“Well?” he said, when she had put away her stethoscope.
Dr Harrington’s eyes were turquoise. Her mouth was wide, like a letter-box.
“Mumps,” she said from the end of the bed.
Topher’s opinion of her took a rapid nose-dive.
“Don’t be ridiculous!”
They looked at each other. Dr Harrington’s gaze did not falter. Topher realised that he was not on the Bench now.
“What do you mean mumps?”
“Mumps. The parotid glands are just coming up. By tomorrow it will most probably be extremely painful for you to open your mouth.”
Topher thought of Chelsea and Penge with their grossly swollen faces when they were children.
“Grown men don’t get mumps.”
“It is rare,” Dr Harrington conceded, “but if there is contact and the resistance is low…”
“How long will I have to be off work?”
“Two weeks. Maybe three. The attack can be quite severe in adults.” Dr Harrington scribbled something on her pad.
“Aspirin when necessary, and I’ve given you something to relieve your throat. There’s not much else I can do.”
She tore off the prescription and put it on Caroline’s bureau.
“Your wife can take it to the chemist.”
Her unconsidered remark had the effect on Topher of a physical blow. Dr Harrington might well be an expert in the diagnosis and treatment of infectious diseases but she still had a great deal to learn about diplomacy.
“My wife died almost a year ago.” Topher watched her face, guessing that it would become suffused with embarrassment when she realised her gaffe.
Dr Harrington’s expression was one not of confusion but concern. She sat down by his side.
“How absolutely dreadful for you.”
Notwithstanding his fiery throat, Topher found himself reiterating the trials and tribulations of the recent months. He had the impression that Dr Harrington was not humouring a man old enough to be her father, but that she was actually listening to every word.
“Loneliness has been associated with a weakened immune system,” she said when he had finished. “The stress induced by your wife’s illness and death could well account for the fact that you picked up the infection. Have you been away this year?”
Topher shook his head.
“I suggest that when you’ve recovered you take some time off.”
“A holiday?”
Dr Harrington stood up.
“Why not?”
When she had gone, letting herself out, Topher made a call to Knightsbridge Crown Court. He had to repeat “mumps” three times to the disbelieving usher whom he instructed to terminate the indecency case.
Mrs Sweetlove was similarly disbelieving. “Mumps, Your Honour!”
To Topher’s horror she offered to visit him. She was sure she could be of help. He reassured her, although his mouth felt like the bottom of a birdcage, his throat burned, his pyjamas were soaked, and his bed a shambles, that he was being cared for by a veritable fleet of nurses.
“Just let me know, Your Honour,” Mrs Sweetlove said, “and I’ll be round like a shot.”
He had fallen into a deep sleep when April, knocking gently and carrying a tray on which a jug of iced barley-water shimmered like a mirage, opened the bedroom door.
“I hope you don’t catch it,” Topher said, feeling sorry for himself.
“Catch what?” April set the tray down beside him.
“Mumps.”
He told her about Dr Harrington’s findings and about Dr Harrington. April reassured him that she had had mumps as a child. At her insistence, and against his better judgement, he went into the bathroom to wash, and change his pyjamas, while she tidied his bed. By the time he was back in it, and had dispatched some of the barley-water, he felt a great deal better. April was looking considerably dishevelled.
“It’s time you thought about moving. This house is far too big. There must have been five hundred glasses in the cupboard when I went to look for one.”
“Caroline collected glasses,” Topher said defensively. They had rarely returned from a bird-watching trip without visiting a village junk shop or antique fair, where she would add to her collection.
“Poor Caroline,” April said. “I think of her so often. What will you do?”
“About what?”
“About Christmas, for one thing.”
“Christmas!”
“I wanted to say – before you are inundated with invitations – that Marcus and I would be most upset if you didn’t spend Christmas with us. You can bring Chelsea and Penge, and the baby of course. It’s due any moment isn’t it?”
Topher did not want it to be Christmas. For ghosts and memories, momentarily displaced, to make their presence more poignantly felt.
“I’d be lost without you and Marcus,” he evaded the issue.
“I only wish you’d let us do more. I could find you a nice little flat – every other house in the street is being converted – and decorate it for you. You wouldn’t have to lift a finger.”
“I’m too ill,” Topher groaned, “to think about anything.”
“Of course you are. How very thoughtless of me. I’ll shut the curtains so that you can sleep, and take your prescription to the chemist. Do the girls know you’re ill?”
“Chelsea and Penge have their own problems.”
Feeling that he knew April well enough for her not to be offended, he closed his eyes in dismissal.
Twenty-two
David Cornish was free to marry. Chelsea had rung, the words falling over themselves, to break the news to Topher. An unexpected telephone call from David’s wife had informed Chelsea that she had known all along that her husband was seeing another woman. She was prepared to give David up on one condition: Chelsea was to come to the house to fetch him.
“What do you think?” Chelsea asked Topher.
“I think it’s…splendid.”
