The Elderbrook Brothers

by Gerald Bullet

  If the illness went on? But there seemed little chance of its not doing so. The danger was that even Matthew would in time come to regard it as a normal part of life, something that must be permanently endured. Matthew had frequent and earnest conferences with the doctor, but these led to nothing except now and again a change in the colour of the medicine. Matthew respected Waterhouse because he was a doctor, because he had studied at a university and passed examinations and had his name entered on the medical register. It was not, he felt, for the likes of him, Matthew Elderbrook, to set himself up against the expensively educated Dr Waterhouse, though it did seem that with all his science and cleverness he hadn’t got at the root of Ann’s trouble. He had perhaps done her some good. His bottles of medicine had given her relief for a time. But only for a time. Ann’s pains came and went without rhyme or reason, and the doctor’s high-sounding names for them were small solace. To say that they ‘went’ was perhaps putting it too high. Certainly they never went far: Ann could unfailingly rely on their turning up again, smart as new paint, after the merest day or two’s tremulous enjoyment of immunity. To her sick fancy it seemed that all the world was in a smiling conspiracy to humour her, to make light of her sufferings, to persuade her to be sensible and forget them. She fancied she could see the weariness settle on people’s faces, the dull glaze come over their eyes, when she ventured yet again to remark or admit that she was in pain. It was like an infinitely tedious story which a malign fate compelled her to tell over and over again. No wonder everyone was sick of it! She could forgive them for that: what she could not forgive, did not want to forgive, was the polite scepticism she thought she saw in Dr Waterhouse. She suspected him of suspecting her of malingering. And so he did. But he meant (he would have told you) nothing personal by it: it was merely his professional rule. Better that ninety and nine just persons should die for lack of attention than that one malingerer should get past Dr Waterhouse.

  She kept up the struggle as long as she could; but at last, angry and disheartened, she took to her bed and declared she would stay there.

  ‘Doctor can think what he likes,’ she said grimly.

  The girl Hilda, to Matthew’s mild surprise, applauded this resolution. It meant more work for her, more fetching and carrying: but that she did not mind. What she had minded, it now appeared, was seeing her mistress drag herself about the house and continually attempt more than she could manage.

  ‘Now we know where we are,’ said Hilda, with great satisfaction.

  Hilda’s home was at Uptonshaw, a hamlet some thirteen miles away where her mother and stepfather and numerous children lived in a cottage far too small for them. For reasons unstated (the Elderbrooks supposed that the stepfather must have something to do with it) she visited the tribe infrequently and was always glad to be back at Upmarden. Whether she had adopted the Elderbrooks or they her was a moot point, but she was clearly more at home with them than elsewhere. She was rough and ready, capable and self-effacing. She ‘knew her place’ and was very content with it. Being still in her twenties she was too young to have acquired the insolence of the treasured retainer, and she accepted these hard times without complaint and almost without comment. Looking after Mrs Elderbrook, keeping the house clean, attending to the dairy, and seeing that Mr Elderbrook had his proper meals, this for many months now had been the whole of Hilda’s life. She no longer even pretended to take her regulation ‘evening off’: she would look sulky if the matter were so much as mentioned. And in her preoccupation with the matter in hand she discouraged the various boys and men who from time to time showed a disposition to hover in her neighbourhood. Especially did she discourage the man called Caidster, a lean sandy fellow with gimlet eyes, a sharp fleshy nose, no chin, and an air of expecting his own way which many another girl, rumour said, had found irresistible. He made, this man from nowhere, something of a dead set at Hilda; but she, with so much else to think about, was very ready to profit by those other girls’ sad examples.

  When Matthew at harvest-time took on this stranger as an extra hand, Hilda, most unlike herself, became almost loquacious.

  ‘I wouldn’t trust him far. Not that Caidster.’

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘He’s a stranger here. Pity he don’t go back where he belongs.’ After a pause she added darkly: ‘Perhaps he knows better.’

  Matthew was inclined to trust the girl’s judgment, but he felt in fairness bound to defend the man.

  ‘He works well enough, Hilda, so far as I can see.’

  ‘So he will, the first day or two. But he’s never up to much good if you ask me, Mr Elderbrook, though it’s none of my business. The way he goes after girls—-coo! And him with a wife and family, I shouldn’t be surprised.’

  With that she dismissed the subject of Caidster, retiring into her habitual silence. But the man himself was not so easily got rid of. He came to the back door with a tale about the pigs being loose. More than once he poked his eager snout in at the dairy window and wore out the girl’s patience by affecting not to understand her repeated snubs. Then one day he disappeared from the district and was not heard of again for months. No one knew much about him, nor seemed to care. He was a man without roots, it was supposed: not a true countryman, but a townee gone wrong. He had made himself agreeable to simpletons by standing treat in the local beerhouses, but the barmaids did not take kindly to his trick of running his eyes up and down their figures and then saying, across his lifted glass: ‘Thanks, dear. Very nice.’

  One evening, not long after dark, Matthew got wearily out of his chair to answer a knock at the front door. Neighbours were few, visitors rare: he wondered who it could be. In the room overhead, where Hilda was making her invalid ‘comfortable for the night’, both women heard a clear, remote, familiar sound which told them he was knocking out his pipe on the chimney-side. The other knocking they had not heard.

