by H. S. Cross
* * *
She sent the boy for towels. He was laboring to breathe, which meant he could labor, but they could slip away as you watched if the things they swallowed overcame the brain. There was brandy on the floor and a vial without label. Perhaps too late but that should never bar trying. She turned him on his side, took hold of his head, put a finger to the back of his throat.
* * *
When he returned with the towels, the man was propped against the side of the desk. Gray helped her to lift him and haul him into the back seat of the motorcar.
—He’s asleep again!
—Be quiet!
Face tight, mouth fierce, she switched on the headlamps and reversed across the playing fields. Back at the cottage, she roused the man enough so they could get him up the stairs to her bed. She sent the boy again for towels and hot water, but she didn’t let him back in the room, not that night, and not in the days and nights that followed.
56
Dishes became his domain. He applied too much soap and too little effort, his mother said, but he took pride in the sight of clean things waiting to be put away. There were people, he supposed, who washed dishes every day of the year. Often he imagined the girl at his side imparting wisdom. Contrary to appearances, he informed her, he had cleaned dishes before, though not many. She would lecture him about the privileges of boarding school, where housekeeping was performed by others.
His mother slept on the chaise longue in the little study off the parlor. She may have also dozed in the bedroom armchair. He didn’t think she was getting much sleep. He himself had been disturbed by groans and cries issuing from that bedroom, but it was merely a bad fever, his mother insisted, like the malaria that used to come upon his father. She was immune so risked nothing from contagion. He, however, was to stay clear of the room in every circumstance. She issued her command with such vehemence that he didn’t dare disobey. Fear, too, kept him away. He’d never before seen a master incapacitated. What grown man fell so ill unless he was dying?
He asked his mother whether the girl and her father ought to be told what had happened. (Even with a perfect postal service, she wouldn’t get his letter before Monday.) What if the man upstairs died?
—He isn’t going to die.
When he asked how she knew, she said it wasn’t that type of fever. Shouldn’t his family be wired anyway, Gray persisted, at least to be told where he was? Certainly, his mother agreed, but there would be nothing assuring to tell them until the fever broke.
The second night passed much like the first, and as he lay awake trying to pretend that the patient was one of his mother’s poor unfortunates, arguments with the girl played out behind his eyes. You’d let me lose him, too, and not give me a chance?
He tackled his mother again at breakfast, having prepared the eggs and toast himself:
—What if they’ve been expecting him? he said.
She looked the way she had looked last summer when he’d shown her the roofing that had blown off into the strawberry beds.
When she lay down for a nap, he took coins from her pocketbook and crossed the street to practice charm on Mrs. H. The woman was well and foresaw a busy day. After the shop closed at one, she had mince pies to manufacture, pastry chilling now. Oh, yes, the wire prices were correct, but she could help him, if he needed, trim his message to his coin. Here was paper, pencil. Just what was the thing he most needed to tell?
JG HERE ILL STOP WONT DIE STOP PH SLEDMERE 04 STOP TGRAY
* * *
Her mind was blunted by lack of sleep, but she knew the boy was right. The man would be expected by someone, surely frantic now. In the pocket of the man’s trousers she had found ticket stubs for Cambridge and York, and in his waistcoat, a card reading Oxford 67. She’d never placed a blind telephone call, but her patient had passed a most difficult night. In the parlor, her son was pretending to read. The post office was closing and wouldn’t open before Monday. There wasn’t time to handle things as she liked.
—Do you recognize this exchange? she asked.
The boy blanched in a way that said it wasn’t the card of a stranger.
—It may be his family, she said breezily. I shall place a call directly.
—The post office is closed!
—I don’t think so.
—But—but that’s Dr. Sebastian’s …
She’d had enough of this one and his games:
—Bring in some more coal, please.
* * *
He waited as long as he could stand before following her. Wind tore down the street, and he could see her speaking into the telephone.
—No, you mustn’t come up, she was saying as he entered. I haven’t been able to speak with him yet.
The bell on the door tinkled. She snapped around:
—Get out.
—Is that Dr.—
—Now!
* * *
Her father said Uncle John had only missed the train, but when Dr. Sebastian rang up to check, she felt a grim vindication; no one missed that many trains. Dr. Sebastian had later telephoned the Academy, but no one answered no matter how long he let it ring.
Friday morning, lunch, supper, dark. Girls who can’t treat people properly don’t deserve to have them. Saturday dark, light, breakfast, lunch. People who’ve been happy deserve an equal measure of grief.
It would be a relief in a way, nothing left to be taken. When the telephone rang, she let her father get it. This blade would never again take her by surprise.
—Are you sure? her father cried. Holy Mother!
She had not arrived late to a house full of people. She knew what she was getting this time, and why.
Another bell, at the door. A boy in a uniform presented a wire, name on the front not her father’s, but hers. This is what happens to girls who—She tore it, eager, numb with dread. Inside the snake coiled, hissing to show her the landscape of the future.
