A Fortunate Man (3 page)

She lay in a four-poster bed: her face was ashen-coloured and her cheeks fallen in. Her eyes were tight shut in pain. She wheezed as she breathed, especially when breathing out.

The doctor stood looking and then asked for a cupful of warm water and cotton wool. As he injected morphia into her upper arm, she flinched a little. Strange that suffering so much pain in her chest she should flinch at the pin-prick. With the warm water and cotton wool he cleaned away the little droplet of blood from her worn, large arm, the colour of stone or bread, as though it had acquired the colour through its scrubbing and baking.

Then, using the same much-worked arm, he took her blood pressure. It was very low. She kept her eyes shut as if the light, so soft and so precise, was pressing between them. She had still said nothing.

He prepared a syringe for another injection. The fifty-year-old daughter was standing at the foot of the bed, waiting to be told what to do.

He inserted the needle into a vein near the wrist. This time she didn't flinch. After half the injection he paused, holding the syringe in the loose fold of skin as if it were the skin's feather, and with his other hand he felt her neck to check the strength of her pulse in the artery and the degree of congestion in the jugular vein. He then completed the injection.

The old woman opened her eyes. ‘It's not your fault,' she said very distinctly, almost crisply.

He listened to her chest. Her overworked brown arms, her deeply lined face, her creased strained neck were suddenly denied by the soft whiteness of her breast. The grey-haired son down in the yard with the cows, the daughter at the foot of the bed in
carpet slippers and with swollen ankles, had both once clambered and fed here, and yet the soft whiteness of her breast was like a young girl's. This she had preserved.

Downstairs in the parlour the doctor explained the medicines he was leaving. The old woman's wheezing was still audible through the floorboards. Three dogs lay on the carpet, heads on outstretched paws, eyes open. They scarcely stirred when the old man came in.

He seemed dazed and sleepy. The doctor asked him how he was. ‘Not so bad,' he said, ‘except for the screws.'

Neither father nor daughter nor the son outside asked the doctor about the old woman. The doctor said he would be coming back that evening.

When he came back the parlour was in darkness. This disturbed him somewhat. He called out and receiving no answer felt his way up the stairs. The stairs led straight into the first bedroom. Across it he could see the light under the door of the second room.

The room smelt now of sickness: under the dressing-table on which stood all the family wedding photographs in leather frames and a nineteenth-century child's mug with the Death and Burial of Cock Robin engraved upon it, there was an enamel bowl with urine in it, and spit stained a little with blood. The daughter explained that every time her mother coughed she peed a little involuntarily. The old woman was paler and a piece of damp rag was laid over her forehead. The room smouldered around her, all its comfort burnt and drenched and then burnt again.

The doctor listened once more to her chest. She lay back exhausted. ‘I am sorry,' she said, not as though it were an apology but simply a fact. He took her temperature and blood pressure. ‘I know,' he said, ‘but you'll sleep soon and feel rested.'

Her husband was sitting in the dark in the next room. The doctor had walked through it without noticing him, when he had come up the stairs. Now the daughter shepherded both men down, but still without putting a light on. For a moment it seemed that
the stairs and the parlour were part of the outbuildings, unlit, unheated, belonging to the animals now stabled for the night. It seemed that the home was reduced to the four-poster bed in the lighted room above, where the old woman, the soft whiteness of whose breast had never changed, was dying.

When the daughter suddenly switched the light on, the doctor and the old man were dazzled. For each of them it was like finding himself on a stage. The familiar furniture was part of a stage set and both had to play roles which were utterly strange to what they thought of as their true nature. Both would have grasped any chance of reverting to the normal truth.

The old man sat down with an overcoat across his knees. ‘She has pneumonia now,' the doctor said, ‘and she must take another medicine beside the ones I gave you this morning. Do you think she can swallow these pills? They are rather large. Or would she prefer to take it in liquid form? The liquid is made up for children but we can increase the dose. Which do you think would be best?'

The daughter, submissive and finding her only slight hope in trust, said: ‘It's up to you doctor.'

‘No it's not,' he said. ‘I'm asking you. Can she or can she not swallow these pills?'

‘Perhaps the liquid then,' said the daughter, abandoning her small hope. The doctor also gave her some sleeping pills – for her father as well as her mother. They would at least sleep tonight under the same drug.

The old man, whilst the doctor was explaining the medicines to the daughter, sat looking in front of him, his hands clutching and unclutching the heavy material of the overcoat across his knees.

When the doctor had finished his explanations, there was a silence. Neither father nor daughter moved to show him out or ask when he would be coming again. They simply waited. The doctor said, ‘The immediate danger is past – another half hour
and she might have died this morning, now she's got to pay the price of surviving the attack.'

‘It sounds a funny mixture,' said the old man without looking up, ‘heart trouble and then pneumonia. A funny mixture. She was quite well yesterday.' He began to cry, very quietly, like a woman can: the tears welling up in his eyes.

