First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (13 page)

“Occasionally there’s a birth, or someone’s attacked by a shark, or poisoned by a stonefish or a snake. But generally
speaking, the islanders are very healthy and there’s not much for me to do,” he said.

I thought for sure he was going to ask me now about my uncle’s accident. But he didn’t. He just wheezed along behind me.

L
IZZIE WAS STANDING
at the front gate with a little smile on her face. She greeted the Doctor then led us through the house and out the back door into the garden.

Uncle Norman still lay face down, where he had fallen across the potato drills. A blue-striped dish towel covered his head. Blowflies were in a feeding frenzy in the areas where blood had seeped through the cloth. A lizard had crawled onto the heel of his right work boot and was contemplating the flies.

“Well, well,” said Doctor Hebblethwaite. The sight of the body had made him very alert. He carefully rolled up his shirtsleeves and bent over my uncle’s body. He tried to lift the dish towel away, but the blood had congealed. He ripped it off quickly and tossed it aside, where it attracted its quota of flies. Then he brought my uncle’s arms in by his body and rolled him over.

Now I could see Uncle Norman’s face clearly. It was very grey. The bloody right side of his head was stuccoed with garden soil.

“We’ll take him inside,” said the Doctor.

The flies buzzed around us angrily as we organized ourselves to take their food away from them. The Doctor and
Lizzie lifted an arm each, and I helped by taking my uncle’s spidery ankles. I didn’t like the feel of the fine leg hair on my fingers. We dragged him along and up the steps to the back door, like a sack of potatoes bumping on the ground.

Inside the cottage, the wooden floor, polished every week with the Abbot’s Wax, made it easy to slide the body along into the living-room. Many of the flies had run the gauntlet of the bead curtain at the door; they still buzzed around the body. In the beams above us, one of the house lizards took up position.

Lizzie sat down on a rattan chair, and I stood opposite, with the body between us. Each time our eyes met, she smiled.

Doctor Hebblethwaite took off his white coat. He probed the wound delicately with his fingers. He spoke without looking up.

“A fall, I suppose.” It might have been a question. Lizzie looked at me, but said nothing.

The Doctor probed some more.

“These short falls can cause such dreadful wounds.” I could hear no mockery in his voice. Now he opened his bag and filled a syringe from a phial. He spoke to Lizzie.

“Well, you’ll be delighted to know your husband isn’t dead.”

She didn’t seem very delighted.

“Though he most certainly should be,” Doctor Hebblethwaite said. “His skull’s cracked rather badly. But he’s alive.” Lizzie’s face was closed like a fist. “Some people,” the Doctor muttered, “need practice before they learn to die properly.” He pushed up my uncle’s sleeve and injected him in the upper arm.

He wiped the spot with a swab then spoke to me.

“Young chappie. I’m afraid I have to ask you to run down to the town again,” he said. “Go to the infirmary and tell
the nurse I have a patient requiring transportation. You might also call in at my surgery. Tell my wife I may be delayed.” He looked at Lizzie again. “I think it would be wiser if I stayed with the patient.”

Almost an hour later, I came back to the cottage along with soldiers in red jackets who pushed a four-wheeled barrow. They laid Uncle Norman on a little palliasse and placed him on the barrow. Then they rolled it down the bumpy path, going very slowly. They didn’t want to kill the patient; though one of them had told me on the way up that the wheelbarrow also served as a hearse at island funerals.

For three days after that, my Aunt Lizzie and I stayed alone in the cottage. Even though I’d seen what she’d done, I felt safe with her. She would often hug me now, and I got to like that. She never mentioned Uncle Norman, nor did we go to visit him. She acted as though he didn’t exist.

At noon on the fourth day, one of the soldiers who’d helped with the cart knocked at the cottage door and said that Doctor Hebblethwaite wanted to talk to me alone. Aunt Lizzie nodded consent.

So I went down to the town. The infirmary was set into the battlements near The Motte. Doctor Hebblethwaite met me in the little office at the entrance.

“Your uncle came out of his coma this morning,” he said. “He rather wants to go back up to the cottage without delay.” He was watching me closely. “He hasn’t the faintest idea how he came to be injured.”

I felt very awkward the way he looked at me.

