Death Of A Hollow Man

by Caroline Graham

  If he had whined or complained or yapped or reacted in any other way but the way that he had, she was sure her heart could have been hardened. But what she couldn’t handle was his simple confidence. There was no doubt at all in his eyes. Here she was at last, and off they would be going. And didn’t she owe him something? reasoned Deidre, recalling the terrible night when he had been her father’s only companion.

  “Got his lead?”

  “Oh … no … I came straight from the Barnabys’. I haven’t been home yet.”

  “Shouldn’t really take him without a lead.” She was replacing the lock. Deidre looked at the dog. His expression of dawning dismay was terrible to behold.

  “It’ll be all right,” she said hurriedly. “He’s very well-trained. He’s a good dog.”

  PW Brierley shrugged. “Okay. If you say so …” and opened the cage. The dog ran out, jumped up at Deidre, and started licking her hands. She signed a form for his release and they left the station together and entered the High Street. The cobbler’s had some brightly colored leads and collars, and Deidre chose one of scarlet leather with a little bell. As she bent down to put it on, the man behind the counter said, “D’you want a disc for him? In case he gets lost? Do one while you wait.”

  “Oh, yes—please.” Already, barely minutes into dog ownership, Deidre could not bear the thought of him getting lost. She gave her address and telephone number.

  “And his name?”

  “His name?” She thought frantically as the man stood with the drill buzzing ready. All sorts of common or garden dog’s names came to mind, none of them suitable. He was certainly no Fido or Rover. Nor even a Gyp or Bob. Then she remembered the day center where she had first seen him and the name came. “Sunny,” she cried. “He’s called Sunny.” The man engraved “Sunny,” added the other details, and Deidre fixed the disc to the collar.

  Now, arriving at the main hospital entrance, she wondered what to do with him. “You can’t go inside,” she said. “You’ll have to wait.” He listened closely. She tied his lead around an iron foot-scraper and said, “Sit.” To her surprise, he immediately lowered his ginger rump to the floor and sat. She patted him, said, “Good dog,” and went indoors.

  She was immediately engulfed in a series of labyrinthine corridors and started walking with a heavy heart. When she had been told, on ringing the general hospital to inquire when she could visit, that her father had been transferred to “the Walker,” she had been horrified. The brooding soot-encrusted Victorian pile of bricks had always been known locally as the fruit-and-nut house, and, as a child, she had luridly imagined it inhabited by chained people in white robes, raving and shrieking, like poor Mrs. Rochester in Jane Eyre.

  The reality was different. So quiet. As Deidre continued on past several pairs of swing doors looking for the Alice Kennedy-Baker ward you could have believed the place to be deserted. Thick, shiny linoleum the color of cooked veal muffled every footfall. The walls were dirty yellow, the paint cracked and peeling, and the radiators, though giving out powerful blasts of heat, were scabbed with rust.

  But all these things, though depressing, were nothing compared to the deadening pall of despair that permeated the atmosphere. Deidre felt it choking her lungs like noisome fog. It smelled of stale old vegetables and stale old people. Of urine and fish and, most profusely, of the sickly synthetic lavender that had been aerosoled everywhere in a futile attempt at aping normal domesticity. A nurse, crackling by in white and sugar-bag blue, asked her if she was lost, then pointed her in the right direction.

  The Kennedy-Baker ward appeared to be empty but for a West Indian nurse sitting at a small table in the center by a telephone. She got up as Deidre entered and said the patients were in the sun lounge. She explained why Deidre had not been consulted over the decision to transfer her father. Apparently there was no question of permission being sought. He was being admitted to the Walker for his own safety and that of others. If Deidre wished to speak to the doctor in charge of his case, an appointment could be made.

  “Your father’s feeling very well, though, dear,” she added as she led Deidre to the sun lounge, a bulbous growth on the far end of the ward. “Quite tip-top.”

