Kansas in August

by Patrick Gale

  ‘They came and took him away!’ she shouted. ‘Your horrid men came and took him in a plastic bag with handles.’

  ‘Which men?’

  ‘There were two. One was very fat. They said you’d sent them and it was all right.’

  Finally she started to cry in earnest, in hard, wrenched little sobs. She stood with the crook of one arm across her eyes and her small frame shook.

  ‘There. Ssh. It’s not your fault,’ Hilary started to say, but she ran stamping past him and down the stairs. He heard the front door open, then slam behind her.

  He set the cot upright once more, then walked around the room making a stack in his arms; changing mat, anorak, clean babygro, teddy, pack of nappies. He piled them all up in the bucket, which he nestled on top of the cot. Gingerly, because it was hard to see where he was going, he carried the lot down to the hall for Mrs Sharma to collect when she had time.

  The answering machine had recorded five messages in his absence. On his return to the living room he pressed ‘play’, then lay on the sofa-bed staring at the ceiling as he listened.

  ‘Hello, Hil. It’s Evelyn. Thanks so very much for a lovely party last night. Dan’s quite enchanting and I’d be delighted to godmother him for you. I bumped into Hannah – Hannah Flowers – in the library this morning and mentioned the possible court case and she’d be delighted to help out. She’d like to meet you in any case. Anyway, lovely party. ‘Bye.’

  ‘Hi, Possum. It’s Brij,’ said Bridget. ‘Blissy evening and even blissier baby. What a clever boy you are! Many thanks. Let’s go and get legless soon. Oh, and I’ve found a marvellous black babysitter for you. A bientôt.’

  ‘Hello, Hilary. It’s Henry here. Look, I’ve been asked for an interview at the new research hospital at Fontainebleau, so I’m off to stay with Dad and M – C tonight. Back next week sometime. Thursday or Wednesday probably. If you ring me before I go and let me know what they gave you, I’ll thank them for you. Otherwise I’ll just send love. Oh God. I’ve still got your present by the bread-bin, haven’t I? Come to supper when I get back so you can pick it up. Ring me, anyway. ‘Bye.’

  ‘Hilary Metcalfe? This is Peter Gorbling at the Department of Health and Social Security. We would like to make certain inquiries regarding your domestic situation.’ There was a pause, then a gale of laughter. ‘Had you fooled, didn’t I?’ said Richard. ‘Bravo! You’ve been and gone and done it now. We’re all very proud. No, honestly. Get Brij or someone to babysit and we can go dancing later on. There’s something going on at Helen’s, I think. I’m out now – auditions for Dutch lager; not me I know but il faut souffrir pour le cash. Back sevenish, but the machine’s on so you could always chat to that. T’ra.’

  ‘Hi, Hil. It’s big sister again. Sorry. I forgot to mention. There was some problem with picking up that blasted baby, but I spoke to the DHSS woman and she said she’d get someone round there today. ‘Spect Mrs Wotsit will let them in for you. Lots of love.’

  The machine stopped, bleeped and rewound its tape.

  Hilary drifted through to the kitchen to pour himself a glass of coke. The feeding bottle lay on top of the fridge. He started to put it away, then slumped against a wall, pressed the bottle to his baking forehead and, doubling up, wept.

  He wanted his mother, but his mother was his sister and she was going to France. He slid on to a chair, still clutching the bottle, and tried to tug off a piece of kitchen towel. He had no hand free to steady the roll, however, and the thing fell, unfurling, to the floor. Sobbing, nose bubbling, lips swollen, he clambered after it and almost laughed. Gasping for breath more steadily, he went back to pouring himself a coke and put the feeding bottle back inside the fridge.

  The drink calmed him. He was hung-over, that was half the problem. Fresh air always helped. He would take a smallish ride before it got dark and when he got back he could pour himself a proper drink and start ringing people up. It was Friday night, after all. Richard could take him dancing again, or to Helen’s if it was a party. The marking would have to wait.

  He hadn’t used his Walkman that morning because his head had been throbbing. He took it now, slipped the headphones over his ears, pressed the play button and set out. A late afternoon sun was out and Mary Martin gave him her vehement assurance:

  ‘I expect every one

  Of my crowd to make fun

  Of my proud protestations

  Of faith in romance.’