The doctor, who had already picked up one of his bags, put it down again and leant back in the chair. ‘Can you make us a cup of tea?' he said

While the daughter was making the tea the two men spoke about the orchard at the back and this year's apples. When the daughter was there, they spoke about the father's rheumatism. After the tea the doctor went.

The next morning was another autumn morning like the preceding. Every leaf of each tree seemed separate. The sunshine, filtered through a tree in the orchard, played on the floor of the old woman's bedroom. She clambered out of bed and suffered a second attack. The doctor arrived within a quarter of an hour. Her lips were purple, her face clay-coloured. She died quickly, her hands very still.

In the parlour the old man rocked on his feet. The doctor deliberately did not put out a hand to steady him. Instead he faced him. The older man was the taller by nine inches. The doctor said quietly, his eyes extra wide behind his spectacles, ‘It would have been worse for her if she'd lived. It would have been worse.'

He might have said that there have been kings and presidents of republics who have never recovered from the death of their wives. He might have said that death is the condition of life. He might have said that man is indivisible and that, in his own view, this was the only sense in which death could have no dominion.

But whatever he said at that moment, the old man would have continued to rock on his feet, until the daughter lowered him into his chair in front of the unlit fire.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Only her feet betray her. There is something about the way she walks on her feet – a kind of irresponsibility towards them – which is still quite childish. Her figure is 36–25–36.

She was crying when she came into the surgery.

‘What's wrong Duckie?'

‘I just feel sort of miserable.'

She sat like other girls had sat there crying because they thought they were pregnant. To make it easier for her, the doctor slipped the question between several others.

‘What's getting you down?'

No answer.

‘Sore throat?'

‘Not now.'

‘Water-works all right?'

She nodded.

‘Have you got a temperature?'

She shook her head.

‘Periods regular?'

‘Yeah.'

‘When was your last one?'

‘Last week.'

The doctor paused.

‘Do you remember that rash you used to get on your tum? Has it ever come back?'

‘No.'

He leant forward in his chair towards her.

‘You just feel weepy?'

She inclined her head farther towards her own consoling bosom.

‘Did Mum and Dad put you up to come to me?'

‘No, I came myself.'

‘Even having your hair dyed didn't make you feel better?'

She laughed a little because he had noticed. ‘It did for a while.'

The doctor took her temperature, looked at her throat and told her to stay in bed for two days. Then he resumed the conversation.

‘Do you like working in that laundry?'

‘It's a job.'

‘What about the other girls there?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Do you get on with them?'

‘You get stopped if they find you talking.'

‘Have you thought of doing anything else?'

‘What can I do?'

‘What would you like to do?'

‘I'd like to do secretarial work.'

‘Who would you like to be secretary to?'

She laughed and shook her head.

Her face was grubby with tear stains. But around her eyes and in the muzzle of her face which terminates in her full lip-sticked lips there is evidence of the same force that has filled out her bust and her hips. She is nubile in everything except her education and her chances.

‘When you're a bit better I'll keep you off work for a few days, if you like, and you can go to the Labour Exchange and
find out how you can get trained. There are all kinds of training schemes.'

‘Are there?' she said moonily.

‘How did you do at school?'

‘I wasn't any good.'

‘Did you take O-levels?'

‘No. I left.'

‘But you weren't stupid were you?' He asked this as though if she admitted that she was, it would somehow reflect badly on him.

‘No, not stupid.'

‘Well,' he said.

‘It's terrible that laundry. I hate it.'

‘It's no good being sorry for yourself. If I give you a week off, will you really use it?'

She nodded, chewing her damp handkerchief.

‘You can come up again on Wednesday and I'll phone the Labour Exchange and we'll talk about what they say.'

‘I'm sorry,' she said, beginning to cry again.

‘Don't be sorry. The fact that you're crying means you've got imagination. If you didn't have imagination, you wouldn't feel so bad. Now go to bed and stay there tomorrow.'

Through the surgery window he saw her walking up the lane to the common, to the house in which he had delivered her sixteen years ago. After she had turned the corner, he continued to stare at the stone walls on either side of the lane. Once they were dry walls. Now their stones were cemented together.

 

 

 

 

 

 

He had heard rumours about them. That they were on the run. That she was a prostitute from London. That the Council would have to act to turn them out of the abandoned cottage which the owner, a farmer, had given them permission to use (some said because he had met the girl in London) but in which they were living like squatters.

Three children were playing by the back door with some chicken wire. The mother was in the kitchen. She was a woman in her late twenties with long black hair, thin long hands and grey eyes that were both bright and very liquid. Her skin had an unwashed look which is more to do with anaemia than dirt.

‘You won't be able to stay here in the winter,' he said.

‘Jack says he's going to patch it up when he gets the time.'

‘It needs more than patching up.'

There was a table in the kitchen and two chairs. By the stone sink there was an orange-box cupboard with some cups and plates and packets in it. Half the window above the sink was broken and there was a piece of cardboard across it. The sunshine streamed through the other half and the grey dust slowly rose and fell through the beam, so slowly that it seemed to be part of another uninhabited world.

Later in the front room she sat down on the bed and allowed herself to ask the question for which she had really sent for him.