by MARY HOCKING
‘Did the doctor tell you to close the windows?’ he asked.
‘He said to keep him warm.’
‘I see.’ He could feel the sweat breaking out in his arm-pits, at the backs of his knees, down his spine. ‘Well, I don’t suppose the doctor will be long now.’
‘Would you like a cup of tea? I’m making some for myself.’
He said, ‘That would be very nice’ to get rid of her. When she had gone, he pulled up a chair and stationed himself by Cope’s bed. Sickness had always aroused a physical revulsion in him, and because of this he thought that it was essential to touch people who were ill, that to fail to do so was to abandon them. Cope was moving restlessly, his head turning from side to side; his breathing was irregular and every now and again he emitted a strange jumble of sounds which although they made no sense still conveyed a disturbing impression of urgency. One arm was twisted beneath his body, the other hand plucked at the sheet. Moray lifted the hand away from the sheets and held the wrist; the pulse was hammering, there was something very unpleasant about this thing that jerked beneath the flesh. Moray transferred his grip to the hand; immediately Cope’s fingers began to pluck at Moray’s hand, just as they had plucked at the sheet. It seemed even hotter in the room. If this went on much longer, he was going to faint. Moray released Cope’s hand and moved his chair farther from the bed. It wasn’t just the physical nearness that bothered him; he felt he needed space between himself and Cope.
Something had gone badly wrong. Quite why he felt this, or even what he meant by it, he did not know; but the sense of it was terribly strong in this room. He felt the cold sweat of sickness like slime on his face. He concentrated on the low brick wall outside the window, counting each brick from left to right, fighting down the nausea. He wasn’t sick, but the nausea stayed with him. When the doctor arrived Moray made this an excuse for going outside; he sat on the steps leading down to the basement and drank the tea the landlady provided.
‘You look nearly as bad as him,’ she told him.
The doctor said, when he called him into the room, ‘Been overdoing it, have you?’
‘Electioneering is a tiring business.’
‘So I imagine. Can’t understand why anyone does it.’
Moray sat down on the chair, his back to Cope. ‘How is he?’
‘No worse.’
‘Are you going to get him into hospital?’ Moray wanted Cope in hospital; he wanted the whiteness, the antiseptic smell, the fever charted on graph paper.
The doctor didn’t want Cope moved at present. ‘Hospitals are the most draughty places on this earth,’ he was saying. Moray was about to plead the landlady’s case when the health visitor arrived; she looked so formidably capable that he did not dare to argue.
‘I shan’t be in Westminster until next week,’ he said. ‘If there is anything I can do, please let me know.’
The landlady was in the hall, making a show of polishing the front door knob. He handed her the empty cup and refused a refill. ‘Have you any idea what happened?’ he asked her.
‘He was out Wednesday night,’ she said. ‘I went to bed at ten o’clock and he wasn’t in then. Perhaps his car broke down and he had to walk in all that rain. Enough to give anyone pneumonia. I’ve got his garage keys. He’d left them on the chest of drawers. I thought I’d get my husband to go along and see everything was all right.’
Moray offered to do this and she gave him directions to the garage. The car was there, parked crookedly, the hood down. Even after a lapse of some thirty-six hours, the inside was still very wet; there was mud on the floor. Moray poked around and found a washleather; he mopped the car down carefully, it seemed the least he could do.
He returned to his office and told Hannah that Cope had pneumonia. She said, ‘But he seemed quite all right on Tuesday.’ She obviously found it difficult to accept the idea of Cope being seriously ill and seemed to think a little argument might bring about a more reasonable state of affairs.
‘He’s not all right now.’ Moray did not want to talk about it. His terseness only made matters seem more serious.
‘But how did he manage to get pneumonia?
‘How does one get pneumonia? I don’t know. It’s no use asking me.’ She was not attacking him, yet for some reason he adopted a defensive attitude. He said, to forestall more questions, ‘Would there be any coffee?’
While she waited for the kettle to boil, Hannah said, ‘Will you be going away this week-end? I could work tomorrow if that would help.’
