The Various Haunts of Men (2 page)

As she left the protecting walls of the town centre, the fog and darkness closed in around the car. She turned down the road oddly called simply Domesday, and left into Devonshire Drive. A few lights were
on in the bedroom windows of the large detached houses, but she could only just make them out through the fog. She slowed to twenty and then down to fifteen miles an hour.

Impossible to see in such weather that this was one
of the most attractive and sought-after parts of Lafferton. She knew how lucky she had been to find the small house in Barn Close, one of only five houses there, at a price
she could just afford. It had been empty for over a year, following the death of the elderly couple who had lived in it for over sixty years. It had not been a close then, and very few of the imposing houses on Devonshire Drive had existed either.

The house had been completely unmodernised and in a state of some disrepair, but as soon as she had stepped inside it for the first time, behind the
young estate agent, Angela Randall had wanted to live there.

‘I’m afraid it needs an awful lot doing to it.’

But none of that had mattered at all, because the house had embraced her at once, in a very particular way.

‘People have been happy here,’ she had said.

The girl had given her an odd look.

‘I want to make an offer for it.’

She had walked into the chilly little eau-de-nil-painted kitchen,
with its cream gas cooker and brown varnished cupboards, and seen past them, out of the window to the field over the hedge and, rising behind it, the Hill. The clouds had been chasing the sun across it, teasing, making the green slopes now bright, now dark, like children playing.

For the first time since the knock on the door had come all those years ago, Angela Randall had felt what she recognised
after a moment as happiness.

Her eyes were sore, with tiredness and the strain of peering through the windscreen into the streaming fog. It had been a difficult night. Sometimes the old people were quite settled and peaceful and there was rarely a
call. They just checked round every couple of hours, and did any linen sorting and other routine jobs that were left for them by the day staff. She
had been able to do a lot of her degree coursework in the staffroom of the care home, on nights like that. But on this last her books had scarcely been opened. Five of the residents, including some of the frailest and most vulnerable, had gone down with an acute sickness virus, and at two o’clock they had had to call out Dr Deerbon, who had sent one old lady straight into hospital. Mr Gantley’s tablets
had had to be changed, and the new prescription gave him nightmares, wild, terrifying, screaming nightmares which woke those in the rooms on either side of him in fright. Miss Parkinson had walked in her sleep again and managed to reach the front door, unlock and unbolt it and get halfway down the path before any of them, frantic with sickness everywhere else, had realised. Dementia was not
pretty. The best anyone could do was damage limitation and safe confinement, as well, of course, as provide clean, bright surroundings, decent food and friendly care. She wondered how she would have coped if her mother had lived to suffer with an illness that robbed people of their very selves – personality, memory, spirit, dignity, the ability to relate to others – everything that made life worth
living, rich and valuable. ‘You’ll take me in here, won’t you,’ she had more than once joked to Carol Ashton, who ran the Four Ways Home, ‘if I ever get that way?’ They had laughed it off and talked of something else, but Angela’s questioning had been like that of a child seeking reassurance and protection. Well, she had no need to worry about any of that now. She would not grow old alone, whatever
her condition. She knew that.

As she reached the end of Devonshire Drive, the fog thinned and changed from a dense bank to thinner skeins and veils which wound themselves about in front of the car. There were now patches of darkness through which house and street lights shone out clear orange and gold. Turning into Barn Close, Angela Randall could make out her own white-painted gate at the far
end. She let out a long sigh, releasing the tension in her neck and shoulders. Her hands were damp on the steering wheel. But she was home. She had a long sleep and a four-day break ahead.

Outside the car she could taste the fog like damp cobwebs across her skin but from the Hill a slight breeze was blowing towards her. Perhaps by the time it broke light and she was ready to go out again, it
would have dispersed the last of the fog. She was tireder than usual, after the bad night and such an unpleasant drive, but it would not have occurred to her to change her routine. Angela Randall was an orderly woman, of regular habit. Only one thing had happened recently to break into the safe cocoon she had built around herself and threaten disorder and chaos, but the potential disorder and the
chaos were sweet and, to her own surprise, she had welcomed them.

