No. 4 Imperial Lane

by Jonathan Weisman

  “David, I’m not feeling too well.” Hans’s voice rose like a whisper in the fog. The A23 had finally cleared Gatwick. Pease Pottage signaled the break I was waiting for, as the suburbs gave way to open road.

  “I’m not feeling too well myself, Hans.” I smiled over my left shoulder and caught just a glimpse of him, strapped into his chair at the waist and chest. His head bowed slightly forward. His face looked puffy, pale in the glow of the streetlights. Even from my vantage point, I could see purplish, veined lines across his swollen cheeks. His lower lip was protruding, with a bit of spittle on his chin. He looked terrible, even for Hans.

  “Yes, quite right,” he said quietly, his words slurred with fatigue. I heard nothing more from him that night, not even as I wheeled him out of the ambulance or hoisted him into bed. Elizabeth had appeared in the hallway in a long, flannel nightgown, too tired to be of much help but satisfied to see us, home and alive.

  “’Night, David,” she yawned and walked off as I tucked Hans in beneath the piles of covers.

  The next morning, Hans could barely lift his head from the pillow.

  “Long night,” Elizabeth said with feigned cheer as I mashed up some Weetabix to offer Hans in tiny spoonfuls. His lip protruded as sickly as I remembered. The paleness of his skin had not been a trick of the streetlamps. He ate nothing. I was more relieved than usual when the nurses arrived.

  “Hans needs to go to hospital right away,” one of them said before the morning ablutions were complete. She was not chipper at all.

  “What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

  “Dunno exactly. Kidneys, I ’spect.”

  It would have been more difficult to load Hans into the ambulance than push him up the steep, two-block climb to the Royal Sussex County Hospital, so I hoofed it. “You go on,” Elizabeth had implored me. “I’ve got a class. I’ll try to catch up in a bit.”

  The Spartan, Victorian, redbrick façade gave way to a dreary, fluorescent-lit admitting room, where Hans was greeted like a regular, if not an old friend.

  “Good morning, Mr. Bromwell,” the round, porcine lady behind the counter said with a slight trace of cockney. It was one of the rare times when someone behind a desk had greeted him and not me, the attendant. Hans was in no shape to be effusive. He just grunted.

  I walked behind as peroxide-haired men, their piercings removed for work, rolled Hans to a room with a window overlooking Imperial Lane. For so long, I had looked up at this hospital, which menacingly stood watch over us. Now I was seeing the other vantage point. It was lovely. The wait was long, but not as long as the scolds in the States would have you believe was endemic to socialized medicine. As it turned out, diagnosis was instant. The doctor took one look at Hans and turned to me.

  “Will you call Elizabeth?”

  “It could take a while. She was heading off to the poly.”

  He sighed.

  “Hans’s kidneys are going, and I need to talk to his sister.”

  “OK.”

  He showed me to a pay phone and gave me ten pence when I had to admit I had nothing in my pockets. There was no answer. I tried again in five minutes, then again in another five. Finally, she picked up.

  “Elizabeth,” I said, “I’m sorry to bother you, but the doctor needs you here.”

  They greeted each other like old friends as she walked into Hans’s light-filled room.

  “Doctor Worthy, I’m delighted it’s you,” Elizabeth said with a relieved little swoon.

  “Elizabeth, it’s been a while.” He planted a kiss on her cheek that she clearly relished. She was blushing when he told her, “I’d be surprised if he had much more than a quarter of a kidney left.”

  He led her away with a gentle tug at the elbow, not so far that they were out of earshot but far enough to confer on Elizabeth a responsibility that would be hers alone.

  “We can keep him here for a few days, flush his system, get rid of the salt and potassium. I’ve got some phosphorus-lowering medication. Some iron supplements may goose up the red blood-cell counts. He’ll feel better, a bit more chipper. Or…”

  He hesitated just for a moment. “We could do nothing.” He gave her a knowing look. She looked at Hans, then at me, her face momentarily stricken. Then she looked at the floor, composing her thoughts.

  “What about a transplant?” I blurted.