He had meant to stay with Lucy, but that arrangement had been made ten days ago; Lucy seemed as though she was part of another existence. He said. ‘I’ll work at my flat. There are one or two things I must sort out. Nothing you can help with.’
‘Don’t you overdo it and get ill.’
It was apparent she felt that things were becoming too much for him. He looked at her round, pleasant face and thought she had about as much sensitivity as an apple dumpling. Usually, he viewed his fellows through a filter which removed such glaring antagonism and left him with an amused acceptance of inadequacies. But there seemed to be nothing between himself and Hannah Mason at this moment, her personality made direct contact with his nerves and his nerves were raw. ‘Don’t try to soothe me, Hannah,’ he said. ‘All I need is a few moments’ peace to collect my thoughts.’
‘Yes. All right.’ She made the coffee and returned to her typewriter. She did not raise her eyes from her notebook, but he felt that every time he swallowed it registered with her. He decided to work at the flat for the rest of the day.
At the flat, he had another coffee, but it did not revive him; it was like pouring liquid down a well. There was a letter from Lucy. Usually, she wrote on a single sheet of paper, but this was a bulky package. He couldn’t cope with Lucy, he hadn’t any emotion to spare. He put the letter on the table unopened.
He looked at the files strewn about the room. He had been through them so many times now his head began to ache the moment he picked one up and he no longer took in any of the words. But the questions went on endlessly. He couldn’t have done any more during the campaign, surely he couldn’t have done any more? There had been times when he felt as though one extra fact to remember would destroy the whole balance of his brain. He couldn’t have gone into the financial side of it; even if he had tried, he simply couldn’t have absorbed it. Cope had said, ‘You fight the election. I’ll pay the bills.’ It had seemed fair enough, the right use of time. But now, when there was more time, it was not so easy to understand why he hadn’t asked more questions. Where had the money come from? Cope had all the details, and he had shown Moray the list of contributions. Had anything struck him as odd? Moray wondered. He hadn’t been looking for anything odd, though, just praying there would be enough money. But was that quite true? What was it that Hannah had said? Something about one of the firms that had contributed. . . . He sat with his head in his hands, trying to remember. When no words came, he tried to visualise her when she had said it. What kind of day had it been? Raining, sunny, the wind rattling the window pane. . . . Suddenly he saw her, standing in a dust-speckled beam of sunlight; she was by the filing cabinet, a drawer half-open, and a file resting on it. He heard her voice quite clearly. ‘The miserable devils! I know someone who works for them. They pay her twelve pounds a week, believe it or not. And they’ve got this sort of money to play around with!’ It had irritated him that she had referred to the contribution as ‘playing around’. She got under his skin when she made it apparent that to her politics was some kind of game played by men who haven’t yet grown up. If his supporters adopted that attitude, how could he expect anyone else to take him seriously? It had been a particularly gruelling day. He had gone out of the office because he couldn’t trust himself to keep his temper.
He couldn’t remember the contributor, probably he had never known to whom she was referring. Why had he left so much to Cope?
He could hear voices: ‘We must have this by tomorrow
morning at the latest . . .’ and when he had protested, they said, ‘It will be too late after that, Ormerod is giving a press conference . . . the socialists are on to it already . . . ten-minute broadcast after In and around Scotney . . . the Gazette goes to press tonight . . . the Council meets tomorrow . . .’ People waited for him outside houses as he walked down a street. ‘Do you know how long that house has been empty? Four years, and the one on the other side of the road . . .’. ‘No one gets our vote until something is done about those Continental lorries; do you see that gable up there. . . .’ It was inexorable, he was on a moving staircase and it was going faster and faster.
And then, the Ormerod scandal broke. It happened and it had to be used. He had campaigned about corruption, how could he evade dealing with this evidence of it? At the time, he had felt he was doing something hard and dangerous, he had not expected to come through unscathed. He had not expected Ormerod to crumple like that.
