Читать книгу Honey for the Ghost - Louis Golding - Страница 13

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It was as if Jack Thomley had never been. The weeks went by. It was May now. It was June.

“It’s a waste of life,” muttered Jim Gunning to himself. “I can’t stick it any more. I’ll never get any better in this place.” There were times, in fact, when he admitted to himself something might be wrong with him. But he would, at once come back on himself, like a dog showing his teeth at his own image in the mirror. “Any better? What’s wrong with me? Let me get out of this place and I’ll show ’em.”

He wrote less and less frequently to Sal in Holloway. Sometimes weeks went by without a note to her. She did not chide him. Perhaps it was the counterpart in his mind to the damage which had planted itself inside his body.

She had sometimes, not often, met these moods in him before, chiefly during those dragging years between the evacuation of France and D-Day, when he was doing the frozen, forlorn garrison duties on the Norfolk coast. They sometimes came on him at home, too, for a day or two or three at a time.

He would come home with heavy eyes and say not a word to any of them, and then go out and get drunk. Or he would not come home for dinner at all. He would drink, and go out after closing-time, and start walking, and go on walking. He might not be home till hours after midnight.

She would not utter a word of reproach to him. She would wait for him, and he would come back, a little ashamed of himself, and a little bewildered. Neither would say a word to each other. It was all right. It would always be all right till the last day.

So now, when these silences fell on him in Dorset, she did not chide him. She wrote him her brief uneloquent notes about the job and the home and the boy and the family and the two old women downstairs. If he read them well and good, if he did not, no harm done.

Then, one evening, when she returned from the chromium-plating factory where she worked, she found a letter from him, and read it. She did not give herself time for her evening meal. She went into the best bedroom where the chest of drawers was, packed a few things, said a few words to her mother, kissed the small boy, and went off to the tube station.

It did not even occur to her to telephone and find out when the trains left Waterloo. She knew they went from Waterloo, because she had seen Jim off there.

She got to Corfe very late, and would have made her way somehow to the sanatorium, she would have walked if necessary, and then it occurred to her perhaps he had not left yet. If he had not, and she turned up like this, it might upset him. He might think something had happened to the boy. A shock could do him no good at all.

So she got them to let her telephone from one of the hotels. It was not the first time that a worried connection of a Barnham patient had asked to telephone at an odd hour.

She got through, and asked whether her husband was all right. She was too clever to ask whether he was still there or not. She did not want to make a fool of him, or herself for that matter, supposing everything was as it should be.

They seemed to be a bit taken aback at the sanatorium, but after some silence, and some shuffling of feet, and some asking and answering, the reply came to her; “Yes, certainly, Mrs. Gunning, your husband is perfectly all right.” It was a woman’s voice and a kind one. “If anything was wrong, you could rely on it, we would let you know at once.”

“But, please,” insisted Mrs. Gunning. “Have you seen him? Is he far away? Could you please see him and let me know if he is all right?”

There was silence again at the Barnham end of the telephone. It was felt there that this was an odd and insistent creature. But it is like that sometimes. Wives and husbands of patients become more curious than the patients themselves. After all, they have not got doctors and sisters and nurses looking after them all day and night.

“Yes, certainly,” the voice came through again. “We are telephoning through to the ward. The patients are already in bed, you know. The night nurse will go and see him, and let us know about him. What message would you like us to give him?”

“Oh please, madam, no message. Please don’t tell him I’m here. It’ll only upset him. I’ll come up and see him in the morning, if that’s all right.”

“Of course, Mrs. Gunning. Of course, it will be all right. Will you please hold on a minute or two?”

“Yes, please.” She held on.

A minute or two later the reply came through.

“Are you there, Mrs. Gunning?”

“Yes, madam?” Her voice was faint with anxiety.

“He’s perfectly all right. The temperature was fairly normal. You have no need to worry, Mrs. Gunning.”

“Thank you. Thank you.”

“Well, we’ll expect to see you sometime in the morning. Sometime about twelve would be convenient.”

“Please. May I come early?”

“Well, certainly, Mrs. Gunning, if you prefer it. Good night. Please don’t upset yourself.”

“Good night, madam, and thank you.”

The letter that brought Sal Gunning to Dorset with such haste was caused by an episode in which Len Atwill was involved, the ex-sailor from a minor public school whom we have met for a moment earlier, on the day of Jim’s arrival at Barnham. He was one of the patients in Jim’s ward, a pale young man, pale under the patina of his tan, with pale hair, long and silky, and pale eyes flecked with green. He seemed to have assigned to himself the position in the ward once held by the dead Thomley. He had become the great kidder, the leader-up-the-garden-path.

It was, perhaps, a symptom of the irritation caused in him by the lack of improvement in his condition. He did not get any worse, but he did not get any better, and he was a young man. There was a girl from Rome he wanted to marry, whom he had met when he was stationed in the British Naval Mission out there. He did not do his kidding as well as Thomley, who had had a natural gift for it. Thomley had had verve. The laughter was, perhaps, a little synthetic, but the glow in the black eyes was not.

