Читать книгу Honey for the Ghost - Louis Golding - Страница 11

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A letter from Jim Gunning to his wife:

Dear Sal,

I hope you are well as it leaves me at present. I hope those washers are still all right on those taps. I really think we should have new taps, those washers keep on wearing out too quick.

How is the boy? Is he all right? I hope he does not play up too much because I am not at home. But tell him to look out. It won’t be too long before I will come home, and then I will give him a left hook.

I think it is a liberty. They kept me in bed three weeks, and now they only let me out two hours in the morning. It is all madam. But it is not that what gives me the hump. There is so much carrying on here I can’t stick it. They have not got anything else in their minds most of them. They talk about it all day and all night, it makes you sick, gives you the fair creeps.

Honest, Sal, I don’t think I can stand it much longer. I said three months when I left, but I don’t think I can stand it two months. I can just do the same thing at home, if it was really necessary, milk and fresh air that’s what it is. Besides the old job it is all fresh air, you can’t get away from that, can you? And at night I can store the bike at Baker Street station, and come home by bus, or even a taxi when the papers don’t shift, like sometimes they don’t. I hope that swelling in her ankle is keeping down.

Well, all the best, pal, and thanks for that scarf what I got and I forgot to say I got it.

Love to everybody. How is our George making out in his new job?

Yours sincerely,

Jim Gunning.

X X X X X

A letter from Sal Gunning to her husband:

Dear Jim,

I hope you are well as it leaves me at present. Dickie is fine and he sends you his love and lots of kisses, and so does mum, and he is not worried about that left hook, because he has that straight left like you always tell him.

Jim, I have been to the doctor, and he thinks it downright wicked you should come home. He says it often happens people get impatient, but you have to stick it. Please you will for our sake. I want you back of course I do, but for always Jim. So please.

Mum and the boy send their love and I have only just managed to get some more grey wool and the pullover will be finished though one sleeve will be just a shade lighter. We went to the Gaumont last night and saw Bacall and think she is soppy but Dickie wants to be Humphrey Bogart when he grows up.

With love and kisses,

Yours sincerely,

Sally Gunning.

X X X X X

P.S.—George is making out fine in his new job.

The two doctors at Barnham certainly knew more about Jim Gunning’s physical condition than Jim Gunning. They knew a good deal about his mental condition, too, but there was a lot they did not know, as the event proved.

They were not satisfied, though they kept their misgivings from the patient. He was as scornful as he had been from the beginning, and though it was impossible for him to be unaware of certain developments, they did not impress him. His temperatures were rather higher than they had been. Sometimes they shot up quite dizzily. He found himself compelled to use his flask with some regularity. The knees felt groggy towards the end of the day, in the way it sometimes happened in the sixth or seventh round of an eight-rounder against a tough customer.

But it was not he who had ever admitted the toughness of the customer, and he did not now, though the toughness was beyond all comparison with what had been. He had kept on fighting with fractured wrist-bones or ribs against opponents many pounds heavier, and it did not occur to him he could not win.

Now, too, for a long time, with injuries more subtle and more deadly, it did not occur to him he could not win.

The treatment continued along its prescribed and familiar course, ample food and the best of it, quarts of milk a day, carefully graduated exercise, certain tentative inoculations, and always night and day fresh air and more fresh air. Even during the few weeks that followed his getting up from his bed, he was aware of two or three patients who had been discharged as cured, and the rumour came to his ears of one or two patients who had been quietly transferred to other institutions, where they would be permitted to die without fuss. At Barnham they preferred to house the surviving sort. Jim was neither elated by the cured cases nor depressed by the incurable. His extraordinary conduct sprang from other emotional sources. A light will be thrown on it by a conversation which took place in one of the verandas on the ground floor of the women’s block, where the women reclined on their couches during the rest periods after meals and exercise. The conversation took place immediately after the luncheon in the main dining-hall where Jim had made his first public appearance.

“Did you see him?” asked Flora Wilson. “Did you see him?” She was panting slightly, but her minute squint gave her a curiously archaic expression, so that whether she was, in fact, delighted or cast down it could not be divined in the landscape of that marble and hieratic impersonality. She was a typist from Chiswick.

