by Francis King
‘I’m exempt. I have asthma.’ There was no reason why I should feel self-defensive and guilty but I did.
‘Oh, yes, your asthma!’
A silence followed, eventually broken by the sound of voices from beyond the dining-room door.
Nanny jumped to her feet. ‘Oh, there they are!’
I soon came to hate the rigid manner of the two nurses in their starchy uniforms. Clearly, they resented my intrusions into the sickroom. Clearly too, they even more resented any task that Hammond asked me to do for him. On one occasion, as I was patting a pillow, one of the two women snatched it from me. ‘I can do that!’ A few days later, when I had begun to read to him the news from the Morning Post, the other, who was then on duty, interrupted: ‘I think he ought to get some sleep now. Doctor said that sleep was the best thing for him.’ No longer did I occupy the dressing-room, since that was where, the door always open, one or other was always sentinel. My new room, far larger, with a yellowing sitz-bath with rusty taps in one corner of it, was at the other end of the long corridor.
One afternoon, when one of the two had left and the other had still not arrived, I was alone with Hammond. His face was blotched with curious reddish-purple swellings, each the size of a then penny piece, and his forehead was creased and shiny with sweat. His eyes were closed as, seated in an upright chair, I stared across at him with a dull, heavy mingling of repugnance and grief. There was a rusty stain of blood, shaped like a star, on his pillow, whether from his mouth, his nose or somewhere else I could only guess. The ammoniac smell was overpowering.
His eyes opened blearily. He stared, then screwed them up. ‘Mouse,’ he muttered.
‘Mouse. Oh, Mouse. It’s you.’
I got up slowly, approached the bed and lowered my hand. At once, with a swiftness that struck me with momentary terror, one of the claw-hands shot up and gripped it. ‘Oh, Mouse, I feel so ill. Why do I feel so ill?’
‘It’s because of the temperature. That’s all. But it’s going down,’ I added, lying. ‘You’re getting better.’
‘Oh, don’t be silly, Mouse. I’ve had it. I’m sure I’ve had it. I thought I’d had it after the crash and I was wrong. But this time …’ He raised his head and then let it fall back sideways on the pillow.
‘I forgot to shave you this morning.’ I had noticed, for the first time, the stubble on his chin. He was always so careful about his appearance.
‘Did you know that the hair and the nails still grow on dead people?’ The almost exact repetition of what he had once before said to me was eerie.
Once again the claw-hand shot out and grabbed mine. The astonishing strength of its grip almost made me cry out. I remember thinking: a drowning man might grip one like that.
‘You know, Mouse, I’m frightened. Terrified. Yes, terrified.’ His body jerked from side to side as though in an epileptic spasm. Then suddenly he yelped: ‘Oh, hold me, Mouse, hold me! I’m losing everything!’
I had always tried to touch him as little as possible. I had always hated doing all those intimate things that had become part of my daily duties until the arrival of the nurses. But now I leaned over the bed and put my arms around him. His body shuddered against mine. Then he began to sob, in what sounded like a prolonged, useless bout of retching.
The door opened. The resonant, contralto voice of the larger of the nurses said: ‘Now how are things in here?’
I at once let go of him and scrambled to my feet.
‘I must change that pillow case. And give him his injection.’
She was telling me to go.
I was with him only once again. It was on the eve of my departure. He wanted to see me, Lady Hammond said, interrupting me as I was yet again playing the Bach Aubade. In those days I never ceased to find in it the solace that Nanny clearly found in her daily trudges to the church. Lady Hammond was haggard, her lower eyelids sagging strangely so that the eyes looked much larger than usual, and her voice rasped. ‘Don’t stay too long with him. He’s terribly weak. Just say goodbye. Just that. That’s all.’
The two nurses were eating together in the next-door dressing room. They had turned on the wireless that Lady Hammond had provided for them but were talking animatedly and from time to time laughing above the voice, measured and grave, reading the news. There was an occasional clink of cutlery on crockery.
His eyes were shut. I did not know whether to say something or leave him. I stared down. I had always felt him to be so much larger than I was. Now the thought came: How small he is. There came another thought: He’s like a mouse. A dead mouse. Crushed in a trap from which there’s no escape.