  Matthew had only just sat down after a long day. The newspaper he held in his hand was still unopened, still folded in the wrapper in which it had travelled through the post from London, arriving at Upmarden in the late afternoon. On the table, which was covered with a red plush cloth, stood a shaded oil lamp which threw a soft-glowing nimbus upon the lower half of the room, but left the ceiling in shadow except for one large hazy-edged coin of light in the middle. Tired both in body and mind, for the burden of Ann’s condition did not lift, he was in no mood for callers. He rose reluctantly, and as he stepped up into the region of shadow there became apparent, for anyone who should be watching him, a ditch of darkness round each of the deep-set eyes. The bony structure of the face was in that instant defined, giving the man a gaunt impersonal look.

  Quietly, wishing not to be overheard, he went into the flagged hallway, took the chain off the broad oak door, turned the key, and opened to the darkness.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  It was a dark night, starless. The moon was not yet risen. He made out the vague shape of the visitor, whom by his size he took to be a child. The night was fresh and very still; the air held the cool fragrance of hedges hidden and fields asleep3 and in the second of silence that followed his question Matthew seemed to live a long time savouring the oddness of sharing this intimate solitude with an unrevealed stranger.

  ‘Mr Elderbrook?’

  The voice was soft and clear, with a tang to it, a musical quality, that was not of Mershire.

  ‘Yes. Who is it?’ said Matthew impatiently. ‘What d’you want, my boy?’

  A soft gurgle of amusement preceded the answer. ‘I’m the doctor, my blessed man, if only you’ll let me past the threshold of your dwelling.’

  ‘The doctor! Come in, do,’ said Matthew.

  He was completely mystified, but no longer inclined to resist invasion. As the visitor stepped into the house, the light diffusing through the open door of the room beyond showed him for what he was: a very small slight figure of a man, with a long melancholy face, brilliant eyes mocking the melancholy, and a mass of wild
black hair. At first glance he had more the look of a gnome than a human, and his stillness when he was still, his nimbleness when he moved, reinforced the absurd suggestion.

  ‘We’ll go into the light by your leave,’ he said pleasantly, ‘and you can take a better look at me.’

  Following close at his heels Matthew said politely: ‘Did you say you were a doctor?’

  ‘I did and I am,’ said the stranger. ‘I know what you’re saying to yourself,’ he quickly added, wagging an admonitory finger. ‘You’re saying to yourself that Waterhouse doesn’t look himself tonight. Shrunk a bit, hasn’t he? Ah!—but dash it all I won’t deceive you, Mr Elderbrook. I’m not Waterhouse. The poor fellow’s ill in his bed and I’m doing his rounds for him. Dick Meganzer, from Singlehurst.’

  Book Four the Tree

  § 1

  Time ticked away; the war ended; the men came trickling home; and, as Guy was apt to say to himself, when Christmas came to remind him that he had brothers, of course nothing ever happened to poor old Matthew, stuck away in the country, working his farm, grumbling content with a modest living and with no thought to spare for the dangers and rewards of big business. Whether he was equally content with his unremarkable wife, only Matthew himself knew, if anyone did. Apart from Ann’s illness, a bit of sheer bad luck, were they happy in their marriage? They sometimes were. Were they then unhappy? Even so. Life has other concerns than happiness, and the truth of any marriage, even the best, even the worst, is too complex to be told. After seven years of it neither Matthew nor Ann could have answered yes or no to your question, except evasively, wondering what it could mean. As easily tell in a word the long slow growth of a tree, its roots ramifying, sap leaping, leaves budding and falling, and itself engaged in a subtle, ceaseless, infinitely eventful commerce with earth and air. Theirs was a marriage like other marriages, and like other marriages it was unique.

  Ann’s ultimate recovery was in their opinion all Dr Meganzer’s doing. The truth can hardly have been so simple as that: nevertheless, and though the worst of Ann’s physical ordeal was then to come, his arrival that night broke the evil spell that was upon her. It made an end of her despairing apathy, and it set in motion certain practical measures which were to have momentous consequences not only for Ann but for Matthew, and not only for Matthew and Ann. Her going to the Singlehurst cottage hospital and her long stay there were as unforeseen as the sequel was unforeseeable. She had resisted that plan, but not for long. Hospital in her imagination had been a place where people died, after suffering much bullying and ordering-about from women in uniform who had neither the time nor inclination for human feeling. Hospital meant imprisonment in a mechanical routine; meant being washed by strange women, sat upon bed-pans, starved on slops or forcibly fed with ill-cooked food; meant being denied all the comforts and privacies of home life. Hospital was only one degree better than the poor house. But Dick Meganzer, with his easy flow of talk, had soon wheedled her into a different frame of mind. He, with his odd appearance and odder manners, made her feel like a child whom someone has presented with the most amusing kind of animated toy: a figure, almost “human, who would both listen to her and show by his answers that he had heard what she said. Not only did he hear her: he heard her with an indignation which she found comic as well as comforting, precisely because she could not bring herself to doubt his sincerity. This fantastic Dr Meganzer, so utterly unlike the worthy conventional Waterhouse who was now retired from practice, treated her disorder not as a problem, not even as a nuisance, but as a personal enemy upon which it was his pleasure to shower abuse. He dramatized her illness for her, declared war on it, and demanded her help in his campaign. ‘We’ll not stand any nonsense from this body of yours, Mrs Elderbrook. We’ll take it into hospital and teach it manners, eh?’ And when Ann answered fearfully that she didn’t fancy being messed about in hospital he made big eyes of indignation at her and said crisply: ‘Messed about? You? God bless us, madam, you are an immortal spirit kicking your heels in a region beyond space and time. No one’ll lay a finger on you!’

