A Kind Man (6 page)

They came in the doctor’s car, Tommy running into the house first, his face full of fear.

The doctor was gentle, careful, touching and listening, murmuring to Jeannie but otherwise offering no word.

The Westminster clock chimed the hour.

He got up at last and stood looking down at the child. ‘She should be in hospital, but I don’t like to move her. She’s very ill.’

‘What’s wrong? Has she caught something? What’s to happen to her? Can you …?’

Eve’s words came out anyhow and left her breathless.

He shook his head. ‘She has no rash on her skin. She could have a brain fever or it may be measles, and if that is the case the rash will come out.’

‘Doesn’t that help? I heard it brings about a crisis and then the fever goes down, isn’t that true?’

He shook his head, not as if disagreeing with her but as if he did not know.

‘You should take her to bed and shade the light. It plainly hurts her eyes. And have a sponge with tepid water and wipe her down, let her cool. I’ll give you some powders to put on her tongue with a dab of sugar. And if she worsens, you come back for me.’ He looked at Tommy.

‘You mean if the fever doesn’t ease?’

‘If she seems in pain – if she has a fit, if her head seems to be aching, if she goes limp, or loses consciousness, if her eyes roll back into her head. And if she’s still burning hot after the sponging and the powders. Then we will have to take her. But I would rather not.’

Eve coaxed open the child’s mouth and sprinkled the powder and sugar on her tongue. She coughed once or twice but took a spoon of warm water and then turned her head away.

‘I can’t leave her on her own.’

So Tommy brought the cot into the front bedroom, before carrying Jeannie up the stairs with great tenderness, cradling her head against him and moving slowly. By the time she was undressed it was clear that her fever was lessening. Her face was still flushed but there was no longer so much heat radiating from her.

They did not turn on the lamp but left the door ajar and the landing light on. Eve did not leave her but lay on their bed, her arm outstretched to touch her daughter’s damp hair that was pressed down onto her forehead. Tommy brought her tea and would have made food but she told him to eat it, for she could not.

And so the evening wore away and the night drew in and, eventually, they slept, Jeannie now cooler, her
limbs no longer going into spasm, her head flat on the bed, as if she did not need to press it into the pillow.

An owl hooted softly from the far edge of the field.

Several times Eve woke and at once leaned over and looked carefully in the dim light to check on the child, but each time she saw and felt that she was sleeping peacefully, her breathing easier, her skin normal to the touch. Tears came with the relief and then she slept herself.

The mornings were light by six now and Eve woke as the dawn seeped through the thin bedroom curtains. She could hear Tommy moving quietly about in the kitchen, the rumble of the coal as he filled up the range, the sound of the water running into the kettle. She leaned out of bed and reached to the cot and knew.

These things happened, the doctor said, and there was no telling how or why. They happened. But his face was grey and he seemed suddenly older as he stood in the room, looking down.

‘If I could have known … But I could not. You understand that, don’t you? It seemed the greater risk to move her in the state she was, all the way to hospital. I would do the same today, you know. I’d have left her here at home.’

‘At home to die,’ Eve said. But she did not blame him. She understood, looking at his face, how it must be for him.

‘Children die,’ he said quietly. ‘They do.’

‘But if I –’

He shook his head. ‘No. Not you, nor me. No way of knowing, no way of preventing it.’ He did not look at her. ‘The worst of all,’ he said.

But for her the worst thing was that she wanted to explain to Jeannie and could not.

That week was the most terrible of Eve’s life and the year that came after it the most terrible of years. She did not want the funeral to be public and open to all eyes, nor in the granite-grey town church and so Tommy arranged that it would not be, found out about St Paul-Alone and how they could take her there. No one came. Tommy himself carried her to the grave.

After that, life went on, a long, narrow, bleak tunnel through which they had to walk, one which would surely never end in any light. The only thing Eve had with which to comfort herself was that she had enjoyed every last moment of the little girl’s life, and never once felt her to be a burden, difficult or tiresome, never once failed to love her absolutely, in flesh and spirit. She had been a happy, open, giving
child and loved easily in return, and no moment had been missed, no day wasted. She wished Jeannie back but regretted nothing.

Miriam had six boys and did not come to see them though she sent a brief letter. But Eve would not go to the town and besides, Miriam would never welcome her.

No other child was born to them. Tommy became quieter still, afraid to intrude on Eve’s sadness. He felt the death of Jeannnie Eliza more than he had words to express – if he had had need of words. But neither of them did and the comfort was that they understood one another.

So great a pall lay over the town still that their grief would have simply added to it, been noted but after that absorbed into the misery of everyone’s daily hardship.

It was easier at 6 The Cottages and Tommy was still in work. Jeannie’s death had made no difference to any of that. Eve went through the spring and summer tending the garden and walking across the track to the peak and then up to St Paul-Alone, carrying flowers or a branch of fresh blossom and greenery to the grave. She could stand or kneel beside it half the day and never want to leave.

Tommy did not come with her. He said nothing but she knew that the sight of the grave and later, of Jeannie Eliza’s name on the headstone was unbearable to him.

Eve did not bother to look at her own face closely in the glass when she brushed and put up her hair, but she knew instinctively that it had changed, that Jeannie’s death was written there and had aged her.

Sometimes, going into a room or up the stairs, she had the sense that the child was there, pattering behind her but she never glanced over her shoulder. There was no need.

IT WOULD
have been no wonder if one or other of them had fallen ill that winter, for grief takes its toll, but Eve was well, though the days were tunnels to be trudged through, one leading to the next without respite or purpose.

But one morning, catching Tommy’s face as he turned, she saw that there was something wrong, though she could not then have said what it was or how she knew. Something. That was all.

