Читать книгу Honey for the Ghost - Louis Golding - Страница 15

Table of Contents

Several more weeks passed. It was July now. This was the ninth month at Barnham. The doctor had practically promised he could get away after six months, but when tackled he was as evasive as before. They were making a sick man of him, like that Lancashire girl he had been told of, a husky factory girl who took size eight in shoes. She had never had a day’s illness in her life, and then it had been announced in the Works Order, or whatever it was, that any factory hand could have an X-ray examination on request. So the girl went and had an examination, feeling that somehow she had paid for it, and she was going to get her money’s worth. They announced they had found a spot on her lung. She started worrying. She went on worrying and was dead in fifteen months.

“X-rays!” snorted Joan Bracken. She was by way of being a cynic. “I’ve got spots as big as a fist, but are they going to kill me? Not bloody likely!” It was a day of driving rain and a group of men and women, Jim among them, had come out of it into a corner of the general sitting-room. “Where’s Thomas?” Joan Bracken asked. She meant Thomas Mann, more particularly his work, The Magic Mountain. “Here we are!” She opened the first volume where a newspaper spill marked the place. “It’s old Settembrini talking. A good fellow, Settembrini. You should get to know him, boys and girls.” She read:

You know that the photographic plate often shows spots that are taken for cavities when there are none there? And, sometimes, it shows spots although there is something there? Madonna—the photographic plate! There was a young numismatician up here, with fever.

She stopped and explained: “Here’s a T.B. place, up in Davos in Switzerland.” Then she went on:

And since he had a fever there were cavities plain to be seen on the plate. They could even hear them. They treated him for phthisis, and he died. The post-mortem showed his lung to be sound; the cause of his death was some coccus or other.

“See?” said Joan Bracken. “It’s a carve-up.”

“What?” asked her friends.

She winked at Jim. Jim smiled.

“He’ll know,” she said. From the wink and the smile they had a feeling they knew, too. “A swizzle, a fiddle, a cop!” she further expounded.

“You can’t get away from a blast of colour in the old spittoon,” said a pessimist.

She stared at him frigidly.

“I know of a young man who blasted all his hopes of a university scholarship because he had an immense hæmorrhage, and they sent him to a san. in Cheshire. The hæmorrhage was later proved to be the work of a virulent quinzy.”

“Goody,” murmured Jim Gunning. His own hæmorrhage had followed a virulent quinzy. There had been a streak of colour in his own old spittoon this morning, and he hadn’t the least doubt that he’d done something to one of those silly tonsils in a slight fit of coughing he had had earlier on.

“I’ve not finished with Thomas,” Joan Bracken said severely. “Here she is, the girl I wanted to tell you of.” She started reading again:

A charming woman, of Russo-German origin, married, a young mother. She came from the Baltic provinces somewhere—lymphatic anæmic, but probably some more serious trouble as well. She spent a month here and complained that she felt ill all the time. They told her to be patient.

Another month passes, she continues to assert that she is actually worse instead of better. They point out to her that only the physician can judge how she is—she herself only knows how she feels; which does not signify. They are satisfied with the condition of her lung. Good. She says no more, she goes on with the cure, and loses weight by the week.

The fourth month she faints during the examination. “That is nothing,” says Behrens—Joan Bracken explained that Behrens was the big man up there in Davos—“her lung is perfectly satisfactory.”

But by the fifth month she cannot get about, she goes to bed and writes to her husband, out in the Baltic provinces; Behrens gets a letter from him marked “personal” and “urgent” in a very firm hand—I saw it myself. “Yes,” says Behrens, and shrugs his shoulders, “it seems to be indicated that she certainly cannot stand the climate up here.”

The woman was beside herself. He ought to have said that before, she had felt it from the beginning, she declared—they had killed her among them. Let us hope she recovered her strength when she went back to her husband.

“Did she?” someone asked.

“It’s not on record,” said Joan Bracken.

The climax of the Barnham act of the drama was induced by a few sentences in an unspectacular conversation. The conversation was going on in the staff room on the top floor of the building on the men’s side. Through the frosted glass panels of the door you caught sight of the outlines of two women, stooped over a table or bench there. The door was ajar, and you heard their voices. The two women were Sister Eckersley and Nurse MacGlowrie.

“Mr. Gunning?” Jim heard, for he it was passing along the corridor towards the ward, to replace a handkerchief he had mislaid that afternoon.

He should have gone further. It is always wise to keep moving, and to move more quickly than before, when we hear our names mentioned, in a conversation not intended for our ears. If Jim Gunning had kept moving that afternoon, he would not have plumbed the depths of hell.

He paused and overheard. It was Nurse MacGlowrie who had asked. It was Sister Eckersley who replied.

“Yes. The doctor spoke to us the same evening. Monday, wasn’t it? Yes, Monday.”

(Monday? thought Jim. What had happened on Monday? Oh, yes, that was the day he had had another X-ray examination. One had been due for a week or so.)

“He proposes to get on with both of them on Saturday,” continued Sister Eckersley.

“Get on with what?” Jim Gunning asked himself. “I’ve got some say in the matter too.” (It did not occur to him to question that he was involved in the “both” he had just heard spoken of. And he may have been, of course.)

There was a brief silence while the two women went on with the job they had in hand. Then Nurse MacGlowrie spoke. She spoke entirely without emotion, as was natural, for she was dealing with the routine material of her profession.

“When did we have the last thoraco-plasty in Ward D3?” asked Nurse MacGlowrie. As if the conversation dealt with hand-towels, or clothes-hangers.