“Will it be safe to send him home?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I can’t detain him here forever.” He sighed. “Come in and see him.”

He showed me into the infirmary, which was really just one room with three beds. It was gloomy and hot, with little windows high in the wall, and smelt of floor-polish and disinfectant.

My uncle was the only patient. He was lying on one of the beds with his head in bandages. I was shocked at the change in him. Not that he looked awful after his injury, as I’d expected, but that he looked twenty years younger.

“Andrew!” he said when he saw me. That was the first time he’d called me by name. “Where’s Lizzie? Is she with you?”

His face wasn’t emaciated any more, and even though his lips were a little twisted, they were twisted in what was meant to be a smile. I’d never seen him smile before.

Doctor Hebblethwaite, standing behind me, answered his question.

“No. Lizzie’s not here. She’s preparing the cottage for your return,” he said. “But I’m wondering: wouldn’t you rather spend a few more days in the infirmary? Just till you’ve recovered properly.”

My uncle shook his head.

“No, no,” he said. He seemed very upset that my aunt wasn’t with me. “Lizzie’ll look after me, won’t she, Andrew?” His voice was animated in a way I’d never heard it before, and higher pitched, like a younger man’s. “And I’ve got lots of work to do. I can only imagine the state of the garden. Three days! That means I’ve missed three full nights at the telescope.” He said this, as though whatever he searched the night skies for might have come and gone during his absence, and he looked anxious. I’d never have believed his face could be so expressive.

Doctor Hebblethwaite told the infirmary nurse to start
preparing Uncle Norman for the journey. He signalled to me to follow him. Outside the door of the infirmary, he lit a cigarette.

“Now, young man. I haven’t subjected you to any direct questions, and I don’t intend to,” he said. “I understand only too well these husband-wife problems. But I hope your Aunt Lizzie knows that if there’s a recurrence of this type of thing, I simply will not be able to ignore it. The Commissioner will have to be informed.” He took a long draw on his cigarette, his blue eyes narrowing to counter the acrid smoke that drifted past. “It’s most regrettable this had to happen after you arrived on the scene. Don’t worry though. Maybe everything’ll turn out all right yet,” he said.

In the mid-afternoon heat, Doctor Hebblethwaite and I headed back up to the cottage along with the cart, pushed by two soldiers. My uncle lay on the cart humming cheerfully, slightly off key. The sun shone brilliantly on his bandaged head, on Doctor Hebblethwaite’s white medical coat, on the scarlet tunics of the soldiers, on the flies that hung around us like glittering smoke. Real smoke came from the cigarette of the Doctor, who gradually fell off the pace and straggled along behind us.

From a long way off, I could see Lizzie standing at the gate. Nearer the cottage, my uncle raised his head and was able to see her too. He lifted his arm and waved. Perhaps she thought he was only waving the flies away, for it was a while before she waved back.

When we arrived at the gate, he called out.

“Lizzie! Lizzie!” and he stretched his hand out to her. She hesitated before she gave her hand to him. He drew it to his lips.

“Oh, Lizzie! It’s so good to be home,” he said. Her eyes widened.

The two soldiers began manoeuvring the cart up to the front door. While we stood watching, Doctor Hebblethwaite arrived, a little breathless.

“He hasn’t any sensation in his legs yet,” he told Lizzie. “It should return in a few days. He can’t remember what happened. His mind’s a
tabula rasa
. The whole incident’s been wiped clean. How long that will last is a matter of speculation. But probably he’ll soon remember some of it. Or all of it. That’s generally the way with amnesia.”

Lizzie nodded her head slowly.

The soldiers carried my uncle in and laid him on the bed. Doctor Hebblethwaite did a last check on him while Lizzie fussed around, adjusting the pillows. Uncle Norman kept looking at her and smiling. She smiled back cautiously.

I watched all of this carefully. I understood what a strange situation had developed.

S
O IT WAS THAT MY
Uncle Norman came smiling home to his murderer.

For the next week, I might almost have believed Lizzie’s attempt to kill him had been a misunderstanding, she was now so kind to him, so loving. She would cut red and yellow flowers from her own flower patch and arrange them round his bed, to his delight. She fed him like a baby, spooning the soup into his mouth, cutting up his meat into little pieces. Three times a day she sponged his entire body with rose-water. She shut the bedroom
door behind her when she did this. Through the slats of the door I could hear the whimpers of pleasure that accompanied this ritual.

