by David Storey
There was a long intense silence, in which he didn’t seem to have realized he’d stopped speaking. There wasn’t a sound in the room. It seemed it was going to last for ever, and I could think of nothing to say, no sound I could make, to break it. Then he added, ‘She’s the norm here, although we usually deal with older people. You’ll understand I’m speaking dispassionately.’
‘I wouldn’t care to hear you talk about somebody you didn’t like,’ I said, and he laughed. I started to try hard to like him. ‘But I want the best for her.’
‘Okay, Arthur,’ he said. ‘But I’ve every reason to believe she wants to die.’
‘What about her children? She’s got a boy and a girl.’
‘They’re being taken care of by a relative, if I remember properly. The only one she’s got, it seems.’
‘Has she any chance at all?’
He paused to assess the tone of my voice. ‘Don’t let me paint it too black. I’ve been open about it. There is some hope. How often do you want to come in and see her?’
‘I’d like to come every day.’
‘Every day,’ he said, and made no effort to hide his mild surprise. ‘And you say you’ve no ties with her—emotional or anything. It’d be better for all concerned if you told me right now if there were.’
‘I used to live with her … you know—close.’
He sighed and tried to look unpleasant. Perhaps he didn’t sense how he was the first person outside I’d admitted it to. ‘Why didn’t you say you were concerned at the beginning? You needn’t have explained the circumstances—you could have just told me … well, anything. How do you feel about the situation now? I mean, are you wanting to look after her because I’ve told you she might die? Do you feel guilty—owe her something?’
‘You can call it that.’
‘I’m not being sentimental about it, Machin, so let’s get it straight. Do you feel you owe her something now she’s in this condition, something you never gave her before—or does it go deeper than that?’
‘I don’t know. You might be right. In any case—I feel I owe her something.’
He wanted to continue his attack, but he suddenly softened and changed his mind. ‘When did you stop living with her?’
‘Over a year ago.’
‘It was a final break that never mended?’
‘I tried to … I couldn’t get in touch. I don’t know where I went wrong. She didn’t want any more. She was frightened.’
‘There was some genuine feeling between you, then? You know, affection—something that might have been permanent?’
‘I reckon I spoilt all that … I don’t want to make it sound all rubbish.’
‘But there was something.’
‘There was on my part. There was everything on my part! … But I just couldn’t make her see it.’
‘Wouldn’t she see you again?’
‘No. She wouldn’t have anything to do with me.’
‘You must have been specially hard,’ he said.
‘I wasn’t hard! … Yes, I was. No, I don’t know. I just couldn’t get through. I was just like an … ape with her. I never realized she wasn’t as strong as I tried to make her. I must have knocked her about—emotionally—more than I thought.’
He moved round the office, and adjusted three snake-stem reading lamps. ‘What do you want me to do, then?’ he said.
‘I’d like you to get her the room like you said, if it doesn’t mean shoving too many people out. And I’ll come and see her every day.’
‘I’ll make you out a card. You’ll probably be her only visitor, apart from the relative.’
‘When’ll you move her out of that ward?’ I said as he started writing.
‘Tonight if I can arrange it. I’ll show you the room I have in mind as we go out. If anything happens I’ll ring you.’
I wrote down the phone numbers of Primstone, Weaver’s, and the flat.
From the ridge overlooking Highfield I could look down on the lights sparkling in the faint blue mist—the square-set pattern of the estate, curved and quilted by the folds of the broad valley bottom, Fairfax Street, the concertina roofs of Weaver’s, the glint of the river between the squat warehouses. I drove up to the moors. There wasn’t a sound amongst the great blank folds of heath. The autumn mist was thickened by a low blackish purple. I felt elated—an elation compressed by some bitterness and by self-reproach, as if at last, really at last, I’d got hold of something which before had always slipped my grasp, and which I wasn’t too clumsy to hold. Now it was real, and held me. I was no longer alone.
I went up to the Riding each night.