  Ann had been three months in hospital before the day came when they told Matthew that the ordeal was ended, the enemy beaten. He was astonished, not knowing that all had gone pretty much according to plan, and that this crisis, now surmounted, had been expected by the knowing ones. He was allowed to tiptoe his way along that now familiar corridor, at the heels of a dark-eyed nurse, and take one look at Ann asleep. They told him she would probably sleep for some hours, and then, after a brief interval, would be encouraged to sleep again. He turned away from that blissful, heartrending sight, and went home. The loss of his immense burden made him feel giddy.

  These months, and the months preceding them, had had for Matthew the quality of a dream: one of those feverish dreams in which you seem to go round and round after an unimagined object, or get involved in some frenzied and impossible mathematical sequence. Though to all appearance he took everything as it came, that invisible assault on Ann had been both a torment and an exasperation to him. The neighbours, even the Haslams who knew him well, thought him solid and stolid enough to meet any disaster calmly; and it was true that he did not make many thoughts about what was happening. Even in his own mind he had the habit of silence, especially about the things that went deepest. After a time his thoughts of Ann had become empty of all desire, except the desire to see her well again: her suffering, while dissociating her in his mind from all idea of sex, made a continuous demand on him. During all these months she had never been quite out of his mind: waking or sleeping he had been always in some part of him aware of her.

  Aware of her, and unaware of the tension in which his own being was locked, so that now, in this sudden release, he felt lost and strange, hardly able to bear the violent change. That rigid concentration was snapped. He felt free and irresponsible and bursting with energy. The rhythm of the pony’s trot, the sound of the turning wheels, added fuel to his overcharged senses.

  § 2

  Arrived home, he felt childishly disappointed to find no one in the yard. He must talk. He must tell someone. He began looking for Hilda. She was not in the dairy. She was not in the yard. She was not in her kitchen. Odd. What’s come over the girl? Tired perhaps. Lying down. At another time it might have occurred to him that if she was tired it would be kinder to let her rest. But no such thought impeded him now. He must tell Hilda, Hilda who had borne this burden with him, perhaps more than her share of it. Hilda’s room was the attic room which Faith had occupied in the old days, and Nancy in more recent years, until her marriage. It was approached by a stair leading from the brick-floored kitchen. You opened the door of what looked like a cupboard, four feet to the left of the big open hearth, and there was the stair confronting you: a joke they had enjoyed playing on friendly visitors when he and his brothers and sisters were small children. He opened the door of this stairway and cocked an ear towards the region it uncovered to him. It was the gesture of one who suspects, without being sure, that he is not alone in the house: an unthinking gesture, because Hilda’s room was beyond earshot, two flights up, the second flight a mere ladder running from the middle landing. After a moment’s indecision he mounted the stairs, reached the landing, and there paused again.

  ‘You there, Hilda?’

  At first, silence. Then a small faint sound, or confusion of sounds, as of someone moving, turning over in bed. Then silence again.

  With his mouth full of news Matthew went up the ladder, opened Hilda’s door by two inches, and said again: ‘You there, Hilda?’

  Half sleepy, half smothered, came the answer. ‘Whaat?’ Then with a quickness, a sharpness: ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘It’s only me, Hilda,’ said Matthew, pushing the door wider open. The room thus revealed was strange to him, small and strange. He had not seen inside it since Faith’s time, and the impress of another and simpler personality was upon it. ‘It’s good news. She’s better. She’s pulled through.’

  Hilda said, with half a
yawn: ‘Coo, isn’t that lovely!’ Lying on the bed she propped herself up on one arm and with the knuckles of the other hand rubbed sleep from her eyes. Her face was flushed with sleep, her hair in disorder. ‘You caught me napping. I quite lost myself. That tired I was.’ The full meaning of his words reached Jher. ‘What, really better, Mr Elderbrook?’

  He nodded. ‘She’s in a lovely sleep.’ The sleep of a child. All pain smoothed away.

  Hilda swung her legs off the bed and sat there, staring at distance. There was no doubt of her gladness. Drowsy with sleep a moment ago, her eyes were now full of a soft sheen. Matthew felt he knew what she was thinking. It was what he was thinking himself. Their long labour was accomplished. They had worked together, he in his sphere and she in hers, looking after Ann, trying to get her well again, hoping for her, pitying her, saluting in homage her fortitude, bearing with her outbreaks of impatience, sharing with each other (no words said) the long misery of her being always ill. And now it was over.