The Stick

by David Beaty

  ‘Did she bring Mick?’ Paul said the name with distaste.

  ‘As a matter of fact she did. The second time, not the first.’

  ‘What did you think of him?’

  Harriet looked troubled. ‘A nice enough chap. But I hae me doots. He’s kind and warm …’ She hesitated, Harriet-like, for the exact and fair description.

  ‘So not like me?’ Paul put in, smiling wryly.

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’ She caught his hand. ‘You know I didn’t. He’s kind and warm but a bit … unstable perhaps is the right word. I don’t think he’s the kind to see her through. If things get tough, I mean.’ She held his hand against her cheek, his get-you-there hands, now powerless to save her.

  ‘So you didn’t like him?’ Paul asked after a long pause.

  ‘No. I do like him. But I think Jane is going to need someone. Someone more like you.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He felt at first inordinately gratified, for Harriet never made flattering remarks or gave praise unless she meant it. But then he began to realise it was an implicit appeal. Jane will need you. Look after her.

  Yet the up days continued to be more frequent than the down days. Leaning heavily on her stick she took him out to look at the frogs under the lily pads on the tiny pond.

  Her use of the stick became his barometer. No longer was it something he disliked. The more it was used, the better she was. If she was in bed when he came to see her, his eyes always alighted on the stick to see if it was in a slightly different position. When it was, his spirits rose.

  The warm autumn had kept the swallows in England. There were still families of them, teaching their second litter babies to fly. ‘Like little anchors in the sky,’ Harriet said, as she watched them wheeling high above the firs surrounding the hospital. He willed them to stay. He willed the sun to keep shining. Each day of warmth, each day they spent in the garden was another touch of sweet healing grace.

  Suddenly the swallows were congregating on the telephone wires. He saw Harriet look up at them as they walked to the lily pond. But she said nothing. And soon the sky was empty of anchors, and only the wind moved the telephone wires. The stick remained unused for nine consecutive days.

  ‘It’s the cold,’ she said on the first Sunday of November. ‘I haven’t felt energetic. I’ve felt just like staying in bed. Everyone’s felt the same. Oh, I do wish we could have a bit more sun.’

  But despite the lack of exercise, she remained bright-eyed, alert and pretty. The hospital hairdresser had been round to do all the patients’ hair the day before. She said she felt very frivolous.

  ‘You look beautiful. Just a girl.’

  He stayed longer that evening. She had had a letter from Colin. He mentioned possible home leave. That was something to look forward to, wasn’t it? Jane had been again. She was beginning to show a little now. The sparrows had taken over the telephone wires … the robins had come. Nurse Runciman, who was her special nurse, had just got engaged … life went on …

  After a while her eyelids began to droop. ‘Go home, darling. You look tired. I think I shall drift off now,’ she said. He leaned over and kissed her forehead. She caught both his hands and kissed them. He felt happy and calm and contented as he left her. He had no thoughts of her dying, none.

  He only realised the moment he found himself using her stick to tap his way across the forecourt to his car, and looking over his shoulder, saw Nurse Runciman hurrying down the steps after him.

  The funeral took place four days later at two o’clock, allowing Colin time to arrive. He was a stranger, more thick-set and mature, very upright and handsome in his naval uniform. Paul and he shook hands, clapped each other on the shoulder, but were at a loss for words of comfort. He would spend the night after the funeral with his father but then, alas, he must report back to Plymouth.

  ‘I didn’t know …’ Colin began, when Jane arrived in a green maternity smock and flat shoes. Then he broke off and looked questioningly from one to the other.

  ‘That I’m married?’ Jane put on her truculent adolescent expression. ‘That’s because I’m not.’

  Colin’s surprised expression changed to one of embarrassment and indignation.

  ‘Is he here?’

  ‘No. Don’t worry, you won’t have to horsewhip him. He isn’t here. He can’t stand funerals.’

  How right Harriet had been, Paul thought, putting his hand on Jane’s arm.

