Casting Off (67 page)

And now she was about to embark upon it.

‘Oh, yes, I really love him.’

And Charlie answered, ‘Then there is nothing to worry about. You’ve always been a worrier. Now you’ll have to learn to stop.’

He was waiting for her at the register office, with his younger brother and his wife who, with Charlie, were to be witnesses. They stood in the small office-like room, and then she laid her hand upon his black silk stump where his hand had been and they walked up to the registrar, who at once began the ceremony. It was over in minutes: he bent to kiss her, and then the others kissed her as well. Their names were signed, she signed her new name for the first time.

‘It was over so quickly,’ she said, as she walked with Hugh to his car.

‘But the really good, long part has just begun,’ he answered. He stopped in the street. ‘You’re not worrying about the Leaflets, are you? We can send them postcards tonight.’

‘I’m not worrying about anything at all,’ she said. ‘Nothing in the world.’ It was true.

‘Are you
sure
you don’t want us to go with you to the station?’

‘Absolutely sure.’

They were all three standing outside the restaurant where his parents had taken him for a farewell lunch. It had not been an easy occasion, but he had realized that it had been far more difficult for them than it was for him, and he had tried his best to keep things on an even keel. He had been calm about his father’s hostile ruminations about his future, and reassuring about his mother’s – he thought – irrelevant and frivolous anxieties on the same subject. He had deflected them by asking them about themselves, a worn trick that none the less worked with most people (another thing he had learned from Father Lancing). Also, talking about Polly’s wedding had been a distraction: his mother had enjoyed the whole thing enormously, and his father had been impressed that Gerald had a title. It was odd: his father, who had once been such a terrifying and dominant force in his life, was now of no real account; that he was also a snob struck him as just one more pathetic aspect. But at least he, Christopher, could not be bullied any more. There had been small incidents at the lunch. His father had offered him a drink, and when he had refused, had pressed him, had tried to
make
him have one whether he liked it or not. It was when his mother had intervened – ‘Oh, Raymond, can’t you see he really doesn’t want one?’ – that he was taken back to those innumerable times in his childhood when she had tried to protect him and had often made things far worse. He had looked at her then with a sudden affection: money, and disappointment with her husband (painfully apparent) had aged her; she had the look of haggard brightness that he could now associate with inner discontent. He felt sorry for her as well.

‘You’ll keep in touch, won’t you, darling?’ she was now saying again – she had said it several times during lunch.

‘I expect he’ll be back with us before you know where you are,’ his father said then. ‘Do you want a taxi?’

‘No, thanks. I’ll get a bus.’

‘What station are you going to? Because if it’s Victoria, we could give you a lift.’

‘It’s Marylebone, Mummy. I’m fine, really. Thank you very much for the splendid lunch. It was splendid,’ he repeated. He shook hands with his father, and put his arms around his mother’s bony shoulders. ‘Of course I’ll write to you. I’m not going to the ends of the earth, you know.’ He smiled and then kissed her as he saw her eyes fill with tears.

‘Darling! I do hope you will be happy. All right, at least?’

‘I shall.’

‘Come on, now,’ his father said. He put his arm round her protectively. ‘I’m going to take you to a nice film to take your mind off it.’

Everybody said goodbye again, and he turned and walked away down the street to the nearest bus stop. It was done.

On the bus that eventually went down Baker Street, he could not help thinking of Polly whom he had loved so much. After that weekend in the caravan, he had suffered
for
her as much as about her: she, too, was enduring the pain of unrequited love. When Oliver fell ill and, in the end, in spite of all the vet could do and his nursing, had had to be put down, he had returned from the vet with the body which he had buried in the wood behind the caravan. It felt as though he had lost his only friend. He had held Oliver in his arms for the last moments of his life, feeling his poor body, his ribs like a toast-rack, his fur dull and staring, and then Oliver had looked up at him, his brandy-snap eyes still glowing with entire trust and devotion as the vet put the needle in. Seconds later he felt the body go slack. He had managed not to cry until he had got Oliver in the back of the car.

The caravan seemed awful without Oliver. He mourned and withdrew from the Hursts who kept inviting him for meals.

Then one day, Mrs Hurst – Marge – asked him whether he would take an old infirm neighbour to church in the car. ‘Tom takes him usually, but he’s got a terrible cold. I don’t want him going out.’