He stirred. He opened his eyes, which were rimmed with something sticky and yellow. Was it pus? For a while he stared up at me and then he smiled. ‘Mouse,’ he whispered. ‘Good old mouse.’ He brought out a claw-hand from under the sheet and held it out to me.
I took it. ‘I’m leaving tomorrow. Early. Your mother’s going to drive me to the station with your father. I’ve come to say goodbye. And thank you.’
‘Oh, Mouse, are you going? I hadn’t realised. Why didn’t you tell me?’
In fact I had told him. He couldn’t have taken it in. ‘ Term. Term starts. I have to go.’
‘But what’ll I do without you?’ It was not the usual question, asked merely as a convention of regret. I knew, with a pang of sorrow and guilt, that he really meant it. On an impulse I said: ‘I’ll stay if you like. Would you like that? Yes, please let me stay.’
Violently he shook his head from side to side on the pillow. ‘No, no! I wouldn’t dream of it. You mustn’t be late for term. Don’t feel you have to stick with me to the end. Don’t feel you have to do that. No. You must go, Mouse. You must get on with it. Become another Rubinstein. Or another Solomon. No time to be lost! You must get on with it!’
I edged away from the bed. But I still stared down at him. Then I made up my mind: ‘But I’d like to stay on. Truly. Term doesn’t matter all that much. I can make some excuse. I can say that I’m ill – or that my mother is ill – or that our flat has been bombed. Something like that. Easy. Oh, let me stay!’
He might not have heard me. ‘ Oh, there’s something I want you to have. For all you’ve done for me. It’s – it’s over there, I think. Nothing much. In the left-side drawer. Top. Over there.’ He pointed at the chest-of-drawers under the window. ‘It’s my DFC. Take it. Keep it. Go on! It’s no bloody use to me. A souvenir for you of a thoroughly boring summer.’
‘Oh, no. No! I couldn’t do that Your mother and father … They must have it. They’d want it. It wouldn’t be right. No.’
Suddenly, shamefully, I felt the tears welling from my eyes.
‘Oh, very well. If that’s how you feel! Anyway, thank you – thank you, Mouse. Thank you for helping through all this.’ He peered up at me. ‘Mouse. Mouse! You’re not blubbing, are you? Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ His voice had weirdly changed. It now had the tone, jocular and yet vaguely jeering, of those now remote days when I had been a mouse to his lion. ‘Stop it, Mouse! Oh, stop it! Don’t be such a bloody fool! Stop it! What’s the matter with you?’
I turned away. As I did so, I noticed that one of the letters that I used sporadically to answer for him had blown off the desk under the open window on to the carpet. I stooped, picked it up and returned it to the pile. After that, I walked on to the door and, without looking round, left him for the last time.
The Pushchair
These days he feels either moribund, staring down dejectedly at a book that he hardly takes in or at The Times crossword that he can now rarely finish, or else twitchingly restless, as a knee jerks, his knuckles creak as he cracks them, or he keeps biting his dry lips, sometimes making them ooze a small, lethargic bead of blood. Having left the bags of shopping on the kitchen table, he sits for a few minutes staring at them, but then totters up and begins to wander about the capacious Edwardian house, pausing from time to time to stare at some picture or object that will soon be carted away for th
e sale. These fragments have I shored against my ruin. But the fragments are valuable, so Elsie constantly reminds him. You won’t want for a bob or two, is how she puts it.
He stares out of his study window. A listless snow is drifting down on the overgrown garden, flake by flake. The blackbird – there are, in fact, a number of blackbirds but he never sees more than one at a time and so thinks there is only one – is up there hunched on a branch of the hawthorn. Poor chap. It’s only in December that birds ever look dejected. Perhaps they too suffer from SAD, like myself.