“You don’t sound very pleased.”
“I’ve got mumps.”
“Mumps?”
Topher sighed.
“Is there anyone looking after you?”
“A great many people,” Topher said through his teeth.
“Poor you.” Chelsea sounded relieved. “Look, I’ll come over when I can.”
“There’s no need. I’m managing very well.”
Which was, Topher thought, replacing the telephone on the bedside table next to the hothouse grapes from Jo, the understatement of the year.
He could not remember when he had last stayed in bed. In the manner of those of strong constitution (he had inherited his from his father) he had little patience with indisposition. He had been known to tell his family, firmly believing it, that the afflictions of which they complained from time to time, existed nowhere so much as in the mind and could be banished by their own volition. In the grips of his own singularly inappropriate illness, he wondered whether his words might not only have been hasty but foolish. He felt wretched and had felt wretched for days.
A tom-tom in his head (which was reluctant to contain any cohesive thoughts) beat incessantly; his throat was raging; his neck and face (now distended unilaterally) were stiff; he had the greatest difficulty in opening his mouth which, when he did manage to do so in the interests of eating or speaking, caused him great distress. His chest hurt when he took a deep breath. Dr Harrington had started him on an antibiotic which upset his stomach. Each limb was a millstone. He shivered and shook. He was, by turns, unable to get warm, and afterwards consumed with such a fever that his bedclothes were perpetually sodden. He felt extremely low, and had at times an absurd and atypical desire to weep with self pity.
There was no question that he had not been looked after. He had been churlishly ungrateful for some of the care which had been lavished upon him. Someone should write a book, he thought in his more lucid moments, about sick-room etiquette. Apart from Marcus, who blew in and made jokes, at which
it caused Topher severe pain to laugh, he had been surrounded by women. Sally Maddox had been the first to arrive, with an armful of books. At lunchtime she had disappeared into the kitchen from which she had emerged (what seemed several hours later) with a plate of spaghetti which Topher would have been unable to eat even if he had had the strength to disentangle the glutinous strands. Despite his irritation with her – he wondered whether he had in fact got something wrong with his brain – he was sorry to see Sally go. The minute he heard the front door close he wanted her to come back.
Lucille had brought books too. A plastic carrier of gold- and silver-embossed paperbacks. She had tried to jolly him out of his misery with her “Come on, lamb” and “You’ll be all right, love”, and “I’ll make you a nice crayme caramelle.” She had talked to him as if he were a child and, like a child, he had refused to eat her custard.
Jo Henderson had, in addition to the grapes, sent a dozen quarter-bottles of Moët et Chandon (1981) and a jar of beef tea. She had commiserated with him over the telephone.
“By the way we always have this enormous house-party at Badger’s, darling.” She had taken to calling him darling. “I didn’t want you to lie there worrying about what you were going to do in the Christmas vacation.”
Christmas was the last thing Topher was worrying about. He opened one bottle of the champagne. It had had disastrous effects on his salivary glands and had not been at all wise. When a bouquet of white lilies (Pulbrook and Gould) had arrived from Jo, he had serious doubts about the suitability of her choice.
Mrs Sweetlove had sent a card (with a rabbit on it) trusting that Topher would “soon be hopping about again”. Tina had insisted upon coming down from Bingley. She had arrived bearing love from Miles, and a bag in which – apart from her overnight things – were a ginger cake and some Lancashire hot-pot.
“Who sent these gorgeous flowers?” She stood wide-eyed before the lilies.
“Just a friend.”
“Has Lucille been to see you?”
Topher nodded.
Tina put her nose into the lilies which had no smell.
“Lucille really likes you.” Tina roamed the room, setting it to rights with her customary lack of method, and putting everything away in the wrong place. “This house is really too big, you know.”
It was the second time in a week that its unsuitability had been pointed out to him. Tina’s solution to the problem was different from April’s.
“Do you think you’ll settle down again?”
“Get married, you mean?” Topher disliked euphemisms.
“I know it’s early days. Lucille may be a bit brash but it’s mostly because she’s nervous. You won’t find anyone better natured.”
“Why is it that women always feel they are obliged to do something about a man on his own?”
“For one thing, it’s not tidy.” Tina picked up Topher’s dressing-gown from the floor. “You don’t like being on your own?”
Topher had to admit that he was getting used to it. He also had to admit something which had come as a revelation to him since his widowhood. He liked women. He enjoyed listening to them. He was interested in their opinions. When he was with a woman, whether she was nineteen or ninety, he liked to give her his complete attention. Caroline had always told him that every woman he met, no matter what she looked like, was left with the impression that he wanted to go to bed with her. He had never believed it. The unspoken invitation, if it existed, was inadvertent. It had something to do with his eyes. Feather-brained as she was, Topher even liked having his sister about him. He watched her move from one side of the room to the other, forgetting what it was she had intended to do by the time she got there. Women, he thought, gave a sense of meaning and continuity to life. An insinuation of pasts which had been, and of futures to come. Men were pinned down, two-dimensional, unequivocally in existing time.
