A Kind Man (11 page)

Mary lay back, a little colour coming into her face now, the woollen blanket on the floor.

‘Shall I get you a drink of water, Mary?’

But Eve was already bringing it and sitting beside her to raise her head, help her drink.

Mary took almost half the cup and then looked around, as if the room were unfamiliar and she was trying to work out where she was, who they were.

‘Should I still go for the doctor?’

‘Who wants a doctor?’ Mary asked. ‘I had a turn, that’s all. People have them. Why would I need a doctor for that?’

Eve looked round uncertainly.

But Tommy had gone, back to their own house, back, dragging himself as if he were filled with sand, slowly, slowly up the stairs and into the bedroom. Taking off his jacket and boots again was harder than a day’s work, harder than any walk home in the face of a gale. He lay down and slept at once, an exhausted, drowning, dreamless sleep, and did not wake for nine hours.

WORD WENT
round as word does, word of what had happened to Tommy Carr and of what Tommy Carr had done, though where the word first came from who could say. And word changed and grew extremities.

Dr McElvey was asked by a dozen patients a day about Tommy Carr and a dozen about Mary Ankerby, and word was passed to him as he went into houses and treated patients and listened and nodded but said nothing.

Tommy woke heavy-headed but still early and got up as he had always done, to riddle the ashes and fill the range and set the kettle on to boil.

‘You surely can’t be right to go back to work,’ Eve said. But he smiled and tied his bootlaces and set off
and as she watched him walk away she could hardly remember how it had been with him only a couple of days before. He looked as usual.

Mary, coming down the path with a tin of scraps for Eve’s chickens, seemed quite as usual too, passing the tin across the fence, looking at the rain clouds building behind the peak, her face as bright as always. Eve could make no sense of it.

The staring began as he joined the rest of them walking in twos and fours towards the works. Nothing was said, a few nodded, and yet he could hear the whispers like smoke on the air. He felt as if he had committed some terrible crime and been found out, felt like a victim of the plague, felt like a leper among his old colleagues and friends. They moved slightly away. Tommy thought, they did that to witches.

But once in the works he could get on with the jobs in hand and the din of the machines meant no one could ask him questions. But they could still look and from time to time catch one another’s eye. Yet over days they would have got used to him again and soon enough it would be forgotten, because there would be some other thing, as there always was, some death or birth or accident or shame.

At twelve thirty he went out to drink his can of tea
and eat the food he had packed for himself, and those who had gone at twelve returned to the din inside. He heard it but not first. Others who were on their way in heard it but the thud was muffled by the wooden doors. Then the doors opened and the shouting started, men and women, voices, names, cries for help. He rushed in with several others, dropping their food and running.

One of the twelve o’clocks had tripped and fallen and in falling, a pile of the huge, heavy metal pallets set against the wall waiting to be lifted, had come down and pinned the man by the chest. His face was swollen and turning black, his eyes bulging.

They heaved off the trays frantically, six or seven men at once, and it needed that many, the trays were solid, but it took time to reach the last, they had fallen on top of one another anyhow.

The machines were still running, they could only see the man, not hear him moaning and then falling silent, in the din.

Tommy was on the end of the last beam as they dragged it off the man.

‘George Crab,’ someone said, though it had to be read on his lips through the noise.

Another had run across the yard to the offices where there was a telephone, someone else running to the doctor’s surgery.

There was blood coming from the man’s nose and ears, and his bulging eyes were bloodshot. His arm was bent awkwardly backwards and one leg was twisted over. Someone knelt down and put his head to him to try to tell if his heart was beating.

And then, quite suddenly, as if it were the end of the day, the machines juddered and fell silent and there was only the faint ticking of the metal as it settled and began to cool.

The air seethed with dust. They heard their own breathing.

‘He’s dead, he’s dead,’ one of the women shouted. ‘It’s Ellen Crab’s man, someone go for her.’

But the man who had put his head on George Crab’s chest looked up, shaking his head.

‘His heart’s beating all right.’

‘Only look at the state of him.’

George Crab moaned, the sound seeming pushed out of his ribcage. The fresh blood trickled out of the corner of his mouth.

‘Go for Ellen.’

Tommy Carr was standing at the man’s right side, where he had helped to pull off the last metal strut, and as he stood, he felt the heat flood through his body, down from his head and out as if from his heart, and without knowing what he did, he knelt and touched George Crab, first with his right hand then
with his left and kept his left hand there on the man’s coarse cotton overall.

‘Has someone run for Ellen?’

‘No, poor woman, leave her, she shouldn’t see him in this way, leave her to see him in the hospital.’

‘He’ll be a dead man by then.’

‘His heart was beating, I felt his heart.’

Tommy stayed quite still, the heat coming off him as if he had come out of a fire.

George Crab let out the soft moan again, but then there was the sound of the siren and the urgent voices shouting and the clang of the gates opening.

Tommy got to his feet and almost fell, his legs too weak to bear him. He reached out and clutched one of the wooden pillars and leaned against it.

No one paid him any attention. The footsteps came clattering up the iron stairs. Tommy took a couple of breaths and moved away and then there were the men in blue serge and caps and a stretcher and people saying this, saying that, telling, contradicting.

From the far end of the long room, he watched them carry George Crab away.