He begins effortfully to mount the stairs, half-dragging himself with a hand clutching at the banister. He has no purpose at the top – or, if he did, he has already forgotten it. Elsie must have omitted to shut the door to the flight of narrow steps that now beckon him on, up, up to the attic. No wonder the house feels so icy. She spent yesterday afternoon sorting things. No, I don’t need your help, father. You’ll only make your bronchitis worse in the cold up here. Please! He obeyed her, as he always did. But for some reason he felt an all but physical nausea at the thought of those stubby-fingered, capable hands violating the debris of both his life and that of her mother, dead these fourteen – no, now fifteen – years.
The smell that, surrounded by dusty, broken pieces of furniture, suitcases and packing cases, he now begins to inhale, strikes him, weirdly, as not an indoor but an outdoor one. He thinks of a damp nook of the garden, bare, black boughs above him and a rank mulch of leaves at his feet. The image makes him shiver, crooked fingers pressed to mouth. Oh, drat the girl! But she is no longer a girl but a woman of fifty-four. Why did she have to leave those copies of the Studio scattered everywhere? What was she doing with them? For the last, oh, how many years he had carefully stored every issue there, in a neat row of packing cases. Now – total disorder! A whole set like that is valuable, for heaven’s sake.
He touches a jumbo arm-chair slumped in a corner, trails a hand over a rickety towel-rail, and then peers into a cabin trunk, the open lid of which reveals some swathes of cretonne eventually recognised as having once been the curtains of the bedroom that he shared with his wife for all those uneventful, happy years. There used to be a light switch somewhere hereabouts. Yes, yes. He touches it, eases the switch upwards. Funny, he has remembered that, upwards, not downwards. Head lowered, to avoid the increasing slope of the roof, he totters on, pausing to peer, in the low-wattage light, now at this dusty object, now at that. Is it tomorrow that they, whoever they are, are coming to cart away all of these things except those that have been earmarked by Elsie and the man from Sotheby’s?
Suddenly, in the farthest corner, leaning against the huge water-tank, he sees it: the pushchair. How did that get there? Like the glimpse of some apparition or the discovery of a corpse, it transmits an instant buzz of terror. He zigzags over to it. Beside it there is a wicker basket, of the kind used to transport an ailing cat to the vet, a pale-blue suitcase, one hasp of which hangs broken, and four or five plastic bags all but bursting with clothes. The pushchair and all the other things are festooned with spider-webs. He picks up one of the plastic bags, peers into it, and jerks out something knitted in red and blue wool. It’s a child’s – what? – jumper? He puts the jumper to his cheek, then abruptly drops it to the floor, as though it were burning his fingers. He drags the pushchair towards him. She’s pushing it – or am I pushing it? – and we’re both laughing, and he, she, the child is laughing, turning his (yes, yes, a boy, Ivor, Ivan, something like that) turning his head up and around to look at us. The thorn-like memory jabs at him.
Later, after he has microwaved for his supper the spaghetti Bolognese left by Elsie in the deep freeze, he sits by the empty fireplace in the sitting-room overheated by three radiators, and broods for a while, as he often now does, on the future ahead of him. Melanie and I would so much like to have offered you a refuge. We feel guilty about it. But, as you know, there are only those two bedrooms and in any case we’re both out all day and often late into the evening. Everyone says that that home is one of the best in the country. That was reasonable enough. He could never have fitted in with them in that small space. But his resentment against the woman usurper of the attention that he still feels, in a reversal of the usual parent-child relationship, should be his exclusively, has only intensified. You’ve robbed me of my daughter. You’ve robbed me of her love.
As though to escape from tasting the poisonous bitterness of that rejection, he once more thinks of the pushchair. An image comes to him: his hand and the girl’s hand, resting side by side, pushing it simultaneously. Am I imagining it? Or did that really happen? She was so fragile-looking and yet was so strong. It was the same with her hands. Small hands, but with a strength that always amazed him. I can’t get this wretched jar open. A quick twist by those small hands to the lid and he could then scoop out his marmalade. Thanks! Thanks! Terrific!
It was through Elsie that she and the child had come to him. Now that mother’s no longer with you and I’m so rarely home, you need someone. You’re not used to looking after yourself. One hears of confirmed bachelors. You’re a confirmed widower. Yes, you really need someone. He wanted to say: It’s you I need. Only you. But they never said things as dramatic and self-revelatory as that to each other. You’d also be doing her a good turn. The poor thing is desperate.
