by H. S. Cross
Sometimes a dose of brandy would take the edge off his complaints and calm the sensation of dread. Sometimes he lay in bed until the boys’ second morning bell, imagining a sanatorium at the top of an Alp. If only the right doctor existed, one who knew him and could prescribe just the right regimen … instead he had Mrs. Firth pounding his door, forcing him to stir, to wash, to dress.
As to where my patients acquire their “poisons,” there are always unscrupulous persons who for a price will provide what they so earnestly desire.
Merewether would know such people, or would know someone who knew them, surely?
I discussed your question with a boy on the ward, and he reports that here in King’s Lynn there is at least one public house where, upon making discreet inquiries, one might be shown into a room where an individual known as “the doctor” will procure whatever one requires. I’m confident he tells the truth—before coming to us, he was in the habit of injecting a shocking amount of morphine each day.
He had forgotten that it could be injected. He’d seen it in the war, of course, even administered the injections on occasion. Until now, though, that substance, which had delivered such mercy to those on the brink of death, had been nothing to do with the bitter drops Kardleigh kept in his dispensary. Was there in fact a difference between them? She hadn’t said why the boy on the ward had resorted to injections, but it was possible that he’d first required them in a field hospital. John didn’t think Captain Lewis took anything. He got around the Academy well enough in his chair, never complained, was a paragon of efficiency. True, there were days he failed to appear, and occasionally Jamie’s affairs would fall into disarray when, they understood, his secretary was under the weather. John had in those cases assumed a cold, but what if Lewis’s condition were more fragile than it appeared? Why else would Kardleigh keep ready vials in the dispensary?
This boy tolerated the morphine well enough. His trouble was gin. He was barely alive when he arrived. I can’t tell you how they revived him.
Her accounts, after all, were a relief. Her patients could not teach history lessons, run a House, or conduct correspondence. They could not travel with colleagues to the polls and vote in the general election. They could not vote contrary to their colleagues and contrary to the nation, casting their ballot for the opposition, however doomed it may be. The fact that John had no convincing reason to vote for the Labour Party other than a vague sentimental support for the underdog was neither here nor there; he, unlike those who’d abandoned ordinary life, could still exercise his native-born right as an Englishman without having to explain himself to his friends, his colleagues, or his employer.
* * *
The city of York always induced in John a mild claustrophobia, made worse by the city walls, which closed around the crowded, twisting streets. Still, he reminded himself, it was a half holiday, and he was at liberty, or would be once he’d finished Jamie’s errand and then fetched the book for his aunt’s birthday next week. The proprietor of the Crooked Staff greeted him warmly and behaved as if he hadn’t been waiting seven months for John to collect the novel he’d ordered. John let him wrap it up but realized with shame that he could never send his aunt a book called Vile Bodies, no matter how entertaining Mr. Waugh’s previous novels had been. Pretending he’d ordered it for someone else, he solicited the man’s advice for his aunt and then settled on a book of stories by Mrs. Mansfield, which he asked the man to post on for him. Freed from the weight of a long procrastination, he tramped around to four different printers before settling on one he felt confident would produce the new prospectus in a tasteful, timely, and frugal manner.
More than an hour yet until his train, and all he wanted was to lie down and close his eyes. His stomach felt off, though he couldn’t think how his usual breakfast of toast and tea could have gone awry. A wind was whipping papers off the ground and penetrating his insufficient suit. The Hanged Man possessed a large fire, so he worked his way inside, the crowd much larger than reasonable for four o’clock of a Wednesday afternoon. Huddling by the hearth, he could feel the muscles in his back shuddering, like butterflies drying their wings. He downed one medicinal scotch and ordered another, but despite the fire and the smoke and the red faces of the workmen around him, his skin crawled, and the chill bored deeper. A wall of voices: Labour lost York, Burgess out, Lumley in, foreigners and their blethering cheek. John had skimmed The Times and its columns on The Belgian Reaction, Opinion in Denmark, The Soviet Explanation, but he didn’t think the Hanged Man would appreciate his treatise on foreign affairs. In any case, the twitch had disappeared, and perspiration was trickling under his collar. He returned his glass to the bar and strained to think of how to say to the barman what Nurse Riding’s patient had told her he said. His shoe caught the flagstone, he stumbled, someone laughed, and the barman told him to mind himself or be upskelled.
