by Susan Hill
But when she got there, and found Tommy gone and the letter from Mr Arnold on the table, and the kitchen bright with sunlight, then she cried, for Miriam’s unloved brood of boys and for the death of her own child, and for the empty house. If she had not known quite surely that it would be wrong, she would have gone straight back and fetched Arthur George and had him for company and, she realised suddenly, to fill the silent space that indeed Jeannie Eliza had left.
The air was heavy with sulphurous clouds gathering like a boil over the peak. She sat on the step as Miriam’s boys had done, and finding a few stones around her feet made them into a small pile and moved them into lines and rings and squares. Before long she would have to scrat around in the dry soil for any last potatoes, though she had done so already for days and found none. The carrots were shrivelled and full of holes, the marrows small and hollow. Rain would come now but it was too late to save anything.
Bert Ankerby came down his own path whistling. No man was more cheerful, day in, day out and no matter what.
She scooped the stones up in the hollow of her hand and tipped them out again to see how they would fall, did so again, and then again. Thunder rumbled in the distance and the sky darkened.
23
THE STORM broke as he walked from the bus, so that he arrived at the door with his clothes soaking wet and his boots, which he had tried to patch and mend himself, letting in the rain.
It was not Mr Arnold who opened the door but a servant, who looked at Tommy with disdain before leading him to a back room to take off his wet things. He handed him an old gardening jacket and a pair of rubber boots. Tommy felt embarrassed under the man’s scrutiny, ashamed when his clothes were taken away to be dried while he was led back into the hall.
It was empty. The man disappeared on silent feet. He heard the murmur of voices from a room nearby. The sky beyond the two long windows was blue-black and once or twice lightning zigzagged down it and with the thunder seemed about to crack it open, like a fissure running down a rock.
And then Mr Arnold came across the hall.
‘Will you come through? My daughter is away but I know she would wish me to give you her greeting. She is quite well, quite well. We cannot thank you enough.’
‘You need not.’
Mr Arnold lowered his voice. ‘You did not cash my cheque. It troubles me that you have gone without any reward.’
‘I want none.’
He was anxious to dismiss the subject, as always feeling fraudulent when he was thanked or people tried to pay him in whatever way.
They went into a small bright sitting room with windows onto the side lawn.
‘My mother.’ Arnold gestured to an old woman, small and frail as a bird, who watched the storm from a straight-backed chair. She had a puff of fine white hair like the head of a dandelion, the pink of her scalp showing beneath it.
‘Mr Carr?’
Tommy nodded. He felt a stranger to himself, standing in this elegant room wearing a garden jacket and boots that were not his own.
‘Are you in pain?’
Her eyes were bright, her skin papery pale as the discs of honesty.
She nodded and put out her hands to him. The joints were swollen, shining and horribly bent.
‘I can only give you what I give to everyone. I don’t know how or what it is but it seems to be of help to people. I will hold my hands out to you and you take the heat from them into yourself. Nothing else.’
She nodded.
He reached out and took her hands and held them lightly in his own.
The storm was drifting away, the room was lighter, with rain on the windows.
People asked him if he prayed but he did not and he thought of nothing, he merely touched and felt the heat flow from him. Nothing else. Nothing more.
Tommy held the small hands in his own and after a moment the heat rose through him until he was burning. He saw Mrs Arnold’s eyes widen with surprise and she stared down at their hands as if she might see fire.
The heat faded, seeming to thin out like a cloud dispersing.
‘It has gone,’ she said quietly. ‘The pain has quite gone.’
‘You should rest now. It is tiring and you will sleep, perhaps for some time.’ He stood.
‘Yes.’
The room was still and quiet. Then Arnold said, ‘I must offer you some refreshment. What will you take?’
‘A glass of cold water. Thank you.’
Mrs Arnold was leaning back, her eyes closed, her face changed, as if someone had brushed away years and left her as she had been before the illness.
‘You should help her upstairs soon,’ Tommy said to Mr Arnold. ‘She will want to sleep comfortably.’
‘Indeed, but first, please come into my study and have your refreshment, if water is all you really want.’
‘It is.’
A carafe of it, with a glass, was brought in by the man who had provided Tommy with the jacket and boots, and he drank it down.
It was always the same, this immense thirst. While he did so, Mr Arnold sat at his desk.
‘These are hard times,’ he said, ‘and there is no employment or likely to be. I insist on giving you some payment.’
‘No. Thank you. I will take my fare, no more.’
The man shook his head. ‘Come, man, what use is pride these days? Pride will not feed and clothe you and keep the roof over your head.’
‘I cannot take payment. I know it would be wrong.’
‘How do you know?’
Tommy did not answer.
‘Why?’
But he did not know that either.
He turned away.
The sky through the hall windows was pearl pale, the storm over. It was not the supercilious man but Mr Arnold who came with Tommy’s own jacket and boots, warm from the drying.