* * *
His mother returned from the post office and made a racket in the kitchen. When he brought more coal for the stove, she brushed past him and disappeared upstairs. His heart pounded in his chest, and then it pounded on the door.
—Thomas Gray?
Mrs. H stood on the mat. He froze.
—Telephone come through for you.
—What’s that? his mother called.
Mrs. H repeated herself. His mother darted down the stairs, took him by the wrist, and escorted him like an urchin to the shut-up shop, where Mrs. H passed him the receiver.
—Yes?
Her voice like melting chocolate.
—He’s all right, Gray told her.
He’d never heard her cry, not even for her mother, but now came a geyser bubbling in his ear, making him wish that she would cry all afternoon, that he could see her eyes when red and hold her while her shoulders shook.
—It’s only a fever, he said at last.
His mother took the receiver from his hands:
—This is Mrs. Riding. To whom am I speaking?
He stood exiled by the magazine rack.
—Cordelia, put your father on the line.
She turned to him:
—Go home.
—No!
—Now.
* * *
John retched into the chamber pot. There was nothing left, but his stomach still writhed. His chest hurt, too, as if he’d been set upon by professionals. Beneath the covers he shuddered, like something being mauled into life. Had his first birth been as bad? Then, he’d come breathing water, not racked on a feather bed, pain every place that could feel. They were expert at their work. Until this hour, he had never imagined.
* * *
He tried to read, but the cries upstairs froze him. They stopped as if on command as she unlatched the front door. Again without a word, she went to the kitchen. He slammed down his book and followed her:
—When are you going to tell me the truth?
Slowly, she turned:
—I beg your pardon?
—The truth about what’s happening!
He had shouted. She set down a handful of cutlery.
—I can’t believe I just heard you say that.
Other times, her tone would have shamed him.
—I’m not a child, to be ordered out of the room when grown-ups want to talk!
She darted forward, but instead of raising her hand, she brushed past him to her workbasket and began to rummage (would she pierce him with a sewing needle?) until she found an envelope, roughly opened.
—When you’re prepared to tell me about this, then perhaps we can talk about the truth.
An envelope that belonged in his tailcoat.
* * *
The symptoms peaked Sunday night. She knew it when she saw it, the body’s near-refusal to live without the thing it had come so intensely to need. She sat with him, sponged him, held him down when necessary. This body had little to do with her son’s Housemaster, the one she had trusted to guide and to guard him. So many people refused to see the truth when it stood before them, preferring instead to anesthetize themselves with confusion or optimism. Tom had never been that sort of person, and neither was she. But part of being Tom’s sort of person was accepting what the facts left behind. If she were to start making excuses for this man—because she wanted him to be trustworthy, and because she wanted him to be as he had seemed through the slant of his script, the pressure of his pen, the daring of his words—if she disregarded facts, she’d be no better than the hospital’s patroness, who after touring the ward proclaimed that its patients could be cured if their poverty were eliminated. While not every fact of John Grieves could be known, it was clear that he had fallen into a dependence upon morphine, as the empty vial testified when she put it to her tongue. It was also a fact that he’d failed to reform her son, as the Headmaster’s letter attested. She knew she needed to replace her previous idea of John Grieves with the truth of the patient before her. The truth hurt in a part of her breast where she was used to feeling pain, and she recognized the symptoms in herself that she’d endured the first year after Tom, though admittedly not now as acute—sleeping poorly, waking with a curious lightness, remembering the brutal new reality. But even as she urged herself to put feelings aside, she found it impossible to treat this one with the dispassion she showed other patients. He clung to her hand and yelled into his pillow, as if part of him were there with her, waiting on the man who suffered. Sometimes when she bathed his neck, he would reach for her, eyes closed, and rasp a thanks.
The Headmaster’s edict alarmed her, but she knew, when she thought coolly, that it needn’t be taken as a fixed decision. Much about the future had been thrown into question by her patient’s arrival. She’d seen enough cases to know it was futile to be vexed by decisions in the old life. When a person wound up in circumstances such as this, the patient, or the patient’s family, would often grasp desperately at details from the life they had just departed—what about the wedding they were to attend? How long could their employer get along without them?—without realizing that the old life was just that; that they stood now at the shore of a new life, and in the process of disembarking, many things would likely be discarded.
There would be time for questions, but not yet. Now she had charge of this body, which belonged to this man, a man who knew her son more than she could ever hope to know him even though he’d come from her and nursed from her and had been known by her before the sea had changed.