So he did. He was a widower, a very old man with arthritis. All his movements were full of pain and he used crutches.

‘It’s good of you,’ he said. ‘I don’t like to miss my Sunday prayers.’

As he was in the church, he thought he might as well try to pray. He prayed for Oliver, and afterwards he felt calmer and much better about him.

That evening, he decided that he would take the plunge and ask Nora if he could be of any use in her establishment. Might as well try to be some use somewhere, had been what he had thought.

Yes, she would be delighted if he would come. There was plenty to do. ‘I’m run off my feet,’ she had written. ‘You could be a great help.’

It had not been at all what he had expected. He did not have to nurse people, Nora said, when she fetched him from the station, except for lifting them sometimes – her back had got quite bad doing it. ‘And there’s the garden,’ she added. ‘It would be wonderful if you could grow the vegetables. And you could talk to Richard sometimes. He gets rather bored because I’m so busy.’

It was Richard who shocked him. Outwardly, he looked much as he had at the wedding – a bit puffier in the face and his hair was thinner – but it was the rest of him, his frightful unhappiness, which it took time to perceive. To begin with, he thought that Richard was rather spoiled and peevish; he also seemed to take an almost infantile delight in irritating Nora. His main objects in life were to get cigarettes and smoke them when she was absent and to drink anything he could lay his hands on. He recruited Christopher to help him in both these ploys. ‘You don’t have to tell
her.
I only want a bit of fun, which, God knows, is in short supply in this place.’ When Nora discovered that he had been enlisted, she gave him a tremendous talking to. ‘It’s bad for Richard,’ she said. ‘People who can hardly move have trouble enough with their lungs anyway – and smoking would be the last straw.’ And ‘We simply cannot afford drink here. And it would really be most unfair if Richard had some and the others didn’t. I do want to be fair.’

So the next time that Richard asked him to buy cigarettes, he said he thought he should not, and explained why. He was naive enough to think that that would be that, but, of course, it wasn’t.

It was winter, and he spent a good part of the day sawing wood into logs for the communal day-room fire. One late afternoon, he went into the small sitting room that Nora kept for her and Richard’s use, with a basket of logs, and found him slumped sideways in his chair. It was in its usual position in a corner of the room so that he could look out of the window, which Nora said that he liked to do. When he went to help him upright, Richard said, ‘Been trying . . . no bloody good . . . not a thing I can do.’

Tears of frustration were rolling down his face, and mucus from his nose. Christopher got a paper handkerchief to mop him up.

‘Blow my nose,’ he said as, at the same time, they both heard Nora coming.

‘Goodness, it’s cold in here!’ she exclaimed. ‘Christopher, you might have kept the fire up. We don’t want poor Richard getting pneumonia.’ (He had just sneezed.)

‘I’ve only just got in,’ he said, as he knelt to make up the fire.

‘Soon it will be tea-time,’ Nora was saying. ‘Mrs Brown has made some lovely scones and there’s that rhubarb jam you like so much.’ Richard sneezed again. ‘Oh, darling! Are you getting one of your colds?’

‘Oh, I think I’m
aiming
at pneumonia,’ he answered, in the special tone, both childish and sardonic, that he used so often with her, and to which, Christopher had noticed, she seemed impervious.

‘Well,’ she said comfortably, ‘we’ll do everything we can to prevent that, but if you should get a touch, even of bronchitis, the doctor says there is a brilliant new drug that kills the bug off. So, there’s no need to worry. I’ll go and get the tea.’

When she had gone, Richard, without any expression, said, ‘I don’t
want
the bug killed off. I want to die. It’s about the only thing I do want.’ He had met Christopher’s eye at the end of saying this. There was no doubt that he meant exactly what he said, and Christopher was appalled.

He went and sat by him. ‘Isn’t there
anything
I can do?’

‘Well, you could help me to drink myself to death, which would be marginally more pleasant than pneumonia. I don’t think that Dr Gorley has a new drug to cure one of that. And I think there’s a fag left behind the books up there. You could light that for me. There’s just time before the Angel of Life returns with the exhilarating scones.’