—I …
He groped for words. The barman pulled his head back like a goose. Was it a doctor he was wanting?
—I understood there was a man called the doctor here.
Chatter, chatter, muscles on his back.
—Oh, aye?
—Aye.
The man wiped his hands and lifted the counter. John followed him out the back to an alleyway. Tap door end of snicket, look frinit, and he was gone.
On the Alp, he’d be summoned by bells, told when to sleep, walk, eat. Wrapped in the knowing arms of the place, he’d give in and the pain would cease and the longing subside and the mountain air would cleanse him. The door scraped open to his knock, and he tripped inside down a dark flight of stairs. Cots, couches, curtains, the room went back and back. He waited for his eyes to adjust. It was cold inside, the temperature of vice.
He was not there, not truly. He was watching a man like himself ask for the doctor. People shuffled aimlessly, and there was smoke, sweet, flowery, like roasted chicken. A man with one eye asked him what he needed. He hadn’t got so far as planning what to say, but he babbled about the front and what they did for dying men. The doctor brought out a vial, brought out a strap, brought out a needle, led him to a cot, wrote a price on a piece of newsprint. Wrote it with a pencil stub. John could pay the price. He did not fear the needle. But he knew all at once that he must leave, the cellar and the city. Upstairs in the alley, it was milder, wetter. How curious that Hell should be colder than the night.
A cab took him to the station, and the train took him away, Warthill, Holtby, Stamford Bridge, away from the flowers and the chicken and the man who left his eye behind, to another cab and the Wetwang road, its holes, its concealment. Mistake averted was no mistake at all. She need never see, in word or in fact, what he’d become—only nearly become. His problem was a late-October flu, nothing a bowl of soup and a good night’s sleep wouldn’t cure. He could taste her mouth as it tasted on the platform, filling him with the fire of all the holy spirits—oranges and lemons, farthings.
* * *
Morning, rain, Mrs. Firth at his door.
—Chapel twenty minutes, she said.
Where, God, had the rising bells gone? He forced himself to move, if only to turn his head to the wall.
—Wire come, last night.
—Wire?
—On your desk.
His feet were on the floor, every pain gone. She had answered his kiss, not in a letter but in the brevity of a wire, mercy like an arrow, swift and sharp. Mustn’t rush it. Must remember, recall for the future every moment of this day: this clock in the hall, this corridor of his House, boys tramping down the stairs. What would he tell them once he could tell? He had some money from the maiden aunts, enough to live simply, plainly, with goodness. How would she say it? What words would mark his history, correcting its course from now to its end?
The drapes had been opened, and rain was tickling the French windows, perfect counterpoint to the pool of lamplight that ringed the holy wire. Origin, Ely. Inside—not yet. Take a second to recall what was passing, the years of longing—suddenly
tender—and Jamie, the Bishop, the boys, the Common Room, yes and even Nurse Riding, her son and her unfortunates and her spoiled second chance. He nudged the point of his knife against the flap. Don’t rush, don’t rush. Remember everything, hold it in your heart, remember every moment of this blessed … bless …
41
When God made agreements with people in the Bible, his contract was clear. Even if the terms could make your skin crawl—a whopping great lamp moving by itself between animal parts—even then, nobody doubted what had happened, and no one got confused later. In Meeting they mostly talked about the Light when they meant God. This Light didn’t act like the Lord in the Bible, but then real people didn’t act like books and the Bible was only a book.
