Читать книгу Honey for the Ghost - Louis Golding - Страница 9

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A pair of wrought-iron gates stood folded back to receive them. On the left-hand of the drive were acres of rhododendron and azalea shrubbery and tracts of recent pine plantation. On the right-hand extended the approaches and bunkers and greens of a private golf-course. Groups of players, male and female, were wandering through the rough or crouched over their putts on the greens.

Holiday? Had they got by mistake into the grounds of a posh private hotel?

The drive now turned right-angled and the sanatorium stood deployed before them. It consisted of a centre part all columns and porticoes and shining with white plaster. Nice and old-fashioned, Jim decided, like those houses in the outer terraces of Regent’s Park. New parts, much larger ones and somewhat higher, had been added to the central house; the framework of these was red brick, but there was really much more glass than red brick. It was all windows and long balconies built out in front of them. On some of the balconies there were beds, with patients in them, lying out to take the air. They looked all right up there, reading and playing card games and taking things easy.

The mood of ease and sunshine and holiday communicated itself to the older Turvey woman, despite a small fit of coughing that troubled the daughter just as the car drove up to the entrance. The girl got it down while the driver waited, then he helped the women out. He left Jim to get out his own bag. He obviously had had experience of Jim’s type of patient.

A large and comfortable woman with a genial smile extending along three-quarters of her face, came out to take the new visitors in hand. There was not too much hospital formality in her attire, only the full stiffness of the bodice, and the white collar and cuffs. An orderly in a white coat took the luggage over.

“I’m Miss Wetherell,” the woman said, holding out her hand to the mother. “I’m the Matron. You’re Mrs. Turvey? Of course. And Miss Turvey, Miss Lydia Turvey? How do you do?” She looked at a slip of paper in her hand. “And you’re Mr. Gunning? How do you do?” The extended hand moved on from the first to the second to the third hand like an episode in a chain-dance. “I do hope you’ve had a pleasant journey. I must say your daughter looks well, Mrs. Turvey. And you, too, Mr. Gunning. Follow me, will you, please?” They followed her.

“This is our drawing-room. Rather comfortable, we think.” It was very comfortable. Nurses and orderlies appeared to make the transition from the public world to the private world as easy as a cup of tea. There was a brief interview with a secretary who checked up on a few details, name, address, previous treatment, responsible auspices. Then Miss Turvey was told the number of the room she would occupy, Jim Gunning was assigned his ward. His auspices were, apparently, less august than hers.

“You are both going to be very comfortable and happy, aren’t they, Mrs. Turvey?” smiled the matron. There was a special smile for each of them. For Jim there was even something of a wink. “And as for us, Mrs. Turvey, we’ll have a nice cup of tea.” She stood rubbing the back of her left hand against the palm of her right. “Then you can go up and kiss her au revoir. We make our own crumpets,” she vowed. It might almost have been a Vicarage and a cosy little talk about the Old People’s Outing next Bank Holiday.

“What happens now, mate?” asked Jim, as the orderly conducted him from the central house to the ground-floor corridor of the right-hand block.

“You go up to your ward, see the sister, and settle down.” He spoke with a certain severity. He was a pale young man in a white coat and suede shoes. He had a big nose, and arms that dangled almost to his knees. (“Rob All My Comrades,” said Jim to himself with a grim assurance. “Looks it all over.”)

“What do you mean, settle down?” he asked the orderly. The orderly shrugged his shoulders.

“You have a bath, and go to bed,” he said.

“To bed? Me?” Jim was outraged. “I don’t need no bed.” Though the army, strange to say, had improved his speech, he sometimes slipped back in moments of tension to Cockney modes, as, for instance, the double negative, the dropped “h.”

“It’s the routine,” the orderly said dourly. He had met before the types who were perfectly all right and did not need to go to bed. “They keep you under observation for a bit. Here’s the lift.”

They went up and came out on the top floor, the fourth, then turned left. The doors of wards and rooms were on their right hand, on their left large windows, wide open, looked out on the woodland which crowded close up to a strip of lawn along the rear of the building. A number of small wooden huts with large windows were to be seen below there, set down in clearings among the pine-trees.

“The Châlets,” insisted the orderly. “See?” He was quite insistent that the new patient should take note of them.

“Yes,” said Jim. He vaguely assumed them to be some sort of sitting-out places. But no. There were beds in them, some with patients.