In the afternoons, Lizzie and I would spend an hour weeding his garden. We brought his telescope into the house and set it up by the bed so that he could examine the night skies through the window. He thanked us, but he didn’t seem as obsessed with either of these activities as before.

In fact, Uncle Norman was a new man. The ice in his light blue eyes had completely melted. His lips had become used to smiling, so that it started to seem natural. When he spoke, he’d use the kind of homely sayings you’d never have expected from him. Once when I came inside, I’d a rip in my pants from a thorn bush, and he said: “Ask Lizzie to fix that right away. A stitch in time saves nine.” One morning when I was sitting at the window looking down towards the ocean, he said: “Look at that view, Andrew. Money can’t buy a view like that.”

Nor could he conceal his affection for Lizzie. “My old girl,” he’d call her, and he’d reach out and touch her whenever she was near the bed. When she talked to him, he’d look into her eyes with rapt attention.

He seemed to enjoy my company.

“Come and sit on the bed, Andrew,” he’d say, and he’d ask questions about Stroven and about my adventures on the way to St Jude—things he’d never shown the slightest interest in before. He asked about my mother, too.

“She was a very fine woman,” he said. “She and Lizzie were great friends. Their mother died young, and they brought each other up—they went to school together and did everything together. I felt bad about taking Lizzie so far away.” He smiled. “But it’s so nice you could come and live
with us, Andrew. We’re going to make sure you’re happy here.”

He’d ask Lizzie about other islanders they’d known—years ago, before he’d cut himself off from them all. He seemed puzzled that he’d allowed himself to become such a recluse. “I just don’t know what must have got into me. As soon as I’m well enough, I’m going to start taking walks down to the town with you whenever you go shopping.”

She smiled at him encouragingly.

One night after dark—it was Friday—Lizzie and I were sitting by his bed and he was telling me about his hobby.

“Do you know what I look for at night, Andrew? Meteors. The skies here are so clear it’s possible to see meteors no one else in the world has ever seen. The only time we’re aware of them is when they flare up and disintegrate in the earth’s atmosphere.”

He looked at Aunt Lizzie.

“I wonder what I found so attractive in them, Lizzie. They seem such cold, lonely things.” His eyes were full of affection for her. “Bring my book, Andrew,” he said. “The one called
Heavenly Debris
.”

I brought it from the mantelpiece and gave it to him. He opened it at a photograph of a meteor.

“See,” he said. “It looks just like one of those rocks in the back garden.”

At this naming of the rocks, his eyes suddenly narrowed. He was silent for a while, his eyes looking inward. The word had triggered something off.

“Are you all right?” Lizzie asked.

“I was just trying to think how I hit my head,” he said. “I remember going into the garden. Then I remember pulling weeds from among the potatoes. Then everything’s a blank.”

That mention of the rocks was how it started. From then on, during the time I was with him on Friday night, and all through the day on Saturday, I could see he was preoccupied, racking his brain.

On Saturday afternoon I was sitting with him. Lizzie was making dinner. He’d been silent for a while, then he looked at her and smiled.

“Sorry, Lizzie. I’m not very good company for you and Andrew. I just wish I could remember. It’s like something being just on the tip of your tongue. You know how annoying that is.”

I wished I knew how to counsel him that it would be better not to remember. Lizzie’s attempted murder had transformed him into a human being, and the three of us into the happy family I’d dreamed of.

His memory returned, completely, just after midnight on Saturday night. The sound of his voice awakened me from a deep sleep. I slipped out of bed and looked through the circulation vent in the door.

In the moonlight that illuminated the cottage, Uncle Norman, quite naked, was dragging his scarecrow body and his useless legs across the floor. Lizzie, also naked, stood watching. Her face was stone.

“Let me go,” he was saying. His voice was the deep voice of the old Norman. “Let me out of here!”

He scrabbled his way to the front door and got it open. He crawled out into the yard and she followed. I waited then went out into the living-room and over to the open door. From there, I watched.