Читать книгу Honey for the Ghost - Louis Golding - Страница 5

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It was the old woman who first uttered the deathly word. All the symptoms were there, the cough, the flush in the cheeks, the sweating.

“I don’t like it, Sal. You’ve got to get ’im to see the doctor again. It ain’t just bronchitis any more.”

“Mum, you don’t think ... no, it can’t be.... He’s so strong. He’ll get over it. He always gets over it.” Sal’s eyes were like a dog’s, with a huge boot hanging over it, about to kick.

“Sal, dear, it’s consumption. It can’t be nothink else. Quiet now, love, quiet! ’E’ll be coming in any minute. You mustn’t let ’im see you in that state.”

The beginning of it all may have been that night he was floundering in the water off St. Nazaire, when a German bomb blew up the transport he was in. Till that night his chest was sound as a bell. He was, after all, a professional boxer, though he made the steadier part of his living as a newspaper roundsman.

If the trouble did not start that night, it certainly started during the next winter, or the next winter after that, when his battalion stood on guard in the rain-soaked defences of the East coast.

There were bouts of pleurisy and bronchitis, which, as their way is, never quite cleared up. When the war ended, he returned to his newspaper deliveries. The union confirmed his membership card, which had been on the point of endorsement when he joined up, and though his job was one of the humblest in the industry, the money was good already; and it would be better in the years to come, for the union was hard to get into and looked zealously after its own, particularly when they were good union members, like Jim Gunning, who was on the committee of his section, and never missed a committee meeting, and worked like a black for the annual functions, dances and all that.

And he liked his job. He could not bear the idea of working indoors. For a brief time during his army career they had made a clerk of him, and he had detested it. He liked people, and people liked him. He liked movement. At present he could move no faster than a bicycle took him. Some day he would have a van assigned to him, and would go hurtling in a lordly way through the London streets, flinging out the bound parcels of newspapers to boys and men waiting for latest editions at street corners, as he had himself waited once.

The work was strenuous, or he made it strenuous, for he undertook more deliveries than most, and he had several jobs on the side. At midday, in between editions, he collected bets up and down the place for a bookmaker. Now and again he undertook odd jobs, like carpentry and decorating. And he was indefatigable in his own home.

Probably for a time the fresh air kept the thing at bay. Or perhaps it had already slid inside there, like a snake through a crevice. It may be the abandon with which he increasingly threw himself into his job was a psychological reflex of the still obscure physical fact. But there was nothing obscure about the hæmorrhage which followed a previous bout of quinsy.

For a time the nature of the hæmorrhage remained in doubt; it could be either pulmonary or a lesion created by the quinsy. He recovered, and once more became extraordinarily strong. He gloried in feats of strength which he would have hesitated to undertake when he was doing eight and twelve three-minute rounds.

Only at night, on that last bicycle journey from Baker Street to Holloway, the knees sagged, and the sweat gathered clammily on his forehead. The other symptoms manifested themselves more and more grimly. At last his wife and his local doctor prevailed on him to submit to specialist examination. The report, pronounced by the specialist with the customary tact, was as positive as a clap of thunder.

He was not so much surprised as angry. He had had a feeling that the specialist would set his seal on the outrageous conspiracy which the universe had organized against him. He was so angry that for a blinding fraction of a second he was aware of exactly the same sort of emotion as had possessed him from time to time in the ring, when his opponent struck him below the belt, certain that he was so strategically placed that the referee could not see it, and at the worst it must seem like an accident. He had the sensation now as then, that he must lash out, anywhere at all, with fists, skull, feet, anything. And now as then the sensation was gone almost before it was born.

But he remained angry. The doctor did not know it that morning, and that night even Sal hardly guessed it. To show his anger would be to confess he was anxious and frightened. And he was not. He was angry and humiliated. How could they believe such things about him, him, Jim Gunning? How could they ask him to go spitting into dirty little blue bottles, and using paper handkerchiefs that must be burned at once?

He did as they asked him, for he had a natural sense of discipline, but it was laughable. He could still do twelve three-minute rounds with any boy in the country at his weight and age, if he got into training. Apart from that he was such an ordinary bloke. Why should they pick on him?

Yes; they believed it, the doctor and Sal; the old woman would believe it, too, as soon as she was told about it after coming in from the “Black Swan”. He pressed his lips together so hard the blood seemed to leave them. Sal noticed it, but she said nothing. She noticed a good deal that night without saying anything, as he sat in the rocking-chair by the fire, the small boy on his knee, the roar of the big fight broadcast filling the room.

Why should they pick on him, he asked himself resentfully? He was just an ordinary bloke. He had his wife, and his kid, and a job he liked, and a home he was glad to get back to of an evening. Sal had been the first girl he had gone out with, and in course of time he had married her, just before the war.