“Very expensive,” said the orderly. Then he sniffed. It was impossible to make out whether he sniffed because he disapproved of the châlets, or because he divined they were so expensive they were beyond Jim’s means. They moved forward. Behind one of the doors a patient started coughing. It was a noise like a dog getting up out of a kennel and dragging along an enormous chain, link by heavy link.

“Don’t sound good,” murmured Jim.

The orderly pursed his lips primly. There was an implication that maybe that person, too, in his or her time (you could not tell whether the patient was male or female) had had ideas about being too fit to get into bed for observation. Jim was aware of something like the tip of a cold finger against the nape of the neck, as if a third person were walking along the corridor behind him, a shadow, like you might say.

They were approaching the ward at the end of the corridor now, when suddenly another noise from beyond its swing doors assailed the air, a loud bellow of laughter, in a sort of morse code of thunderous dots and dashes—dot-dot, dot-dot, dash-dot-dash, dash-dot-dash. The orderly opened the doors, and Jim went through. There was no nonsense of any shadows here.

The place was bright with the southern sunshine, that came toppling in over the balcony and splashed over on to the two rows of beds, the lockers, the wardrobes, the porcelain wash-basins, the mirrors. The noise came from the throat and lungs of a dark young man some twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old, in a bed on the right near the doors. There was nothing much wrong with those lungs, you would have said.

The young man had shining black hair plastered back with hair-cream, and eyes shining and black like the hair. Despite the pyjamas, and the propped-up pillows, despite even the spitting-cup beside him, he seemed to have come straight in from a session at a Palais de Danse, to which he would return quite soon, after he had rested up a bit. He was very Cockney. As the door opened the laughter caved in with a roar, like a house in an air-raid.

“Mr. Gunning for you, nurse,” said the orderly, in the silence and the cool air and the windy sunshine.

A tall, raw-boned young woman in her early thirties, with a lank slab of a forehead, a big jaw and big boots, came forward and greeted the newcomer. The smile was attractive, despite the big teeth. The eyes were quiet and kind.

“And how are you, Mr. Gunning? I hope ye’ve had a guid journey. Number three, Bennett, please,” she indicated to the orderly. The nurse’s voice had a pleasant sing-song quality, of the Northern Highlands, Jim learned later. “I’m Nurse MacGlowrie,” she announced.

“She’s Scotch,” the black-eyed young man said. “He’s Turkish.” He obviously meant Bennett, the orderly. Bennett turned and flashed a baleful eye at him. It did not seem a good thing to be described as Turkish. He went up to the number three wardrobe and put the suit-case down there. Then he went off, his lips pursed and pale.

“She’s from Largan nah Chaorochain,” further specified the young man. Then the inconceivable funniness of coming from Largan nah Chaorochain, wherever that might be, almost doubled him up. Dot-dot, dash-dot-dash, went the morse code laughter. Ho-ho! Hoo-hoo-hoo! Largan nah Chaorochain! The tears were running down his cheeks. Nurse MacGlowrie waited patiently for the fit of laughter to subside. She seemed almost to treat it like a clinical symptom. As if it were a fit of coughing, or might any moment rattle and rocket down over into a fit of coughing.

The black-eyed young man stopped at length. “Largan nah Chaorochain,” he once more brought out, with what remained of breath in his lungs. “Do I say it right, nurse?”

“Pairfect!” she said. She waited. Had the patient had enough of his joke, or hadn’t he? There was no such place, in fact, as Largan nah Chaorochain; or there had not been for a century or two. She had mentioned it quite casually once, by way of a joke. It was a name on an old map, a question in a letter, a ruined croft on the moor where she had been born. She could not remember now. It was Mr. Thomley who did the remembering. He summed up, addressing himself to the newcomer, forehead, eye, cheek, combined in a broad wink.

“Scotch, like I told you,” he grinned.

“Scottish,” Nurse MacGlowrie insisted. She would not let that go by. She made no comment on the mountain-top funniness of coming from Largan nah Chaorochain, even when there was no such place to come from. “Scottish, Mr. Thomley. Will ye never lairrn?”

“Yes, ducks,” the voice allowed, a slight fatigue in it after its recent exertions. “Whatever you like to teach me.”

From a bed opposite, near the French windows, another voice piped up.

“Don’t mind him! He’s the Sheek of Araby.”

