A Time to Heal

by Claire Rayner

  He moved a little then, and again grimaced and his right hand moved a little and then relaxed.

  “It hurts,” he said, and it was like a whimper. “Pain, told her …”

  And then, at last, she came back to herself, and the exhaustion was damped down as it had to be, and she stood up, almost briskly, and spoke in the special doctor’s voice she had learned to use those long years ago when she had been in general practice; she rarely needed it now, at Brookbank, but when she did, there it was, ready to jump out of her mouth as though a button had been pressed somewhere.

  “Now, listen to me. You aren’t well, and I’m going to get someone else to come and see you—another doctor, a specialist. Do you understand? I’m going down to telephone, and there’ll be another doctor coming to see you soon. I want you to lie here very quietly until I come upstairs again. Do you understand? You’re not to move at all.”

  He looked up at her, and the blankness shifted in his eyes, became a gleam of triumph and he said in the thick hoarse voice that had so revolted her, “Told you. Told her … said I was …”

  “And you’re not to talk. Complete rest, you hear?” She made herself lean over him, and smooth the sheet across his chest, and then she went to the door, and looked back for a moment at the narrow head on the pillow, the eyes thinned to a slit but still watching her, and nodded at him and went down to the telephone.

  The next few hours were a confused and even more exhaustion-filled blur. Sam Lemesurier came up from Brookbank without demur, and she was intensely grateful to him; she should have called the G.P., a slovenly bumbling middle-aged man who served the village and the surrounding farms and cottages, but she had never used his services, knowing perfectly well how useless he really was. Sam could have objected strenuously to being hauled out to an old man who was nothing to do with him, in the middle of a bitterly cold night, but he just grinned at her when she opened the door to him and began to thank him, and pushed past her to dump a couple of heavy bags on the sitting room table.

  “I brought the ECG machine, since you were so specific about the diagnosis. Though quite what we can do if—however—here, you look rough, Harriet! Christ, you could have had a coronary yourself from the look of you.”

  “I’m tired,” she said, almost guiltily enjoying his concern and finding reassurance of her personal value in it. “I was up in Town all day and got back to this. I’ll do a bit longer yet, though.”

  Sam spent almost an hour with the old man, fiddling with the leads from the machine, making his tracings, and checking the readings. From time to time, George slid into uneasy sleep, only to wake again with a grunt of pain after a short while, and Sam gave him some morphine, jabbing the needle into the skinny arm with cheerful callousness.

  “I can get an ambulance to take him up to Brookbank tonight, Harriet. He ought to be monitored and we’ve got the gear there, of course—but we can’t keep him long, you know that? We’re research, not clinical, though we’ve got those few beds we can use for short-term things. Theo did Geraldine Cooper’s varicose veins for her in one of Geoffrey’s obesity beds, I know, but this—even for you, I doubt Oscar’d let the old boy stay with us above twenty-four hours or so.”

  “I’ll worry about that in the morning,” she said. “I’ll talk to Oscar, or Theo maybe. But right now—if you can get him in, I’d be grateful. I couldn’t trust myself to stay awake and watch him the way I am—and if he had another—”

  “Well, of course! Christ, you don’t think I’d leave you alone with him, do you? Even though it’s not too bad, you know. It’s almost certainly on the anterior aspect. I can’t be sure till I get another tracing tomorrow, but it looks anterior at present. And if the clotting can be controlled he’s got every chance of doing well. Mind you, he’s pretty old for it—what is he? Seventy-seven? No stripling. Still, he could do well. We’ll see more clearly tomorrow.”

  13

  SHE SAT in the square-backed armchair in Sister Hornett’s kitchen-cum-office, leaning back against the embroidered cover with its incredibly red and yellow and blue flowers and faceless poke-bonneted be-parasoled crinoline lady, all worked by Sister’s own hands during slack times on the ward, and tried to feel like herself. It was a necessary exercise, because ever since she had got up that morning, she had felt strange, almost depersonalized, as though all the things that were happening to her and around her were only shadow events, projected onto a screen like a film or a television play.

