“I suggest, Nurse,” said Night Sister, picking up Daddy Ledward’s little claw to try to find a pulse, “that instead of hanging round young men who are quite well you pay a little attention to old men who are very ill.”
“But, Sister, I-! What can I do for him, anyway?”
“Nothing,” said Night Sister unreasonably.
“Jacky,” Daniel called softly, as she passed his bed early next morning. “I want to tell you something.”
“Tell me later,” she said. “I can’t stop now. Daddy Ledward is dying.”
He died just before the day staff came on, but none of them would help her to lay him out. “My nurses have their own work to do,” said Nurse Fitt. “Anything that happens before eight o’clock is your affair.”
When she got to her room, late and very tired and past caring that Sister had discovered the concealed mending and was going to speak to Matron about deceitfulness, Jacky remembered that she had never been back to hear what Daniel wanted to tell her.
Chapter Eleven
Nellie
Nellie had made such plans. For a month now, ever since Sonny had told her, she had been giving her mind to it all the time, and she saw it all, exactly as it was going to be. She had even cooked meals in her imagination and argued with herself whether to have potatoes baked or fried.
When Sonny had first told her, squeezing her hand so hard that she could almost have cried out if it had not been for all the Other people in the ward, Nellie could not believe it for a long time. Things like that just did not happen to people like them.
Mr. Brett had asked them to come and live with him in his cottage when Sonny was out of hospital. Mr. Brett had asked them…. She made Sonny say it over and over. She was always slow to take things in. Often she did not see Sonny’s jokes until he explained them, but he did not mind. Once she got hold of a thing she never lost it. He was proud of that in her.
Once she had got hold of the idea that they were really going to live with Mr. Brett the thought was never out of her mind. She saw it all. He had never had a home, poor Mr. Brett, since his wife died, but Nellie was going to make it just like home for him again. Not pushing herself. She and Sonny would never get in his way, but Nellie would cook and work all day long and Sonny would do odd jobs, and there they would be, the three of them, as happy as birds.
“I’ll pay him back,” Sonny said. “You’ll see. As soon as I can get about a bit I’ll get my job back, or a better one. I’ll earn good money, and I’ll not forget. I’ll pay him back.”
But Nellie knew that she could pay him back long before that, right from today when she was going to start making things nice for him.
He must have the say-so about everything, of course, since it was his house; but in the cottage, Nellie had decided, no one was going to dictate to anyone else, because people could not be happy except in their own way. She had had enough, first with her own parents, and these last two years with Sonny’s people, of everyone prying on everyone else and taking you up if you didn’t go exactly their way. At Camden Town, where there had been such a noise all the time, and everyone trying to live everyone else’s lives for them, Nellie had kept herself to herself, and she knew that Sonny’s family thought her a dull nothing. Even Sonny did not know that she was really a person on her own, because she had made herself a part of him. That was what she wanted.
He knew so much more than she did. He had had more schooling, and had read books there in the hospital that were nothing like the magazines that Nellie liked to read. Sonny was clever. He had ideas about every subject you could name, but sometimes Nellie felt that there were ways in which she knew more than he. She was not always worrying away at the thoughts of what life was all about. The ideas she had of it were so few that they were all the clearer for being on their own, not crowded up by other notions coming in all the time.
At the cottage, if Sonny and Mr. Brett got talking cleverly, as she had heard them going at it there in the hospital, Nellie might get ideas of things to say, but she would keep them to herself. When you tried to voice your thoughts, they always came out differently from what you meant, and people took you up wrong.
She had not yet been down to see the cottage, because she wanted to see it first with Sonny. She did not quite know what to expect. The word cottage in her mind conjured up the only cottage she had ever known, her aunt’s tumbledown brick box near Dorking, with a slipping tiled roof, hens on a rubbish heap, and tin sheds stuck all over the place.