  Hil sang along with the thundering string punctuation, making a noise like a tuba. Sumitra was skipping on the pavement with a little boy. He waved to them and pedalled towards the Wood Lane junction.

  ‘And you’ll say I’m naive

  As a babe to believe

  Any fable I hear

  From a person in pants!’

  Somewhere in the background a lorry sounded its horn.

  Chapter twenty-five

  He had posed as the Narendra Saraswati and been found out. Her respectful devotion to him was now passion for an heroic trickster, and she waited gloomily for the punishment that must surely be meted out. After bathing her eyes at the kitchen sink, she slipped through the chattering women to the privacy of her own room. Here she silently let fly. She cracked the stolen record with her shoe and cut the palm of each hand with one of the fragments. Wincing, she hid the wounds with sticking plaster and ran back out to the street. If questioned, she would tell them she had fallen over.

  A small boy was dragging a skipping-rope past the shop-front.

  ‘Let me show you how,’ she said.

  He passed it to her, brightening. Deftly she whirled the rope about her and skipped, staring hard at the passing cars to concentrate her important thoughts.

  ‘All in together, girls,’ sang the boy and clapped in time with her thumping sandals. ‘Never mind the weather, girls. When it is your birthday, please jump OUT!’

  As panic hardened into deadly calm, there crystallized the resolve that when Shri Metcalfe’s moment came, she would have to die with him as a would-be propagator of a false religion.

  ‘January. February. March. April.’

  He might at least gain some consolation from her puny solidarity. She skipped faster, hurrying the boy’s recitation of months, then saw Shri Metcalfe leaving the flat. He rode past and waved; she stopped skipping and forgot to smile back. The boy chased the bike and on impulse she chased the boy, letting fall the skipping-rope in her haste. She saw him cross Wood Lane on his bicycle and froze.

  She saw the lorry as it bore down on him from the left, but she couldn’t shout. The lorry hooted twice, then pulled on its brakes with a screech as he rode into its path. The little boy laughed, turning to Sumitra for approval. Shri Metcalfe almost escaped, but the lorry struck his rear wheel and as the bicycle was torn beneath the giant tyres, he was flung up to where the lorry’s radiator smote him squarely on the back. His body was whipped in a broken heap to the side of the road.

  As the ensemble of horns burst out in the queue behind the lorry, Sumitra sensed that she was not allowed to die quite yet, being ordained for a secondary purpose. Leaving the boy to stare, she ran to the kiosk on a nearby corner and summoned an ambulance. Then she pushed through the gathering crowd and cast herself weeping on to his body. Huge white hands tried to haul her off, but she cried the louder. All she could think was that suddenly she was closer to Shri Metcalfe than she had ever been or was likely to be again. There was a thick streak of blood running from under his hair, and his legs were twisted unnaturally.

  ‘Don’t touch me. I love him,’ she announced and the hands let her alone. A woman thrust her head against his chest and announced that there were still signs of life.

  ‘Come on, dearie,’ said a black man in a uniform. ‘Is he your Dad? Where do you live, then?’

  ‘I love him,’ she informed him.

  ‘Have you ever been in an ambulance?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I won’t leave him.’

  ‘He’s coming too.’

  The amb
ulance was quiet as night inside. A cheerful woman with white hair tied Shri Metcalfe to a bed and held a plastic mask over his face. The mask hissed.

  ‘Are you gassing him?’ Sumitra asked.

  ‘No, love. This is to keep him alive.’

  ‘Oh, good.’

  Could this be a reprieve? Sumitra crouched on the floor of the ambulance and held one of his lovely hands to her lips and cheek, feeling the long bones in the fingers.

  ‘Who’s a good girl!’ said the woman with the white hair.

  ‘What do you know?’ thought Sumitra and gave her her briefest smile.

