Читать книгу Honey for the Ghost - Louis Golding - Страница 14

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It was on his way from the dining-hall next morning after breakfast that an orderly came up to him with a message. A lady was waiting for him in the drawing-room, his wife. Jim stood silent for a few moments, his lower lip trembling slightly. Then he got the lower lip under control.

“Yes, mate,” he said. The orderly went off. Jim took his handkerchief out and wiped his forehead. Then he made his way to the central building, where the drawing-room was. His knees felt a little groggy. He had a vague feeling that he ought to be very angry. After all, he was the husband, and husbands don’t expect to have wives barging along when they’re not asked, or God help them. But he could not work up any anger at all. He felt a bit of a fool, really, when he came to weigh it up. He should have known Sal would come rushing up like a race-horse after him writing a letter like the one he wrote. She was a damn good kid, that’s what she was, one of the best.

Anyhow, she was here. As the gravel crunched under his feet, he felt a curious sense of relief. It had been an awful long time he had been without Sal, it felt like years and years. In actual months, some of his absences during the war and before his demobilization had been longer. But now, at this moment, he realized for the first time how much he had missed her; how much he loved her, too. He loved her an awful lot. She was the mother of his kid, too, a game kid, a bit of a handful, but a good little kid. His heart seemed to swell up inside him with pride and love. He had reached the drawing-room now. He went in.

There she was, sitting small and pale-haired and big-eyed in the hollow of a deep chair. She was fiddling with her fingers in her lap. Her dress was up to her knees, she had been so nervous, and she had probably jerked it down half a dozen times already and it had worked back. The stockings were tucked in creases above the ankles.

She had been too worried to give much thought this morning to the way she looked. But she was wearing that beige hat he had bought her for Christmas, one side down, the other side up. “It makes me look like a film star,” she had said, and smiled, and kissed him very shyly, like she always did. Like she did now.

“Hello, Jim,” she said.

“Hello, Sal,” he replied, and went forward to her.

She got up, and put her mouth to his. But it was not a kiss like you see in pictures, all deep and close. It was shy. It was like the touch of a cat above your shoe.

“A fine to-do this is,” he said. He sat her down in her easy chair again, and drew up another chair, and looked down at her. There was a hint of wetness in the corner of her eyes. Her lips were trembling slightly.

“Jim, you’re not cross with me, are you? I had to come. After that ... after....”

“After that letter. Yes, Sal. I was a mug. I can see it now. Well, here you are. You could have sent me a wire, couldn’t you? I’d have come down to the station for you.”

“There wasn’t much time, was there, Jim? There wasn’t, was there?”

“I suppose not. Well, it’s all right now. I’ve talked to the bloke. He was very decent about it.”

“Will you tell me what happened, Jim? Then I’ll know properly what you’re talking about.”

He gave her in more detail an account of the Len Atwill episode, though she had the salient facts already.

“So is that all, Jim?” she asked. “There isn’t anything worrying you?”

His eyes darkened.

“It’s enough. I’m not that sort of a bloke. Well, it’s over now. I’m glad you’ve come. We can go back together. The kid’ll be scared stiff, you away as well as me.”

“Jim!”

“Yes?”

“Jim!” She looked down on the carpet. The hands in her lap started twining and twisting again. “I don’t want you to go away. I’ve seen Dr. Hillman this morning. He was very nice to me. They’ve all been nice to me. They’re good people.”

“I know exactly what the doctor says.”

“You don’t, Jim, you don’t!” Her voice became very urgent. “He doesn’t say all he thinks to patients. He can’t!”

“He says I’m going to snuff it?” The voice was hard and raw.

“He doesn’t. He thinks you ought to stay on here, and then you may be all right.”

“He’s been saying that for months and months. I can’t stand it any more.”

“Yes, Jim. I know it’s hard for you. It’s hard for me, too. So I’ve been thinking.”

“Thinking? What? What’s there to think about? You’re there, and I’m here, and it ain’t doing me no good.”

“I’ve been thinking we could send the old woman with Dickie to Clara in Staines. They love having him.”

“And you?” His heart knocked.

“I could get a job in one of them caffs in Corfe. I saw a notice up in a caff on the way to the station: ‘Waitress wanted here.’ It’s summer now and there’ll be tourists coming along. I could get a job easy.”

He felt his heart knocking, knocking, in that funny sharp way, like a hammer knocking in nails. He knew two things in that moment. He loved her more than ever he had loved her before. He knew how much her proposition meant to her. She was lost, she was hopeless, outside the few streets that encompassed their home in Holloway.

After the V2 bomb destroyed their last home in Querridge Street they could have had a much more commodious place from the Borough Council, in the further fringes of the Borough Council’s jurisdiction. But she could not uproot herself from that small concentrated world where she belonged, where she had married, where her boy was born, even for running water in the bedrooms and no trains within a mile to shake the very ornaments off the shelves.