She waited. He worked steadily, walking or cycling to the town and back, helped her with the jobs as always, though he left in the dark and came home in it, so there was nothing to be done outside. But the fact that he sat across the table or in the armchair opposite her meant that she could watch him more closely and see the small changes. His face was thinner,
the bones became prominent as blades through his flesh. His clothes hung more loosely. He pulled his belt in one then another then another notch. But he still ate well, worked, slept, as usual.

Eve said nothing. Watched.

They did not talk about Jeannie Eliza because there was no need, she was with them, between them, all about them, and their love did not change or their grief lessen, though it might have dropped out of sight.

Christmas. ‘Let us just not have a Christmas,’ Eve said, for the memories were burned into her and there seemed nothing to celebrate. But Tommy said they should never ignore the day, that it would be selfish, and how would it help for them to pretend? So they killed a chicken and Eve made a small pudding and Tommy fetched a tree. On the previous year they had taken gifts and a large Christmas cake to Miriam and this year, he said, they must do the same. The boys should not be made to suffer. Gradually, then, they worked their way through the preparations and her heart lightened as she baked and wrapped and tried to think only of Miriam’s sons. But that was not possible.

‘Tommy looks poorly,’ Miriam said, ‘he looks a bad colour.’

The boys were thundering about, so much bigger now, taking up so much more room and air in the house, like clumsy animals. Arthur George had a thick livid scar on his forehead where he had fallen against the table edge and had to be stitched.

They ate tea, bread and butter and biscuits and some of the cake, though Tommy refused. They had their own, he said, the boys would need all this one.

He was good with them, better than their own father, who sat about all day in misery, having neither work nor interest, and could not bestir himself to take them out or play any game. They pulled Tommy out into the street for football, but Eve saw that he tired and was quickly out of breath and as he came back into the house, saw too that his flesh had a sallow tinge and his eyes were darkly circled. She said nothing until Christmas Day was over and they were inside all the next day because of the high wind and sleet. It was bitterly cold. She had been to the market for the boys’ presents and while there got material to make a frock and a couple of new aprons. She had not bothered before but Tommy had urged her. ‘You have something nice. It’s what you deserve, Eve,’ and put his hand into his pocket to pay at once, and suggested they have new curtains in the kitchen too. But she could not face changing anything in the house yet. The curtains were the ones Jeannie
had known and sometimes pointed to for their brightness.

He had been eating less than usual, she was aware of that, scraping the leftovers from his plates into the bin. She made smaller portions, though not so much that he might complain, but even these he did not finish.

That same night, she went out into the scullery and found him putting fresh notches in his belt with the awl.

‘You work too hard. You need to eat well.’

‘Look at you, Eve,’ he said, ‘how thin you got. The weight dropped off you after … it’s maybe just catching up with me.’

She shook her head. ‘What should I tempt you with? The eggs are so good just now and I’ll put more than a scrape of butter on your bread. Bread and top milk, that’s what the old women swear by, with a sprinkling of brown sugar.’

But Tommy only laughed, threading his belt back through his trousers.

Still, over the following weeks, he grew worse.

He never talked about Jeannie, but one night he said, before putting out the lamp, ‘I miss the little sounds she made through her sleep. I sometimes wake and think I’m hearing them.’

She reached out her hand and rested it on his arm.
‘You’re bone,’ she said then, feeling along, ‘just bone. You should see the doctor, Tom.’

‘No, no. We don’t need to spend money that way. Maybe you can make the bread and milk and sugar? That will soon set me up again.’

So she made it. She beat up two fresh eggs with milk and poured it over the buttered bread and got brown sugar specially. Every night before he went to bed he ate it slowly from one of the white bowls and told her it was good, even for invalid food. But she noticed that he scraped it round with the spoon until the china gleamed clean. It gave her pleasure to watch and she thought how strange it was, that she had had heart for nothing since Jeannie Eliza, but only gone heavily through the days, and now her heart should lift to watch him eat a bowl of bread and milk.

The weather turned warm and the leaves fanned out on the trees almost overnight. The swallows returned to nest above the door and the martins under the eaves. She saw Jeannie, pointing up to the skimming birds.

Tommy grew steadily worse. One morning, taking him a cup of tea, before he could be up first to fetch hers, Eve noticed a swelling just beside his jaw which seemed to have blown up overnight like a boil. She said nothing, just touched it gently with her finger. It was shiny-smooth and firm but there was no core or redness like any abscess.

He drank the tea carefully on the other side of his mouth and when he got up, said only, ‘I’ll be a bit later then, Eve, if I’m to take this for the doctor to look at.’

She almost told him to tell the doctor about everything else, the weakness and the fact that he was barely eating any food and the way he had to keep punching new notches into his belt, but she did not. He would say, or else the doctor would notice for himself and as one visit cost what it cost no matter how many things you took in to the surgery to be sorted out, Tommy would make the best use of it. But she watched him dress slowly and had to urge him to eat a small spoonful of porridge, a few scraps of bacon, before he set off, going without his old energy down the path and out of sight, his head bent, shoulders stooped, where they had always been straight and his step springing.

She filled the sink with suds and then stood, hands in the warm water to her wrists. She had lost Jeannie. Now she was to lose him. She had little doubt about it, having watched the life seep out of him over the past months, and she put it down to the death of the child, after which he had seemed to shrink into himself and lose heart for anything, though he had always tried to encourage her not to do the same but to enjoy
what she could for Jeannie’s sake, and remember her with gladness. Neither of them needed words, each knew well enough what was in the other’s heart and neither could forget or hold out any hope for the future. She would have liked another child but sensed that there would not be one. That was for Miriam. All they could do was fill the quiet house with her boys from time to time, bringing some noise and life to it that way. But it was not the same. Jeannie had been a quiet, watching child.