Mrs Hammond was in a coma. It seemed only a matter of time before she died.
When I reported for training on Tuesday night, George was waiting for me at the players’ entrance. ‘There’s a message for you, Arthur—from the Riding. They advise you to go up there.’ The dog was panting, and George held the car door with fatherly concern.
Everything held me up in town. The car ran out of petrol and I had to run for a can, the lights were fixed to stop me as often as they could, the gears crashed, the clutch slipped—everything as if it was my fault. I left the car—I couldn’t drive it—and ran up the hill.
The doctor—a different doctor—and two nurses were just coming out of the room. A room as familiar as my own flat, as Fairfax Street, as Weaver’s. The doctor came back in with me to say, ‘She seems to be going. How long can you stay?’ He left a nurse behind.
I sat beside the bed and held the small hand sticking out from the sheets. It was unbelievable that it had once made great bombs. It was nothing more than a child’s. Her large eyes were shut. The skin was stretched tight on her face, dragged into the hollows, gleaming yellow over the bone. Her hand was cold and too still, its fingers clung to mine with an unconscious, lifeless anxiety. A sore hand, stained. She’d been biting her nails and breaking them, and there were thin rinds of dirt. I didn’t remember her biting her nails. I thought about it. The vein pumped and pulsed like a wire in her wrist, and the struggle went on in her throat—strings tugging her body to a remembrance of life. Her lips were slightly parted, a tooth gleamed in the tight crevice. Her nostrils were flexed wide to suck in air.
I sat for hours and nothing happened. The doctor came in occasionally. Another nurse took over.
Nothing happened. I kept the hand and stroked it. I’d never had her like this before, and she’d never know it. I pressed my strength into her. I squeezed it through her fingers. I told her not to be mean. Her skin was stained with grease.
She couldn’t go, I told her. I told her she couldn’t go so she’d believe it. She had to stay and breathe. I told her she mustn’t be mean.
In the morning the doctor told me I ought to leave. I noticed how he looked at me—as if there was something there he shouldn’t rightly see. But which he’d seen too often.
It was cold outside.
I walked down the hill to the car. It took some time to start it. I drove straight down to Weaver’s and waited for the gates to be opened at seven-thirty. It was the first time I’d seen it like that, the first time I’d been so early to work that I was the only person in the shop. It was empty and dead, the lumps of metal lying about the machines like carcasses after a battle.
It came to life with a low vibration of the main loom, then the whine and the shudder as the machines started and belts slipped over the loom, and the floor trembled. Men filtered into the place, their voices, their feet, their blue overalls. A line of sparks curved out as the metal screamed under the grinder; the hiss of hot metal in water. The overhead crane chattered, clanked, groaned, and slowly eased itself forward in a rumble down the shop. The far corner suddenly took fire with a blue light, trembling and sparking as the welders moved their flames over the steel.
It seemed I’d only been out of the room a minut
e. She was still there, small, rolled up in sheets, her nostrils poised into the air. She looked a thing whose only function was to die.
‘She must have a heart of leather,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s still pumping twenty-four hours after it should have stopped.’
‘Does it mean she’s still got a chance?’
He pulled his lips together and frowned. ‘You should see the end tonight—if you’re staying. Her sister-in-law and husband aren’t coming.’
‘She doesn’t look …’ I couldn’t think of any word to say. He made a grimace with his eyes, sympathetic and resigned.
I fell asleep in the chair. A sleep which was just a struggle to wake up. A large insect appeared on the ceiling, its thin legs spread-eagled from its long plump body. Although it was small I saw every crevice and tiny undulation on its skin. Its two eyes didn’t move; expressionless, they stuck out like solid balls, hard and secure. When the legs moved the body arched, the flesh creased, and it shifted rapidly across the ceiling to the wall above the bed. I watched it there a long time as it clung to the smooth paint and made no quiver. Then I suddenly realized how close it was to her: that it was just above her head I went crazy because I hadn’t noticed it before, and I sprang across to the wall to crush it.