Her mother was cured. She herself had done her bit, as well as she could do. She’d swept up the mess and sent it away in two parcels. Done, dusted, past. But then came the harrowing weekend. To harrow meant to dig with a plow, to crush and to break and basically to plunder. She’d been expecting something good that weekend; her mother was turning thirty-five, and now there were years more to come. The harrowing started at Mrs. K’s, when her mistake came snarling out of the ground. She thought it had been wise to send all the letters away, but in Mrs. K’s kitchen she saw how close she had come to ruining everything. History was full of blood sacrifices, and if killing off a friend—could she call him one?—if such a killing didn’t count as sacrifice, what would? It wasn’t like a lamp moving in the night, but that was the contract: her mother or the boy.
Of course, that was only the beginning. After you killed things on an altar, you had to amend your life and be serious about your duty. Sleepers, wake, for night is flying! The watchmen on the high are crying. People sang it in the streets at Christmastime. She had been asleep, but from this point forward, she would watch.
When Uncle John left, the incursions began. Had they been happening before without her noticing? Her mother’s face, often flushed. Eyes unrested, attention like gnats. She said she had hay fever, but did she really? Watchmen’s leave, canceled. Effort doubled: arranging books according to the color of their names, and then when her father couldn’t find the one he wanted, sorting them back alphabetically; preparing dinner; stopping by her father’s premises after school and waiting until he came home; early one morning finding a glass on the mantel, the first in Ely, washing it, replacing it, half emptying whiskey bottle and refilling with water. All this, then one night a skirmish on the walls.
In the old house, you could hear everything; here only a tune, though one no watchman could ignore. In the bathroom was an airing cupboard, and in the back of the cupboard some plaster had come away and you could touch the lathe and if you put your face close … The back of their radiator had cobwebs, but you could see the bed. It had sounded bad, but now it seemed he was only teasing her; she was wearing her shift and laughing as he complained of her secret lovers. But then she walked past and he stopped her, taking her wrists and pulling clips from her hair, dings on the floorboards as she pulled away and fell to him, hairbrush sliding towards the bed and disappearing beneath it. Sounds were cries and not cries, words and not words.
Watchmen, attention, your Prince and Captain cometh.
Report, men?
Something, my lord, against the walls. But the night is dark, the moon snuffed, may chance it was no enemy. May chance it was …
Understood. Return to posts.
Days and weeks learned by heart: eyes good, color good, appetite good then quite good. Post fetched every day from the door to the table. Fetched that day, too, reviewed that day, too. Three pieces for her mother about the German children; one from Mrs. K, infallible Wednesday letter; a notice from her school; the last—hark, men. Postmark Paris. Pocket, not table. This was not filching. Review then return, no one the wiser.
On the train she examined it. Their old address had been struck out and the new one written by a different hand. The penmanship looked foreign, but the numbers weren’t French.
My dear Margaret …
This, watchmen, this. This was what they were for. Notebook, pencil, six minutes to their stop—this, men, concerned tomorrow, and if they replied and posted it before school, he would receive it today at the London address here. Makeshift letter, yes, no time for frills: Oh, dear Dr. Zarday! Her mother was overjoyed to receive his letter. Truly, she was cured, as they realized soon after leaving the sanatorium. Her father had returned, and so her mother could not correspond, as Dr. Zarday must understand. But she would come, in her mother’s stead, tomorrow to his lecture. À bientôt!
Watchmen didn’t lie, but watchmen did as duty required: French shoes and skirt to be exchanged for school uniform after lunch. The stop in Cambridge was on her way home, Wednesday half holiday not hard to explain. The lecture was free. She wouldn’t speak to anyone.
In the lecture hall, two young men sat down to her right, and a third came to her left who was their friend. When she offered to swap seats with the one, they refused, treating her as if she’d been part of their clique all along. They puzzled over the lecture title, The Power of Persuasion in Modern Medicine, and asked if the speaker was Austrian.
—Magyar, she blurted.