  ‘But you’re here,’ he said. ‘That’s the main thing.’ She looked as surprised as he was himself at his own tenderness. She patted his hand. They made a strange, misshapen trio of a family, Paul thought wryly, for Harriet to have lavished her whole life upon. Yet perhaps all families were queer misshapen entities, supporting one another with their bumps and hollows, slotting in like a jigsaw momentarily when there was real need.

  Paul had continued to be calm, composed and distant. Knowing instinctively Harriet’s wishes, he had made the service short, followed by a burial in the country churchyard, not cremation. He had chosen her favourite hymns: He who would valiant be, Morning has broken and Love Divine all loves excelling. As if in appositeness to that second choice, the blackbirds were indeed singing as they filed into the church for the service to begin.

  Madge cried noisily throughout. Archie dabbed his eyes and blew his nose at intervals on a large handkerchief. Colin remained standing stiffly to attention.

  No goblin nor foul fiend

  Can daunt his spirit;

  He knows he at the end

  Shall life inherit.

  Tears streamed without stopping down Jane’s face, dripping onto the collar of her smock, until Colin unbent, handed her a handkerchief, then slipped an arm round her shoulders and drew her to him.

  There was a large contingent from Atlanta Airways, senior staff most of them. They all came up to shake his hand as the mourners left the graveside.

  ‘There are refreshments back at the house,’ he said to them for want of anything else to say. ‘Madge has organised them.’

  She was organising them all now towards the cars, her big face blotchy and red, averting her eyes from the men shovelling earth into the grave. The grey stone side wall of the church was piled with vivid flowers. Their unbearable sweet fragrance mixed with the smell of newly turned earth and fresh-cut sods.

  ‘You should look at the wreaths, father,’ Colin whispered. ‘People will need to be thanked. Atlanta sent a huge one.’

  Dutifully, dispassionately, distantly, Paul walked along in front of the chorus of bright dancing colours. I am immune, he told himself, I can feel nothing. I am like a moon-walker in a space helmet. Nothing can penetrate. He held his head on one side to read the cards: Atlanta, Truscott, Woodhouse, Tilsley, the customers at the Wheatsheaf, Mrs Webb, the radiography staff at the hospital. He would remember them all. He had a good memory. Harriet would have loved all these flowers. He could think that without feeling anything.

  Then he came to a little wreath in the shape of a cross fashioned out of crimson rose buds placed, it seemed, a little apart from the rest. He bent his head to read the card.

  It said simply With deepest sympathy and was signed B.

  It was at that point that his immunity was shattered and the grief and guilt rushed in.

  Chapter Nine

  For a fortnight after the funeral, Paul incarcerated himself in Elmtrees as though it was a prison, seeing no one. Jane phoned, said vaguely she would be coming down, but, perhaps because she sensed his need for privacy, she did not make an appearance. Twice Madge and Archie came round, rang the bell, and waited. But he stayed in the sitting room, listening to the chiming of the front door bell, till finally he heard their footsteps walking away and the sound of their car starting.

  Mrs Webb came as usual, but he hardly spoke to her. His exercise was to walk to Thresher’s Field, clean Fandango’s stable, give him hay and water in the morning and a feed of bran and nuts in the evening. The horse nuzzled his hand and made warm snickering noises th
at were oddly comforting. The big brown eyes stared over the stall, liquid and unblinking, but it was the food they were focused on, not him.

  Paul for his part had no illusions about Fandango. There would be continual, aggravating problems of organising someone to keep an eye on the horse while he was on Service. As a bait for Jane’s return home, he was clearly a failure. Paul had already made enquiries about his disposal, and had been told: ‘ You won’t get anything for him now. Wait till the spring.’

  Come the spring, off Fandango would go. And come the spring, off he would go from Elmtrees. He could not bear the house any longer. He could not bear the memories nor the emptiness. Going out into the garden, he would see the rust-brown chrysanthemums that Harriet had planted, the glazed urn they had brought back from Portugal, the white iron garden furniture on which they used to have breakfast on the patio during the summer. Turning back into the house, each time he anticipated hearing movements, Harriet’s voice, Harriet suddenly coming round the corner of the stairs. Once he shouted out, ‘Harriet, where are you?’ and stood listening in the hall beside the stick, still standing in the alcove below the telephone.