When the station taxi stopped at the white gate and Nellie got out and looked over, she could not believe that they had come to the right house. It was like a fairy tale, the sort of house you might see from the road, cycling, or from a train. You were not envious, because it was the kind of house other people lived in, not you. But this—this! If Sunny had built it for her with his own hands it could not have been more perfectly right.
Mr. Brett had said that it looked like a cross between a calendar and a tea cosy, so Nellie was prepared for it to have a thatched roof and lattice windows. But she was not prepared for it to look one with the earth, as if it had stood there from the beginning of time, to have walls the indescribable colour of sunlight, geraniums all along the window sills and a cobbled path that led straight to the front door between borders of crowding blue primroses. Behind them were daffodils, a rose arbour, and then a lawn on each side with a bent old fruit tree, and beyond that more daffodils, all along the thick hedge that folded in the garden like a sanctuary.
She was going to live here. She couldn’t take it in, couldn’t see herself coming down that path as casually as coming home. But—well! She lifted her chin from the gate and brisked herself up. Couldn’t stand there goggling all day. Whatever would Mr. Brett think?
She turned back to the car, where Sonny was craning from the window. “Sonny, Sonny—oh, it’s lovely! It’s ever so— oh, come and see!”
“How can I till you get me out?” he grumbled practically.
With the help of the driver, she got out the collapsible chair, helped Sonny into it and wheeled him down the path. He was as staggered as she was. Sonny usually had plenty to say for himself, but all he could do now was give little whistles and murmur: “I say, Nell, I say” as she took him slowly, trying not to bump him on the cobbles.
Outside the front door, between the rosemary bushes, they looked at each other. What should they do—knock or call for him or what? It seemed silly to knock, when you were going into your own home, like.
“Go on in,” Sonny said. Nellie tried the latch and the door opened.
It was a long, low room with rugs on a tiled floor and beams not only across the ceiling but up the walls as well. There were spring flowers everywhere, oak furniture, chintz, a great open hearth like a cave, with logs burning. Nellie could not take in every detail, but it was like one of those English films that critics in the Sunday papers said was too oldeworlde to be true.
“Sonny, it’s—it’s-” But he was fuming outside, and rocking the chair dangerously in his impatience. She tipped the wheels to go over the step, and deposited him in the middle of the sitting-room with a proud “There!” as if the cottage were all her own work.
“Gee, Nell, do we live here?” He looked round quickly, then raised his voice as Nellie could never have done in a beautiful house like this, or any house for that matter. She could not shout. Her voice did not run to it.
“Daniel!” Sonny yelled. “Where are you? Daniel! Hi, we’ve come!”
While he was shouting, Nellie noticed a bit of paper on the table by the door. “Back soon” it said. “Make selves at home. Have tea”
“Should we?” Nellie showed Sonny the note.
“Well, that’s what he says, isn’t it? If he says ‘Have tea’, he means ‘Have tea’, and it’s the one thing I want.”
“Me, too; but, Sonny, it’s his house, not ours.”
“You’re running it now, though.”
“Yes, but not to presume,” Nellie sa
id. “Don’t ever forget, dear, he was here with his wife.” As she looked at the chairs by the fire, she saw it, with a saddened heart. “I mustn’t ever do anything to make him feel I was setting myself up to take her place.”
“Hey,” said Sonny. “You’re not his wife, you’re mine. Come here.” He wheeled himself towards her round the furniture. Deft, he was already in that chair. Sonny could always master anything mechanical.
“All the same,” said Nellie, as she straightened herself up from his boyish hug, “it’s his house, and we mustn’t ever do anything to make him feel sorry he asked us to share it. Why did he, anyway? Why us?”
“Because he’s so damn nice,” said Sonny. “He can be murder, mind, if something gets his goat. You should have seen him on the ward. Poor old Fitt. I thought she’d take a stroke that time he called her a-”
“You told me once,” said Nellie. “There’s no call to repeat it.”
She helped him out of his wheelchair into the armchair by the fire, and left him chuckling while she went to find the kitchen.
