The Daffodil Sky

by H. E. Bates

  But on a morning in October Spratchley did not wake them. Miss Constance lay for more than half an hour in frowsy irritation at this lapse and then finally got up and put on her dressing-gown and went downstairs.

  ‘Spratchley! Spratchley!’ she called. ‘Jackie!—oh! there you are—what on earth has got into Spratchley?’

  Spratchley slept downstairs in a tiny ten by eight bedroom that had once been a stillroom leading off the kitchen. The two sisters had never thought it their business to enter this room. Now, puzzled and irritated but not anxious, they stood outside, calling:

  ‘Spratchley! Spratchley!’ in cooing, possessive, owl-like voices.

  It was Miss Jackie who thought she heard groanings in answer. When she opened the door the sudden sight of Spratchley’s small iron bed, his clothes littered about the floor and of Spratchley himself, flat and cold-eyed in the bed, with a yellowish lump of cottonwool oozing from one ear, shocked her into pity.

  This pity for Spratchley took the form of a spasm of fright, clumsy and startling, as she knelt by the bed. She was not aware of the stupidity of her questions. ‘Is something the matter, Spratchley? Aren’t you well? What is it, Spratchley?’

  A glaze of pain on Spratchley’s eyes gave her another spasm of fright. She saw him try to heave himself upward from the pillow. An asthmatical stutter for breath became a long choking wheeze, almost a whistle, excruciating as the scour of steel on glass.

  She heard him try to say, ‘I can’t, miss—I can’t——’ and then saw the under-whip of pain catch him unprepared, up through the lung, leaving him gasping.

  It was Spratchley who said, when the doctor came: ‘Not the hospital, sir. Not the hospital. I don’t want to go there. I don’t want to go to that place, sir,’ but she felt that the words were really her own. In her fright she could not express them and it was Miss Constance who echoed them aloud:

  ‘Is it necessary, the hospital? We have every comfort here. He can be looked after here.’

  ‘Not quite in the same way.’

  ‘You heard him beg not to be taken,’ Miss Jackie said.

  ‘That’s a natural feeling everybody has.’

  ‘Yes, but must he really? Against his will? Does he have to? When we could look after him equally——’

  ‘Pneumonia is always a long job,’ the doctor said. ‘With all your penicillin it’s still very tricky. You need persons with training. It can be very exhausting for persons like yourselves with no training. The only possible solution would be a nurse——’

  ‘Then if that’s the solution,’ Miss Constance said, ‘he must have a nurse. We don’t mind the expense of a nurse.’

  ‘I’m rather reluctant,’ the doctor said.

  ‘If you had a possible nurse couldn’t you send her over and try——?’

  ‘Very well,’ the doctor said. ‘We will try the nurse.’

  There had always been in the house a sort of casualness, a perfunctory ease of the kind that comes of long orthodox habit not broken by accident of affliction. The division of the labours of Spratchley did not require argument. It did not seem to demand the evidence of affections. It was perfectly simple as it was. Like Spratchley himself it had long been taken for granted.

  The nurse, Farrer, arrived with a discordancy of brass, driving her own car. The sisters had long given up a car as a luxury pointless to two people who had etched a plan of life with perfection between the walls of their own garden. They did not call on people, a habit which, they discovered, had the satisfactory result of encouraging people, very largely, not to call on them. The few people who did call rang the old-fashioned spring bell at the front door and Spratchley, hurrying from any quarter of his world, however far away, always answered it.

  Nurse Farrer rang the bell with muscular brevity and entered the house without waiting for an answer. She was already hanging up her coat in the cloakroom and was about to wash her hands in the basin there by the time Miss Jackie had grasped with confusion that she ought to be answering the bell.

  Miss Jackie was aware of a tall crisp healthy woman in her forties, with sensational shoulders. Her flesh had a smooth and tightened surface that shone with waxy reflections, as if recently starched. Her voice crackled.

  ‘Well, where are we? Where is our patient? Are we upstairs?’

  ‘No, nurse, downstairs. This way.’

  After Nurse Farrer had looked at Spratchley’s small congested room in a silence of surprised disfavour she went in and shut the door.