And as I moved it dropped quickly down the wall and disappeared behind the bed.
I stood and waited. I watched her to see if it had reached the bed. I began searching, getting slower and slower till I could hardly move at all, and when I finally saw the thing it had grown to twice its size and was standing under the bed watching me. I couldn’t move.
I pulled my eyes open thinking I’d heard her whisper. She was still dead except for her breath. Her persistence weakened me. She seemed to grow there like fungus, out of the dead. Persistence of fungus.
The next time I woke a thin trickle of blood was running from her nose. It’d just reached the curve of her lip.
I pressed the bell, and stood back to watch the streak lengthen, and probe its way round the corner of her mouth and edge towards her chin. It received a fresh impetus of darker blood. I opened the door and shouted down the corridor. The nurse was coming at a trot. She put her finger to her lips as she ran. She took one look and was gone. The doctor arrived, and I was left in the dark waiting-hall. I lay down on a wooden bench and watched the door. I sat up, lay down again, then went out in the cold night air, and looked at all the lights below that no longer meant a thing. I rushed back thinking I heard somebody calling. The hall was empty. I smelt my sweat with the ether.
I wandered into the corridor and down to the wards in the hope of cadging some information, and each time I was turned back by smooth nurses. I started on the wall nearest the door and read all the notices I could find. I worked round the room, reading bulletins, reports, advice, national health regulations, rules for out-patients, no smoking, no spitting, wait on this side of the barrier, ear, nose, and throat. The hall was still empty. I sat in a wheel chair and propelled myself up and down. Somewhere at the back an ambulance arrived and left.
At dawn a nurse came in and asked me what I wanted. She went away and came back with a message that her condition was unchanged. I tried to see the Scots doctor but he wasn’t on duty. ‘You can wait here, if you wish,’ the nurse said. ‘But I’m afraid it won’t alter anything. It would be much better if you came back later.’ She seemed to know me. Below the nurse firmness I seemed to remember a sample at the Mecca. I wondered if she thought I’d changed. I drove to the flat and set the alarm for half-seven. I slept a couple of hours, then went to work.
In the evening I discovered that Mrs Hammond’s father was still alive, living in an almshouse at the back of the railway station. I got there the next day just as they were moving him to a home. He didn’t understand what I told him and was under the impression I was somebody called Stan. I wondered what would have happened to all of us if his daughter had stayed with him, never done war-work, never gone to Moyston. He must have forgotten all about her: he mumbled on about Stan over the stove as he waited for the car.
They let me see her early Thursday morning. A dressing covered half her face, and though nobody admitted it I felt this was a good indication. I held her hand thinking she might now be able to feel it, but the nurse reckoned to be alarmed when she came in and found the arm exposed.
‘Then you think she’s a chance of recovering?’ I asked her.
‘I couldn’t tell you, Mr Machin. But we all hope she has, don’t we?’
I slept in the chair beside her till morning.
The new room was larger than the first—it reflected the difference between the Municipal Hospital and the Riding. And she could see the flowers. Before they’d just lingered there and drooped. Now she saw the freshness as soon as they came into the room. When they showed signs of withering they were taken out. She watched the flowers more than anything—the flowers and the summit of a tree, black with winter, that overlooked her window.
Occasionally she smiled, as if good-naturedly she gave over trying to recall the past, and she just gazed out at me. Her face was small, and smooth, and lay over the sheets like a kid’s thinking over the pleasures of the day.
She was back to the girlhood of the photograph she’d shown me—her head leaning back in the sun, her face open to a girl’s laugh. For the first time I saw how she had been—without Eric, without me. It was the girl, and the laugh—and in between then and now was emptiness, with everything forgotten.
She’d turn and watch me silently as I came in the door. She never said a word. I sat there—sometimes we swopped a look, inquiring. Every minute passed as a second in the quietness as we made the effort to recognize each other.
