Читать книгу Honey for the Ghost - Louis Golding - Страница 8

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A quarter of an hour ago the sky had been grey, like an army blanket. Then they turned up a side-road, through a wood, and when they came out again, it was as if on the other side, the world had a different sky all to itself, with a bright sun in it, and broad blue acres arching down to the south. That was February all over. Sleet in the back doubles of Marylebone, and twenty minutes later bright sunshine on Primrose Hill.

But this was not Primrose Hill. This was the county of Dorset, where the Barnham Sanatorium was. They were out of the wood now and a great expanse of country lay before them. The little conical hills were flattened down. There were fields with hedges here, and birds on them, and birds on the sticking-out branches of the clumped trees, birds which seemed to have been brought in by that wind that had pushed back the grey cloud blanket, and it had set their small feet down on those hedges and those trees, and there they were singing up to the sun, not singing, making glad thin noises.

The fields here did not have the feeling they had back there, of richness and blackness and lots of soil. There was sand lying about in tree-roots and between the lines of ploughland. Somehow you felt you could not be far from the sea. Of course, you were not, for these were seagulls heeling over, such as you had seen heeling over the whelk-stalls at Clacton-on-Sea, and Trafalgar Square, for that matter.

The horizon ahead of you was fields, and then a long line of woods again, and then once more fields. They were not heavy humpy trees in the woods, like those oaks and beeches you leaned up against when you trudged up and down on guard by the Norfolk defences. They must be pine trees; that was it, a long city of spires, but the spires were trees. And then there was a flashing among the trees, as if a whole corps of signallers were flashing mirrors all at one time. What could that be? What sort of trees have leaves or fruit that flash like mirrors?

But it wasn’t trees or signallers, it was windows, and in a building with so little wall and so much window, it threw a hundred small suns back to the big sun that had sent them down. And that, of course, must be the Sanatorium, said Jim Gunning to himself. Not a bad sort of place, it looks. He tapped the driver on the shoulder.

“Is that it, mate?” he asked. “Barnham Sanatorium?”

“Yon’s ’tplace, chum,” the driver said. Formality had gone by the board. You couldn’t wonder at that with the sun shining, and those tassels that look like caterpillars, some yellow and some smooth green, hanging from trees, and birds flirting and chasing each other like kids at street corners.

Jim caught the eye of the young woman, his fellow-patient, and smiled. It was a smile of reassurance. She smiled back at him.

“It isn’t going to be so bad,” his smile said. “We’ll be back home again where we both belong, before many weeks are by. A holiday. Call it a holiday, see?”

A holiday. Like only this last summer, at Southend-on-Sea. The sands, the deck-chairs, the man in the straw-hat coming round with ice-cream cones in a tray slung from his shoulder. The old woman with the handkerchief over her eyes. Dickie shovelling the sand into his bucket, Sal drowsing by his side, himself dimly working out greyhound form.

Well, this wasn’t so far from the sea. Why not have Sal over some time for a week-end, and the kid, and the old woman too? It would be a change for them. There might be a nice place that let rooms in Corfe, that village back there under the castle. Sal liked looking at old-fashioned ruins and things, though he did not go much of a bundle on them himself.

Just for a change. Proper holiday is summer, and Southend or Clacton and whelk-stalls, and a few pints at night, after the kid has gone to bed.

In summer. He’d be home long before then. Sal must book the same rooms they had last year in good time. That is, if they decided on Southend. It might be Clacton, of course.