Lidia (yes, the second letter an ‘i’, not a ‘y’ as he had at first supposed) was a Hungarian. She and her husband, a dark-skinned Brazilian waiter in a Pall Mall club, lived with their infant son in the flat next to Elsie’s. That was long before Elsie and Melanie had met and had moved into a mansion flat of their own overlooking Holland Park. This was a poky one, rented not bought, in Hackney. The couple were constantly fighting, with doors reverberantly slamming and voices exploding upwards, in jagged splinters, from the dank well. Elsie at first complained, something for which she had a talent, and then comforted, something for which she had less of one. Would she have done the second of those things if the young mother had not been so appealing in her woebegone fragility?
The man’s clearly a brute. I can’t imagine what she sees in him.
He smiled slyly. Perhaps he’s wonderful in bed?
Elsie pulled a face. She didn’t care for the idea of that.
There were feeble excuses for the bruises and lacerations – a trip over a carpet, a kitchen cupboard door inadvertently left open. Then, one night, there was the hammering on the door – Please, please let me in! – and Elsie in pyjamas was confronting the couple, the girl with the baby tucked in the crook of an arm and that brute gripping her shoulder and shouting ‘Come back! Come in!’ With a hiccup of a sob the girl suddenly obeyed him. As she did so, the baby, previously so silent that he might have been dead, began to wail. Elsie shouted at their retreating backs: ‘I’ll call the police if there’s any more of this!’
It was when the Brazilian, a fanatical supporter of Arsenal, was away in Belgium for two days to attend a match, that Elsie hatched her plot. It’s the perfect solution for you, father. She worked as an au pair for some lawyer and his wife in Hampstead. She’s a sweet child. And the baby won’t be any trouble if you put them in the basement flat. You need someone like that. And you’ll be doing her a good turn. She had difficulty in persuading him; but, as so often in the past, her tenacity eventually overcame his reluctance.
He had never cared for young children. But he had had to admit that the baby was no trouble at all. Lidia never let him out of her sight, as she energetically pushed and dragged the antiquated Hoover around room after room, made the vast double bed in one corner of which he would sleep late into the morning, or prepared one of her delicious Madeira cakes. At dinner parties, she would often be carrying the child on her back as she steered her way around the table. ‘Are you offering me a choice between the potatoes and your baby?’ one guest once jokingly asked.
That combination of sweetness and strength. It’s irresistible. I’m so glad that you thought of the idea. It’s the best thing that’s
happened to me since your poor mother died.
He never felt closer than when he and Lidia would venture out together with the pushchair. I really must buy you a new one. But she was always careful even with money not hers. Oh, no. It’s fine. Fine. She had bought it from another of her London neighbours, whose child had outgrown it. He would feel suddenly light-headed and, yes, inexplicably happy, as he helped her lift the pushchair up the steps or stood with it on the sea-front, smiling down alternately at the child and at the gentle, sunlit waves, as she scuttled across the road, short-cropped blonde hair glistening, to buy him his evening paper. Oh, no, no! He could still hear her protesting, so many years after she had vanished from his life, against his purchase of yet another present for the child. You spoil him. So far from spoiling Elsie, he had always been strict with her.
Strangely, when he had opened the door and seen the tall, dark, narrow-faced man standing before him, he knew at once who he was.
Lidia is here. A statement, not a question.
Who are you? Why do you want to see her?
Then there she was, standing behind him, the child, as so often, in a crook of her arm. It’s all right. It’s fine.
But he could not believe that it was all right, fine. Reluctantly he moved aside. Why, why? Why had he failed to stand his ground? He was often to ask himself that question.
We are going for little walk together.
He gripped the cretonne curtain in one hand and gazed down to the steep street. The man did not help her with the pushchair, as he himself would have done, but merely stood watching her as she struggled to manhandle it down the steps. But he took over from her as soon as she had eased it through the gate. He then began to push it down the hill towards the sea. Oddly, Lidia walked not beside him but behind him. For a moment she halted and looked up at the window and the old man could see – or thought he could see – the beseeching terror and anguish on her face.