  “Hans, what do you think of our young American friend?” Elizabeth called to her brother. “I believe he’s offering you a kidney.”

  Hans said nothing, just looked tired.

  “Blimey, David, you are a little thick sometimes,” Elizabeth continued. “Did you draft those letters to the Voluntary Euthanasia Society in duplicate? You might want to take another read.”

  Kidney failure was a common conclusion to quadriplegia, and a fairly painless one at that. She turned serious and looked up at Worthy’s expectant face.

  “Do what you can, Peter. Make him feel better.” She walked over to Hans, took up a lifeless hand, and stared into his weary eyes. They stayed that way awhile, he in silence, his expression inscrutable.

  She leaned toward him on some signal I had not or could not detect, and put her ear near his lips.

  “‘Kill thy physician,’” he whispered.

  “‘And the fee bestow upon the foul disease,’” she said, completing the quote and giving him a sad, sweet smile. She kissed him on the forehead and signaled for me to leave with her.

  “‘The true beginning of our end,’” Elizabeth said with a smile as she handed me a glass of red wine that evening. The sky was darkening as we walked home. Elizabeth had raided Hans’s stash of Barolo and asked if I would be going to Maggie’s while Hans was “in hospital,” as the Brits put it.

  “Maybe,” I had said with a shrug. “Not tonight.”

  “Splendid,” she said, cocking her head, smiling just a touch and giving me a look of genuine affection. I saw for a moment how attractive she could be. “Then let’s have something Hans would hate.”

  That would mean a run to the chippy down on the Marine Parade. She knew I loved it, especially the chips deep-fried in the same oil used for the cod. I couldn’t explain the appeal, but French fries with a slightly fishy taste, salted with vinegar, were enormously pleasing. Expensive Italian red didn’t go at all, but I wasn’t complaining. Neither was Cristina, who had joined us, a rare occasion and another pleasure for me. I thought of my promise to Hans.

  “David, if I didn’t love you like a brother, who knows where we might go?” she sighed that night in the kitchen, her voluptuous lower lip rising in a teasing pout. Her black hair, combed to a shine, swung pleasingly before her eyes. She had the most perfect mouth.

  “Story of my life,” I grumbled. “Elizabeth, does she always act this way?”

  “Only since puberty,” Elizabeth replied, flashing a look of mock disapproval at her daughter.

  “Oh, c’mon, you two. I’m only joking. Sorry to tease, David. Really, I can be a right cow.” Instead of meeting my eyes, she looked down at the counter. I smiled. Her eyes, dark, almost black, lifted and locked on mine.

  It was a silly exchange, but it felt good, normal. OK, better than normal. I felt something stirring, beyond the lust I had felt the first time I laid eyes on Cristina. I didn’t try to suppress it under the guilt of unfaithfulness to Maggie or the self-loathing I had carried for months, knowing I could never win her. I had to admit to myself I wanted Cristina in some new way. Maybe it was folly, but I harbored ambition, and I didn’t care how wrong it was on so many fronts.

  That night, we spoke of Hans’s demise for the first time, as if it were imminent and inevitable. I hadn’t given it much thought, but Elizabeth’s studies, her preparation for the world of work, made sense now.

  “You’ve been amazingly patient, waiting him out, David,” Elizabeth said, searching out the last crumb of a chip from the greasy tip of the paper cone her meal had come in.

  I looked at her with a shocked expression.

  “D
on’t get me wrong. Pathetic as this might sound, he’s the man in my life. I certainly can’t count the boys this one brings round,” she said, nodding to Cristina.

  “Mother!” came the obligatory huff of protest.

  “Or the volunteers, no offense. Hans saved my life, David, and Cristina’s. He rescued us. He treats me like dirt at times, but I can hardly complain about this little world we’ve made here. Better than the alternative. Anyway, that chapter’s about to end, isn’t it? A blink of an eye, really.”