Nevertheless, for the present she kept to her routine, and in any case, if she missed her run even for a day she noticed the difference the next time she went out, felt just a little less supple, breathed slightly less easily. The doctor had told her that she should take up a sport, and she trusted him completely. If he had told
her to hang upside down from the branch of a tree for a week, she would have done so. But no sport appealed to her, so she had started running – walking at first, followed by
jogging, working up in speed and distance to a daily three-mile run.

‘A balanced life,’ he had said when she had told him that she was also starting her next Open University degree. ‘Take care of both mind and body. Old-fashioned
advice but none the worse for that.’

She went into her tidy, spotless house. The carpets, an indulgence for which she had saved carefully, were thick and close-fitted. When she shut the front door, there was the silence she so enjoyed, a soft, deep silence, padded, comforting.

Nothing was out of place. In a sense, this house had been her life and more to her, until recently, than any family,
any human being or pet could ever have been. It was reassuringly as she had left it the previous evening. There was no one to rearrange anything. Angela Randall relied on 4 Barn Close and it had never failed her.

During the next hour, she ate a banana chopped into a small bowl of muesli and drank a single cup of tea. An egg on toast, with a rasher of lean bacon, tomatoes and more tea would come
later, after her run. Now, she set out the food under a cover, the pan, loaf and butter, refilled the kettle, and emptied and rinsed the teapot. Everything was set ready for later, after the run and her shower.

She listened to the news on the radio and read the front page of the newspaper the boy had just delivered, then went upstairs to her pale blue bedroom, changed out of her uniform and dropped
it into the laundry basket and put on a clean, freshly ironed white T-shirt and pale grey tracksuit, white socks and running shoes. Her hair was brushed and pulled off her face in a white elastic headband. She put three wrapped glucose sweets into
her pocket and the spare front-door key on a ribbon round her neck underneath her tracksuit top.

As she closed the front door behind her, more lights
were coming on in the houses and a thin, sour, bleak dawn was breaking over the Hill. The fog still hung about, wreathing among the trees and bushes on the slopes, swirling, thickening, then shifting and clearing again.

But curtains were not yet drawn. No one looked out, keen to begin the day, to see what was going on or who was about. It was not that sort of morning. At the corner of Barn Close,
a few yards from her own house, and at the beginning of the path leading to the field, Angela Randall broke into a light jog. A few minutes later, she was running, steadily, purposefully and quite unobserved, across the open green and on to the Hill and, after only a few yards, into a sudden bolster of muffling, dense, clammy fog.

Sunday morning at a quarter past five and a gale blowing. Cat Deerbon lifted the phone on the second ring.

‘Dr Deerbon here.’

‘Oh dear …’ an elderly woman’s voice faltered. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t like disturbing you in the middle of the night, Doctor, I am sorry …’

‘It’s what I’m here for. Who is it?’

‘Iris Chater, Doctor. It’s Harry – I heard him. I came down and he was making such a funny
noise with his breathing. And he looks … you know … he isn’t right, Doctor.’

‘I’ll come.’

The call was not unexpected. Harry Chater was eighty. He had had two severe strokes, was diabetic with a poor heart, and recently Cat had diagnosed a slow-growing carcinoma in the bowel. He should probably have been in hospital but he and his wife had insisted that he would be better at home. Which, she
thought, letting herself quietly out of the house, he almost certainly was. He was
also happier in the bed they had arranged for him downstairs in the front room with his two budgerigars for company.

She reversed the car out into the lane. The trees around the paddock were tossing wildly, caught for a moment in her headlamps, but the horses were safely stabled, her family sound asleep.

