The Loud Halo
Page 21
And the next day, looking like something the mice had been nibbling at during the night, he had come quite early down to the cottage to commiserate with me on my ‘sore head’.
The woman in the next bed said: ‘It’s wonderful to think I’ll be sleeping in my own room again on Friday night—and I won’t have to wake up in a morning and see all those memorial tablets over the beds. They fair give me the creeps.’
I agreed most heartily with her, for it is disturbing and disheartening to come out of an anaesthetic with one’s body a tangle of pain to be confronted by a well-polished, but sombre plaque stating that one’s bed is dedicated to the memory of a deceased relative by a loving family. Seen vaguely, in conjunction with massed flowers and the white draperies of the nurses, the plaques give one the feeling that one is attending one’s own funeral.
‘It’d be far better if they had a few pictures over the beds instead of those things,’ said my neighbour. ‘The adventures of Tarzan all along the walls would do more to cheer us women up than a lot of old memorials.’
‘It’s pretty awful psychology, I should think,’ I said. ‘And I’m sure a few delectable pin-ups would benefit the men’s ward.’
She laughed. ‘Ach, well, you’ve done your little bit, anyway, dearie.’ She laughed again and I darted her a look of venom while every nerve in my body cringed with embarrassment.
‘Your blessed brother-in-law,’ I commented.
I had been lying stark-naked on my bed under the infra-red lamp the previous day and though the screens were around me the nurse had left a gap so I could watch the ward clock and call her when my cooking was completed. I was basking contentedly in the soothing heat from the lamp and so paid little attention to the tall man in a dressing-gown who had just come into the ward and was talking to the nurse. I had not taken particular notice when, guided by her pointing finger, he made his way along the line of beds in my direction and it was not until a second or two before he reached my bed that I realised his proximity. Immobilised by an intravenous feeder and in any case too weak to move quickly I could only stare with agonised horror as he leaned his arms on my screens and greeted me with startled affability. I screwed my eyes tight shut and a moment later heard my neighbour’s voice lifted in rebuke.
‘Andrew! This is me over here.’
His head had disappeared by the time I could endure to open my eyes again and there was much awed whispering from the direction of the next bed. When he had gone and, my cooking over, I was settled beneath the bedclothes again, my neighbour called to me. ‘That was my brother-in-law. Seemingly they brought him into the men’s ward yesterday for an X-ray.’
‘I don’t care if he is your brother-in-law,’ I stated flatly. ‘He’s a blundering oaf.’
She laughed with irritating complacency. ‘He just made a mistake in thinking the nurse was pointing to your bed,’ she excused him. ‘But he told me to tell you he was awfully sorry for coming on you like that.’ She tried hard to look solemn.
‘I feel so ashamed,’ I grumbled. ‘And I shall always be dreading the possibility that I may meet him again somewhere. Imagine how I shall feel if I ever come face to face with a complete stranger who’s seen me in my birthday suit.’
‘Ach, but you have no need to worry, dearie. He’ll never recognise you.’
‘I sincerely hope not,’ I said.
‘Oh, no, he won’t honestly,’ she assured me with artful positiveness. ‘He told me he didn’t bother to look at your face.’
