A Little White Death (19 page)

‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s no need for that. How long?’

‘How long have you got? Mr Troy, it needn’t be fatal. These days it hardly ever is—’

‘I meant. How long have I had it?’

‘Hard to say. Tuberculosis can lie dormant for ages. I’ve known some strains to appear fifteen years after the presumed infection. I doubt that’s the case here. You’ve a
specific and readily identifiable strain. Quite rare. There’ve been very few cases in Britain, but in Eastern Europe they call it Khrushchev Flu. Of course it isn’t flu – nothing
to do with flu. I’d say you’ve been incubating it for about six months or so, perhaps less, eight at the most.’

Moscow. Fuckit Moscow. He’d caught the damn thing in Moscow. Fuck Moscow. Fuck Charlie. Fuck Anna.

‘Six months?’

‘Give or take, yes.’

‘So it’s early days?’

She fumbled.

‘I . . . er . . .’

‘I mean. I don’t have it bad.’

‘Oh dear. I’m so sorry. No. It’s not early days. I’m rather afraid you do have rather a bad case. Mr Troy, you’re going to have to prepare yourself. You’re
going to be off work for a long time.’

‘How long? A month?’

She said nothing.

‘Six weeks?’

She said nothing.

‘Three months?’

She shook her head vigorously enough for all three questions at once.

‘We can’t play this game. A year, maybe more, but at least a year.’

Troy said nothing.

Anna drove. All the way home. Troy did not speak to her.

‘We’ll find you the right place. I mean, some of them can be very good. And of course we’ll get you the best that money can buy.’ ‘You don’t
get it, do you?’ ‘Get what?’ ‘You can’t stick me in some private sanatorium up a Swiss mountain – this isn’t Thomas Mann – you can’t stick me
anywhere outside the National Health system. It’s an election year. How do you think it’s going to look for Rod if I buy private medicine and jump the queue?’

‘Bugger, hadn’t thought of that.’

‘We’re looking at a public ward in some dreadful public sanatorium in the home fucking counties!’

‘Some of
them
can be very good too.’

‘There is another way.’

‘What?’

‘I take every bit of leave I have due to me, then you sign me off sick with the flu or something, I hole up here, take the damn drugs or whatever, and get back to work as soon as I’m
over the worst of it.’

‘Troy, it’s an infectious disease. They put you in a sanatorium for the good of the rest of us, not just your own. It’s a notifiable disease. I have to tell the Yard what you
have. Surely you understand? I’m your physician. It’s my duty. If there’s a second case it would be criminal to have deceived them.’

‘You don’t have to send that form in.’

‘I do, really I do.’

‘If you do that I’ll be off work for a year! By the time I get back, if I get back—’

‘You just don’t get it, do you, Troy?’

‘Get what?’

‘I’ve already done it. I had to do it.’

Troy had never heard of Dedham, nor of the wide valley of the Stour in which it sat, the boundary river of two English counties, Essex and Suffolk. Then one of his sisters
muttered something about Constable, and Gainsborough, and Munnings, and he knew what it meant. That stretch, one of those stretches of England associated with whichever painter or writer had stuck
it down on canvas or paper. It was ‘Constable Country’; it was, Troy thought, a deplorable notion, as unspeakable as ‘Wessex’. It was where Anna found an agreeable National
Health sanatorium for the tubercular – The Glebe, Dedham.

Rod drove him down the following Wednesday, at the wheel of Troy’s Bentley – a new windscreen, radiator, bumper and right headlamp. Troy stared silently out of the window at the dull
Essex countryside, wondering if there’d ever be a glimpse of a hill. There was one, just the one, and that in the last half-mile before Rod swung the Bentley off the road and into the
gravelled drive of a small Regency mansion, creamy brick and broad bow windows, just south of the village. The house sat on the side of the hill – at least he’d have a bit of a view,
quite possibly the only one for miles.

Rod turned off the ignition. Looked at Troy.

‘OK?’ he said.

‘Let’s get it over with,’ said Troy, and it struck him at once how stupid a remark it was. He’d no idea when it would be over. It could take for ever.

By the time Rod had played big brother and opened the passenger door for him, a blue-and-white uniformed nurse had appeared on the doorstep. Rod set down Troy’s case on the threshold and
before Troy could reach for it she picked it up. Between the two of them they were determined to make him feel like a cripple.

‘Don’t come in,’ said Troy.