  Only his own voice echoed back at him, and then the silence was so suffocating that he put on the television in the sitting room, the radio in the bedroom, so that suddenly the whole house was filled with voices.

  The letters came, ‘ I was so sorry to read in the Telegraph …

  He read two, but could not bring himself to open any more. They accumulated, a stack of envelopes on the hall table.

  Atlanta Airways continued to be considerate. The General Manager, Woodhouse, followed up the company’s expensive wreath with a telephone call urging him to take up his six weeks of accumulated leave and go for a long holiday. Then the Operations Superintendent rang to say he was not to bother to come in to the Flight Captain’s office: they had found a stand-in who was managing to cope.

  Something about the man’s smooth voice rang a warning bell in his mind. The following Saturday he decided he would no longer remain a hermit in this cell of silence, and went to the Wheatsheaf where the Truscotts were relieved to see him and Archie hinted that the stand-in Flight Captain was coping altogether too well.

  In its own way, it was the stimulant he needed. Never trust airline management had been his watchword throughout his career. Sympathy cost nothing and was the decent thing to give, but what was behind it and how long would it last?

  He found out when he arrived at his office at nine next Monday, and discovered that George Osborne had beaten him into his own chair behind his own desk.

  ‘Company felt you’d been under too much strain, old boy. All this bumf —’ Osborne indicated the overflowing in-tray ‘— would simply add to it. So you see …’

  Paul saw all right. It was a classic case of position-pinching under a shower of crocodile tears. The company paid lip-service to psychological considerations, but had the most extraordinary methods of exhibiting it. They had once sent a severely depressed Captain out on a Bermuda Service, and had given a free first class seat together with free accommodation to the wife who was the main cause of his depression. Halfway round the trip, the Captain threw his hand in and both he and his wife were brought back as passengers.

  Not that Paul was particularly worried about the Flight Captain’s job, which was usually only a temporary one of about a year’s duration. Career-wise, the Operations Superintendent’s job was the plum one, in that the man did not retire till he was in his mid-sixties and was definitely a king-pin in the company hierarchy. Now he longed to get back on the line, to immerse himself totally in flying, to get off the earth up into the sky, where for hours on end he might forget.

  ‘That’s all right,’ he actually heard himself say to Osborne. ‘You stay there. I’ll go back on the Line and take out next Monday’s New York Service.’

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t hurry back to work if I were you, old chap.’

  They’re trying to get rid of me altogether now, he thought. I’m not far off retiring age, there’s a surplus of pilots and I’m the ideal candidate – most experienced Captain in the company or not – for the push under the cloak of kindness.

  ‘You’re not me, George,’ Paul said shortly. ‘You heard me. I’ll take next Monday’s Service.’

  Osborne began stroking his cheek as though for inspiration. Paul could practically see the cartoonist’s balloon above his head containing the words: Well, if he’s not going to make a fuss about the loss of the Flight Captain’s job . . .

  ‘Fine, Paul. Means a change on the roster. Have to ask the Operations Superintendent of course, but —’

  ‘I’ll be up here next Monday evening. In uniform.’

  He went to the Wheatsheaf session next Saturday and told the Truscotts over drinks. They were pleased. Madge volunteered to look after Fandango. On the Monday he set off early and reported an hour before he needed to, just in case there were problems.

  In the event, there were none. It was one of those perfect trips in which he found comfort and relief. The aircraft was the one which he’d brought back from Seattle, X-Ray November. There were no hold-ups. The weather was good for December. And Belinda was not on board.

  Room 5116 at the Plaza gave him twinges of guilt but no painful memories. During that two-day stand off, he saw no one. On the flight back, his crew remained studiously tactful, keeping such conversation as there was on the flight deck to mundane matters.