But it did not deal with hand-towels or clothes-hangers. It dealt with the skin, the flesh, the bone, the hideously delicate pleural membrane, the soft secret spongy stuff of the lung. His own skin and flesh and bone (as he was now irretrievably convinced). His own membrane. His own lung. Not theirs. Not Dr. Hillman’s, or matron’s or sister’s or nurse’s. His own. His own.

As he stood in the corridor, a yard or two away from the half-opened door, he felt himself as cold as if he stood on a sunless day naked on a frozen lake. There seemed a casing of ice round his whole body, from crown to heels.

The ice was not fear. It was not horror. It was indignation. How dare they? he asked himself. How dare they take the liberty? It was the supreme, the culminating insolence. They were all involved in it, not only the two doctors here, and the whole staff, but the specialist back home. Sal was involved in it, too. God was involved in it.

They could not mess about with him like that. It was all his own, private and secret and sacred, what there was inside there, behind the bone. Let them keep their hands off it! He would damn well see to it that they would!

He heard quite clearly a sort of cracking over the whole surface of his body. The ice casing was breaking up. He felt he could move again. He continued moving towards the ward, where the handkerchief was that he had come for. But he would take more than his handkerchief.

His mind was made up between the lifting of his foot and the setting down of it on the floor. In a fight he always thought with extreme speed, and he had a tougher fight on his hands than he had ever had before. He would pack his things and get out. He would get anywhere, excepting to one place, as far away as might be.

The one place was home. He would not go home. Of course not. If he was going to die, he would not die, sweating and spitting and dwindling before his poor wife’s eyes. He would die in a place where no one he knew was, with no one to be sorry for him or to be shocked by him. Like an animal that goes privately into a hole, or a bird that is suddenly not in the air any longer.

But who said he was going to die? He was not going to die, not without a fight, anyhow. He was not going to take a dive and lie there, while slowly, implacably the referee counted the final seconds: five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten—out!

He had always wanted them to leave him alone, so that he could come face to face with the enemy and shake hands and come out of his corner fighting. Good! He had his chance now!

He went into the ward. No one was in bed, as it happened. That was all right. If anybody came into the ward while he was packing, or met him getting out of the building, or in the grounds, and they asked him what the bag was for, he would let them know he was going home for a day or two, as arranged. It was easier that way.

If he bumped up against Sister Eckersley or Nurse MacGlowrie in the corridor, or the doctors or the matron outside, that would be different. They would be bound to know he had no business moving off like that with a packed bag.

Well, so what? This was not a prison. He would say he was going away. Just that. He was going away. That was all there was to it. If there was any account outstanding, it would be settled.

He packed his bag without interruption, and came out into the corridor. No one was about. He passed the staff-room again and the door was closed this time. The women were inside. He pressed the button for the lift. It came up in a few seconds, being only one floor down. He reached the ground floor and got out.

It chanced that Bennett was passing, the R.A.M.C. orderly who had first inducted him to Ward J One on the day of his arrival at Barnham. Bennett turned, opened his eyes, and pursed his lips, in a slightly feminine manner characteristic of him.

“Just off?” asked Bennett. The question might have meant anything.

“Yes.” The fewer words the better.

“Be good,” said Bennett.

“I’ll be good,” promised Jim.

They turned from each other. Bennett twinkled away in his white coat and suede shoes. Jim waited a few moments, then made for the rear door, which led towards the lawn, and the wood beyond the lawn, where the châlets were. There would be fewer people at the back there.

He crossed the lawn and went into the pine wood. That way round to the main drive was longer, but more sensible. Some minutes later he was on the main drive, with the wrought-iron gates a hundred yards ahead of him. They were wide-open, as was usual by day. He reached the gates and walked between them, and was out, away; Barnham Sanatorium was behind him, the evil dream was over.

The evil dream, as he thought, was over.

“Where to?” he asked himself. “Where to?” He had a few pounds on him, enough to take him a good way. A foreign country? He did not like foreign countries. He knew only one, France by name, and it was one too many. Where to? The ends of England—Cornwall, Northumberland? The ends of Wales? Not far enough. Further. How far can you go without going into foreign countries?

Oh, Scotland, of course. Scotland. The furthest end of Scotland, as far north as you can go. Where in Scotland? North-east? North-west? What did that matter? Scotland as far as you could go.

Then he heard a bird calling out, a mocking sort of bird, a laughing bird. He turned his eyes left and turned them right, to see was it a bird flying or a bird on a tree or a bird in a hedge. But there was no bird to be seen anywhere, not a bird calling out with a laughing noise, a sort of morse code of laughter, dot-dot, dot-dash-dash, dot-dot!

Then he realized the noise was inside him. It was the noise of Jack Thomley laughing. Jack Thomley was dead, but his laughter had not died. Hoo-hoo! Hee-hee-hee! Hoo-hoo!

“Scotch, you see! Hee-hee-hee! Ho-ho!” brought out Jack Thomley, with the breath that was not in his lungs any more. “She’s Scotch!”

“Scottish!” Nurse MacGlowrie insisted. “Scottish! Will ye never lairrn!”

“She’s from Largan nah Chaorochain! Ho-ho!” hooted Jack Thomley, like a midnight owl.

“Very well! It’s Largan nah Chaorochain!” agreed Jim Gunning, striding towards the north. “As for you....” He stopped, and put his bag down, and fingered around in his waistcoat pocket. “To hell with you, mate!” he muttered and flung his thermometer as far as he could throw it into the stubble-field beyond the ditch.