“You’re too late,” declared Joan Bracken. “He’s already dated himself with Maysie Sheen.” She spoke roughly and was rough. She had a masculine voice, broad shoulders, a deep chest, and practically no luck at all with men. She said Maysie Sheen. It might have been any other of the half-dozen girls within earshot.

“I wasn’t even in to lunch,” said Maysie Sheen. “What’s he like?”

“My dear, he’s just crushing!” said Ellen Wrigley. It was to be understood Ellen Wrigley was a society girl. She went to the Royal Garden Party, and Hanover Square weddings, and smart night clubs. “I understand he was a wrestler, or a boxer, or something. Too primitive!” Her idiom was pleasantly old-fashioned.

“A boxer, do you say?” said Joan Bracken. She sounded really interested now. It was not an interest in him as a male. She was a boxing fan. It was believed among her friends that if she had been a man she would have been a boxer. She might even have been a woman boxer if she had needed the money, and there had been a craze for women boxers round her parts, as happens from time to time. “What’s his name, did you say?” Nobody had given him a name. “Does anyone know?” No one knew.

“He’s got a cleft chin,” said Flora Wilson. “Like Gary Cooper. He’s beautiful!”

“I wonder which of you will make him first,” said Joan Bracken, as if she were not in the least interested herself, excepting, maybe, if he was really a boxer. She coughed, and spat into her flask with the gusto of a farm-hand. “After he’s through with Maysie Sheen,” she added, remembering she had already established a liaison in that quarter.

“His hair’s all wavy,” intoned Flora Wilson. “Chestnut. He’s beautiful!” she insisted again.

“Not beautiful,” said Ellen Wrigley. “I wouldn’t say that. He looked rather common. But he knows his stuff. Oh, yes, he’ll be a handy man around the place.”

“You make me sick,” said a quiet voice from the last couch in the veranda. It was a girl who had been working for an honours degree in classics at Somerville a year ago. She wore horn-rimmed glasses, and was small and pale, except for the scarlet brush-tip in the centre of her cheeks. She had a volume of Plato spread out before her on her rugs. People hardly bothered to remember her name. She was the sort that would be dead, anyway, in six months. Nobody took the least notice of her.

“Perhaps he’s more like Gregory Peck,” mused Flora Wilson. “He’s not so tall, of course. But what lovely big shoulders he’s got ... like James Cagney. I love him!” she exclaimed, a sudden husky quality coming into her voice. She was not quite sane. But the face remained unimpassioned and archaic, the eyeballs always slightly askew.

It was not in that veranda alone that a conversation along those lines took place that afternoon, immediately after Jim Gunning had lunch for the first time in the public dining-hall, though the one recorded was less inhibited than most of the others. That was partly because there chanced to be no old women or small girls in Flora Wilson’s group. Or perhaps it was because of Joan Bracken, who was a great remover of inhibitions. The girl who read Plato was there, certainly. But she might not have been there, for all anyone cared.

The men, too, liked Jim Gunning, as they liked him in his union chapter, or in the darts team at the “Black Swan.” He did not throw his weight about. He was generous and easy to get on with. He did not add to the store of funny stories; if they were pungent, they seemed to turn him up a bit. He knocked a ball about now and again on the course, but he was not keen about it. There were not a few working men at the Sanatorium who looked rather askance at golf as being rather pretentious for people in their class. Two wars had not succeeded in breaking down that reserve.

In darts Jim displayed the same prowess at Barnham that he displayed in the “Black Swan,” and he would bring out his purse of darts from his waistcoat pocket with a quiet confidence that amounted almost to vanity. But there were times when he would not even play darts. He was a bit on the moody side, to tell the truth. But you can’t have everything in a bloke. He was all right.

At that first luncheon Jim came down to the men noticed he had created something of an impression among the women. He was new, and he was obviously the sort they liked. The men knew the signs, the wide-opened eyes of the women, the ducking of their heads as they clucked and clacked to each other, even the shortening of the breath here and there, the heightening of the colour in the cheeks.

“You’ve made a hit,” said a young man at Jim’s table. “You’re going to be all right.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Jim, as if he didn’t know.

Or perhaps he didn’t know. He wasn’t very quick on the uptake. And he had a certain innocence.

“The dames,” explained the other. “The crumpet.”