“I wanted to discuss Christmas,” Tina said. “You’ll come to Bingley. Evelyn’s room is free and Lucille has offered to cook the turkey. She’s a smashing cook. You can bring the girls. I won’t take no for an answer.”
“I don’t know…” Topher said.
“Of course you don’t. Not when you’re feeling poorly. I just wanted to say we’re expecting you. You’re going to notice it at Christmas, without Caroline.”
Topher did not need to wait until Christmas. While he had been in bed he had had time to think. One of the conclusions he had reached was that he had not sufficiently appreciated Caroline, who had possessed, he decided upon reflection, the finer qualities of Sally Maddox, Jo Henderson and Lucille rolled into one. It was a paradox of course that people died without knowing what those closest to them were thinking. He wished that it had not been so. He could not fathom how today’s mercurial partnerships faded, when his relationship with Caroline had scarcely had time to mature in the cask of their life together. He regretted the fact that he had not expressed his indebtedness to her both more often and in more certain terms.
By the time he had recovered from the mumps, Chelsea had – or rather did not have – her lover and Penge had had her baby. Only one of them was ecstatic.
When Chelsea had let herself into the house on the day she was to collect David Cornish, Topher had been sleeping. His fever had abated and the swollen glands were subsiding. He was not only beginning to enjoy his convalescence, although feeling somewhat guilty at the attention he was receiving, but to believe that he might live. Never again, he vowed, conscious of the altered state to which he had been brought by his ailment, would he be unsympathetic to physical suffering. Opening his eyes, and expecting to find an animated Chelsea bursting with her good news, he was amazed to find his eldest daughter in tears.
For a long time she was unable to talk at all. She borrowed a large linen handkerchief, and sat blowing her nose noisily into it while Topher waited for her to speak. He pieced together the story which came out incoherently in between Chelsea’s sobs. She had taken the day off from the BBC and prepared a celebratory dinner before going to Fulham to fetch David.
“Spare ribs?” Topher said, in an attempt to cheer her up. His words had the contrary effect.
“I b..b..bought a ph..ph..pheasant,” Chelsea howled. “David adores game. And a p..piece of his favourite Dutch cheese with the black rind…and a bottle of Mouton Cadet.”
“My God!” Topher was impressed.
“Candles on the table, soft lights, sweet music…”
Topher waited while she took another handkerchief from his drawer.
“As soon as I got to Fulham I could see that something was wrong. She’d come off her drugs. David’s wife, I mean. She’d absolutely flipped. The house was full of people and she had the stereo on. You could hear it halfway down the street. ‘I know you,’ she said. ‘Stupid cow. I’ve known about you all along. He’s upstairs if you want him.’ It was one of those tall houses with lots of floors. David was in bed…” It was some time before Chelsea could finish her story because she had burst into tears again. When she stopped crying she put Topher’s handkerchief unthinkingly into her handbag and stood up, apparently to look out of the window.
“He was just lying there. When I came into the room only his eyes moved. There was a nurse looking after him.”
She was now in control of herself.
“He was unable to speak. Paralysed down one side. He’d had a stroke…”
By the time Chelsea had told the rest of her story. Topher’s temperature had shot up again. David had collapsed on the squash court. His wife had lived for years with the knowledge that David had had a lover. This was her revenge.
Chelsea was inconsolable. The humiliation she had undergone in Fulham was as nothing compared with her heartbreak for David – whose bleak future she could not contemplate – and the loss of her love object. Her life was in ruins. She was tempted to dispose of what remained of it. Topher was in need of Caroline and Chelsea of her mother.
“Have you told Penge?”
“Penge
is in hospital… That’s what I really came to tell you. She’s in labour.”
The following few days had all the ingredients of a nightmare. David Cornish’s wife – who had become completely manic – had refused to let Chelsea anywhere near the house. She would neither let her see David nor communicate with him. Chelsea did not know whether he was alive or dead. She had gone completely to pieces and had been given sick leave from the BBC. Unable to face her own company, she had left Wapping and moved back into her old bedroom where she lay with her face to the wall. She refused to talk, even to Marcus, who said she was in a state of shock. Sally Maddox, who could generally be relied upon not to visit in the mornings, had come up against a writer’s block and arrived to see Topher at the same time as Lucille. And Penge, after a stop-go labour, half-way through which she had been admitted to hospital, had finally managed to give birth.
Topher, whose life prior to the mumps seemed to have been straightening itself out, felt thoroughly confused by the events. Looking into the mirror he seriously considered that despite his still distorted face he did not look like a grandfather. He certainly did not feel like a grandfather. He had spoken on the telephone to Penge. In the manner of first-time mothers she had managed to convince herself that she was unique. She was over the moon.
Topher enquired if the child had a name.
“Charles,” Penge said. “If it had been a girl it would have been Caroline.”
An Eligible Man Page 19