He fetched the cigarette. It was the last in the small packet. He lit it for Richard and put it between his lips. He inhaled deeply and nodded for Christopher to remove it. Then he smiled. ‘You’re a good sort of chap, I know you are. One of the worst things about being me is other people knowing all the time what’s best for me. They don’t. I’ll be the judge of that. Another drag, please.

‘I begin to see what polar bears must feel like in a zoo,’ he said, after the second inhalation. ‘Trapped. Unable to do any of the things that normal polar bears would do if they weren’t kept prisoner. Of course, I’m supposed to have resources unavailable to bears so far as we know. Intellectual, spiritual resources – or so Father Lancing would say. But unfortunately,’ he smiled again and, for a second, Christopher saw how charming he must once have been, ‘they seem to have passed me by. I can’t even
read
. I’d be better off if I was a
dog
.’

At once he thought of Oliver’s death, of holding him while the fatal injection was delivered.

‘I think I see what you mean,’ he said, as he administered the cigarette for the third time. ‘She does
mean
well,’ he added: he felt sorry for Nora too.

‘Oh, yes. I don’t think,’ he said wearily, ‘that I ever forget
that
. One more drag. She’ll be back in a minute. And then put it in your mouth if you wouldn’t mind. She always smells the smoke, and she’ll think it’s you. Do you believe in God?’ he asked, after his last drag.

‘I’m – wondering about that.’

‘You’re an honest sort of chap, aren’t you?’

‘Do you?’

‘I do my damnedest not to. If he exists, and therefore is responsible for my condition, the implications are too bloody terrifying—’

‘Here we are!’ Nora barged open the door with the tray. ‘Oh, Christopher! It’s not very kind of you to smoke in front of Richard.’

‘Sorry.’ He threw the butt into the fire and caught Richard’s eye: he had been watching Christopher, and winked.

The next time he saw Father Lancing – he had taken to visiting him after supper sometimes – he told him about this occasion. ‘He is so desperately unhappy. When he told me he wanted to die, I could quite see why.’

‘Yes.’

‘And while I can see that Nora is wonderfully selfless, I do sometimes feel that she is wrong.’

‘Not incompatible.’ Father Lancing was packing his small black pipe.

‘And I can see why he doesn’t want to believe in God.’

‘So can I.’

‘Nora does. She once told me that her greatest comfort was being able to talk to God.’

There was a short silence. ‘You know, talk’s a fine thing but, when it comes to God, listening is probably more important.’ He was lighting his pipe. ‘That is partly what prayer is for. To indicate that you want to listen.’ Then he added ruminatively, ‘People are often dubbed selfless when they do things that we wouldn’t want to do. To be selfless is a high state. Most of us only manage it for a few minutes at a time.’

‘What can I do for them?’

‘Do you love them?’

He thought. ‘No, I don’t think I do. I just feel awfully
sorry
for them.’

‘Try to love them. Then you will have a far clearer idea of what to do.’

By the time this conversation took place, he knew Father Lancing quite well. Father Lancing brought communion to some of the inmates of the house, and there were one or two people who were able to be taken to church; Christopher was assigned this task by Nora soon after his arrival. He had been confirmed at school, but he had not gone to church – except for that one time in Sussex – since the end of his education. After a few weeks, Father Lancing suddenly asked him to tea, and he went. The priest lived in a large dank house with a small, silent housekeeper, who was like a wispy little ghost, he thought, since when she spoke, which was seldom, it was in a tiny high-pitched whisper. Father Lancing worked extremely hard: Christopher did not at first recognize that the invitation was squeezed between parish duties, and it did not occur to him to wonder why he had been asked; he innocently thought that his host must be lonely, living alone as he did, but he slowly became aware that this was not so: when he was not conducting services, he was visiting, going to meetings; he loved children and music and much of his energy was spent upon promoting his choir and helping the local elementary school with their outings and festivities. He was High Anglican and some people in the village did not like this, and journeyed to another church on Sundays, but his church was comfortably full and he heard confessions there twice a week. The first time that Christopher went to see him, Father Lancing asked what had brought him to Frensham, and he had explained about feeling useless after Oliver’s death, and wanting to be of some use to somebody. During those sessions, he was always encouraged to talk about himself, and quite soon he felt that Father Lancing knew more about him than anyone else and, soon after that, than
he
knew about himself.