A Kind Man (9 page)

He touched the swelling on Tommy’s neck. It was harder but not larger. He pulled the bedclothes down gently. The swelling in his stomach was huge,
as if the man were with child. He gave a slight whimper.

‘I can give you something to help now.’

‘There’s only a spoonful left of the medicine he brought back,’ Eve said. ‘It seemed as if it helped him just a little.’

‘He needs something stronger to ease him now.’

‘It won’t harm him?’

He turned to look at her anxious face in the dimly lit room and looking, remembered the death of Jeannie Eliza. So this was the next blow she had to bear.

‘No, Eve. It will ease him and help him sleep. Nothing more.’ He set his bag on the dressing table and hesitated, wondering whether he should draw up a syringe or simply give a greater strength by tablet.

Tommy made a sound and started trying to sit up but could not. Eve wiped his brow with a clean folded handkerchief.

‘Try and keep him covered. He’ll feel cold.’

He counted a dozen tablets into the box. ‘He should have two of these soon, when he can drink them down. He should sleep then.’

He looked at Eve and saw the unspoken question on her face.

‘You try to rest yourself now.’

She led him down the stairs but at the door she turned. ‘Is there nothing you can do for him? Can nobody?’

‘Ah, Eve. You can do the most, you know that. Being with him, making sure he’s comfortable. That’ll be all he wants, to have you with him.’

‘It’s hard.’

‘It is.’

‘And harder knowing …’

He waited, but she shook her head and lifted the latch to open the door. It was raining a little on the breeze.

‘I’ll come by tomorrow.’ Dr McElvey touched her arm.

He would, but whether to see Tommy Carr alive again was another matter.

NIGHT CAME
. Tommy lay quietly except that he groaned once or twice and once cried out suddenly when he tried to turn over. Eve got a second blanket and laid it over him, but his hands and face felt cold to the touch and now and again he shivered violently.

He took the tablets, sipping the water from the cup she held close to his mouth. His skin was dry and thin as tissue.

But a little while afterwards he slept and then she lay down beside him, though still dressed, and reached out to touch his hand for comfort. Cold. There was no moon and she had left the window a little open so that the curtain moved occasionally and she could smell the damp earth and the rain on the wind.

What would she do? Would she stay here? She could
not think of herself being anywhere else, could not bear it, but it was Tommy’s wage that paid the rent. Well then, she would have to work, though where or at what she had no idea. There were few jobs and she had no skills or none that anyone would pay much for.

She caught herself. ‘I am thinking as if he were dead. He is not dead.’

But it would not be long. It could not be.

And then she slept, lightly, but it helped her and she did not dream, but was just aware of the curtain blowing and of Tommy’s cold hand.

She woke because he had said something, and when she turned, she realised that he was sitting up.

‘Tommy?’

‘Oh, Eve, would you open the window?’

‘It is open.’

‘I’m so hot. Can you open it a little more? I feel I’m burning. I woke with it. It’s as if you’d opened the lid of the range and set me beside it.’

She reached out to him and felt his skin, but even before she touched it she could feel the warmth coming off him.

She switched on the lamp, got out of bed and drew one curtain back, but she was afraid to let in more cool air in case he took a chill and pneumonia.

Now he had pushed back the bedclothes and unbuttoned his pyjama jacket.

‘Tommy, try not to do that, you could catch a bad cold. Are you thirsty?’

‘Maybe some water would help cool me? I was so cold before. I slept well, the pain was better.’

‘Those tablets the doctor brought … he said they were stronger. That’s good you slept so peacefully.’

‘I
was
peaceful. That’s the right word. I feel peaceful now. As if this warmth were going right through to my bones, right through my body – it’s like sitting in the sun.’

Eve looked at him. There was something in his face, something about him that had changed. His face looked less ghostly, his eyes less sunken into his head and pain-filled.

She went down into the quiet kitchen and opened the back door and the soft sound of the rain on the grass was like a balm. She ran her hands under the cold water.

Perhaps this was what happened sometimes, nearer to death? The cold and then the sudden feeling of heat, the last alertness before the mind clouded again? She did not know. Death seemed to take so many forms. But if he had a little while of calm and ease she would be thankful for it. She drank a little of the water herself and it tasted of the spring from
which it came up on the peak, cold and clear and sweet.

He took the beaker from her in steady hands and drank it slowly down to the last.

‘Ah, Eve, that’s the most wonderful drink I ever drank.’

His voice was so heartfelt that she laughed. ‘It’s only water.’

‘I never tasted water like it.’

‘Are you still so hot?’

‘Not so much.’

‘How’s your stomach? Do you need any medicine again?’

He leaned forward a little. ‘It’s not painful now.’

‘Those tablets must last a long time then. Only tell me if you need more.’

He lay down on his back. ‘It was like being in the sun. The heat of it.’

‘Maybe that was the tablets as well.’

‘Maybe, but I know it’s better being warm than cold.’

‘How are you now?’

He paused, as if checking himself carefully. Then he said, ‘Tired. As if I fought the war and all on my own.’

This time, she undressed before she lay down. She had been terrified that she might have to go and get
Bert to fetch the doctor, or bring Mary in to be with her, she had believed he would die at any minute, but as he seemed quieter, and his pain had eased for now, perhaps she could sleep better herself.

She switched off the lamp and reached to him again. His skin felt as it always used to feel.

‘You were so hot I could have dried the washing by putting it by you,’ she said.

‘Yes. How long did it last, Eve? Feeling so warm.’