On Thursday evening my neighbour sat on my bed and chatted with me for as long as the nurse would allow. I always thought of her as ‘Rosie’ because her offhand geniality, her voluptuous figure and her habit of calling everyone ‘dearie’ made me think of a typical English barmaid. In fact she was the post-mistress of a village that, when she described it sounded to me to be only a little more sophisticated than Bruach. Speaking of her own illness she said: ‘My man was saying he didn’t believe they would have needed to keep me so long in here had we been able to get the doctor when I first felt ill. But it’s the same every year in our village.’ She gave a sigh of resignation. ‘It’s no use wanting the doctor once the grouse-shooting season’s begun for he’s always too busy.’ She fed me a segment of orange. ‘You know, people never like to make a complaint against the doctor,’ she said. ‘There are doctors in the Highlands can get away with murder and people wouldn’t say a word against them. The last doctor we had was asked to go to a man once that was sick and he promised to go but he forgot all about it. A few days later he was passing the house and he sees there’s a funeral. He suddenly remembers the sick man and gets out of his car to ask after him. He finds it’s the very man they’re burying, so he just follows behind the bier to the burial ground. Afterwards all the relatives were saying, “Ach, there we were miscalling the poor doctor for not coming out to visit the man but it seems he’s not so bad after all. He did come to the funeral.” ’
‘We’re luckier than that where I live,’ I told her. ‘But I do remember one doctor we had who loved to buy cattle. If he saw a nice-looking beast anywhere along the road he couldn’t rest until he’d found the owner and bargained with him for the cow. It would take hours sometimes and it didn’t matter at all if he was supposed to be going to an urgent case.’
‘Rosie’ got up. ‘Oh, well, I suppose I’d best get to my bed. The morning will come all the quicker for it.’
‘What time is the ambulance to take you?’ I enquired.
‘Ambulance? I’m having no ambulance,’ she asserted. ‘My man’s hiring a car for me since he heard what happened to the last woman from our village that was supposed to be sent home by ambulance.’
‘Did it break down?’ I asked.
‘No, oh, no! But the woman said she was greatly taken with the way the ambulance driver kept turning round to ask her if she was feeling all right. She kept telling him she was fine. Then he said would she like a cup of tea at the next hotel they’d pass. She told him she would, so he took her inside and bought a nice tea for her. Then she got back into the ambulance and they started off again and when they were about half-way home the driver asked her again if she was sure she felt all right. So she told him again she still felt fine. “In that case,” he asked her, “would you mind going home by tram for the rest of the way and I’ll pay your fare for you?” She looked at him wondering what was the matter with him and he said, “You see, I have a girl friend lives just about here and if you’ll go home by train I can go and spend the time at her house before I have to get back to the hospital.” ’
‘And did she go home by train?’
‘Oh, yes. She didn’t like to say no, seeing as he’d bought her tea, but my man says he’s not taking the risk of it happening to me.’ She was climbing into bed as she finished her story and there was a crackling of paper as she commenced her supper of biscuits, for ‘Rosie’s’ large appetite was not to be satisfied with hospital rations.
The lights in the ward were dimmed and when I had managed to wriggle my poor bottom, that was punctured like a sieve with injections, into the least agonising position, I drowsed first into the short segments of dreams that precede sleep and then into the drugged doze from which I was awakened well before five in the morning so that my bed could be made. More than at any other time this early-morning eruption into activity, just when sleep was deepest, made me yearn for my own bed and the lazy, undemanding winter dawns in Bruach.
When morning came ‘Rosie’ was claimed by a smugly delighted husband and a gently fussing sister and her bed was soon occupied by a little girl who reminded me so much of Fiona that, except for the colour of hair, they might have been one and the same person. She was just as perverse, just as imperious and before she had been in the hospital more than a few hours she had acquainted herself with the complete genealogies of every nurse and every patient in the ward.
The long days dragged increasingly in proportion as my recovery speeded up. Each morning the surgeons, anonymous i
n their white coats, came and smiled down at me with cool, detached smiles and prodded my body with deft fingers. They applied stethoscopes to my stomach that was as bloated as a Botticelli angel’s and congratulated me solemnly on its reboant rumblings. When I was not asleep I lay and listened to it with the same sort of clinical satisfaction and when, thinking to amuse myself, I put a piece of toilet paper (stamped ‘Government property’) over a comb and started to play it, it was some time before the rest of the patients in the ward realised that the noise I was making was intentional. And when a storm came out of a ragged sky, bullying the tall trees in the hospital grounds and rattling the ward windows, it was some consolation to know that all the wind in the world wasn’t inside my stomach as in moments of agony I was willing to believe.
At last my own day for leaving came, but it was only to go on to a convalescent home and there I spent a blessedly sober New Year.