At Camden Town the damp basement kitchen had also been the living-room, and Sonny’s family had a taste for fried food. It had been a dark and greasy inferno, always full of the smells of cooking and people, always a string of babies’ nappies steaming under the low ceiling. The windows were not cleaned from one fog to the next; the walls were spattered with grease, the worn-out carpet repatterned with spilt food and the stove coagulated with years of gravy boiling over. The whole place had got beyond cleaning long ago, and no one was going to embark on it now, even if it had ever been empty of people for long enough even to sweep the floor.
Before that, the kitchen at Nellie’s home where she had lived with her parents had been no more than a tin-roofed shack, stuck slightly askew onto the back of the house by the railway line. Every time a train went by, the little oil cooker teetered on its rickety table, and Nellie’s mother who had few subjects of conversation, remarked yet once more that they would all be burned alive one day.
There were coals in there and piles of boots and shoes, dead ferns, and two broken rabbit hutches that Nellie’s father had been going to mend for years. In summer flies were on everything and food and milk went off almost as soon as you bought it. In winter it was almost more than you could do to make yourself wash your face under the cold tap when you crept down in the dark morning to make the tea.
But the little kitchen at the cottage was like nothing Nellie had ever seen, except in magazines. White-walled, with a red-tiled floor, and the stove, sink, draining-board and work-table fitted round the walls with cupboards underneath. Pans, pots, lids, jugs, eggbeaters, painted canisters, were on hooks and shelves in a satisfying pattern of ornamental usefulness. Red-and-white-check curtains were frilled over the little square window, beyond which was an apple tree with the evening sun coming through to hit you as you stood at the sink. Who would mind doing nothing but wash up all day in a place like this?
It looked spotlessly clean. Mr. Brett must have got someone from the village to look after him. Nellie hoped she wouldn’t come back. That would be dreadful. She stood quite a time in the doorway before she dared go in.
When she did, she told herself, for she liked to savour such moments: This is the first time. To think I shall be in and out of here all day and every day! She turned on the stove, put the kettle on, and unpacked some of the things she had brought—milk, tea, bread, butter, jam—for she was going to be very careful about using Mr. Brett’s stores.
She opened a white-enamel door. It was a refrigerator! Instantly she saw herself making ice-cream for Sonny, and dashed in to tell him. He was reading one of Mr. Brett’s books.
“Oh, Sonny, ought you-” A piercing scream came from the kitchen, and he dropped the book and stared at her aghast.
“Silly,” she said, proudly domestic. “Have you never heard a whistling kettle?” She picked up his book and went back to make the tea.
She hardly liked to use Mr. Brett’s china, but if they were really living in the house it must be all right. Two coffee-cups and saucers were upside down on the draining-board. In the plate-rack there were two plates of each size, and when Nellie opened the silver drawer she saw two napkins rolled through rings. Mr. Brett must have a friend with him, and Nellie shrank from the thought that they might be staying here. It would have to happen eventually, of course. There would be visitors. Sonny would know how to talk to them and Nellie would just have to keep silent, but she didn’t want it to happen now at the beginning, when everything was strange.
When they were having their tea, however, on a table before the fire, it didn’t feel strange at all. She and Sonny might have been there all their lives. The fire crackled like a Christmas story. Outside, the wind was getting up, but in here they were at home.
“Isn’t this cosy?” Nellie kept having to say, and Sonny said it was a bit of all right and made her cut more bread.
“I do hope it’s all right,” Nellie said. “Do you think Mr. Brett would rather we’d have waited for him?” She looked in the teapot. “This will be dreadfully stewed. I wonder when he’ll be back? Shall I just go and pop the kettle on again so I can make some fresh as soon as Mr. Brett comes in? What do you think?”
“Don’t fuss, girl,” Sonny said. “And you’ll have to call him Daniel.”
“I know,” she said, “but not yet. That will come.” She was glad, although she knew she ought not to be, that they were alone just for this beginning. However nice Mr. Brett was, she was going to be shy of him. She could not say this to Sonny, because he was his friend. She could not tell him what, in the happiness of this tea-time, she couldn’t help feeling: that she wished it could always be like this. Just the two of them alone here.