  With sensations of unpleasant confusion Miss Jackie waited outside. She was like a person unaccustomed to sickness who feels a sudden rush of nausea. The shutting of the door, the cutting off of Spratchley and the nurse, the long ominous silence: they were like rebukes she had done nothing to deserve.

  No other emotion came out of the confusion of her nausea as she stood there numbly waiting for Nurse Farrer to reappear. She found herself going through the impotent and futile act of dryly washing her hands. Her sister had gone back to her room to dress and slowly she began to be aware, without trying to explain it, that the house was strange with an enlarging emptiness.

  ‘Is this the best room we can give this man?’

  Nurse Farrer reappeared with forearms crinkled with October goose-flesh. Her shoulders seemed to have expanded, as Miss Jackie afterwards felt they always did, from contact with Spratchley and his bed.

  ‘It’s like an ice-box in there.’

  ‘It’s his own room. It’s the room he’s always had.’

  ‘Well, I want him out of it. No patient of mine is staying in a room like that. Haven’t we got something upstairs?’

  ‘There’s the west room. That’s not used.’

  ‘Where’s the kitchen? I shall want hot-water bottles. This man would have been better in hospital.’

  ‘He didn’t want——’

  ‘It isn’t what they want. It’s what’s best for them. Is the room aired? We’d better have a fire in it. There was frost this morning—it’s perishing.’

  With confusion, for the first time in her life, Miss Jackie laid a fire in the west bedroom. The loose branch of a plum tree banged against the window as she blew on the flames. She knew that on any other morning that would have been a job for Spratchley: he up the ladder, she below in superintendence, giving directions until the branch was tied and nailed into place again. She could not bear untidiness in the appearance of her possessions. Now there was nothing she could do about it except perhaps, when she found a moment, see to it herself. But the rattle of the half-bared branch in the chilly bedroom was a fresh source of emptiness that haunted her, and presently she rushed downstairs to fill hot-water bottles in a kitchen where Nurse Farrer was already making tea.

  ‘All this lugging and carting would have been saved in hospital.’ With insensate blue eyes the nurse stood watching Miss Jackie fill the first of the hot-water bottles. A snarl of disfavour sprang from practical astonishment as she realised that Miss Jackie had probably never filled a bottle in her life. ‘What are you doing? You’re creating a vacuum in that thing!—it will burst and scald somebody!’

  Miss Jackie felt a slow frigid settling in the complex whirlpool of her nausea. She felt the small beginnings of a withdrawal into retreat. A childlike sufferance of the dominance of Nurse Farrer, ordering her up and down stairs, kept her calm, without real thinking.

  On the third of her journeys downstairs, to fetch the coal-scuttle, she saw Nurse Farrer appear with Spratchley, blanketed, in her arms. Her strong sensational shoulders held a husk that had frailly linked two twigs of bone round her big arched neck. The thin body seemed almost to crackle as she clenched it to the starched front of her tunic.

  As she began to go upstairs a door opened on the first landing and Miss Constance, puffed and powdered, wearing a négligée of peach-pink with trimmings of soft white fur, prepared to come down. It had taken her, as always, a long time to dress. She had not moved through the stages of retreat into speechless sufferance that had
affected Miss Jackie. She rounded the shining oak banisters with a flounce, the relieved buoyant flourish of someone who has surmounted at last the tedious business of waking.

  She was a third of the way downstairs before she was made aware, by a shout, of Nurse Farrer filling the whole width of the staircase with Spratchley.

  ‘I can’t hold this man all day! For goodness’ sake open that bedroom door!’

  ‘The west room, Connie,’ Miss Jackie called. ‘The west——’

  She saw her sister cling to the banisters for a second or two longer like a drugged cockatoo. Then she was running: not with agility or lightness but on legs that seemed ridiculously to have grown leaden and inert, like those in dreams, under the foolishly flapping dress.

  A second later Nurse Farrer swung into the bedroom with a Spratchley that Miss Constance thought stared past her emptily, eyeless with pain.

  ‘And shut it—please. I can deal with this.’