  And it was a blink of an eye. I had assumed the life that I beheld that first day in October had been fixed like that for years, and would be for years after. Not so. I was stumbling into a denouement. Charlotte Bromwell had died of breast cancer in 1981, just seven years before my arrival. She had seen her son ignore the wishes of his physical therapists, doctors, and nurses and sink into the worst kind of quadriplegia. She had seen her daughter return from Africa with a new appreciation of what she had left behind at Houndsheath, even if no apologies were on offer. She had seen her beautiful, olive-skinned granddaughter. But she hadn’t seen the cancer. The Bromwells were conscientious objectors to the National Health Service, but by then, they were too cash-poor for private practitioners. So Charlotte simply didn’t go to doctors. By the time it was caught, it was virulent and everywhere. A mastectomy, then another, chemo, round after round, all for naught. Charlotte didn’t stand a chance.

  Gordon Bromwell soldiered on for a while after that. He still had his politics. He had been much older than his wife. He had never considered that he might outlive her. It was easy enough at first. The servants did the cooking and cleaning. In London, cheering Thatcher on was a singular joy, especially from the backbenches of the House of Commons. In the end, however, the tragedies that had beset his family were too much for even him. It was bad enough when his foppish, gallant son had been reduced to a grumbling skull attached to a lifeless body. With Charlotte’s death, he was left with “Oh, Gordon, we are so sorry for your troubles;” “Oh, Gordon, really, anything we can do, just let us know;” “Oh, Gordon, you are a brave, brave man.” Like his son, Gordon Bromwell was not one for heroics.

  He came to enjoy the screaming students of the Animal Liberation Front more than his fellow members of Parliament, with their sickly sighs and expressions of support. The ALF came round pretty much every weekend to scream and stomp and spray garlic on the fox trails. At least he knew where they stood. It was the treacle at Whitehall that drove him to retirement, and to the rifle in the guest room, which he trained on the foxes and rabbits, and one day in 1985, on himself. It had been tricky, no doubt, placing the business end of a rifle in his mouth and firing it with the big toe of his right foot. But Gordon Bromwell used the tools at his disposal.

  A suicide, even late in life, nullifies a life insurance policy. Estate planning, such as it was in Britain, was no match for despair. Innumerate and orphaned, with a quadriplegic brother to care for, Elizabeth turned the fate of the North Downs estate over to a lawyer in Basingstoke she barely knew.

  “‘Liquidate,’ he said. ‘Render unto Caesar.’”

  Elizabeth poured the last of the bottle.

  “The National Trust was only too happy to take such a lovely estate off our hands. They’re turning it into some kind of conference center, business training or some such. Americans like that sort of thing, even if it is a bit drafty.

  “The collapse of the Bromwell fortune was swift. For a time—maybe just two months, it seemed like longer—Hans and I stayed at the house, just the two of us, and Cristina of course. She was getting to be a handful. One by one, the servants left. You know, it’s not like the old days, where the home of service is the only home they know. They have family scattered here and there now. They have places to go. And when we stopped paying them…well, loyalty will only get you so far.

  “That was when I first met dear Haversham. I had gone alone into the village, to a little antique store my mother used to humor. I only wanted someone to come back with me to Houndsheath to look at a few things. We needed cash. The one person I could not afford to lose was Hans’s nurse, and she needed paying. There was this doddering old lady at the shop. She was tall, I remember, like she would fall over with the next breeze. She had very long fingers. She told me a London furniture man would relish a look round the old house. She had some idea of my parents’ taste. She had been indulging them for years. Next day, the little Jew—oh dear, David, I’m sorry, I’ve done it again—Haversham pulled up in that little lorry. First thing he took away was the dining room table. Louis the Fourteenth, I remember. It was an almost-black mahogany, deep, deep red, inlaid with light burled walnut in the corners. The patterns were these intricate damask swirls, two heavy legs on each side splaying out into these dramatic, four-footed buttresses. It brought me what I thought was a fortune. Twenty thousand quid. I’d love to know what he sold it for. It cost me nothing in my mind. I always ate in the breakfast nook. And without that big heavy table, the dining room became this grand play space for Cristina. Got her off the banisters for a while.”

  “I remember that,” Cristina spoke up. “You piled up pillows and blocked off the entrance with chairs, so I could flop about on my own. I was getting pretty old by then, Mother. It wasn’t like I was a baby in a crèche.”