But what was she about, having a thought like that?. If it wasn’t for Mr. Brett they wouldn’t be here at all, would not have a home at all, might not even be together, for there would not have been room for the two of them at Camden Town. This was the most wonderful, impossible thing that could ever happen to them, and it just showed how the devil got into your thoughts uninvited if you could even for a moment wish for anything more than the heaven that had been given you.
Had the same thought come into Sonny’s head? No, because he was a nicer person than she. The devil was not able to put thoughts into the heads of people like Sonny.
“Either drink that tea or put the cup down,” he said. “What have you gone so broody about? Come and sit by us over here.” She sat on the arm of his chair and stroked his stubbly hair.
“Few weeks,” he said, “when these legs firm up, I’ll be able to have you on my knee. I asked the doc.”
“Sonny, you didn’t! Whatever must he have thought?”
“Said he wouldn’t mind having you on his knee himself.”
“He never did!” You never knew whether Sonny were having you on or not. He said these things with a dead solemn face. Never dull, you couldn’t be, with Sonny. He bad so many jokes. She was so proud of what the matron had said to her about him always having a smile for everyone, even in his worst time of pain. How Nellie loved him! Like a wife and like a mother and like a dependent child, all in one.
From where she sat she could sje now that there was a woman’s coat hanging among the mackintoshes and jackets behind the door. It must have belonged to poor Mrs. Brett. That made Nellie feel awkward. She was going to point it out to Sonny, when there were footsteps on the cobbles outside and Sonny’s face lit up as he cried: “Here he is!”
They came in together, Mr. Brett and a dark, graceful woman with a smooth, oval face. Nellie jumped off the chair, tweaked at her dress and put up a hand to her hair.
“Don’t get up, don’t get up,” Mr. Brett said. “You look wonderful like that. Just how I planned it.”
“I hope you didn’t mind us having tea-” Nellie began, but Mr. Brett did not hear, because he and Sonny were greeting each other like long-lost brothers, and started kidding together, something about the hospital
.
“Of course not.” Mr. Brett’s friend smiled at Nellie. “I’ll just go and make some for us before we go.”
“Before you-? Oh no, let me!” Nellie darted forward to take the tray.
“Sorry we weren’t there to greet you,” Mr. Brett said. “I was just saying goodbye all round the village, and we got involved in the story of Mrs. Langdon’s varicose veins. You’ll like her. She’s promised to look after you with milk and eggs and all that.”
“Daniel, what on earth are you talking about?” Sonny said. “Saying goodbye? You’re not going away?”
“Didn’t you get my letter? Damn, I was afraid I’d got the address wrong.”
“But you can’t,” Sonny said. “We can’t stay here without you. It’s your home.”
“You keep it warm for me,” Mr. Brett dropped back on the sofa and put his feet on a stool, mud and all. “You know me. I can’t stay in one place long.”
“It’s not right,” Sonny protested, leaning forward sharply, and grimacing at the jerk to his back. “You must settle down some time. Everyone must. What’s the matter with you that makes you so jittery?”
“Oh shut up,” Mr. Brett said. “I’m not. I’m calm as a ruddy mill pond. Don’t nag at me. You picked that up in hospital. Nellie, don’t let him. You don’t mind my not staying here?”
“Well, you know how we feel about being here at all,” she said, looking down at the tea-tray which she held before her. She could never find words for her wonder and gratitude. “Mr. Brett’s right, dear,” she told Sonny, who blinked, because she hardly ever disagreed with him. “We have to let each other alone. Everyone must live how they must.” Mr. Brett was delighted at this. She had said the right thing. She was not as shy of him as she had expected. He was different from what he had seemed at the hospital. It would have been nice if he had stayed on there with them. But—she and Sonny were going to live here together on their own! Inside her, this thought of joy was forming, growing, but she could not consider it now. Later she would go over and over it, think all round about it, and savour the dream come true of all the days that were before her.
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