But after the campaign. . . . He should have made a stand immediately after that meeting with Hefferman, as soon as he began to have doubts about the West Front development. But while he was trying to find out more about the development, the rumours about the financing of his campaign started; and now, when he turned his attention to that, this happened, this illness of Cope’s which seemed so much worse than anything else.
The situation changed so bewilderingly. During the campaign, to have called Cope to account would have been unwarrantable interference, a psychological blunder which would have affected all the other workers. Today, his failure to do so was an inexplicable omission. He was caught in a nightmare where one situation dissolved and he found himself in a different situation, and then another layer was removed and yet another situation was revealed, and each getting worse. He couldn’t keep up, the ground shifted so fast, he couldn’t find a firm foothold, and without any intention of doing so, he found himself gradually retreating. So little time had passed, and yet already the accusations of delay which he would have to face were formidable. ‘Why, as soon as you realised, didn’t you . . . ?’
‘But I had to be sure, and as soon as I started to investigate this, there was that . . .’
No! It MUST stop here. There were two things: two things which he could and must do. He must publicly express his dissatisfaction with the information now available about the West Front development; and as soon as Cope was better he must demand particulars about the financial arrangements for his campaign. But already, that wasn’t enough. There were other, more fundamental questions he must ask Cope; and further, stretching beyond them, were questions he could not even formulate in his mind.
He must do something. He rang the office, Hannah answered. ‘Do you remember that firm your friend worked with, the one which contributed to my expenses?’
‘Yes,’ she said at once. ‘Cosgrove’s Travel. Why?’
‘You have a very good memory,’ he said acidly. ‘I was just testing it.’
‘Oh, bugger you!’ she said when she had put down the receiver. But she was sorry that things were becoming too much for him. She worked late. Her brother Colin and his wife and mother-in-law were coming to dinner. It was odd how, whenever they came to dinner, Hannah always found it necessary to work late so that she had a rush before they arrived and the meal was late which upset Nancy’s mother who liked to eat early because of her digestion.
Hannah typed all the, letters, although they would have to wait until Monday to be signed. Until recently, she had signed letters on Neil’s behalf, but he had suddenly become insistent on signing Everything personally. He had taken a lot of the files to his flat, too. She hoped he wasn’t going to try to do other people’s work as well as his own. She was rather surprised at this development because hitherto there had been things he didn’t want to know, and these were the very things he was fussing about now.
There were several telephone calls. Councillors, constituents, the chairman of the Chamber of Commerce; they all realised that Moray was busy but thought that they qualified for special treatment. It was a quarter to seven by the time she left, later than she had intended. She became flustered and couldn’t think what to do first when she reached the flat. She had never been able to relax with her nearest and dearest, she was too aware of their disapproval. She was a reasonably good cook, but never excelled herself when Nancy was present. The sensible thing would have been to avoid anything complicated. This evening she had chosen to do one of the more testing recipes. There was no doubt about it, she invited trouble whenever they came to see her.
They had not been in the flat a minute before Nancy said, ‘Hannah, darling, you’ve been to a lot of trouble, I can tell that.’ She herself had been to the hairdresser, her flaxen hair fluffed like a powder puff around her small, pink face.
Hannah took their coats before they could make the usual joke about ‘which of all your rooms do these go in?’
‘Colin, will you pour drinks?’ she said. ‘Do eat the bits and pieces, won’t you? I’m afraid dinner isn’t ready yet. I was late at the office.’
She waited for Nancy to say that she was always late at that office, but Nancy had more important matters to broach.
‘I will have you know, Hannah,’ she said, accepting a gin and tonic, ‘that I went to the meeting of the Downland Association.’
‘Was Neil all right?’ Hannah asked.
‘He was terribly good. I said to Colin, “you really should have come”, didn’t I, darling? Of course, I was very fond of Tubby Ackroyd, he was a dear old boy, but he was getting a little past it, bless him. No one could say that of your Mr. Moray, could they?’