* * *
If she proposed to flog him with the truth, there were things he could say in return. First, her choice of holiday cottage, across the street from the ground where she’d let them put his father. What kind of person spent Christmas in such a place? Answer, deranged women; that was the truth. Second, her expeditions into said churchyard, once and sometimes twice a day. Just what did she imagine? Was she cursing the man or conducting dark rites to raise him from the dead? In either case, letters from his Headmaster faded before such conduct. And if she disapproved of his sitting up late playing Patience, it was a bit steep from one who rarely slept. What did she expect him to do when bedlam noises froze him in the night, when he woke not knowing where he was, Swan Cottage or the Academy, whether his father was dead in the ground across the street or fighting for life in this very house, yards away in another bed.
* * *
When the racking stopped long enough to string a thought together, John realized he was naked. He felt a growth of beard on his face. His chest seared when he moved. Of the memories that rinsed through his mind, none seemed to go in a line. Outside a steely sky, dawn or dusk? Too new, too unskinned, his heart strained to have her back, she who had sat beside him, watching, nursing, standing with this wretched man.
* * *
He was sitting up in the bed, awake and apparently lucid. She locked the door, set down the tray, and took his pulse. Better. Skin cooler and drier, eyes only bloodshot. When she let go his wrist, he pulled the covers up and looked away, embarrassed. This she expected.
—You needn’t. I am a nurse.
He met her gaze with understanding but seemed unable to speak.
—I don’t suppose, she said lightly, that anyone expected a few letters would end up like this.
She’d meant it as a quip to put him at ease, but he reddened. The color sharpened his eyes, emphasizing his cheekbones and lips.
—Could …
His voice parched and ragged, he asked her what time it was. This, too, she expected.
—It’s half past three Tuesday afternoon.
His eyes searched, putting it together. She told him the date, two days before Christmas, and then when his brow still strained, she told him the year.
—I’m not that far gone, he said.
He had a smile that went with his letters. She gave him the tea and then brought him some broth. When he slept again, she departed on her errand, taking bucket and rags in the back of the motorcar. She left the French windows open as she worked, airing the room as she removed remnants of the event. When the school servants returned, they would find only ordinary untidiness, a study whose grate wanted a broom and whose surfaces wanted polish. She explored the nearby rooms until she found one with a suitcase, still packed for a journey. A minor convenience, amidst everything else.
* * *
He awoke to a clump—case at the foot of his bed. She was searching the bureau and found a key to open the latch. He gazed at the contents. His case, in fact. She removed his pajamas:
—I suppose you’ll be wanting these.
He felt the teasing before he grasped her technique: calm their panic while they face the fear. He peered at the items, clothing, sponge bag, papers—could they actually be term reports? He leaned over the chamber pot, but nothing came up. She closed the case and moved it to the floor.
—Listen, she said.
He mastered himself and sat back in the bed. She straightened the bedclothes and sat beside him, her hip against his, divided only by a sheet.
—The sooner you face it, the easier everything will be.
Pulling back the covers, she exposed his chest, so thin, so sunken, so … bruised.
—You can blame me for that.
He shivered.
—That’s what it took, waking you. Do you remember?
Did he? A savage hook that had ripped him from the deep.
—I’ve told him you have a fever. My son.
Her son, the boy—pain flashed through his head.
—He doesn’t know about this.
She was gripping his wrist, indicating a dressing where his shirt-cuff ought to be.
—Or this.
The inside of his elbow. That hollow ached, too, and a dark blue line ran the length of it, a river of bruising.
—And he won’t know, either, she said.
Command or consolation?
—I’ve also spoken with your family. Your goddaughter and Mr. Líoht.
Each sentence dispelled an amnesia he hadn’t known
he had, ringing back curtains on monstrous portraits that had decked his halls all along.
—And to Dr. Sebastian, of course.
He didn’t think his heart would survive it, but she took his hand in a way that felt familiar, the friend indeed who’d stood beside him through the torture. Now she answered his questions without his having to ask. She’d told them all enough, she said, enough but not too much. Telephone calls were booked with both parties when the post office reopened after Christmas. He needn’t fear their descending in the meantime. They had wanted to come, she said, but they wouldn’t. A smile took hold of his face as he imagined Jamie and Owain going up against this woman, this cavalier he longed to call friend.
—Now.
She took hold of his jaw as if she meant to wrench it from his face, turning him to her, eyes dark, voice exquisite:
—Don’t you ever do anything like that again.
Such orders, from such a vengeful angel. She released his chin and fished in her apron pocket. Vial. Empty. His.
—Never again, she said. Not ever, in your whole long life.
—I’d never imagined that it would be long, he said.
Again the dark stare. He wondered if his jaw was in for another clutching.
—I’m telling you it will, she said.
She placed the vial on the bureau:
—Every time you think of it, you can see it’s empty. There will never be any more, not today, not ever.
—My whole long life?
She pursed her lips and told him not to be cheeky. His heart beat everywhere, which showed at least that it still knew how to beat. She brought him broth and bread and instructed him to eat. When he’d finished what he could, she rummaged in his case for a brown-wrapped parcel:
—Why didn’t you open it?
Another curtain, portrait.