  Chapter twenty-six

  Thoroughly in control of last night’s sentimental pilgrimage, which he now dismissed as mere biological function, Rufus stepped out of the taxi at North Pole Road ready to explain all. He paid the driver with some of the money he had found in Henrietta’s kitchen drawer and rang her brother’s doorbell. For the first time in his life, truth seemed to be on his side. Last night he had confessed almost everything to ‘Sandy’, fearing the worst reaction, and had prompted a startling confession in return. Now he would make a clean breast of everything to Hilary. He was less sure how to tackle the problem of having effectively run off with the sister-in-law. In the extremity of the previous night, her revelation had struck him a blow from which he reeled afresh on waking. He had always known that Hilary had a sister called Henrietta, and what she did, but Hilary had cherished some idea that she disapproved of his lifestyle and so had kept the two of them apart. The only relative he had met had been that elderly, Volvo-driving godmother. Given that Henrietta had lied – well, that they had both lied – the misunderstanding was quite explicable. Given Hilary and Henrietta’s strong physical resemblance, the sexual attraction was perfectly straightforward. He would feed the final, delicate gobbets of truth to her while they were in France.

  No one came to the door. Denying that he felt remotely furtive, Rufus fished out his key and let himself in. He would make some tea, give Hilary half an hour to come back from wherever he was, then he would leave a charming letter (and possibly the key) before travelling home to pack his things.

  The hall was almost blocked by a baby’s cot filled with nappies and things. Presumably the vestiges of Mrs Sharma’s niece or whatever she had been. He climbed the stairs, conscious of a faint, medicinal smell that was not normally there. A boxful of empty wine bottles was waiting on the landing. Three full ashtrays lay on the kitchen table and what looked like a case of port lay on the lino underneath it. Rufus put the kettle on to boil and sat down. His heart leapt as he saw a pamphlet about DHSS tribunals. He frowned, as Hilary wasn’t signing on so far as he knew.

  The day’s moral courage was still strong and he hoped Hilary would come home soon. A letter was shamefaced and emotionally unfinished; he needed to suffer as some kind of expiation. A radio was playing in the Sharmas’ flat below; the kind of music Rufus abhorred. He pulled out the newspaper he was sitting on. It was a copy of The Stage and a bold red ring had been drawn around the announcement of an audition for chorus (male) for a revival of Kismet in Croydon. Same old hopeful Hil! The kettle came noisily to the boil and Rufus stood to turn it off. He opened the fridge. The only milk was inside a baby’s bottle and he took out the incongruous article between finger and thumb – doubtless some joke of Richard’s. The fluid looked watery. He unscrewed the teat and sniffed; the bottle had been washed in something medicinal. He wrinkled his nose and poured some of its contents into a mug. Staring at the dusk falling outside, he saw one of the yellow street-lamps flicker to life and knew that he was the proverbial heel. He determined to write a letter now and run away. If he saw the boy face to face, he’d have to stay. He’d be caught. Forgetting tea, panicking almost, he tore a sheet off the notepad on the wall and was looking for a pen when the telephone rang. He answered it without thinking.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Is that Hilary Metcalfe’s house?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘It’s Hammersmith Hospital here. We wanted to contact his family.’

  ‘What’s happened to him?’ asked Rufus, feeling sick.

  ‘Sorry. Who am I speaking to?’

  ‘A friend. We live together. What’s happened?’

  ‘There was an accident. He’s in a serious condition, but we think he’ll be all right.’

  ‘You must ring his sister.’ Rufus felt a burning in the pit of his chest. ‘She’s his only kin in the country. Dr Henrietta Metcalfe at Princess Marina’s Hospital.’

  ‘Ah yes. We’ve got that number here. And could I have your name please, Sir?’

  ‘Andrew. No. I mean … Oh fuck!’

  Rufus dropped the receiver. Within seconds he was down the stairs, out of the door and running down the road to his lover.

  Chapter twenty-seven

  ‘Bloody hell,’ shouted Henry, honking her horn at some pedestrians as she pulled off the Westway like a demon. Through waiting for them to cross, she was forced to stop at a red light. Flashes of hatred at Hilary for raining on her parade before it had even set out alternated with hasty oblations of superstitious apology: ‘Don’t go and die. Oh, God. Please no,’ she muttered. The light changed and she swerved off to the left in hot pursuit of Hammersmith Hospital.