Morag had a fire going and my cottage warm and bright with welcome when I returned at last to Bruach and the overwhelming kindness of my neighbours.
‘Did they tell you what was wrong with you?’ Morag asked at last. ‘We were told you were very poorly but nobody rightly seemed to know what it was.’
‘I don’t know myself,’ I replied. ‘They weren’t very forthcoming at the hospital.’
So a few weeks later when the nurse called I asked her if she knew what had been wrong with me.
‘All they told me was that you were terribly constricted and it was a very big operation,’ she replied.
‘I wonder just what that means?’ I asked, but she shrugged her shoulders.
It was not long after my conversation with the nurse that I met Hector and Erchy coming up from the shore with paint brushes and scrapers in their hands and looking as though they had put in a full day’s work. ‘We’ve had Ealasaid up on the beach,’ they told me in reply to my glance of enquiry.
‘Why, was there something wrong with her?’ I asked.
‘Och, aye; she was terrible constricted.’
‘Constricted?’ I repeated, almost choking on the word. ‘How do you mean?’
‘It means she had a terribly dirty bottom,’ elucidated Hector. ‘Covered all over wiss weeds and tsem big barnacles. It’s days we’ve been now scrapin’ tsem off her and scrubbin’ at her. It’s been a right big job we’ve had wiss her.’
‘And is she all right now?’ I quavered, stifling the wild laughter that was threatening to shatter me.
‘All right?’ repeated Erchy, ‘I’ll say she’s all right. Just you wait till you see her gettin’ goin’ again. You’ll hardly know her she’ll be that much faster.’
I too am a lot faster now.
Epilogue
The morning was cold when my companions and I pushed open the door of the station waiting-room and saw the enormous fire we turned and stared at each other in joy and amazement. We rushed to crouch in front of it and were just beginning to feel our chilled bodies responding to the warmth when the door banged open and an overalled man came in brandishing a long-handled shovel. He gave us a perfunctory greeting and then, walking up to the fire he lunged at it with his shovel and lifted off most of the burning coals.
‘Hey!’ we reproached him testily. ‘Why are you doing that?’
‘I need it to light my engine,’ he informed us with great dignity. ‘You’ll be wantin’ the train to start, won’t you?’ The door slammed behind him.
My companion grinned. ‘A real Highland farewell for you,’ was his comment.
We huddled over the few coals left in the grate until a disgustingly cheerful porter came in and covered them with a shovelful of dross. I took a flask out of my bag and put it along with a packet of bread and butter and some hard-boiled eggs on the grimy table.
‘The last of your own eggs?’ queried my companion.
‘Yes,’ I admitted with a sad smile.
‘I hope you’re not going to miss having your own produce,’ he remarked.
‘Of course I shall miss it,’ I told him. ‘But not so much as I shall miss the people.’
‘And the scenery?’ he enquired.
‘And the scenery.’
‘And the rain and the gales and the midges?’
I shuddered.‘Not the midges.’
‘You’re not likely to be travelling on buses where the driver takes a ferret or a gun and invites the passengers to come and help him get a rabbit,’ he warned.
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘Nor where it’s permissible to relieve a dull night journey by putting the headlights full on people so as to watch them fall into the ditch.’ I chuckled in spite of my gloom.
‘What would you be planning to do tomorrow if you were going back to Bruach?’ asked my companion.
I thought for a moment. ‘If the Lord spares me,’ I began, and he giggled. ‘I should probably be starting to dig for potatoes.’ Immediately I said it I smelled the new-turned earth and saw the finished lazy beds looking like a tray of overdone sausage-rolls.
‘And you’d end the day with backache!’
‘Oh surely,’ I affirmed. ‘If the Lord spared me.’
‘You won’t be hearing that expression used where you’re going.’
‘I once heard Morag say, “I believe the poor man will die tonight surely” and then she added automatically, “if the Lord spares him.” ’ We both giggled. ‘I remember old Sarah telling me once, “Miss Peckwitt, if I was to die in the workhouse I don’t believe I’d ever live down the shame of it.” ’ The memories came crowding back as we ate in silence for a few minutes.