  The lounge had a gray-stained haircord carpet, assorted shabby chairs, and an ill-conceived and poorly executed oil painting of its benefactress in true electric blue gazing munificently down at the assembled company. There were five people in the room; three elderly women, a young man, and Mr. Tibbs, who was sitting by the window wearing unfamiliar pajamas and a violently patterned dressing gown surely designed to stimulate rather than to soothe.

  “Your daughter’s come to see you, Mr. Tibbs. Isn’t that nice?” said the nurse very firmly, as if expecting some denial.

  Deidre pulled up a low chair with scratched wooden arms and sat down, saying, “Hullo, Daddy. How are you feeling?”

  Mr. Tibbs continued to gaze out of the window. He didn’t look very “tip-top.” His jaw gaped in a sad, loose way and was covered in grayish-white stubble and snail trails of dried saliva. Deidre said, “I’ve brought you some things.”

  She unpacked her bag and laid his toilet articles, some soap, and Arrowroot biscuits on his lap, keeping back his special treat, a box of Turkish delight, until the last moment, to ease the pain of parting. He looked at the little pile with fierce puzzlement, then picked the things up one at a time, handling them very carefully, as if they were made of glass. He obviously had no idea what they were, and tried to put the soap in his mouth. Deidre took them all away again, and put them on the floor.

  “Well, Daddy,” she said brightly, struggling to keep her voice on an even keel, “how are you?” Oh, God, she thought, I’ve asked that already. What could she say next? And what an incredible question to be asking herself. She who had spent years quietly and contentedly talking and listening to the old man in the basket chair who bore such a strange resemblance to her father. She couldn’t even tell him about the dog, in case it brought back memories of that shocking night at the lake. So she just held his hand and looked around the room.

  The young man in baggy flannel trousers was drumming on his knees with the tips of his fingers at tremendous speed. He sat next to an elderly woman with the hooded, gorged glance of a satisfied bird of prey. Then there was a dumpy, bald woman with warts like purple Rice Krispies who was stretching out her arms, palms inward, holding an invisible skein of wool. The third woman was just a bundle of clothing (checks and spots and stripes and patterned lisle stockings) with a tube disappearing up the skirt from which hung a plastic bag of yellow liquid. There they sat, each sealed in an impenetrable bubble of drugs and dreams. They could not even be said to be waiting, since the act of waiting acknowledged the possibility that life might be about to change. Deidre eased back her sleeve and looked at her watch. She had been in the sunshine lounge for three minutes and suddenly felt that she could stand no more. She fastened her coat and started to pull on her gloves. Her father gazed blindly out of the window. I can do nothing here, she thought. I am no help. No use. “I’ll come again soon, Daddy … On Sunday.”

  She stumbled out into the ward proper. Before she had reached the swing doors, she heard her father’s voice raised in song to the tune of his favorite hymn, “The Old Rugged Cross.” But the words were strange and garbled, and some of them obscene.

  Nicholas, invited to dinner, had arrived bursting with excitement, brandishing his letter of acceptance to Central and sporting a battered nose. He had been at the house half an hour and hadn’t stopped going on about the letter, although, as far as Avery was concerned, you could have covered the subject adequately in two minutes flat and still had time for a lengthy reading from the Upanishads.

  “Isn’t it absolutely marvelous?” Nicholas was saying yet again.

  “Enough to bring stars to your eyes.” Tim smiled. “Drink up.”

  Avery, eggshell-brown tonsure gleaming under the spotlights, was slicing a tenderloin of pork into slices so thin they fe
ll into soft rosy curls on the marble slab. Peanuts and chilies stood by. The fresh tomato soup was keeping warm in the double boiler. Basil, picked the previous summer and immediately frozen into an ice cube, thawed in a cup. Avery moved purposefully among his culinary arcana and drank a little Frog’s Leap Cabernet Sauvignon almost content. Almost, not quite. A cloud, no bigger than a man’s lie, would keep drifting across his horizon. And a tiny scene—hardly a scene even, a vignette, was stamped on his memory.