  Perhaps this sense of unreality was due to the fact that she had been alone in the cottage when she woke that morning? She explored the idea with an almost academic detachment and found it had some sense in it. For as long as she could remember, she had never been alone in a house. First as a child at home; then as a student living in college; then marriage to David, and the children. For a moment her mind tried to keep to thoughts of David, but she pulled herself away, almost violently. After that, the children and George and sometimes Oscar. How long since she had woken and known that she was totally alone, surrounded by empty rooms?

  But that wasn’t what had made her feel so odd this morning. She realized with shame that the solitude had given her intense pleasure; that the memory of the previous night’s events, crawling into her sleep-sodden mind, had brought a wave of luxurious relief.

  “Think of yesterday,” her mind whispered. “Think of yesterday and the men who talked—”

  Obediently, she tried to think of yesterday and the men who talked, but all she could do was re-create a set of jerky images of mouthing figures far away on a distant platform, none of which had any relevance for her.

  There was a sound outside the half-open door, a rattling and a faint creaking as a trolley was wheeled along the corridor, and a voice cried irritably, “Mind that offside wheel, Joe—silly bastard ’oo left that there ought to be shot—” and the sounds dwindled away to culminate in a distant rattling of iron gates and the whine of a lift going away down to the bottom of the building.

  And then as the sound died, she felt a movement of air, chill but stuffy, across her face, and smelled the pure breath of hospital–formaldehyde and disinfectant, flowers and floor polish, vegetables cooking and lavatories and carbolic-soapy bathrooms—and she knew why she felt as she did. And this time she gave up the attempt to push the memory and the thoughts away, but let them take her over completely.

  She had sat, like this, in a hard-backed chair in a ward Sister’s kitchen-office, waiting to be told what she already knew. She had listened to the business of hospital going mindlessly on, to trolleys and lifts and noisy porters, smelled the smell of hospital, and had tried to plan a future that didn’t contain either David or her father. She had been ready for it, in a way; no one could live in London in wartime and not be ready for it, but the readiness had not been enough. Now it had happened, it was so much bigger, so much emptier, so much sillier than could ever have been foreseen.

  And she had, at that moment in time, done the most positive thing she could. She had pulled the door shut, there inside her mind, and had hidden behind it, refusing to look out and beyond into the silly huge emptiness. So that when the young doctor came, with Sister hovering behind him, their eyes filled with a sick mixture of pity and macabre curiosity, and “thank-God-it’s-not-me,” to tell her in deep embarrassment that they were both dead, she had nodded composedly, and taken the death certificates and gone away to the babies and to George, leaving the door closed firmly on the future.

  Now, sitting in that future in another ward Sister’s office, separated from that day by twenty-five years, she knew she had never opened the door again, not for herself or even for the children. She had lived a day at a time in everything personal, including her dealings with Oscar. Only where work was concerned had she ever planned forward. In a working context she could think not only of tomorrow but of next week, next month, next year, five years’ time. But not otherwise.

  So this morning she felt as she did because once again she had reaffirmed th
e existence of the closed door within her mind. It was comforting to have reached that understanding. Now she knew, she thought she felt a little better and almost experimentally opened her eyes to look round the room, at the old-fashioned scrubbed wooden dresser with its rows of thick white cups hanging on hooks, its stacks of plates and trays and biscuit tins, at the small um hissing lackadaisically in the comer beside the sink. She ought, surely, to feel right now that she knew why she had felt so odd.

  But it made no difference. The sensation of being split in half, of being partly nonexistent, was still there, and irritably she stood up and went to the window to stare out at the sprawl of buildings four floors below her, at the corrugated iron roofs of the pathology lab complex, the weather-stained felted flat roof of her own unit, with its little boiler house alongside that had to be constantly watched to make sure the temperature in the animals’ rooms didn’t drop to chill the monkeys to expensive death.

  Somewhere in the very pit of her mind there was real knowledge, understanding that was trying to get out and scream at her, but even as she tried to reach it, she knew part of herself was still grimly hanging on to the knob of the door—

  “Silly bitch” she said aloud, and turned round, moving with a heavy purposefulness. If she stayed here alone much longer, she would go screaming mad. High time someone came and told her what was happening.