Eve was in when he got home. She looked up at him and he saw pain in her face.
‘It was reaching up,’ she said, ‘my back twisted. They said not to go in again.’
‘Until it’s rested?’
‘Not to go back. They can’t have people who aren’t up to the work.’
He put his hand on her arm and she leaned against him. But her eyes were dry. She did not feel pity for herself.
‘I’ll see if there’s any work maybe sitting down at one of the benches.’
But they both knew there would not be.
There came the click of the gate and steps on the path and when Tommy went out he found a man and a child.
‘Would you see the boy? He has a terrible rash of boils.’
And so the day went on and by dark he had seen four others and every day there would be more. When he slept he was so heavy and still for hour after hour Eve wondered if he breathed.
Late that night, when the last of them had gone and she was already in bed, he picked his jacket off the chair back and felt something deep in the pocket that he had not noticed, and reaching in, found an envelope. Inside the envelope were four folded notes for fifty pounds each. He had never held so much money in his hand. He got up and went to open the door and the smell of the garden after rain was sweet but it did not lift his heart as it should.
He was happy that Eve was no longer getting up at dawn to do work which had made her ill and in any case paid so little, but he could not get work himself.
The sky had cleared. It was cool. The year was drifting down.
Why was he so sure that he should not keep Mr Arnold’s money? It had been freely given and for a second time.
He went back and looked at the notes. Touched them.
Then he folded them back carefully into his pocket, locked the door and went upstairs. Eve woke as he went into the room and he could see that the bedclothes were disarranged where she had been turning and lying different ways to try and ease the pain in her back.
‘You look troubled, Tom.’
‘No, no.’ He set his jacket on the back of the chair.
‘Things will get better. Everyone
says.’
‘They will.’
She sighed and turned over again. Sometimes he was in the room, sitting or lying next to her, but not there at all, she could not reach him through the stone wall of his own thoughts and so it was now. She knew better than to pester him. If he had something to say to her he would say it.
But it seemed that he had nothing.
It had begun to rain again and Eve lay listening to it patter on the window and wished that things would change in some way, though most of all, change back, so that Tommy had his work and she had Jeannie Eliza and none of the rest of it had ever come about.
24
TOMMY THOUGHT about it for two full days and on the third decided that he would keep Mr Arnold’s money. He put three of the banknotes into his clothes drawer and took one into the town where he exchanged it for others, some worth five and the rest one-pound and ten-shilling notes. Into an envelope he counted enough to pay their rent for a whole year and walked with it to the office of the landlord, getting a receipt in return, after which he felt as if he had been relieved of a great burden. Eve loved the cottage and he knew that having to leave would break her. If he had worried about anything it had been that and he had accepted Mr Arnold’s money to be sure that they could remain there.
But he spent a little more of it on a cornflower-blue scarf for Eve, and, as an afterthought, a bar of rose-scented soap wrapped in paper. Carrying his purchases home, he remembered the day he had met her, when she had dropped her brown-paper parcel into the canal and he had rescued it for her. As he had grown up he had watched the young men around him find girls and make them wives and start families and had naturally felt that he would do so too but not understood how to choose. He had looked at some and they were pretty, at others and they were pert, at the ones with kind faces and the hard ones, the laughing ones, the sad and those old before they had had time to be young, but walking by the canal he had seen Eve and she was different. How she was and why and what made him know it, he had wondered every day since.
When he walked in, she was lying on the stone floor of the kitchen trying to ease her back. Tommy knelt down and saw the creases of pain on her face and the clouding of it in her eyes.
‘Shall I help you up to bed now?’
‘I’m better here, the mattress on the bed bends my back.’
‘I brought you this,’ he said, reaching in his pocket for the soap with its rose scent that had made his jacket smell of the flower. ‘I should have thought before – you don’t have enough of pretty things, nice things to enjoy.
‘It’s been wrong of me to help others and not you.’
Eve looked at him anxiously.
‘Take my hands.’
She did so and he saw how much the movement hurt her.
Her hands were no longer the hands of a young woman, although that surely was what she was still, they had been worn thin and roughened by work.
‘The money was freely given,’ he said quickly. ‘I didn’t ask for payment and never would. You know it.’
‘It’s what you think is best. It’s not for me to say.’
‘This is best.’
‘I know you are a good man.’
‘No. I do what I have been given to do, nothing else.’
He had been holding her hands for several minutes, waiting for the heat to come and flow through him to Eve.
It did not come.
Ten minutes went by and it did not come.
‘You can’t help me,’ Eve said, ‘because I am not a stranger to you.’
‘Why do you think that?’
‘It just feels as if it would.’
‘No. But I think you should get up, the stone is so cold.’
She sat on a hard chair by the kitchen table, and again, Tommy took her hands and then touched her shoulders, her head, her arm, and at last, held his own hands against her back.