  Tim and Esslyn, standing together in the clubroom, heads close, two tall, dark blades. Esslyn talking quietly. When Avery had entered, they moved apart, not guiltily (Tim never did anything guiltily), but quickly nonetheless. Avery had let several days drag by before he had casually asked what the fascinating conversation had been about. Tim had said he couldn’t recall the time in question. The lie oblique. Bad enough. Avery let the matter slide. What else could he do? But then, much worse, came the lie direct.

  While they were all huddling frailly in the wings, as Esslyn’s life blood seeped into the boards and Harold stormed, Avery had whispered, “This will put the lighting out of his mind. P’raps we won’t have to leave after all.”

  And Tim had said, “No. We’ll definitely have to go now.”

  “What do you mean now?”

  “What?”

  “You said, ‘We’ll definitely have to go now. ’ ”

  “No, I didn’t. You’re imagining things.”

  “But I distinctly heard—”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake! Stop nitpicking.”

  So, of course, Avery had stopped. Now, not quite content, he watched his love through the yellow-mottled screen of mother-in-law’s tongue relaxing, toasting Nicholas.

  “I must say,” Avery called, making a special effort to put his fears aside, “I do miss not being able to bad-mouth Esslyn.”

  “I don’t see why you shouldn’t,” replied Tim. “When he was alive, you never stopped.”

  “Mmm …” Avery took down a heavy iron pan, poured in some sesame oil, and added a pinch of anise. “Half the pleasure then was the chance that it would somehow get back to him.”

  “Tom said I ought to get a solicitor,” Nicholas said suddenly. “I’m sure he thinks it was me.”

  “If he thought it was you, dear boy,” said Tim, “you wouldn’t be sitting there.”

  Nicholas cheered up then, and asked for the third time if they thought he would have any problem getting a grant for drama school. Avery reached for his chilies and threw a couple in. He shook and rattled his pan a little more loudly than was strictly necessary. He often did this when visitors came. Childlike, he was afraid both that they might forget he was there behind the monstera and philodendron or, if they did remember, might not appreciate just how hard he was working on their behalf.

  Nicholas leaned back on a raspberry satin sofa seamed and scalloped like a great shell and drank deeply of his aperitif. He loved Tim and Avery’s sitting room. It was an extraordinary mixture of downy delights such as the sofa and austere pieces of donnish severity like Tim’s Oscar Woollen armchair, two low black glass Italian tables, and a stunning heavy bronze helmet lying on its side near the bookshelves. He said, “What’s on the menu today, Avery?”

  “Satay.”

  “I thought that was a method of doing yourself in.” Nicholas slithered about on the shiny cushions. “Whoops! Can I have some more of this marvelous wine, Tim?”

  “No. You’re already all over the place. And there’s some Tignanello with the meat.”

  “Shame!” cried Nicholas. Then: “Did you see Joycey’s daughter on the first night? Wasn’t she the most breathtaking thing?”

  “Very lovely,” said Tim.

  “Those legs … and that long neck … and eyelashes … and those spectacular bones …”

  “Well, you may not be the most sober person in the room, Nicholas,” said Avery. “But my God you know how to take an inventory.”

  “Will you come and see me in my end-of-term shows?”

  “How the boy leaps about.”

  “If asked,” said Tim.

  “Maybe in my last year I shall win the Gielgud medal?”

  “Nicholas, you really must at least pretend to be a bit more modest, otherwise the rest of the students will positively loathe you.” Avery turned his attention back to his cooking. He frazzled the pork a little, sipped some more wine, checked the soup, and peeped at his little sugar baskets with iced cherries keeping cool in the larder. Then he took hot brown twists of bread from the oven, poured the soup into a warm tureen, and tuned once more into the conversation.

  Nicholas was saying that he would come back and see them in the holidays. Personally Avery believed that once the lad hit the smoke, neither of them would see or hear from him again. He called, “From me to you,” and took in the tureen, the bread, and an earthenware bowl of Greek yogurt and sour cream. The talk was still of the theater.

  “I don’t know whether to stay on for Vanya or shoot off now,” Nicholas was saying.

  ‘‘You won’t start at Central for months,” said Tim. ‘‘But I could get some sort of job and see all the plays and join a movement class or something.”

