only she couldn’t hear me,’ he said again and again now, ‘she couldn’t hear me.’