So she had preferred the restored houses of Territon Street with the crooked lines still showing in ceilings and walls, and the dust and the trains and the noise. The West End was to her a distasteful journey.

When during the height of the bombing she had gone with the baby to stay with some people in Norwich, Jim being in barracks hard by, she had returned to London within a fortnight, bombs and all, because she thought those foreigners such queer people, and she meant the people of Norfolk.

She was ready to leave Territon Street, and her girl friends, and the local Gaumont, and her sisters, and her brother, George, and her mother. She was ready to leave Dickie, too, always a dreadful deprivation, for clearly it would not be easy to serve in a caff and look after Dickie at the same time. She was the best pal in the world. He took her small hand, a little rough from the chromium plating work, and pressed it between his own two hands. It was the sort of affectionate gesture a man might well have permitted himself with a man friend. But she blushed. Those two did not go in for gestures.

He knew the measure of his love for her in that moment. He knew another thing; or rather he allowed himself for the first time to admit another thing. He knew there was a chance he might get really ill and die.

It was not a nice death to die. He had gathered a fair amount of knowledge on the various ways in which T.B. patients can die, and none was easy or pleasant. It was less easy for the looker-on than for the sufferer. It could be hideous. However minute the chance was that he might die, he could not risk having her in on it.

“No, pal,” he said sombrely. “I can’t let you do that. No, Sal, I can’t. That’s final, Sal.”

“But Jim, Jim,” she begged him. “Why? Why don’t you let me? You must, Jim. I can fix it all up. If I can’t have the kid with me here, he can go to Staines to Clara. It’ll do him real good being in the country. He goes racing about with Clara’s kids, and they’ve got that big garden, and the old woman can have a rest, too——”

“I’d like him to go, Sal. I’d like you all to go. I want you to give up that job, you know how often I’ve asked you.”

“I have given it up once,” she thrust back at him. “But I took it on again. I like it. I like working. That’s why I’d take that job on in the caff here, and I only need to see you a few times a week, when you want me. I know you’ve got to get on with the treatment. Nothing has to get in the way of that. Oh, Jim, do let me, please.”

It was dreadful having to say no to her, but he could do nothing else. The idea of bringing her to these parts was quite, quite impossible. It was common knowledge that the sanatorium authorities definitely discouraged wives or husbands or parents coming along and hanging round, for nothing could be more demoralizing for everyone concerned, particularly if it was likely the patient would die. He was about to point this out to her, but he stopped in time.

“Please, Sal,” he pleaded, “don’t make me go on having to say no. You know how much I hate doing it. You know you’re not happy when you leave Holloway, even for two or three days with Clara, and she’s your sister. And you’ve got to be with the kid too. It’s not fair to you or to him.”

“He could come, too,” she said “I’d find a place for him.” There was a suspicion of a pout in her lower lip; perhaps she was going to cry. “I don’t need to take on any job. We’ve got a hundred and ten pounds in the Post Office between us. I could easily raise some more on my wrist-watch, if you’d let me. It would be like a holiday for all of us.”

He got up from the chair. His face was quite gentle.

“No, Sal, no. That’s quite final. How long would you like to stay here?” he asked quietly. “You don’t need to go back to-night, do you, now you’ve come all this way?”

She knew that that gentleness was rock, it was an obstacle there was no shifting out of the way. It was more unassailable than any temper, or even than the dark mysterious sullenness which sometimes came down and sat all round him like a fog.

And then another thought came to her. If he granted this, at least, the day was not wholly lost, the journey wasted.

“Jim,” she said, “look here!” There was a note of brightness in her voice. “If you won’t let me stay, I’m going to ask you one thing!”

He was immediately on the defensive again. There is a sense in which the sick and the well, however much they love each other, are enemies. A profound gulf separates them. Sometimes the gulf becomes too broad for any bridging, not only because in illness something in the body dies. Sometimes something in the spirit dies, too.

He looked at her cautiously from the corner of his eye.

“Yes, Sal, what is it?”

“I want you to promise me something.”

“What?”

“Will you promise me, please, Jim!—will you promise me you won’t ever leave this place till the doctor lets you?”

He pursed his mouth, and closed his eyes. He was silent for one minute, two minutes, three. Then he opened his eyes again.

“No, Sal. I won’t!” His voice was rock once more. She waited. She knew it would be dangerous for her to attempt argument or expostulation. Something strange and bad would happen. Defeat now was absolute. “Sal, love!” His voice was quiet like a bird’s in the evening. “Let’s go out for a walk now. It smells so good in them pinewoods back there. We’ll forget about trains for just now, shall we?” He lifted her up from her chair the way he used to when she was having Dickie. Then they went out.