It was not so with Atwill. His kidding was off-beat. It usually went on for a second or two too long, for he lacked Thomley’s sense of timing. And the accent was slightly “posh,” which did not help matters with the working-men patients.

The Len Atwill episode took place in the ward while they were getting into their night things. Jim Gunning had been out for quite a long walk that afternoon and evening, rather longer than usual. He had set out alone, for during those periods when he did not write to his wife, and this was one of them, he avoided people, and they avoided him, though he was a pleasant enough fellow normally.

Joan Bracken met him and called out to him, but he pointedly ignored her. “For two pins I’d have socked him on the jaw,” said Joan Bracken. This was the young woman who was keen on boxing. She knew a lot more about the works of Pierce Egan and the contests of Cribb and Belcher than Jim did, and quite as much about the more recent exploits of Young Perez and Johnny Cuthbert and Toni Canzoneri. She had seen Jim himself box once or twice in the Corn Exchanges of county towns. They had become quite good friends here at Barnham.

But he did not want to talk to her or anybody that day. He was feeling down. She hallooed to him from a path in the wood, but he ignored her. He went on walking. An hour passed by, and two hours. The air was delicious that day, with the sun warm and a breeze coming in from the sea. Perhaps he was in any case coming to the end of the dark mood. The moods had to stop some time. You had to get on with people. You had to write to Sal. He drew a deep breath. He lifted his forehead to the sun.

Then he met Lydia Turvey and, though he had gone out alone, he came back with her. Lydia Turvey was the pretty little pink-cheeked, blue-eyed girl who had become a patient at Barnham on the same day as himself. The little girl was doing nicely, he had already noticed that. It was quite a long distance from the sanatorium where he met her, towards the end of the belt of pine-trees where the wood straggled down towards the saltings and the sea.

They had rarely, if ever, had a word with each other since that first day, except for a good morning or a good night. They dined at different ends of the dining-hall, and she had one of the châlets which kept her out of the way a lot of the time. They were neither of them easy talkers.

But he was feeling good now, and so was she. What a day it was, she thought, with these rivulets of wild flowers running along the ditches, and the opening fronds of bracken among the tree-trunks, and wild hyacinths still lingering in clearings, and out on the woodland edges, birds calling, butterflies tumbling.

Jim stopped as the girl came forward, with a posy of bright flowers and weeds in her hand.

“It’s lovely, isn’t it?” he asked. That was quite fulsome speech for him. He meant the sun and the air and the smell of the woods. But he might almost have meant her, too. She was a gracious thing to look at.

“I’ve found some lily of the valley,” she said.

“You’re Miss Turvey, aren’t you? I remember from that first day.”

“That’s right. Lydia Turvey. And aren’t you Mr. Gunning?”

“Yes. Seems a long time ago, doesn’t it?”

She must have divined a certain wistfulness in his tone.

“Oh it won’t be long now. You look awfully well.”

“So do you.”

They were both silent for a moment or two.

Then: “I’ll be going on now,” she said. “It’s quite a long way, isn’t it?”

“It is,” he agreed. “I’ll come back, too, if that’s all right with you.”

“Of course it is.”

They sauntered back towards the sanatorium. They did not say much to each other for they preferred to keep out of their minds the one subject they had in common, the sanatorium and their disease. They found it easy to go on like that, without exchanging more than a word or two every now and then. There was a slight rise at one stretch of the road. When they got to the top, she seemed to be making rather heavy weather.

“I think you should sit down a bit,” he said.

“Perhaps I should,” she admitted. She looked round for a place to cross the ditch, over to the tangled bank that ramparted the wood.

“Here,” he pointed out. A little distance away was a traverse of several planks laid side by side. He crossed with her, through a dip in the bank into the woodland. She sat down against a tree-trunk. He stood up beside her.

“You ought to sit down, too,” she reproved him. “We’re all to take things easy.”

He sat down. Something had caught her eye on the floor of the wood.

“Look!” she said. “That’s wild strawberry.”

“Pretty,” he said. He looked round sharply among the grass-roots. She liked these things. He might as well humour her. He saw the gleam of purple beside a stone. “Isn’t this ...” he began, “isn’t this ... ? It’s a violet, isn’t it?”

“You’re quite right,” she smiled. “Dog violet.”

Two or three minutes passed. She looked like one of those flowers there, up against that tree; no, not one of the inside woodland flowers so much as one of the flowers from the open places; or perhaps a flower from a garden. He hoped she was going to get out of this all right, this lung business.

She closed her eyes for half a minute, then she opened them again.

“Shall we go now?” she asked.

“Have you rested enough?”

“Oh yes, thanks. You’re all right?”

He ignored that. He helped her to her feet. She smiled and thanked him. They came back out of the wood by the narrow plank bridge and resumed the journey back to Barnham. That was the sum total of that adventure that June day in the pinewood between Barnham and the sea.