  The faintness of nausea Miss Jackie felt was transferred some seconds later to the pale dusty figure of her sister groping its way, without dignity, downstairs. Miss Jackie found herself following her into the kitchen. She had moved towards a second stage of sufferance that was defensive; she was aware of a strange chill and then of her mind, in numbness, wrapping itself up.

  ‘Does she stay? I mean does she live in?’

  ‘I suppose so——’

  ‘In that case she’ll want a room. Shall we give her the box-room with the double bed?’

  ‘I want to be near my patient.’ Nurse Farrer had come downstairs to fetch her black square nurse’s bag. ‘What about the room next door? Is that in use?’

  ‘That’s the room where mother died. We don’t use that.’

  ‘I want to be near this man—I want to hear if he calls.’

  With severe finality she grasped her bag and went back upstairs before either of them could think of anything to say in answer. And on the landing the firm clenched snap of the west room door was all the answer they in turn were to get for the rest of the morning from her. The deadly sick-room silence filled the entire upper part of the house without a whisper.

  It took them a long time to grasp that Spratchley was no longer theirs. At first it seemed merely that an iron wall of discipline had shut them away. They were estranged and unconsidered and unwanted in a house that had never known the affliction of a single disruption. They were suddenly the servants, waiting to be beckoned.

  For the first few nights Miss Jackie did not sleep well. She lay listening to a sound that troubled her and that she could not place for a long time: the loose plum-branch knocking against the framework of Spratchley’s window. Once she got up and put on her dressing-gown and stood at her own window, listening and looking out. Summer was still not over. In a quick westerly turn the warmth of a sea-wind had blown across the countryside a softness in which she could still catch the fragrance of sheltered tobacco flowers under the wall below.

  She stood staring into the darkness for a long time. She could not distinguish the frosted from the unfrosted flowers. She could not be quite sure of the days of Spratchley’s illness. She remembered only a conversation with Nurse Farrer.

  ‘No, I’m afraid you can’t see him. This man is not fit for visitors yet,’ Nurse Farrer had said. ‘In a day or two perhaps. But not yet.’

  In her ineptitude Miss Jackie could only ask:

  ‘When is the crisis?’

  ‘There’s no such thing as crisis nowadays. Penicillin and the sulphanilamides have changed all that. We don’t have crises.’

  ‘I thought there was always a crisis.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re a little out of date,’ Nurse Farrer said.

  As she leaned from the window, breathing the unexpected rush of October warmth from the west, Miss Jackie fancied she could see the glow of a night-light from Spratchley’s room. It was most strange about the night-lights. She had been to the village to fetch them herself. A grown man with a night-light—she wondered what small primeval fear of dark might have prompted that until Nurse Farrer said:

  ‘I prefer them to torches. I have had patients running a temperature through someone flashing a torch.’

  Since then she had been able to imagine the night-lights. She thought of them continually shining beside Spratchley’s face in the dark. And because she could not reject the idea that only children needed lights against darkness Spratchley became, in her mind, a child. He was afraid in his darkness and she was frightened too.

  Some moments later she found herself standing on the landing outside her door. She had made up her mind to go to Spratchley and there was an enormous thumping in her chest. Then before she could move another step she heard the click of a door beyond Spratchley’s room and a sharp question:

  ‘Who is that?’

  ‘Only me. Going to the bathroom.’

  ‘Very well. Don’t make a noise. Don’t wake my patient.’

  It was the following afternoon before she remembered the plum-branch. It made her heart begin thumping uncomfortably again as she remembered its shaking in the night.

  She had hammer and nails in her trousers’ pocket and a ladder up against the west side of the house, under Spratchley’s window, when Nurse Farrer appeared, rattling starchily, on the garden path.

  ‘Whatever are you doing up there?’

  Like a child Miss Jackie explained about the plum-branch.

  ‘You can hear it all night. I can’t sleep for it. I was going to tack it up.’

  ‘All right, but no hammering. Just tie it for now.’