  But as she reached the door, it swung open wider, and Sam and Sister Hornett came in.

  “Sorry to keep you, Harriet. You didn’t need to come up here, you know, I’d have phoned you as soon as—”

  “I know. But I had to,” she said shortly. “Well?”

  “Well—” Sam began, and then the door moved again, and Theo put his head round.

  “Sister Hornett? What’s all this I hear about—Harriet, then you are!” He came in, squeezing past Sister Hornett who primmed her mouth and looked offended, to stand in front of Harriet and peer into her face. “My dear girl! Have you been up all night? You should have called me!”

  Sam laughed with a heavy and patently false jocularity. “I told her last night she looked a bloody mess—been cavorting around the metropolis all day, she told me.” He grinned at her, his head on one side. “Come on, Harriet! Don’t look so stricken! I know the old boy’s ill, but he’s not dead yet, is he? And even if he were–damn it, woman, he’s old enough to tot up his accounts, after all!”

  “How is he this morning?” she asked curtly. “Have you done the rest of the ECG’s you wanted?”

  “Yes, I’ve done them.” Sam, embarrassed, became immediately businesslike. “And as I thought, he’s had a couple of small anterior infarctions. I’ve done a little preliminary work into the state of his arteries, and they aren’t too good. Not bad for his age, of course, but still, there seems evidence of a good deal of atheroma. So he needs anticoagulants and very careful nursing if he’s not to have another serious go like last night’s. If he does, he won’t do, I’m afraid. But at present, he’s not too bad. His heart is basically sound, considering the rest of the clinical picture. So there you are.”

  “Will you continue treating him here, Dr. Lemesurier?” Sister Hornett asked. “Because you know, the bed situation …”

  “Um. I was coming to that,” Sam said. He leaned back against the dresser and took a crumpled cigarette pack from his pocket to fuss with lighting one, not looking at Harriet. “I could ask Oscar to let me keep him, Harriet, but to be perfectly honest with you, I’m not all that keen. I was happy to come out to you last night—I mean, Christ, I wouldn’t wish that slob from the village on my worst enemy—but I’m having enough trouble keeping my series going with useful patients, as Sister here could tell you, and there’s nothing at all that—well, I know how you feel, Harriet. He’s a relation of yours and all that, but from my point of view, a man of seventy-seven isn’t much use either as research material or—” He shrugged. “I’d rather you got him in somewhere else, if you can. I’m sorry.”

  “I gather he’s not fit to be looked after at home?” Theo said with a certain eagnerness in his voice.

  “At home? Well—I suppose he could, eventually. But he needs some inpatient treatment, to get the anticoagulants stabilized, and, of course, until these infarctions heal. After that, with full-time nursing, maybe.”

  “Then it means a home,” Theo said with decision, and looked at Harriet. “No, don’t argue with me, Hattie. Not now, anyway. You can’t possibly arrange to care for him full-time at home, so that’s all there is—”

  “Mr. Fowler, have you ever tried to find a place in an old-age home for an ill old person?” Sister Hornett said crisply. “Because if you had, as I did before my mother died last year, you’d not even mention the possibility. They’re not interested in invalids. Not unless you can pay, that is.” She looked at Harriet, her eyebrows raised a little. “Twenty pounds a week and more some of them ask—and the nursing they get—well!” she sniffed. “I wouldn’t look after a cat the way they look after some of their old people, I can tell you. If Mr. Berry needs careful nursing, he’ll not get it in any old-age home I’ve ever come across.”

  There was a silence, and then Sam said awkwardly, “I’m sorry, Harriet. But I don’t see—look, I’ll call Peders at the District General, if you like—”

  “Thanks, Sam. You’ve been marvelous,” Harriet spoke almost mechanically. “But I need time to think about this. Could I—how long can you keep him here, under treatment?”

  “Oh, several days, easily, and to hell with Oscar,” Sam said heartily. “Glad to oblige. But we’ll have to do something right away about making other arrangements. It can take a lot of time to fix up.”