The brush with Atwill occurred that night, after supper. They were up in the ward, undressing. Atwill was just getting his pyjamas out of the drawer in his wardrobe, Jim had already got into his pyjama-trousers. They were only two or three feet away from each other.

“Had a good time, Gunning?” Atwill asked casually.

Jim did not know whether he meant the time he had spent at Barnham or the time he had had that day. He was not interested enough to find out.

“O.K.,” he said, and stooped for his slippers.

“I mean in the woods, this evening,” said Atwill.

“Oh, in the woods,” said Jim. “It was O.K.”

“I bet it was,” said Atwill, and grinned to the ward at large. The others paused in what they were doing. There was a sense in the air of fun about to happen. Jim said nothing. He took his socks off, and got into his slippers. He straightened up again.

“I saw you with that girl,” Atwill jested. “You’re a bad lad.”

“You did, did you?” said Jim. If Atwill had been a little more sensitive to voices and the set of jawbones, he would have stopped at that moment. Jim got hold of his pyjama-coat and flapped it into the air to straighten it out. It was in his right hand.

“What’s her name now?” continued Atwill. “The little Turvey girl, isn’t it?”

Jim ignored him.

“I saw you,” said Atwill. “With my own two eyes I saw you.” There may have been a slight fluttering in his heart. But he had gone too far to go back. He was a wit, anyway. Everybody knew he was funny. “I saw you go into the wood with her,” continued Atwill. “Do you deny it?” Again there was a wink.

“Pipe down!” said Jim, very quietly. That was undoubtedly the moment to pipe down.

“I saw you fastening your trousers up!” said Atwill. The next moment he was on the floor, head and shoulders up against his cupboard. He was spitting blood. There were one or two teeth among the spittle.

Jim stood over him, the left fist still clenched, as if he were waiting for the referee to start counting Atwill out. The pyjama-coat was still in the right hand. But there was not a ring. There was no counting. Jim blinked and shook his head as if it was on his own mouth a massive left-hook had been landed.

He turned to the fellows in the ward.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I lost my head.”

“He had it coming to him,” said a voice.

“I’m sorry,” Jim repeated, as if he had not heard. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

At that moment the night nurse entered. She saw Atwill still hunched up against the wardrobe, feeling his upper jaw tenderly. She saw Jim, his fists still elevated. There was blood about, she noted, but it was not the sort of blood in which she had a professional interest.

“Had an accident, Mr. Atwill?” she asked, for it was up to her to make some comment. “So sorry. Come, wash your mouth out!”

Jim became aware of the pyjama-coat in his right hand. He looked at it, shook his head, then put the garment on. Nobody in the ward made any further comment on the episode. Temperatures were taken and marked down, here and there a dose was mixed in a glass and put on the bedside locker.

Only Bert said something, the small boy who was older than he seemed.

“Ooh! it was a beauty!” he exclaimed. “Good-o!”

That was all. The conversation beyond that became almost painfully extramural. Even sex for the next few hours declined its rampant head and tucked itself away darkly into the shadows.

After breakfast next morning Jim Gunning ignored the statutory rest-period. If anyone saw him in the writing-room, well they saw him. It did not matter now.

He had to get a letter written to Sal. It went like this:

Dear Sal,

I hope you are in the best of health as it leaves me at present. I want to tell you I am coming home. I might get home as soon as this letter, or to-morrow maybe. I don’t know. I will have to say beg your pardon to a chap here, what I have never done in my life before, but perhaps I didn’t have to before, but I have to now.

He is not much of a bloke, he is a bit of a weed, but he was saucy, and before I knew where I was, I give him one. I had no right to do such a thing, he is a sick man, and I don’t suppose he ever had his fists up in his life either.

It is not only in my health it is getting me down here. I was better, Sal, before I came here. It is inside me. I could not have done such a thing like that before I came here. I am sorry I am a worry to you, but what has to be has to be, and you know how I feel about you, pal.

I send you my love and kisses.

Yours sincerely,

Jim Gunning.

x x x x x

He licked the envelope and dropped it in the letter-box. Then he rose and stood a moment. No, he decided. He was not going to get out on the veranda with Len Atwill and the other blokes. He could not look them in the face. He waited till the rest-period was over, then went out and walked on the Corfe road. He did not come back for luncheon, either. He had nothing to eat, but knocked back a good many pints of beer at a wayside pub. They seemed to have no effect on him. He came back in the late afternoon, and ran across Dr. Hillman going out with his clubs to knock up a hole or two.

“Now I’m for it,” Jim said to himself sullenly. But nothing happened, excepting a breezy smile.

“Hello, Mr. Gunning. Feeling all right?”

“Not bad, doctor. Thank you.”

Of course Dr. Hillman knew all about that business. It must have got round to him. It made Jim Gunning feel a little meaner than before. He looked round furtively for Len Atwill. He was not to be seen. Quite likely he was back early in the ward, with a degree or two more on his thermometer.