Not many
people kept budgerigars now, apart from the competitive bird-fanciers. Caged birds were out of fashion, like poodles. She tried to remember, swerving slightly to avoid a fallen branch, when she had last seen anyone with a poodle, clipped to look like the woolly pompons Sam and Hannah had made in their playgroup days. What other handmade things had they brought so proudly home? She began to make
a mental list. It was eight miles from the village of Atch Sedby into Lafferton, it was pitch dark and raining and there was no one else on the road; for years, to exercise her brain and keep herself awake on these night calls, Cat had forced herself to recite poems aloud – the ones she had learned by heart at school … ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’, ‘This is the weather the cuckoo likes’, ‘I had a
silver penny and an apricot tree’, and, from the exam years, choruses from
Henry V
and soliloquies from
Hamlet
, the set plays. Listening to the car radio seemed to make her more sleepy, but poetry, or chemical formulae, or mental arithmetic kept her going. Or lists. Woolly pompons, she thought, and pasta pictures, and binoculars made out of the insides of toilet rolls; Mother’s Day cards with
yellow-tissue daffodils, crooked coil pots, papier mâché animals, mosaics from little slivers of coloured sticky paper.

The moon came out from behind the fast-scudding
clouds just as she turned into Lafferton and saw the cathedral rising up ahead, the great tower silvered, the windows mysteriously gleaming.

‘Slowly, silently now the moon

Walks the night in her silver shoon …’

She struggled
to remember what came next.

Nelson Street was one of a grid of twelve terraces known as The Apostles. At 37, two-thirds of the way down, the lights were on.

Harry Chater was going to die, probably within the next hour. Cat knew that as she walked into the stuffy, crowded little front room, where the gas fire was turned to high and the smell was the half-antiseptic, half-fetid one of illness.
He was a man who had been heavy but who was now shrunken and slipped down pathetically into himself, all his strength and much of his life force gone.

Iris Chater went back to the chair beside his bed and took his hand, chafing it gently between her own, her eyes flicking from his crumpled, grey face to Cat’s, full of fear.

‘Come on now, perk up, Harry, here’s Dr Deerbon to see you, Dr Cat …
you’ll be pleased it’s her.’

Cat knelt beside the low bed and felt the heat from the gas fire burning into her back. The budgerigar cage was covered in a gold velour cloth with a fringe and the little birds were silent.

There was not a great deal she could do for Harry Chater, but what she would not do was call an ambulance and send him off to die, probably on a hard trolley
in a corridor at
Bevham General. She could make him as comfortable as possible, bringing in the oxygen cylinder from her car to ease his breathing, and she could stay with them both, unless she was called elsewhere.

Cat Deerbon was thirty-four, a young GP, but one who, from a family of doctors going back four generations, had inherited the conviction that some old ways were still the best, when it came to individual
patient care.

‘Come on, Harry love.’ When Cat came back with the oxygen, Iris Chater was stroking her husband’s hollow cheek and talking softly to him. His pulse was weak, his breathing uneven, his hands very cold. ‘You can do something for him, can’t you, Doctor?’

‘I can make him more comfortable. Just help me lift him up on the pillows, Mrs Chater.’

Outside, the gale was hurling itself at
the windows. The gas fire sputtered. If Harry lasted longer than the next hour or so, Cat would call in the district nurses.

‘He isn’t suffering, is he?’ Iris Chater still held her husband’s hand. ‘It isn’t very nice, is it, that mask over his poor face?’

‘It’s the best way of easing things for him. I think he’s quite comfortable, you know.’

The woman looked at Cat. Her own face was grey too
and creased with strain, her eyes deep-set, the skin beneath them pouched and bruise-coloured with tiredness. She was nine years her husband’s junior, a neat, energetic woman, but now she looked as old and ill as he did.

‘It’s been no life for him, not since the spring.’

‘I know.’

‘He’s hated this … being dependent, being weak. He hasn’t been eating. I’ve had a job to get a spoonful of anything
down him.’

Cat adjusted the oxygen mask on Harry’s face. His nose was beaked and jutted out, as the flesh had fallen away on either side of it. The skull showed clear beneath the almost-transparent skin. Even with the help of the oxygen, his breathing was difficult.

‘Harry love …’ his wife stroked his brow.

How many are there like this now, Cat thought, married over fifty years and still contentedly
together? How many of her own generation would stick it out, taking everything as it came because that was what you did, what you had promised to do?