  He grinned at her and came across the cluttered room to pat her on the shoulder, spraying cigarette ash over his waistcoat as he moved, and she smiled at him and thanked him again, and he went away, Sister Hornett surging importantly behind him, leaving her alone with Theo.

  He sat on the edge of the table in silence for a while, watching her as she went again to the armchair to lean wearily back against the crinoline lady.

  “So what are you going to do, Hattie?” he asked gently. “You must see now that you’ll have to do something. As for what Sister Hornett said—well, I daresay that was all a bit exaggerated. I’ve no doubt I could manage to find somewhere. Anyway, found it will have to be.”

  She shook her head, not opening her eyes. “No, Theo. Sister Hornett was right—about the sort of care there’d be, I mean.” She looked at him then. “If I put him into a home, even supposing we find one that will take him, he won’t get treatment. He’d just be left to die.”

  Theo looked back at her, his face expressionless, and then said carefully, “He is, of course, a very old man.”

  “Which means you think, like Sam, that the sooner he dies the better? Is that what you mean?” She could hear the note of hysteria in her own voice, and very deliberately damped it down, and said more coolly, “No, I’m sorry, Theo. Whatever you think, I’ve got to get him somewhere he’ll get treatment Not just a bed to lie and wait for death in. Treatment, proper nursing—”

  “Hattie, may I suggest we don’t discuss it right now? You’re somewhat overwrought, I suspect, and I’m not sure you can give this the sort of thought it needs. Tell me, had you done anything about lunch before you left home to come here this morning?”

  “Lunch?” she stared at him, and then laughed to cover her embarrassment. “Theo, I’m sorry. I’d forgotten it was Sunday. Will you forgive me if we miss out on the usual arrangement? Because frankly, I didn’t—”

  “Did you think I was asking for a meal, for God’s sake?” he said angrily. “Really, Harriet, you do me less than justice! There’s something remarkably self-centered about someone who can produce an insult like that, under the—” He stopped, and then shook his head. “As I said, you’re over wrought. And I’m not precisely myself at the moment either, come to that. Forget it. All I wanted to be sure about was that there would be no meal burning to a crisp
at the cottage if I took you into King’s Lynn for a pub lunch. That’s all. You’ve obviously not eaten at all yet today, and you’re green with fatigue. So come along. After lunch, we can talk about George and his future.” He stood up and smiled at her. “Come along, now.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t leave Brookbank, Theo. Gore on—I called him this morning. He’s driving down this afternoon.”

  “Oh. Oh, of course. I’m sorry—I should have realized. And Patty?”

  “Not Patty,” she said stiffly. “There’s no point in calling Patty.” She looked up at him and saw the puzzlement in his face. “Because of Ben,” she added. And then shook her head again. “You don’t know about that, of course. I—later, I’ll try to explain.”

  “Later, then. But you still need lunch, so come on. Well have it here. Even Brookbank’s roast lamb and boiled cabbage are better than starvation.”

  “Well, I must say, I can’t think what you’re being so stubborn about, Ma. You’ve got Theo’s considered opinion on George’s whatyamacallit—prognosis,” Gordon said crisply. “If that’s the word. Anyway, whatever your own medical opinion may be, it’s clear to me that both Theo and Lemesurier feel the best answer would be some sort of home where nursing can be provided. Now you say you won’t consider it. Why?”

  Harriet was staring out of the common room window, watching the gate porter desultorily dragging a rake across the uneven gravel of the almost empty car park. “Do you know something?” she said abruptly. “I hadn’t really thought about it until today. I haven’t addressed him directly for—oh, years. I never call him anything. Isn’t that extraordinary?”

  “What?” Gordon said, a little irritably.

  “George. I call him ‘George’ when I’m talking to you, Theo. I call him ‘your grandfather’ talking to you and Patty, but I never call him anything. Only ‘you.’ Are You all right? Do You want anything? You, you, you. Which makes him nobody at all.”

  “Really, Ma, I know you had a rough day yesterday and that last night—but do, please, let’s stick to the point. I have to be back home tonight before eight. We’ve got people coming.”