  The worst part of the whole trip came after he had landed, taxied and reported to Operations. Walking down the long glassed-in corridor, he could not resist glancing out as he always did to see if the Citroën was drawn up against the kerb, even though he knew damned well it was in the aircrew car-park gathering dust and dead leaves. The place where Harriet usually parked was occupied by an old red MG. Just for a moment, he told himself it might be Jane and his heart leapt. Foolishly, for she didn’t own a red MG, and as he watched, a young man in jeans got out and waved to one of the junior stewards on his own crew who was just coming out of the Operations Block door.

  It was a blustery December morning. The wind felt sneaky and biting. He hurried head-down against it to the crew car park and his own car.

  The sight of it, driverless and abandoned, hammered home to him Harriet’s loss. He got out his keys, opened up and got inside.

  Inside was even worse. He could have sworn the upholstery was scented with a faint fragrance of Alliage. He kept glancing at the empty passenger seat as he started up. He switched on the radio to drown the obtrusive hush. He trod harder on the accelerator as if the haunted silence could be burned off like mist.

  Yet home would be infinitely worse. If the airport felt unwelcoming, if the car emphasised his loneliness, what about home? His first homecoming. He shuddered.

  Yet though he had no desire to reach his destination he I found himself speeding towards it as if trying to escape from himself. To further this end, he worked himself into an indignation against Jane. Had she no feelings for him at all? Couldn’t she realise how much it would have meant to him if she’d come? After all, she was living in South West London, only a comparatively short distance away. She might have phoned Madge, found out his movements. And though she must be about six months pregnant by now both she and Mick appeared to be unemployed, and they had a car of sorts.

  Turning into the short drive of Elmtrees, he saw a car parked outside the front door and for the second time that morning, he hoped for Jane. Then he recognised the Truscotts’ old banger.

  ‘Good old Madge!’ he thought gratefully, getting out of the car and letting the door slam loudly. At once the front door opened. Madge came out with her stout arms held wide.

  ‘I know it’s not the same, Paul dear, but welcome home!’ She flung her arms round him, and he kissed her fat quivering cheek with real affection. ‘I hope you didn’t mind me being here, but I thought …’

  ‘Mind! My dear girl, you don’t know how much it means! It’s Archie I hope won’t min
d!’

  It was an attempt at roguishness.

  ‘Archie’s at work. Griffiths gave him a lift in. But it was he who suggested I waited for you. Archie can be very understanding at times.’ She laughed. ‘Mind, only at times. Now bring your bag in and have a wash. And then I’ll dish up your lunch.’

  ‘Madge, you shouldn’t have!’

  ‘Yes, I should. Harriet would have done the same for Archie, if it’d been the other way round.’

  She said Harriet’s name determinedly as they crossed the threshold into the hall. Don’t be afraid to talk about her, everyone said. Mention her name. Exorcise her ghost.

  ‘I’ve dealt with her clothes,’ Madge said sturdily, ‘like I said I would. I kept some good ones in case Jane …’ Her voice trailed.

  We’ve always been keeping things in case Jane, he thought, but didn’t say it.

  ‘But shall I throw out Harriet’s stick?’ Madge asked, seeing his eyes rest on it. ‘You won’t want it, will you?’

  ‘I do want it,’ he said sharply. He picked it up and felt the firm grip of the crook. ‘ I’d like to keep it,’ he said more gently, ‘ just where it is.’ He put it back in the alcove.

  ‘Well, I’ll leave it to you,’ Madge said with unusual perception. ‘You can get rid of it when you feel able.’

  She went off into the kitchen. Upstairs, she had swept away the more obvious and painful signs of Harriet, her clothes, her shoes, her toiletries. But contrarily, Harriet was more present than ever, as if these frivolities had been mere distractions from the real Harriet.

  Downstairs in the dining room, Madge had arranged a bowl of flowers on the table and another on the sideboard.

  ‘I remembered you enjoyed my chicken casserole the last time you and Harriet came over, so I made you one.’ She set a savoury smelling plateful in front of him.

  ‘You’ve been busy,’ he said, beginning to eat with what appetite he could muster. ‘I’m most grateful, Madge. You must have worked like a slave.’ He caught her hand and squeezed it. ‘The house looks super and what with looking after —’