The voice was startlingly shrill and childish. It came from a boy so small he hardly humped up the bedclothes. A moment later a hair-brush whizzed over towards his head. A quick up-jerk of the counterpane just prevented it getting there.

“Whisht, boys, quiet!” Nurse MacGlowrie rebuked them. “Or I’ll be telling sister on ye. What will the new patient be thinking o’ us?”

It was all rather bewildering to the new patient: a bit like Tom Merry, or Bob Cherry, or whoever it was, at Greyfriars, in those penny weeklies you read when you are a kid. It was also a bit like fun and games in an army Nissen Hut. He looked from the smiling eyes of the young man, to the watchful eyes of the boy, now uncovered, now swiftly covered again.

“Ye’ll be having your bath now, Mr. Gunning,” requested Nurse MacGlowrie. She was taking his things out of his bag, and bestowing them into the wardrobe. “Here’s your pyjamas, and your dressing-gown. I’ll be showing ye the bathroom, when you’ve undressed.”

“Hi-de-ho!” mocked the black-eyed Mr. Thomley. “Undressed, eh?”

“Will ye no’ be quiet!” the nurse demanded. “By the time ye’re in bed, Mr. Gunning, Sister Eckersley will be round to see ye. Ye’ll no’ be seeing the doctor till to-morrow. Come now, into your pyjamas, please.”

There was clearly nothing to be done about it. They were going to treat him like a bed-patient for a day or two. Well, he would have to put up with it. He had his bath, returned to the ward, and got into bed.

“Um! um!” came from Thomley. That was all he could say, for he had a thermometer in his mouth. But with eyes like those, you did not need to talk with your tongue.

“Um! Um!” said the small boy in his corner.

“Um! Um!” said a tousle-headed, long-faced young man who had got into bed while Jim was out.

The thermometer was a great reducer of conversation and straightener-up of accents. Jim, too, had his temperature taken, and entered up on the chart hung over the foot of the bed.

“I’ll be off for my own tea,” said Nurse MacGlowrie. She looked round. “Everything all right?”

“It could be all right,” observed Thomley, with a wink that was quite a leer.

“Ye’re a bad lad,” said the girl. There was a slight flush of annoyance on the nurse’s cheek. Or perhaps it was the westering sun uncovered by a cloud. She went out.

“One-track mind. That’s me,” said Thomley to the world at large.

“You’ve said it,” said the small boy. He talked with an odd maturity.

“He’s Bert,” explained Thomley. “His father and mother were test-tubes. We put him back in a test-tube every night.”

“What are they keeping you in bed for?” Jim asked Thomley a little diffidently. He didn’t know whether one asked that sort of question. “You look all right,” he added. No one could object to being told that.

“Just running a bit of a temperature,” said Thomley, brushing the temperature off like a speck of dust from his sleeve. “Bert over there, he’s going to have a baby.”

“Yes,” Bert agreed. “Twins.”

Jim was aware of an impulse to get out of bed and smack young Bert’s rear. The youngster was hardly older than his own Dickie; he shouldn’t be talking in that odd grown-up way. A moment later Bert got out of bed to go and get something out of his wardrobe. You could see that Bert was a lot older than you thought. The head was too big for the small body. A sharp line entrenched his face from his nostrils to the corner of his mouth. He was not eight or nine. He might be sixteen or seventeen, maybe more.

“What’s she like?” asked Thomley out of the blue. He was busy working on his finger-nails with an orange stick.

“What’s who like?” asked Jim puzzled. The nurse, did he mean? Thomley ought to know more about the nurse than he did.

“That pusher you came with,” said Thomley.

“Who?” asked Jim, screwing up his eyes. “What pusher?” (Pusher is army for girl). “What girl?” Then suddenly he realized who Thomley meant, who he must mean. “Oh, her, the one I came with. Oh, she’s all right!” His lips tightened. Things got around quickly in this place, didn’t they, even when you’re upstairs out of the way, at the top of the building. They’d only just got here, the girl and himself, a few minutes ago!

There was a silence. Jim had put a folded newspaper on his locker. He proceeded to open it up.

“Does she do it?” asked Thomley quietly.