  “I know. We had so much on our minds then. It was hard to find you a playmate. I tried.”

  “There was that boy from the village, William.”

  “Yes, I remember him. His father had been a gardener at Houndsheath. Of course, we had to let him go, but on good terms. His son quite fancied you.”

  Cristina smiled. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  I imagined Cristina as a child, beautiful and utterly unselfconscious, lustrous dark hair a little unkempt, gangly arms, skinny legs, running wild—an only child in such an odd environment. Where was her father? How had she been wrenched from the Africa that had given her life? How had she gotten here, to No. 4 Imperial Lane, from there, a dying estate from a dying era? It broke my heart in some little, sweet way. I recognized the tenderness, allowed myself a glance at Cristina’s beautiful face, then turned from it.

  “But even that twenty thousand wasn’t going to pay the tax collector. I could’ve sold every stick of furnishing on the estate and not come close. Funny, my father the loyal Tory found no fault in anything Thatcher did, but in the end she did nothing for him. We pretty much lost it all, except the furniture that we could stuff into this flat.”

  “I’m, I’m sorry,” I stammered.

  “‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.’” She lit a cigarette, drained a vodka shot, then stood to do the dishes.

  “I wasn’t in when he did it. I had taken Cristina into Basingstoke to do some shopping, take care of a few things. Hans was, of course. He heard the shot, he reckons, but gunfire from that room was constant. It wasn’t till a servant knocked Dad up for dinner that the body was found.”

  I winced.

  “By then, you know, it felt like just me and Hans anyway, brother and sister against the world. I was protective, but truth be told, we were drifting apart. The bitterness over our entwined and ruined fates was just beginning to creep in. My father was an odd presence, like a hovering angel even when he was alive. He kept watch over me, kept me safe, always knew what I was up to. He had people, you know, seemingly all over the world, spies who knew how to get things done. He directed them, like a puppeteer, but always from afar. It doesn’t feel a lot different now, except he doesn’t appear to be as effective.”

  “Do you mind me asking,” I said gingerly, “why didn’t Hans do the physical therapy? It just seems like a self-preservation instinct would have kicked in.”

  “Ah, those cunts—pardon my language—the nurses and physical therapists, especially at Stoke Mandeville, fawning all over poor Hans. Expect they wanted into his pants, if you ask me. Probably why they wanted to talk to him about sex. They would have given anything to teach him
the way, climb right on top of his gurney and sit on his face.”

  “Mother!” Cristina snapped. She wasn’t teasing. She was angry.

  I looked at her, stunned. I had seen pictures of Hans before the accident, a dashing young man in Paris in a little flat, cooking or posing with some tarted-up girlfriend or his friends Julian and Simon, who have aged only slightly better than Hans. But he was a quadriplegic at Stoke Mandeville, with a lot of other cripples. All of the stories, from Hans himself even, pointed to his own willful self-neglect, a decision that life was not worth living in his state. Surely he wasn’t being exploited by the staff hired to care for him.

  “You’re joking, aren’t you?” I mustered.

  “Oh no, my dear David, you can hardly imagine the attraction: eligible bachelor from a posh background, father an MP with a title, and still so needy. The short life expectancy only heightened the attraction. I had to take him away from the harridans myself, get him back to Houndsheath. I could take care of him as well as they could. Of course, Mother accused me of sabotaging his recovery.”

  “These are flights of fancy, Mum, and you know it,” Cristina said, getting up to leave. “You don’t have to justify those days. Nobody faults you for what happened to Uncle Hans. Don’t try to find fault in anyone else.”

  Cristina gave me an appraising look, as if she wanted to know where I would carry this conversation, whose side I was on. My response was supposed to be reassuring. I was with her. She left the two of us alone in the kitchen, the usual state of things. But as she left, she allowed her bare arm to graze mine lightly, and she glanced back at me for one final estimation, her chin dropping slightly so she would look at me through thick eyelashes. I felt my cheeks burn.

  With her daughter gone, Elizabeth opened the cupboard and reached for the vodka. She took a shot and settled herself.