‘I’m glad Bonny’s gone to a good home,’ I said. ‘It was an awful wrench parting with her.’
‘And your hens? You’re satisfied about them?’
‘Oh, yes!’
Janet had taken my hens although only a couple of months previously she and her brother had sworn to give up poultry-keeping altogether because it was too much trouble to confine the hens and, if they were allowed to roam, there were too many complaints from neighbours. So they had started to kill off and eat two hens each week and this had continued until there was only one hen left. Then Janet’s brother had struck. ‘I’m scunnered of killin’ the poor things,’ he had complained. ‘An’ I’m scunnered of eatin’ them anyway, an’ I’m damty sure this last one has got so tame I haven’t the heart to kill the beast.’
‘What will we do with her then?’ Janet had asked him. ‘It’s no use keepin’ one hen. She’ll only get lonely and go off layin’.’
‘Aye, well in that case we’ll have some more to keep her company,’ her brother had said and so my own offer had come just at the right time. It was such a typically Bruach incident that remembering it brought a warm glow of amusement.
‘It wasn’t Janet’s brother who shot all the hens, was it?’ my companion asked.
‘No, that was another man. He’d always hated seeing the hens round the house but they belonged to his mother. He didn’t dare do anything about them while she was alive because he believed she’d got a nice little nest egg put away and if he upset her she’d probably leave it to someone else. Anyway the morning after she was buried he stationed himself outside the little pop-hole of the hen house where the hens came out and he shot each one of them as it appeared.’ I grimaced. ‘He wasn’t much liked in the village. Even Morag found it difficult to say a good word for him.’
My companion looked at me enquiringly.
‘He was supposed to have fathered a child on a friend of hers but the girl’s father refused to let her marry him even so. The poor girl died in child-birth and on the day of the funeral this man got out his bagpipes and marched round and round the father’s croft playing jigs. He was touched, I think,’ I added.
There were sounds of increasing activity on the station and we opened the door of the waiting-room to look out. There was still some time before the train would leave and the compartments would be cold still.
‘You’re going to miss Morag,’ said my companion as we sat down again.
‘And that man with the thatch of red hair who was always saying rude things to everybody?’
‘Oh, him!’ I exclaimed. ‘Yes, I shall miss him, too.’ I remembered something. ‘Did I ever tell you about the stuff he gave me to put on my hair?’ My companion looked blank. ‘I’d been grumbling to him that my hair was coming out in handfuls on the comb,’ I explained, ‘and he suddenly dashed off into his house and brought out a bottle of stuff which he urged me to use. He told me that many years ago, when he was working on a ship, his own hair had started to fall out. The ship had chanced to call at some little place in Portugal and there, very worried by now, he’d decided to go and find a chemist to see if he could get something to cure it. The chemist had had no English but had seemed to understand his complaint and had given him a bottle of lotion which he had indicated he should rub into his scalp morning and evening. In a couple of weeks his hair had stopped falling out and was growing thicker and stronger than ever before. His shipmates had been very impressed and when the ship had called in the little port on her return journey they had all trooped up to the chemist and laid in a stock of this wonderful hair lotion.
‘Did you use it?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘After the Stallion Mixture I was a bit suspicious. I was glad I hadn’t too when a friend of Mary’s came and translated the instructions for me—they were in Portuguese, of course. It turned out to be “a certain cure for mange in cats and dogs and other fur-bearing animals”.’
‘His own hair was a jolly good recommendation for it,’ chuckled my companion.
‘It was that same man who told me about an aunt of Janet’s who used to brew whisky in her shebeen long after it was made illegal,’ I resumed when we had stowed our luggage and were settled in the compartment. ‘Actually she was still alive when I first went to Bruach and I’ve never met a jollier old soul. She was always chock full of impishness even at eighty-two.’