Jim looked up. There was humour in Thomley’s eyes, but the tone was quite serious. For some moments Jim did not attach its meaning to the phrase. It was not that it was unfamiliar to him but, at that moment, in this place, he was not attuned to that sort of badinage. His eyes moved left, right, left again, as if somewhere, in one of those beds perhaps, he might find someone to interpret the phrase. Thomley must have found the spectacle amusing. Suddenly the thunderous morse code of laughter streamed across the air. Then as suddenly it stopped again.

“You’re a slow worker,” said Thomley. “Does she?” he repeated.

Then the meaning of the phrase came up in Jim’s nostrils like a smell in a swamp. His face flushed with anger. What sort of a bloke did the bloke think he was? What right had he to talk about that girl that way? The jaw jutted forward. Inevitably the fists clenched. He was not at all the sort of person who flailed his fists about, but on the one or two occasions in his life when he had found himself in a rough-house, that was the sort of talk that had started it. He was, however, in bed. They were all in bed. This was a hospital, after all. He opened up the newspaper and lowered his head into it.

“You’d better find out,” he muttered between his teeth.

“Don’t get shirty, mate,” requested Thomley. “No harm meant.” At that moment the doors were pushed open and a young man entered; a tall young man, with pale blue-grey eyes, and almost translucent eyebrows and hair. He still gave the impression he was pale, despite a patina of sun-tan.

“Hello, Jack,” he said. “Muriel’s found out.” The accent was inclined to be “posh,” but Thomley was clearly long reconciled to that, if he still registered it.

“Oh, hell!” said Thomley. “That’s torn it!”

The new arrival turned to Jim.

“You’re the new patient?” he said. “I’m Len Atwill.”

Jim raised his eyes from his newspaper.

“I’m Gunning.”

“He doesn’t like it,” said Jack Thomley.

“He’s kidding,” insisted Len Atwill.

Jim was silent. The anger inside him had gone out like a puff of smoke. He was feeling put out with himself. When a bloke with consumption is in bed running a temperature you shouldn’t feel like lashing out at him with a left hook. He looked well enough, this Thomley, but so did that girl, the one Thomley had been funny about. In this place looking well meant nothing at all. Jim spoke. He could get on with folk if he wanted to.

“It’s all right,” he said, “in its proper time and place.”

“Fair enough,” said Thomley. That was all the concession he needed. You could assume the new bloke wasn’t going to be a pain in the neck. “Are you an Arsenal supporter,” he asked, “or Tottenham?” It was as if that was the natural way the human species divided up.

“I’m Tottenham,” Jim answered.

“What a team!” scoffed Thomley. A discussion on the merits of the two teams followed. Bert did not raise a voice, for, coming from Wolverhampton, his devotion was to the “Wolves.” He remained remote in his private Midland limbo. Atwill remained silent, too. He had been at a minor public school before he had joined the navy, and he was interested in the other sort of football—“ruggah,” his ward-mates called it scornfully, when they referred to it at all. It was perhaps the only area in which, here in the sanatorium, face to face with the great Leveller, the imp of class-consciousness operated.

It was a long time since Jim had seen either Arsenal or Tottenham play. In the newspaper business you are kept especially busy on Saturday afternoons. He strove now to maintain the argument, though his mind was sick with other thoughts, for he realized that the intention was to make him feel at home, he was to be esteemed one of the boys, it was up to him to do his share.

Another patient entered, Fred Parley by name, a fragile, tow-haired man in a blue serge suit, somewhat older than the others. The sound of his cough had preceded him along the corridor, and it took him several minutes before he had come to terms with it. No one seemed conscious of the spasm, not even the man himself. He used his flask, put it away, and immediately wanted to know if they had heard the one about the girl from Tooting. They were not sure. Jack Thomley liked the sound of it.

The tale of the glory of Arsenal’s outside-left fell stone-dead from his lips. Fred Parley was about to get to work on the girl from Tooting, when the sister entered. Sister Eckersley. Her appearance held the story up for some minutes. They were rather awed by Sister Eckersley, it seemed, even Jack Thomley. She went round from bed to bed, spending rather more time with Jim than the others. She looked stern, Jim thought, but sensible.

“I suppose I’ll be able to get up to-morrow, sister?” Jim asked. “I don’t see the point in hanging about in bed.” He was a straightforward young man.

Sister Eckersley’s eyes opened as wide as tea-cups.