  Nurse Farrer stood on the path, watching her climb to the top of the ladder. The plum-branch was bruised to a sticky sandy-brown by its friction against the wall. High against the side of the house she felt her legs turn to a cold and deadly wateriness, so that she was like something amorphous, not herself, floating in air. She seized the plum-branch and bent it down, trying to tie it with fumbling hands. Through the closed glass of the window she grew aware of shapes, but in her nausea and agitation they remained unresolved. They were mere knots of dark and light that might have been Spratchley’s face, a pillow, an eiderdown, a picture on a wall.

  ‘I should have thought it would have been simpler to cut it off,’ Nurse Farrer said.

  ‘They bleed if you cut them,’ she said stupidly.

  At night she felt, for a long time, that she could not go upstairs. She put on a pair of old soft slippers and walked into the garden after her sister and Nurse Farrer had gone to bed. It was quiet and warm and the plum-branch did not bang against the wall where the night-light showed.

  As she walked up and down the damp lawn she was aware of her own sense of crisis. She kept stopping to look up at the light, expecting to see it going out. Suddenly the hatred that had simply been latent inside herself spewed up like a new form of sickness. Its violence seemed to turn her round and push her back into the house. She was not even aware of her slippers, wet from the dampness of the lawn. She kicked them off unconsciously at the foot of the stairs. Then she began to climb up and on the thick stair-carpet she walked with long pauses, perhaps a minute to each step, clenching her hands.

  When she finally opened the door to Spratchley’s room her mind was clear enough for her to remember that the handle was capable of being turned both ways, and she pulled on it slightly and turned it slowly inwards and then in the same way, slowly, after a long time, she shut it behind her and turned it back.

  In the small glow of night-light she saw Spratchley’s eyes open in the bed. His breath came in a slow bubbling stutter.

  ‘Spratchley,’ she said.

  ‘Miss.’

  ‘Don’t talk.’

  ‘Where have you been, miss?’ he said. His words were half-coherent gasps in a fight for breath.

  ‘Don’t talk. She’ll hear you. She wouldn’t let us see you, Spratchley.’ She felt under the coverlet and found his hands. ‘You’re cold, Spratchley, you’re terribly cold.’

  ‘All the time
I been cold, miss. All the time.’

  ‘Don’t talk. I’ve got to go now. I just came——’

  ‘Don’t go, miss,’ he said. She felt a frightened, sinewy tightening of his hands, refusing to let go her own. ‘Stay here with me, miss. I don’t feel I got no friends——’

  ‘Of course you’ve got friends, Spratchley. We’re your friends.’

  A sudden rush of compassion filled her body with profound vibration. She moved her position so that she was half-sitting on the bed. She heard Spratchley trying to speak again. But this time the voice was so low that she could hardly hear it and she bent her head to the pillow so that she could catch the whisper.

  For some time she let her head remain on the pillow. She was imprisoned in her movements by the fact that Spratchley was holding her hands. Then presently her neck stiffened and she knew that there was no way of easing it except to lie with him on the bed.

  She lay with him on the bed for a long time before she realised how cold she was. She watched the night-light and listened to the occasional stir of rising air against the plum-branch which she had failed to tie securely against the wall. In her coldness she moved uneasily and Spratchley said:

  ‘Don’t go, miss. Don’t go away.’

  ‘It’s all right, Spratchley. I’m not going. Don’t worry. I’m here.’

  Her compassion grew to a state of wonder that was like a fine suspense. When she could not bear it any longer she drew her cold legs up to her body and then curled them down again, into the bed. Then slowly she slid her stiffened shoulders under the sheets, into the warmth where Spratchley lay.

  ‘I’m here. Don’t worry,’ she said. She lay close to him, quiet in the bed, her body warming, not realising for some time that he was not listening any longer.

  In the morning the grief of Miss Constance took the form of hatred in which she lost all puffy and flouncy calm and clawed at Nurse Farrer with sagging and vicious lips on which she had forgotten to put her rouge:

  ‘I think it’s perfectly scandalous the way you have behaved in this house. I call it perfectly scandalous. You treated everybody as if they were dirt. Especially Spratchley. He belonged to us—he had always been with us—he had been with us all these years. And you treated us as if we had no right to him at all.’