‘I know it woke you and you were pushing the clothes off trying to get cooler. But I don’t think it was long. Like a sudden fever.’

‘And it burned itself out.’

‘Yes,’ she said. And remembered, as she knew that he remembered. But his illness and Jeannie Eliza’s had been quite different.

She felt his body go heavy as sleep came over him and so, after a little while, she herself slept too, to the gentle patting of the rain and the soft movement of the curtain.

She slipped out of bed and downstairs before six. Tommy was very still.

The rain was over and the sky clear, but when she opened the door onto the garden and the first clucking sounds of the chickens, she could still smell the dampness on leaf and grass and earth and see how it had
brought out the fresh green in everything. She filled the pan and took it down to the birds.

She liked this time alone and felt better for sleeping, but in her mind was only the worry of how Tommy would be when he woke, whether his pain would have come back and increased, whether he would again be cold as stone or burning hot. How much longer he would go on living. She had thought he would die the previous night and so did the doctor, she had told that from everything he had said, the look on him, the way he had touched her arm. How could you go on waiting for someone to die, knowing that they surely would, but not knowing when? How could any person?

It was so quiet when she went back into the house that rather than disturb Tommy’s sleep she riddled out the range and filled it, set the kettle on and took one of the warm eggs she had just picked up from the straw and put it on to boil. She felt guilty, enjoying all of it, the quiet movements, the small sounds, the smell of the air coming through the open door, but she needed the time to gather her strength again, for who knew what was to come that day.

Upstairs, Tommy woke. For a moment, after he opened his eyes, he was troubled, sensing something different and strange and not understanding what it was. Eve had gone down. The house was quiet, but
then he heard the sound of the spoon scraping against the tin and the hens clucking in their scramble for the food. He lay still. He had no pain. He felt quite at ease and when he moved, first his limbs and then his body, there was still no pain or even the discomfort he had grown used to over the past months. He put his hand up and touched his finger to the swelling under his neck which had been hard and giving him such pain to breathe and swallow, though he had said little about it to Eve, not wanting to worry her more. But Dr McElvey had felt it and known.

The swelling was no longer there. He had the wrong side, then, and moved his hand to the right but there had never been any swelling on the right and there was none now. Back again. Feel. Up. Down. Left. Right.

Nothing. His jaw and face and neck were as they had used to be, though he was rough for want of a shave.

Nothing.

He moved his hands down to his belly which had been swollen and which he had barely been able to touch, the pain of it had been so great. Now he felt nothing at all but his finger on the skin. One finger. Two. He traced them slowly across. Three and then the palm of his hand. He put the smallest amount of pressure he could, then a little more, and then more,
until he was able to push down quite far. No pain. Nothing. His stomach was flat and smooth. As it had always been.

As it had been.

He sat up, bracing himself, as he had done for so long, against the immediate pain, but his body moved quite easily in the old way. He took a breath, then a deeper one, filled his lungs full, full, held his breath and let it go with a great explosion so that he gasped. But there was no pain.

He lay back and closed his eyes, not understanding any of it, and then he heard voices in the room below, Eve’s quiet one and that of a man. Bert Ankerby must have come to see what he could do to help her with the heavy jobs, as he had been doing for the past week or more and which had made Tommy ashamed, for Bert was in his seventies and he himself a young man and always proud of his strength.

Footsteps on the stairs.

Dr McElvey sometimes lost sleep over a patient and he had lost most of the previous night worrying about Tommy Carr, anxious for him not to linger, concerned about the level of pain he would have to endure, angry that there was no more he could do for the man other than start to administer his medicine via injection and to give higher doses. Life was hard for everyone
in this town now that this works and that had closed and there was no prospect of other employment, that men and women struggled on pence and tried and so often failed to retain some dignity, that children were born into houses where poverty and misery and dirt and sickness and hunger were the norm.

He did what he could and it was always too little and there were plenty of others in pain, the same pain as Tommy Carr or a different one, it scarcely mattered, and the hospital wards were crammed full. But because of Jeannie Eliza and because of something about the couple and about the home they had, out of the way and contented and calm, because of things he himself did not fully grasp, the doctor felt acutely for them and when he could no longer bear to lie trying and failing to sleep, he had come out to them early. As he drove towards 6 The Cottages, he was leaden-hearted, sure that he would find Tommy dead or near to death, dreading to look into Eve’s face. He shocked himself. He was a doctor. He tried to cure and comfort his patients and to treat them kindly, but he had never become close to any one of them, never been touched deep in his own heart as he was touched now.

Eve was tending to the chickens.

‘I woke so early. Tommy is asleep now. It’s very good of you to come here again to us.’

He said nothing more about payment, not wanting to hurt her pride, but it would be on her mind, he knew. He tried to keep his charges modest, but he had been to the house and seen Tommy at the surgery, there were the medicines. She knew there had to be a bill she would struggle to pay.

‘Can I pour you some tea, Doctor? I’m making fresh for myself. Tommy can’t manage hot things. He finds it hard even to swallow cold water.’

‘I’ll go to him first and then a cup of tea would be very welcome, thank you. You stay here, finish your jobs. I know my way up, Eve.’

He went up and into the bedroom and stopped dead. The curtains were drawn back, the window open, and Tommy was standing beside it, both arms outstretched, head back, taking in lungfuls of air.

EVE LOOKED
up. Her hands were shaking and her mind was a jumble of fears and bewilderment so that when she saw him she dropped a cup into the stone sink, smashing it. She flew out of the door, down the path.