“Doctor Hillman will be round to see you to-morrow morning,” she said. Apparently the question was so ludicrous, it did not merit a direct reply. She moved on to the next bed, and the next, then out of the ward. At once it was as if she had not been there. Fred Parley got to his tale. It was a long and involved story, but it was new to them all. You got the feeling that it had sprung up overnight, like a fungus in the roots of one of their own trees. In the middle of the story still another patient arrived.

The ward was beginning to fill up. The newcomer was a middle-aged man, with a heavy drooping moustache, a bank clerk named Crowther. He had a Bible in his hand and without a word he sat down on his bed, opened up at the point where a silk ribbon marked the place, and started reading, his lips soundlessly forming the words as he read. No one took the least notice of him any more than they took any notice of the fresh spasm of coughing that interrupted the Tooting story.

The Tooting story continued in various forms, as fact or as fiction, throughout the rest of the evening, and long after Lights Out. It continued while Nurse MacGlowrie, who was the day nurse, handed over to Nurse Parker, the night nurse. It continued while the supper trays were being put out and cleared away, while temperatures were being taken still again, and while potions for the night were being assigned.

Whether the woman’s name was Muriel, presumably a patient here at the sanatorium, or whether it was Mae West, it continued amid dry coughings out of cavernous lungs, or copious spittings that bore the lung tissue away; it continued to an accompaniment of grunts and chuckles, little sharp yelps of delight, low obscene murmurings.

It went on and on. It had been like this before somewhere, Jim wondered unhappily. Where was it? It was like this among small schoolboys. That was it. When he was a kid in standard six, and they were all kids, twelve and thirteen years old, at Haxby Road School. And they were all finding out about sex, and telling each other, and some knew a lot more than anyone else, and they were big shots.

Yes, it was all new and frightening and horrible and exciting in the Haxby Road days. But some of you were less excited than others. You felt that all your life stretched ahead of you, to find out things. You had lots of time. Here it was the opposite to that. They had to crowd it all in quickly, these blokes whispering and muttering and roaring in the night. It was urgent. That was it, urgent. Soon, soon, the girl from Tooting would be stone-cold. No, no, not the girl from Tooting. She would be alive and warm; it was the boys and girls from Barnham Sanatorium who would be stone-cold.

They were not only like smutty little school-children. They were also like soldiers in barracks. Yes. Soldiers in barracks. And soon the boys would be going up the line, and some of them would never come back. Get stuck in, boys! Knock back all you can! And when, an hour after Lights Out, here in Barnham Sanatorium, the middle-aged man with a Bible suddenly gave tongue, Jim remembered there had been a Bible-thumper in that laundry in France where they got a couple of hours’ doss on the retreat to St. Nazaire. That other one sang hymns. This one was saying words, clearly out of the Bible.

Oh that I had in the wilderness a lodging place of wayfaring men, that I might leave my people, and go from them! for they be all adulterers.

And they bend their tongues like their bow for lies, but they are not valiant for the truth upon the earth.

“Put a sock in it!” came the cry from the whole ward. They were not impressed by Mr. Crowther or his Bible. “Turn it up!”

Mr. Crowther lay silent there, like a sack of turf.

“Ha, ha! Hee, hee, hee!” crackled the morse-code laughter of Jack Thomley. Dot-dot, dot-dot, dash-dot-dash!

Was there anything else in their minds but this one thing? Did they talk about it, talk, talk, talk, to prevent them brooding on that other thing, but for which they would be living their different lives, in their homes, offices, factories, with a hundred thoughts in their head, and not just one thought?

It made Jim’s heart sink. He was miserable. He was lonely. He suddenly realized he had never been so lonely in his life before. A vision of his own place in London bit upon his mind with sharp teeth, like the teeth of a rabbit-trap. Dickie would be having his bedtime mug of cocoa, kicking the legs of his chair with the back of his heels. The old woman would be pottering around the gas-stove, making to-morrow morning’s porridge. Sal would be ironing one of Dickie’s blue sports shirts, at the table under the hanging light. They would be thinking of him, but not talking of him, because they were not talkers, any more than he was.

Excepting Dickie, of course. He was only a child, and had no idea what all this was about.

“Mum, when will Dad be coming back! Will he be back soon, Mum?”

He heard the voice as clear and close as the whistle of that kettle the old woman had bought only last week, the one that whistled when it boiled.

Not long, Dickie. It’s all madam, all this business. Not long, Dickie boy.