“Oh, turn it up,” said Jim, quite roughly. He blushed like a twelve-year-old. The subject was turned up. The bloke, after all, had been a boxer of class. You might as well turn it up as not.

After lunch there was a rest-period in the verandas. The men smoked, talked smut, and played cards, though they were not supposed to play cards till the social period came round in the evening. After an hour Jim got up, according to orders, folded his rugs, and went up to the ward. For a week or so he would be allowed up only an hour before lunch and an hour after.

Then the men got to work on him. Was he a dark horse, or wasn’t he? Did he do it like a rabbit or didn’t he? Did you see what happened to Flora Wilson? She nearly had a baby on the spot. They’ll be drawing lots for him, you’ll see, like they did for Archie Carpenter, you remember? Poor devil, didn’t do him much good, did it? Never mind! A short life and a merry one! Lucky bastard, this Gunning! He doesn’t know how lucky he is.

He don’t? He’ll find out!

Two months passed, and three months. Jim Gunning did not feel himself getting any better but he certainly did not feel himself getting any worse. He sweated a bit in the night, but that meant nothing this way or that. He was quite certain that the moment he got back home the sweating would stop and the temperature would go down. He was eating and drinking like a pig, and taking too little exercise. No wonder it oozed out of his pores at night.

That apart, the way these blokes talked of stealing into the women’s châlets and the things that went on in them was enough to make anyone feel clammy. (“I bet old Betty’s châlet was rocking on its hinges this afternoon!” “I wonder why she don’t put a red lamp over her door!”) He had had enough of it. The San. was doing him no good.

There were several occasions during the third and fourth months when he was walking out on the Corfe Road, and it was all he could do to induce himself to turn back towards the San. again. How easy it would be just to keep on walking and take the next train for Wareham and so back home again. They could send his things on after him, if they wanted to. But he held back. He knew how grieved Sal would be. He knew the way her eyes would screw up a little, because he had quit, and good blokes don’t quit.

She had written once or twice asking wouldn’t he like to have the boy and herself near him for a day or two, wasn’t there some nice bed-and-breakfast place somewhere in those parts. And he had had the idea himself the day he first came to Barnham.

It all looked so open and so full of sunshine, and the sea wasn’t far off; and the lambs with their long legs were soon tottering around their mothers like girls on high heels; and the rabbits came out of the holes beside the hedges and when there was the sound of a footfall they scampered away like small boys fishing for tiddlers by Regent’s Park Canal though it is against regulations, and the man from the small house under the bridge comes out and bawls at them but they’re simply not there, they were never there at all; and what a lot of different butterflies there are, and a bird goes whirring up when your foot comes down on a lump of grass.

There was all that, and lots more, and young Dickie would have done his nut, he would have torn himself to bits between the things of the sea, and sky, and the things of the trees and grass.

But Jim did not want Sal here. He did not want her to think that he had gone wrong inside, like some of these people here, like most of them, in fact. He did not want the fellows pawing her up and down with their eyes, like they always did when a new female came into view.

And besides, he would be going home soon in any case, if not next week, then a week after that, two weeks at the latest. So he wrote: “No, Sal, leave it for now, anyhow. Give my love to the kid and the old woman.”

And then the business of Jack Thomley happened. That shook up Jim Gunning pretty badly. It happened in the first light of dawn, and it was even more distressing than it might have been, for Jim happened to be awake and looking over towards Thomley’s jet-black hair slanting across the pale pillow.

He was saying to himself what a fast hair-cream Thomley must use, for practically everybody moves at least a little in his sleep, and Thomley’s hair was as fixed and shining as if each separate hair in it had been pasted down on the scalp of a waxwork figure. Then suddenly the hair, the forehead, the mouth, rose from the pillow. There was a first rich and copious gush of scarlet. The blood lay on the top blanket like a great mass of petals from a bunch of red tulips or peonies that is coming all to pieces. Then Thomley managed to stem the rest of the load till he had fumbled for and found a receptacle. Then the rest followed rich and swift and easy.

It was an odd thing how immediately the rest of the ward was awake, though some had been dead asleep five seconds ago. It seemed as if it was the smell of the blood that did it, like the smell of a fox coming on the wind and suddenly setting astir a whole roost of chickens. The smell of the blood, the fox, the enemy.