Gradually the machines started up and people went silently back to them, gradually things settled to normal, except that no one laughed across a machine
at someone else or made a gesture, waved their arms in some joking sign, and when they went for the afternoon breaks, they sat on the iron stairs or the ledge outside the machine room and drank silently, not meeting one another’s eyes. They had seen George Crab, seen the blood trickle and the way his chest had looked caved in and even though his heart had been beating they had no thought that he could be alive, or if his heart still managed to pump, then alive for long.

Tommy worked through the afternoon in a daze of exhaustion. People glanced in his direction and away. He was one of them and yet apart, and still a pariah because of what they had heard. They preferred to think about George Crab.

Just as the machines began to shut down at six, word came that he was not dead but terribly injured and that Ellen Crab had been fetched to the hospital. People shook their heads and took off aprons and overalls, lifted jackets and scarves and caps down from the pegs and went home quietly and the air and dust settled in the long room as the door closed.

THE WEATHER
changed and the sun shone. At midnight, Eve sat on the back step looking at the moonlit garden and the air was still warm, the sky pinpricked all over with bright stars. Bert Ankerby had told her what he knew of the names in the sky – the Bear, the Pleiades, Cassiopeia – and now she tried to pick them out on her own but it was only a pattern and confusion again.

Somewhere on the far side of the field a fox barked.

Tommy was sound asleep in the same way he always slept now, heavy as a stone, never seeming to stir and sometimes scarcely to breathe. He slept like it from the moment he lay down.

The past few weeks had been the strangest he had ever known. He walked off in the morning as usual
and for the couple of miles that he was alone he felt free and light of heart, things might almost have been as they used to be. He looked ahead to when he could make out the chimneys and gantries of the works and the smoke and the dust stained the sky, and at once, he changed, he felt anxious and wanted to shrink away, to turn back, to slink close to the walls and fade into them. People saw him. People looked and looked away, or glanced to one another, though plenty peered at him, said this word or that before moving on swiftly.

Strangely, once he went in through the gates of the works he could lose himself among the others and then he felt safe. They worked with him, they had talked themselves dry about him and perhaps there was nothing more to be said. But he knew that the calm could not last and all the time he was working, or sitting out in the sun on the iron staircase or the flat roof during his breaks, he felt uneasily that he would not be left alone like this, that something else would happen to turn his unsteady world upside down again.

George Crab had arrived at the hospital half dead yet with the life reviving in him minute by minute. His wife Ellen had come, her face stained with tears and her eyes full of fear, but when she had seen him sitting up, had said they had no right to try and prepare her
for the worst when he was nowhere near death, anyone could see. He was a good colour, he looked himself, apart from a graze on his brow.

‘They said you were crushed by the metal racks.’

‘I don’t recall.’

‘They fell on your legs and chest and half crushed you to death, you could barely breathe, you had blood coming from you.’

‘I knew I was dying.’

‘You cannot have been.’

George shook his head. He spoke the truth when he said he could not recall but he recalled the terrible pain over his heart pressing the breath out of him and the feeling as if a knife were cutting down on his leg. He recalled a man’s head bent close to his own, as if he were listening. He had seen blackness and then a terrible redness in front of his eyes and nothing had been clear to him, he could not make out where he was or why.

But then he had felt a few seconds of searing heat, as if they had opened one of the furnaces close to him so that it seemed the whole place was on fire. After that, there had been no pain only a lightness and the desire to sleep and the name of Tommy Carr on his lips.

He had opened his eyes and seen the sky tip from side to side and thought that he was falling forwards
but now he realised that he had been carried on a stretcher down the iron staircase.

That was all. He had closed his eyes and slept.

He had tried to sort out words to talk to Ellen about it and the nurse or the doctor, but there did not seem to be words and when a few came out they shushed him, though kindly, so he had fallen silent and let himself drift back to sleep. When he woke next the blinds had been drawn down against the windows and he had a terrible thirst. They brought him a pitcher of water and he drank it all but did not try to say anything else.

They had wanted to keep him in the hospital but he was having none of it, he was fit. He got out of the bed and walked up and down to prove it to them, so that they let him go, striding out through the doors into the street with Ellen a step behind.

Word was fire and raced round town as it had done before and no one knew what to make of any of it, or what to do or say, and so George Crab was feted and clapped on the back and Tommy Carr was left alone, for you never knew.

It had taken Tommy a long time to walk home one night and when Eve saw him from the window her heart turned because he looked as he had looked before, his shoulders bent, his head down. But he
came into the house with a light enough step and she saw that he was not as he had been, he was stronger, and although he would never be a stout man he had lost the terrible thinness, his belt was fastened a few notches looser.

But she asked ‘Tommy?’ as he sat down, for there was surely something. Something.

He shook his head.

‘Has something happened? Has something been said? Are you not well?’

‘I’m fine, Eve.’

‘No.’

But he would not say more, only asked about one or two things to do with the garden and the new rabbits and the way of the world and she knew she should wait. Tommy did things and said things in his own time or not at all.

He walked to the bottom of the garden and looked over the fields and walked back, stopping to look at this or that, but she saw that he was struggling to make sense of things from the way he frowned and seemed to be absent from himself.

And then he did tell her, as she went about gathering the last scraps for the chickens.

‘Would the man have died?’

He shook his head. ‘Who knows the answer to that? Not me. I know nothing.’

‘And you’ve done nothing.’

‘Have I not?’

‘Nothing wrong, surely to God.’