But the heat did not come.
Later, after Eve had gone to bed and he had tried to make her comfortable, he went out into the quiet autumn night and began to walk, knowing the track by heart and not needing the half-moon’s light to guide him. There would be frosts soon – the faint smell of winter had been on the air these past days, but not now. He walked steadily along the track under the wide dark sky and the wire that had tightened and tightened in his body gradually slackened until he felt easy again. He took the track round the side of the peak and made for the road towards the wood. A fox’s eyes gleamed briefly out of the darkness, something scuttled across his path and into the undergrowth. He walked on, for many miles and several hours, before turning for home, and in all that way and for all that time he neither saw nor heard another human soul.
25
SLOWLY, EVE’S pain lessened and her back grew stronger. She was able to walk down the garden and to prepare their food, though Tommy did the heavy work and anything that meant she would have had to lift or bend. But he knew that her gradual improvement was natural and not on his account, and the heat did not come into his hands on the times he tried to ease her soreness again.
One morning, a few days after she had been able to feed the chickens for the first time without being troubled by any pain, Tommy put his hand up to his neck and felt a swelling there.
The burning pain in his stomach returned and he could not eat any food without it worsening.
* * *
The day he felt the pain in his belly, a woman came to the gate holding a small boy by the hand. The child’s left arm was bent and twisted and his hand swollen, the joints of both his knees reddened. He had a rash on his hands and neck. Tommy sat with him for an hour. The heat did not come. The boy cried in pain and nothing helped him and the woman went away in tears too, though Tommy could not tell if they were of despair or rage.
‘It has gone,’ he said that night, and touched his hand to his neck.
‘Surely not. Perhaps you have done too much and tried too hard.’
‘No. I could have seen a hundred people in one day and it would not have made any difference.’
She looked at his face which was full of a strange sadness and of resignation.
Before long he was as ill as he had been before it all, tired and weak and in pain. He did not try to eat and only sipped water. Soon, he refused that too. He lay not in bed but on the old couch downstairs, and on the few warm periods of some late-autumn days, Eve left the door open so that he could feel the sun on his face and smell the earth that was turned as Bert Ankerby slowly dug over his garden ready for winter.
Eve sat silently beside him for hour after hour, knowing everything, understanding nothing. He watched every movement she made.
People still came to the door and she gently turned them away and so word spread all over again, until they were left alone.
He asked her to promise that she would stay at 6 The Cottages, and then, a moment later, was sorry, it had been unfair to expect it, he told her, she should do whatever she wished.
‘It was just that I would like to think of you here. At least for a year. But only if you would be happy.’
‘I’d be happy nowhere else,’ Eve said. For that was the truth, though she did not then know how she would manage it, for she had no work and rent must be paid.
He died in the dawn of a morning when the frost had crisped and whitened the grass and there was a thin skim of ice on the water trough. His pain had been very great but he had refused to let her send for the doctor for fear of gossip which might hurt or harm Eve.
The room was silent. Eve sat for a long time, without tears, looking out of the window.
Much later, when everything had been attended to, she walked out across the track and climbed the slope to the churchyard. There would be no blossom for many months and she came empty-handed, but knelt on the icy grass and traced her finger lightly over the lettering on the child’s grave.
Jeannie Eliza Carr
Aged 3 years
Beloved daughter
Tommy could not be buried there.
No one could now, and so she was obliged to have a plot in the town cemetery on the other side of the canal.
Word spread but perhaps not widely enough or else it did not speak with a loud enough voice and only Miriam and Bert and Mary Ankerby came to the funeral, with a handful of men who had once worked with Tommy and the usual gang of children, hovering on the other side of the cemetery wall and looking on with huge eyes.
Word had not spread to any of those he had helped out of pain and sickness, or if it reached them they turned deaf ears. But word reached the doctor, who felt vindicated, at first, for what he had said and believed, that there had not and could never have been, any healing and Tommy Carr had died of his illness, though later rather than sooner. But had died all the same. It was Eve he felt most sorry for, though Tommy had not been a bad man and had cared for his wife, that was without question.
But Tommy Carr was dead and it all would be forgotten and the sick of the town would come, as they had always come, to him.
‘You won’t go back there to be alone,’ Miriam said as they walked away from the graveside.
‘Where else would I go? That is home and always will be.’
‘So you’ll work to pay the rent.’
Eve did not answer. They had turned into Miriam’s street and found the boys all outside, spilling over the kerb into the road with the baby’s pram being raced up and down the pathway by three of the others.
Miriam screeched out to them to stop and they did so, running away and leaving the pram balanced on the kerb, the baby asleep and oblivious to it all. She sighed and hauled it back and Eve took the handle to push him to the front door.
‘They could all be killed and what would he either know or care?’
Miriam had said nothing about Tommy, no word of kindness or affection, made no gesture of sympathy. She had come to the funeral. That was all.