They smiled, curious.
—He’s Hungarian, she explained.
They weren’t much older than the boys at her school, but they sported colorful blazers and cologne. They peppered her with questions and made her laugh, like the boy in the chair loft but more confident. They didn’t give their names, but soon she was addressing them as they addressed each other, Toad, Van Gogh, and the Comrade. The one called Toad sat at her right hand, and once the lecture began, he drew comments in a pocket notebook, which he passed with his silver pencil so she might sketch a response. Zoltan Zarday’s talk went over her head, but the Toad’s silent banter made her sides hurt from holding in laughter.
When his uppercase told her—not invited, but informed—that she would join them afterwards at a place called the Foot and Fungus, the watchmen recalled her appointment with Dr. Zarday. Lecture adjourned, she snaked through the crowd, rousing the watchmen to their duty. Give the thing to say that will snuff his questions forever. Send the shot true for your Captain and your Prince.
He had trimmed his beard and looked as though he’d spent time in the sun. His voice cut—
—Cordelia Líoht!
Familiar, shushing, warm, as if her chest held a half-cooked egg that oozed from a hairline crack. Then his arms were around her and with them the smell of his tobacco and the prickle of his jacket. He squeezed her hard and planted a kiss on the crown of her head, and the flood rose, stinging behind her eyes, the temptation to tell him everything. Watchmen, watchmen! She said her mother was cured. His face dimmed, and he took her hands: she must take tea with him, very dear girl, tell him all from the very beginning. Show him the cukrászda in this English town of hers.
People were pressing round, but he kept a hand on her shoulder as he spoke to them, as if she were under his protection and he could hear a secret and keep it. Across the hall the doors stood open, her boys smoking on the pavement. As he went to fetch a paper for a man, she stepped back and then along the aisle, breaking outside to the boys.
The Heel and Toe public house was full in every nook, but the Comrade led them to a cellar that was dim and full of smoke. The Toad put his hand in the small of her back and steered her to a table where other boys welcomed them. She couldn’t join their jokes about men they were studying, but when the Toad said she knew Zoltan Zarday, they addressed her as an equal. The Comrade had been to Paris in the summer, and his talk of its rues and cafés concerts gave way to her descriptions of salons, the spas of Vichy, the glaciers of Italy, the mouths of the Volga. Van Gogh brought a tray with long glasses and slotted spoons, and Toad showed her how to put a sugar cube on the spoon and hold it over the glass while Van Gogh poured water. The sugar dissolved through the spoon and mixed with the green cordial, swirling and clouding like potions in child
ren’s stories, and they were lifting the glasses to their lips, smelling sharp and—
—Is it spirits?
They all laughed.
—The Green Fairy!
They laughed again, and Toad’s breath warmed her ear as she tipped the cordial onto her tongue. Licorice like the cakes her grandmother made at Christmas, and something else—lemon? coriander?—smoothing, soothing laughter. Toad’s fingers were twiddling with her sleeve, swishing the cuff buttons in and out of their holes, and they called for more fairy, and the light smelled green, and his fingers stretched like vapor from a bottle, swirling around with the cigarette smoke, warm at her ear a licorice lip, and her spine rose and it was at her mouth and in it, tongue soft and sweet—first kiss, with a Toad, not frightful but fair—warm ears, warm throat, spreading, spreading, Christmas-cakey-lemon-balm of mother’s love, mother’s arms, mother’s—
Shot, dart and spike. And her coat was in her hand and her satchel on her arm and she was falling up the stairs and through the people to the street. She ran but the moon said, Late, too late. Bounding for the train, she knew something clung to the carriage, like things she couldn’t draw. Watchmen, watchmen! Gates open on their hinges! Train screeched in—run for home. Mustn’t, mustn’t panic. Level head, faithful heart. Mercy, Captain. Mercy, Prince. Light bled from their windows, such light, rays. Knowing, then, like shrapnel.