‘I met him recently,’ Colin said. ‘At the cocktail party at Major Brophy’s. He came in briefly. I must say he’s one of the few men I’ve met whom women find attractive and men don’t want to kick in the pants.’
‘I don’t know what that is supposed to mean,’ Nancy said irritably.
‘It means I quite liked him.’
‘Well, then, why can’t you say so, instead of always sounding as though you’re trying to get at someone.’
‘I still can’t understand why people vote for him,’ Colin went on imperviously. ‘What do they expect to gain by it? Will Lomax was saying that he thought they were like those sick people who go to the chemist and take a lucky dip into the drugs that aren’t on prescription.’
‘Not our chemist,’ Nancy’s mother said. ‘He’d tell you to go to the doctor. But then, he’s one of the old school.’
‘I think that is unkind of Will Lomax,’ Nancy said. ‘He hasn’t been the same since his wife left him.’ It was the first time Hannah had ever heard her mention Lomax, but she sounded as though she knew his whole life history.
‘Did she go off with another man?’ Nancy’s mother asked. ‘Yes, and he consoled himself with Connie Fairbrother, that’s how I know about it.’
Hannah gazed into her drink. If she betrayed the slightest interest in Lomax, Nancy would be on to it like a ferret after a rabbit. Fortunately, however, Nancy had not yet finished with Neil.
‘I should think he has a lot to offer, politically.’ Nancy knew very little about politics, but this did not prevent her from expressing her views with great firmness. ‘We need a change, and we need it soon. I’m convinced of that. But as to his being attractive to women, I’d be a little wary of him. He’s the type of man who’d never be any good to a woman.’ She sounded sad, as though it caused her pain to break this news.
Colin said, ‘Oh, come! You don’t know anything about the man.’
‘He’d string a woman along.’ Nancy was shrewd about this sort of thing, which was why Hannah was afraid of her. ‘He’ll have a lot of affairs, of course; but he’ll run away from responsibility. Immature, perhaps. . . .’ She went on talking. Will Lomax escaped unscathed, except for Connie Fair-brother.
Hannah went into the kitchen. Nancy’s mother said, ‘You’ve upset Hannah. She’s got her eye on Neil Moray.’
‘These things have to be said.
Mother.’ Nancy lowered her voice marginally. ‘Hannah is unrealistic about men. It’s the dull ones that make the good husbands.’
Colin said, ‘Thank you, my pet.’
‘You’ll never convince Hannah of that,’ Nancy’s mother said. ‘She’ll never be contented, like you and me. She’ll always be wanting something she can’t have.’
Hannah said, ‘You’ll be glad to know we can eat now.’
As he sprinkled ginger on the melon, Colin announced, ‘We’ve had a bit of excitement at Picton’s Quay.’
‘Don’t go into all the gory details, please!’ Nancy turned to Hannah before Colin had a chance to say any more. ‘They’ve found a body in the river.’
‘And the police have been around, knocking on doors and making inquiries, and all the housewives of Picton’s Quay are barricading themselves indoors tonight!’
‘Colin, what nonsense you do talk,’ Nancy spoke sharply. ‘They only wanted to know if anyone had seen a stranger in the village last Wednesday evening. No one had, of course, not in that terrible cloudburst.’
‘Do they know who it was?’ Hannah asked.
Nancy looked forbiddingly at her husband. When Hannah went out to the kitchen, Colin followed her and whispered, ‘They’ve been dredging. The body got mixed up with one of the machines.’
At the table, Nancy’s mother was saying, ‘Well, you would go and live out there.’
‘But Mother, you love it, you always say how much you love it.’
‘I’ve never liked being near the river, Nancy. Never!’
‘That was because you didn’t think it was healthy, not because you expected bodies to come floating up on every tide,’ Colin said as he put down the casserole.
‘The body was found two or three miles from Picton’s Quay.’ Nancy was on the defensive. ‘And now we will talk about something else, please. Hannah wants you to pour the wine, don’t you, Hannah?’ As he turned away to do this, she said gaily, ‘I don’t know where Hannah gets these wonderful recipes from!’