It was Thomley himself who spoke first.

“It’s O.K., boys.” He winked broadly. “It does you good, a bit of a clean-out now and again.” He had his handkerchief out and was wiping the blood from around his lips with delicate little movements, as if he had a girl to meet quite soon under the clock at Victoria Station. Then the humour of the situation, for evidently to him every situation was humorous, got hold of him. He embarked upon the dot-dash, dot-dash-dot, of his morse-code laugh. Hee-hee! Tee-hee-hee! But the performance was irked by a great gout of blood that he brought up neatly into his handkerchief.

Then Nurse MacGlowrie entered, though it could hardly be more than two minutes ago that the whole ward was quiet as cloth. Perhaps merely someone had thought of ringing a bell. Perhaps, even out there in the corridor, where she was just going along to take over from the night nurse—perhaps her nostrils, too, twitched with immediate response to the tinny bath-brick odour of blood.

So Nurse MacGlowrie entered, and paused a moment on the threshold, taking in at once a situation not at all unfamiliar to her.

“Hello,” grinned Jack Thomley. “How’s Bonny Scotland? We’re doing fine in Tottenham!” His teeth shone with whitest lustre out of the poppy-red mouth.

She walked straight over to his bed, and, placing both hands around his left shoulder, lifted him away from his pillow, then flattened out the pillow below him.

“Come along, now,” she said. “You must lie down, quite flat.”

He lay down. Then she went swiftly over to a wash-basin, filled a glass with cold water, and damped a towel.

“Sip this,” she requested. She lifted his head high enough to have him take a sip or two.

“Make it a double,” he requested.

“You must be quiet,” she bade him, passing the damp towel about his face. “I’ll be back at once!”

“She’s off to Largan nah Chaorochain!” he wailed. “I won’t ever see her again.”

“Pipe down, Jack!” a voice said. “Play the game!”

He was quiet for two full minutes. Everyone else in the ward was quiet. Jim in his bed heard his heart beating against his ears the way sometimes he would hear it in his corner in the interval between rounds. Then Jack Thomley started again.

“Don’t do your nut, boys!” he said. “I’m not pushing up daisies yet, you know.”

“Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel,” intoned Mr. Crowther, the bank-clerk, the psalm-singer. “Thou that leadest Joseph like a flock; thou that dwellest between the cherubims, shine forth. Stir up thy strength, and come and save us, before Ephraim——”

But it was Sister Eckersley, the ward sister, who made her appearance, with Nurse MacGlowrie in attendance, carrying a bowl of ice.

“Come along, Mr. Thomley,” Sister Eckersley said. “Put your tongue out.” Thomley shut his eyes, and put his tongue out, and the sister placed a lump of ice on it. “There!” It was curiously like the giving of the Host in a communion. “The screen, nurse, please!” she bade. But Nurse MacGlowrie was already putting the screen up round the young man’s bed.

A minute later Dr. Hillman was there. They had telephoned him from the staff room. There was little of the rugger blue in his deportment now. The face was serious, the movements quick and quiet.

“Good morning, gentlemen!” he said, and a moment later he was behind the screen. There was some activity behind there, then Nurse MacGlowrie reappeared and was off down the corridor again. The sister and doctor stayed.

“Thomley had an idea he was due for another one,” whispered Fred Parley, from the bed next to Jim’s.

“Pretty bad, is it?” asked Jim. His mouth was quite dry. He was sure no sound had actually left his mouth. But Fred Parley had heard.

“Not good,” said he. Then everyone lifted their heads. There was a squeak of rubber wheels along the corridor. A moment later Nurse MacGlowrie opened the doors to let an orderly through with a high trolley, swathed in rugs.

“Blood transfusion,” whispered Fred Parley. He knew his way around.

The screen was moved, the trolley wheeled into position along Thomley’s bed. The women deftly effected the transference from bed to trolley. A moment later the orderly was wheeling the trolley towards the doors, with Nurse MacGlowrie leading the head of it.

“Ha! ha! Hee-hee-hee! Hee-hee-hee!” Once more, in strict morse punctuation the laughter of Jack Thomley projected its dots and dashes of sound into the air. It was not so turbulent as it often had been. “Don’t do your nut, boys!” counselled Jack Thomley.

They never heard his voice again.