  Buoyed up by the tandem treats of being invited to the Fontainebleau institute and learning that Rufus, unlike the late Andrew, was an eligible bachelor, she had floated through work. The telephone had rung half-way through the last consultation of the afternoon. Just half an hour before the latter started, Rufus had called to deliver a definite yes, so she had been lending only half an ear to old Ewan Cockburn and his dreary anal-oriented fantasies, working out how long she had to pack, run a check on the car and knock up something for them to eat. Then the bleak message had come through from the hospital.

  She knew that they never announced sudden deaths over the telephone, in case the newly bereaved drove badly and caused further casualties, but she drove like a maniac in any case, convinced that he was going to die before she could reach his side. She winced as she caught herself planning how best to postpone the interview in France without jeopardizing her chances.

  ‘I’m Dr Metcalfe. My brother’s just been admitted to Intensive Care. Which way is it?’ she asked, terrified of being shepherded into one of the small pink rooms they reserved for the breaking of bad news. There was one at Princess Marina’s; it had boxes of tissues, a kettle, sugar lumps and some teabags. She crossed her fingers behind her back.

  ‘Hello, Doctor,’ said the nurse. ‘I’ll show you the way. Sister Fraser, could you hold the fort?’

  Henry followed her sensible shoes down two corridors, her fingers slowly unclenching. She explained to the nurse that she was a big, brave doctor and would like the bad news now rather than later.

  ‘He’s unconscious,’ said the nurse, ‘but breathing fine. His legs are in a bad way, but nothing time won’t mend. The concussion is pretty severe.’

  ‘Did he fracture his skull?’ Henry asked, keeping her voice professionally steady.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘Poor chap,’ Henry muttered. She had fleeting visions: Hilary with a stroke; Hilary unable to eat properly; Hilary with a lopsided smile; Hilary unable to walk without a built-up shoe; Hilary – oh Christ – unable to dance. The nurse stopped at a door.

  ‘Here we are,’ she said brightly. ‘Unit Fourteen. I’ll be back at the desk if you need anything. I’ll send Dr Palmer round to chat with you?’

  ‘Bill Palmer?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Your brother’s young friend and daughter are in there with him.’

  ‘What?’ Henry paused with her hand on the door and felt a wave of relief. ‘Then there must have been some mistake. His name’s Hilary Metcalfe and he’s twenty-five.’

  The nurse’s brow furrowed as she checked a card on a board by the door.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s definitely him.’
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br />   Henry peered through the window into Intensive Care, Unit Fourteen. ‘Oh I see,’ she said, seeing. ‘Thanks.’

  The nurse said not at all and walked back to her post. Henry remained where she was for a moment to muster some measure of control.

  His ‘daughter’, evidently some administrative misunderstanding as she was the daughter of his Asian landlords, sat in a chair by one wall, staring lugubriously at his bed. His ‘young friend’ sat close by, holding one of his hands in his.

  ‘Damn. Damn. Shit,’ said Henry slowly, then took a breath and stepped inside.

  Rufus rose at once. She had been worrying about what to say, but he came straight over and took her in his arms. He hugged her warmly, his cheek wet on her neck.

  ‘Hi,’ he mumbled into her jersey and gave a fruity sniff. She stared over his shoulder at the little girl.

  ‘Hello,’ she said to him. ‘It was kind of you to come.’

  ‘I love him,’ the girl declared and returned her gaze to the bed.

  ‘It’s all rather hard to explain,’ Rufus began, still into her jersey.

  ‘But he was your fiancée?’ she finished for him.

  Rufus gave her another hug as answer. He sighed. No, he didn’t. Hilary sighed. Simultaneously they raised their heads and looked at the bed where her brother lay. His head was fetchingly bound in spotless white. The sheet was lifted off his legs by a wire cage. A monitor was wired into one of the pillows. She took the nearest hand and pressed it, making a mental note to bring him in some decent pyjamas.

  ‘Hil? It’s Henry. Henry and … Henry and Rufus. You’re going to be OK.’

  ‘Yes,’ added Rufus, rubbing the other hand.