Then the war had come, he had been to France, he had come back to England, and had served his time out. There hadn’t been another girl, either in France, or in any of the garrison towns he’d been stationed in. There’s nothing unusual about that. Lots of blokes are that way, though some will make out what gay dogs they are. He loved Sal and he loved Dickie, as anyone would with a wife and kid like them. He liked his couple of pints at the local now and again, with a game of darts thrown in.

He was really quite a dab hand with the old darts, he was an asset to any team. He carried his flight of darts with him all the time in his upper left-hand waistcoat pocket, neatly tucked away in their black leather purse. He looked after them as carefully as keen cricketers look after their bats.

He was a member of the darts team at the “Black Swan” and more than once they had insisted on his being secretary; and often on a Saturday night you played for pints, and then win or lose it meant more than two; so you’d get drunk, and come back feeling rather muzzy and guilty. Well, what can you do about it? You tell yourself you’ll take care it won’t happen again, and then it does.

Sometimes, too, you put more than you should on the horses or the dogs, and it makes a hole in the week’s wages. But it doesn’t happen very often, and when it does, you get down to it and earn it back somehow, and the old woman gets just the same amount of wages to run the house on.

So this can’t be a punishment, this ... this consumption. (Come on, now, face it. That’s what they say it is.)

Besides, it’s not true. It hasn’t happened. It couldn’t happen, not to him.

Look, everything is just ordinary. Sal’s just finished the washing-up. She’s taken out a pair of my old grey army socks from the drawer under the sewing-machine. What, this is the last round of the fight, is it? That’s funny, I could have sworn it was only the fifth or the sixth round. I suppose I’ve not been listening. So Alfie Tatham’s the new champion? Yes, Alfie Tatham’s the new champion. They come and go, these champions; nowadays some of them aren’t worth a light. This Tatham’s not so bad, though, just a bit flash; a good left hand when he likes to use it....

“To bed now, Dickie!” the father said, putting the boy down on the floor. Then he got up from the chair.

“No, daddy, no!” the boy protested pouting. “Can’t I stay up a bit? Please!” He made disgracefully big eyes, and did all he knew to look heartbreakingly wistful. It was a mode of behaviour which his parents called “playing up”. Normally his father sternly disapproved of the “playing up” routine, but he was not stern to-night. His voice and eyes were unusually gentle.

“Yes, son, I think we ought to. Listen how late it is.” He put his wrist-watch to Dickie’s ear. “We’ll play trains, if you like, just for a minute or two.”

Such mildness would normally have provoked a further adventure into the field of “playing-up”; but somehow now it did not. The boy opened his eyes still wider. This was not quite like daddy. He almost preferred the other daddy, the one whose chin came out, and sometimes the hand came out, with a smart slap on the rear.

“Yes, daddy,” breathed Dickie. “Let’s play trains.” The father and the boy went off towards the bedroom.

“I’ll just finish tidying up,” Sal called after them. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

The trains and cars and things were in a big untidy box in the corner behind a curtain. Jim put his hand into the confusion, and brought out a vehicle or two.

“No railway-lines?” asked Dickie. He was not arguing, he was merely asking.

Jim shook his head. The railway-lines, as Dickie well knew, were for Sundays or holidays, when there was time to get down to it. So they just played about with the engines, turning the keys till the engines ran down, spinning the wheels, saying: “Puff! Puff!” It was all a little childish, felt Dickie, but if it amused daddy he did not mind.

By the time his mother came in, the boy was asleep, the passing from waking to sleeping being instantaneous, like a shutter coming down, or a light being switched off. Jim was tucking the bedclothes round him, when Sal spoke.

“It’s time you were in bed, too,” she murmured. “You’ve had a day.”

“Where are those extra blankets?” asked Jim. “In the wardrobe drawer, aren’t they?”

“What for, Jim? Are you cold?”

“No,” he said. He did not turn round from the cot. “I’m making a bed up in the back-room. That spare mattress up there will do fine.” He waited for her to say something, as she must. There was a long silence.

“You must do what you think right, Jim,” she said. Her voice was thin and tired and old; it seemed to come from a long way off.

He turned round to her suddenly, as if he felt somebody were standing over her with a knife, and he was going to knock it out of his hand.

“Sal,” he said. “You know I’ve got to sleep up there.”

“Yes,” she murmured. “It’s hard.”

He went up to her and kissed her on the forehead, between the temples.

“To be going on with,” he said, “till afterward.”

She turned away from him, and sped out of the room, her teeth biting hard into her upper lip.

“She’s only a kid, after all,” he said to himself. “I wondered how long she’d hold out.” He went over and opened up the drawer under the wardrobe, where the blankets were, and took two out. Then he bent over the sleeping boy, and kissed him, too, between the temples. Then, as he passed the kitchen door: “Sal!” he called out. “Good night! Sleep well!”

“Good night, Jim!” came her muffled voice. “Make yourself—” she stopped till she got her voice under control again “—make yourself warm! Good night!”