One day she laid her hand out of the sheets, cautiously, as if to see what I’d do. I took hold of it. It seemed to confirm our awareness, and mould two pieces into one.
At Christmas I brought Lynda and Ian to see her for the first time. Her eyes widened with pleasure and bewilderment. She didn’t recognize but only felt the mutual happiness. As they clung to her on the bed her eyes examined the room in fresh perplexity as she tried to identify their endearment and warmth. Dr MacMahon and the Sister watched the struggle with smiles and a few words of restraint to the kids.
‘Why!’ she said. ‘It’s Lynda!’
‘And it’s me—Ian,’ the boy reminded her solemnly. She clung to them with closed eyes.
A week later she died.
6
As I drove in the stream of traffic over New Bridge I had a view of Weaver’s over the roof of the next car—the steam from the engine in the stockyard, the metal stocks, the concertina roof with its sooted glass. I had a tune running through my mind, maybe reflecting the assurance my place of work provided in this the most nervous day of the week. I caught the impression of the brown industrial water as it foamed in great arcs over the weir and swirled in slow volutes past the stone embankment and the factory wall. Above the weir, in an apparently still pool, the barges were lying idle, like stubby fingers, roped together below the small cranes and the shiny black coal slip. All this I knew, even if I didn’t care to look—the dank smell of the polluted river seeped into the car. But it was all remote.
The man I was giving a lift into town looked across at me, smiling. ‘What’s it going to be today, Arthur?’
‘Easy … throw it about a bit.’
‘Just the day,’ he said.
We both stared up at the low ceiling of grey cloud that obliterated the morning’s sun, in view one minute then cut off by the old brick houses of West Street. Once prosperous, the old millowners’ houses were now darkened stumps, holding back the refuse of a minor printing works, some houses, a W.M.C., a mill office, and some large irregular shaped shops. They gave a dull, empty response as I watched their flight past the window.
‘You’d a shaking last Sat’day,’ the man said with the familiarity of the paying spectator
.
‘One of those days,’ I told him bringing the car near the kerb so he could jump out. He took advantage of a general halt of the traffic and opened the door. ‘Mind you dispose of them properly today … I’ll be watching,’ he added as if I needed just that incentive. He banged the door and waved.
I parked in front of the Woolpacks. A small figure, shrouded in a large overcoat, emerged from the entrance of the hotel and came and threw a fist at my shoulder.
‘’Ow do,’ Maurice said. ‘All right, kid?’ He showed his small cheeky teeth.
As we came into the Saloon his dusky face broadened. We joined a small group at the bar, none of whom, with the exception of George Wade, was drinking.
‘Hello, Arthur,’ he said. ‘We were just talking about your new kiddie, Maurice.’
‘Is that so,’ Maurice said.
‘How’s Judith?’
‘They’re both grand. He weighed eight pounds, five ounces—a bloody little tree trunk.’
‘That’s the way,’ George said. ‘We’ll make a father of you yet.’ He murmured some joke in his throat and his small eyes stretched sideways under the hedges of his brows. ‘Remember he’s to lake at Primstone,’ he said. ‘Though we’ve yet to see a father and son lake in the same team.’ The others found it fit to laugh a bit—Frank, Maurice, young Arnie, and a couple of nervous ’backs. We moved about restlessly.
Frank, with a slight stoop, watched George through friendly, uninterested, coal-dusted eyes. A white scarf was wrapped tightly round his throat, his face was red, and he showed every sign of having worked the night before. Maurice, looking older and maybe more grotesque than a married man of a few years’ standing should, leaned on my shoulder with the same assumed interest. Young Arnie’s mouth hung open in a fixed grimace of amusement.
George, supporting himself against the bar counter, knew he was talking froth, but still carried on, fingering the enormous head of his walking stick. Beside him crouched Toby the second like a small seal, its eyes distorted in servility, watching George’s neat, polished shoes spread-eagled on the worn carpet.