‘I wasn’t going to.’

And Troy remembered how much Rod disliked hospitals, and how often he had visited them – every time Troy got into a scrape and needed bailing out. And a sanatorium was just another word
for a hospital, wasn’t it? He’d put Rod through a lot in his time.

‘Ready?’ said Nurse.

She led. He followed. He felt a bit like a dog.

‘It’s Frederick?’ she asked.

And he dearly wished there were any other answer to that question but the ‘yes’ he now uttered. Why, with all the lexicon of Russian and English names to choose from, had they made
him a ‘Frederick’?

Across a large hallway, an elaborately tiled floor, an elegant staircase, the lines ruined by fire doors in reinforced steel-mesh glass, cutting the smooth, rounded trajectory of Regency into
the sharp angles of modernity. Through the fire doors into what she called ‘our day room’.

Three men sat around a rickety green-baize card table. The furrowed brows and forced smiles of the serious pontoon player.

The woman stood, almost to attention, and coughed. It was obviously meant as politesse. In a sanatorium, thought Troy, it must be the most common background noise. It was. They ignored it. She
harrumphed at them in the most hammy style.

‘Nasty cough you got there, Nursie,’ said one of the men without even glancing up.

‘We have a new face on the ward. This is Frederick,’ she said.

They stopped the hand and all turned to look at him.

‘We’re all Christian names here,’ she said and ran through their names like the naming of parts.

‘This is our Alfie.’

Thin – but weren’t we all? – tall, blond and curly – the wicked smile of a natural wide boy.

‘This our Geoffrey.’

Less thin, almost chubby of cheek – nearer his discharge than the rest? – receding hairline, five o’clock shadow, about the same age as Troy.

‘And this our Eric.’

Gaunt – at death’s door, surely? – but the man was upright, and judging from the pile of sixpences and threepenny bits in front of him ahead in the game of pontoon if not in
the game of life.

‘Now,’ said Nurse, ‘where’s our general?’

Troy winced inwardly at the maternal possessives, weighed the contradiction between ‘we’re all Christian names here’ and the prospect of a man called ‘general’.

‘Up in the ward,’ the one called Alfie volunteered, ‘with ’is ear’ole glued to the radio.’

Nurse took Troy’s suitcase and led off up the broad, curving staircase to the ward in one of the larger first-floor bedrooms, blathering at him without ever turning to see if he was
listening. He wasn’t. Phrases such as ‘walks of life’, as in ‘we have people from all walks of life here’, which she had just used, usually sent him off into
anger’s oblivion. He hated the phrase. It was the sort of phrase men from his background used if they’d just been stuck at signals for half an hour on the slow train from
Frisby-on-the-Wreke, been forced by impecunity – passed off in anecdote as a democratic impulse – to share a third-class compartment with a pig farmer from a Leicestershire village
– perhaps his pig too – and a uniformed RAF mechanic on his way back to base – smoking Park Drive – and found, wonder of wonders, that they both spoke English. Delivery of
the tale necessitated the use of said phrase, implying, as it did, that this was the great leap forward for democracy, furthered by his private decision that the incident had, at a stroke,
abolished the residues of the English class system. They all had different tasks in life – ‘allotted’ here was optional – but they were all the same underneath, even if some
of them earned less than a fifth of one’s own income, and even if one wouldn’t actually want to encounter any of them at the dinner table. Great Unwashed to Salt of the Earth within the
short span of but a single cliché. Or was it three clichés?

An old man lay in a reclining chair, his ear, if not glued, then certainly very close to the loudspeaker of an old wooden-case wireless. To call it a radio offered it no dignity; it hummed on
valves rather than crackled with transistors. He was bald but for two tufts of white hair, roughly pinpointing each cerebellum, and matched by the symmetrical tufts of a white moustache. His eyes
were closed, his face a mask of absorption in whatever he was listening to. It sounded to Troy like a public event of some sort – respectful, hushed Dimblebyish tones dimbledoodling out
across the airwaves, the echoes of a church.

‘General,’ Nurse said rather too loudly.

The old man opened his eyes, lifted his head.

‘We have a new boy.’

Troy was rapidly growing to hate the woman.

‘This is Frederick, from London.’

He felt like a contestant on
Take Your Pick
or
Double Your Money
. He definitely hated this hag.

The old man stood, a newspaper slipped from his knees to the floor in a smooth glissando. He seemed to Troy to wipe a tear from his eye.