  ‘‘There are three marvelous parts in it,” continued Tim. ‘‘And now that Esslyn’s gone, you could take your pick.”

  “Mmm.” Nicholas spooned in some more soup. “This isn’t very tomatoey, Avery.”

  “Miss Ungrateful,” retorted his host. “Still, if your taste buds are punch-drunk on monosodium glutamate, what can one expect?”

  “I don’t know the play,” said Nicholas. “What’s it like?”

  “Twice as long as Little Eyolf but without the laughs,” said Avery. “And the tap routines.”

  “It’s wonderful. A Russian classic.”

  “I don’t think I fancy being directed by Harold in a Russian classic. He’ll have us all swinging from the samovars. I think I’ll go.”

  “You may not be allowed to go,” said Tim, “while the investigation’s still going on.”

  “Blimey.” Nicholas scraped his bowl clean and held it out for more. “I hadn’t thought of that. I suppose we’re all under suspicion. Present company excepted.”

  “We’ve guessed and guessed at the possible culprit,” said Avery, wielding the ladle. “You don’t deserve this— but answer came there none.”

  “The present odds-on favorite is the Everards.”

  “Don’t talk to me about the Everards,” said Nicholas, tenderly touching his swollen nose.

  “That was wicked of Tom to tell you,” said Tim. “I didn’t think the police did that sort of thing. I thought statements were in confidence.”

  “What have they got?” asked Avery.

  “A black eye each and one cut lip.”

  “Don’t swagger, Nicholas.”

  “He asked me! Anyway—why are they on top of the list? They were the court toadies.”

  “Nasty position, court toady,” said Avery, passing the still-warm twists. “You must get to hate the person you’re sucking up to.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Nicholas. “Weak people often respect those much stronger than themselves. They feel safe getting carried along on their coattails.”

  “You surely don’t see the Everards as weak, Nico?” said Tim.

  “Well … yes … don’t you?”

  “Not at all.”

  “I can see him wanting to get rid of them,” continued Nicholas, “nasty little parasites. But not vice versa. I still favor Kitty.”

  “What about Harold?” suggested Avery.

  “Of course, along with everybody else, I’d just love it to be Harold. In fact, apart from him having neither motive nor opportunity, I see Harold as the perfect candidate.” Nicholas slurped his last spoonful. “This soup really grows on you, Avery.”

  “Well, you’re not having any more,” cried Avery, bearing away the empties, “or you’ll have no room for the nice bits.”

  Avery scraped the sauce, smelli
ng of butter and peanuts, into a boat, and took his shallow Chinese dishes from the oven. He loved using these. They had a shaggy bronze crysanthemum painted on the bottom and small blue-green Oriental figures touched with gold around the sides going about their business in a world of tiny trees and short, square white rivers, tightly corrugated, like milky squibs. Avery got such pleasure from causing all this exquisite artificiality to vanish then, as he supped, gradually exposing it again. They were the only things in the kitchen that never went into the dishwasher, and only Avery was allowed to clean them. They had been an anniversary present from Tim bought during a holiday at Redruth, and so doubly treasured. Now, he brought the bowls with their curls of crispy pork and scurried round the table, placing them before the others.

  Tim said, “I do wish you wouldn’t romp,” and Nicholas sniffed and murmured, “Aahhh … gravy mix.” Avery bowed his head for a moment more in relief over a job well done than in thanks for benisons received, and they all dug in. Avery passed the sauce to Nicholas, lifting it high over the candle flames.

  “There’s no need to elevate it,” said Tim. “It’s not the host.”

  The Tignanello was opened and poured, and Tim lifted his glass. “To Nicholas. And Central.”

  “Oh, yes …” Avery toasted Nicholas, who grinned a little awkwardly. “R. and F. before you’re twenty-five, or I shall want to know the reason why. And don’t forget— we believed in you first.”

  “I won’t.” Nicholas gave a slightly drunken smile. “And I’m so grateful for everything. The room … your friendship … everything …”

  “Don’t be grateful,” said Tim. “Just send seats in the front row of the dress circle for all your first nights.”