‘Do forgive me. I always get like this at weddings. Sentimental old fool.’

Troy looked blankly at him.

‘Princess Alexandra and whatsisname . . . Angus Ogilvy.’

‘Oh,’ said Troy.

‘On the wireless. So much nicer than the television, don’t you think?’

He stuck out his hand. ‘Catesby, Arthur Catesby.’

‘Troy,’ said Troy, hoping the tag would stick and free him from his Frederick.

‘Well,’ said Nurse. ‘You two seem to be getting along swimmingly. I must be getting back to work. You’re the bed by the window, Frederick.’

She strode off, sensible shoes squeaking across the linoleum.

‘Infuriating woman,’ Catesby said. ‘You don’t mind if I . . .’

‘Not at all,’ said Troy, who, left to his own devices, would not have disturbed him in the first place. He’d no idea it was Princess Alexandra’s wedding day – which
showed how utterly consuming his ill-health had become in a single week – but he well remembered her mother’s wedding, but for whom there would not be an entire generation of English
women christened Marina. And if Troy had this man’s measure aright, the sentimental tears were not for this generation of royal weddings but the last.

He set his suitcase down on the bed. Sat next to it. Looked around. It was not an unpleasant room. It still smacked of the private house it had once been. Elaborate cornices still intact around
the ceiling. A grey, silver-and-rust-iron-rippled marble fireplace, crudely battened over with pegboard. Elm floorboards a foot and a half across. Almost homely. A ward with only five beds was
privacy compared to some of the London hospitals. All the same he hated Nurse, and he was going to hate this too. He knew it.

Troy took his first bath, before the unnaturally early bedtime. The sky had scarcely darkened, the moon peeped between the hurrying clouds, and the room was a vast echoing
chamber, almost as high as it was long, and his knees stuck up like white-bone mountains in the lagoon of cooling bathwater. He climbed out and stood dripping onto an inch-thick cork mat. Stood
clutching the towel, facing a full-length mirror bolted to the wall. Then it hit him. Everything he had not seen or had refused to see came home to him. He saw himself with Anna’s eyes. And
he did not recognise himself. He was not tall – under height in fact for the job of copper, and only enlisted by a waiving of the rules – but even so, eight stones in weight made him
look little short of Belsen-like, half-starved and half-dead. He let the towel fall. He could count every rib in his chest. His stomach was not just flat, it was concave. His thighs looked like
sticks, his cock, exaggerated by the contrast, made him seem almost priapic – the Errol Flynn of the Eastern Counties. Why did one not lose weight in proportion; why did one not lose it
everywhere; why not a thin cock; why not thin toes? He looked at his toes – they were thin. He stepped on the scales. Seven stone nine pounds.

He revised the image. Swapped Germany for Russia. Tuberculosis – the Victorian word had been consumption, the preferred disease of so many novelists. Who was it in what Dostoevsky novel
who died slowly of consumption, and made such a song and dance about it?
The Idiot
, it was some . . . dammit . . . some idiot in
The Idiot
. Troy would not make a song and dance. But
he would waste away just the same.

He sank towards a bottomless silence. Days passed in a waking dream of idleness and exhaustion. He got to know the others, even as he ceased to know himself.

He knew the Alfies of this world. For that matter he knew the Geoffs too, pompous men – little men, his sisters would have said, dripping scorn – born to be local councillors,
aldermen, justices of the peace, and to run, as Geoff did in Brentwood – a briar patch of which he seemed inordinately proud – a car showroom. Not for him the tat of the second-hand
trade, but plate-glass windows and shiny new Wolseleys and Rileys and a turntable on which to revolve them. Geoff was a bore and best avoided. Alfie was a bore too, but a bore of the type that at
least held professional interest for Troy. Alfie was the sort of young man – twenty-five or six years old – who had gone from job to job for the last ten years, ever since getting out
of secondary modern school, working his little fiddles. Man on the make, but with so little imagination of just how much one could make. He wasn’t a villain – and Troy doubted very much
whether the application of the term would strike him as anything but insult – but he was a rogue. The sort of rogue who could do no job without ‘somefink on the side,
knowotahmean?’ And it ran, as a rule, to nothing bolder or smarter than one hand in the till. The ever-cheerful, ever-chattering, smirking cockney wide boy. Troy knew Alfie. He’d seen
Alfie all his working life.