He was directed to the ward and found it big and noisy. Beds were crammed tightly together round the walls, leaving a wide open area in the centre and the cacophony was such that he had to bend his ear to the little nurse at his side to catch what she said.
‘Mrs King has given us her address. We’ve written to her husband. He’s coming to see her this afternoon at three o’clock, doctor.’
‘I’m only a medical student.’
She hadn’t heard him. There were women singing in loud, shrieking tones. One kept up a wail like a dog and others shuffled up and down the room, moaning or laughing wildly. All of them had had their hair cut in a hideous pudding-basin crop with short fringes. He knew there was good reason for it. Some of the women’s heads were infested with lice when they were admitted and the nurses didn’t have time for dressing hair, brushing and combing. All the same, he believed it was wrong and demoralising to treat them so.
The women wore shapeless grey dresses, tied with tapes at the open back, revealing underclothes on the more sensible and bare backsides on those with crazed minds. There were no bedside tables and the women who lay in bed kept their heads well down, some with frightened eyes above the drawn-up blankets, others, expressionless, howled in a formless, unemotional way, without grief, without tears.
‘Mrs King. Here’s Dr Wainwright to see you,’ the nurse said, giving him a look of quick invitation. ‘If you have any trouble with her, come for me,’ she said. ‘I’ll be in the side room. You can have a cup of tea with me before you go, if you like.’
Edward leaned over the bed. ‘How are you, Mrs King? Are you feeling better?’ he asked.
She turned her head at the sound of his voice and put out a hand to him, not clutching or wild this time. He took it and helped her pull herself to a sitting position. She drew the sheets up to her chest with a modest, nervous gesture. Her hands were dry and hot. He took one and held it in his, so that he could feel the pulse at her wrist.
‘You came. You came to see me, Oliver.’ The woman’s voice was slightly hoarse and she coughed after she had spoken, the deep-seated cough of chest disease.
‘I brought you some flowers,’ he said and handed her the posy. She was calmer than when he’d first seen her, but much, much sicker and a feeling of unbearable sadness came to Edward as he looked into her warm, brown eyes. He knew he had been right to come and a need, a compelling need to help her, overcame him. He looked around him at the patients who did not know where they were and, sad though they were, they didn’t need his help, as the woman whose hand he held did.
He unfastened her fingers gently. ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ he said.
‘Don’t leave me, son,’ she said. ‘Please don’t go.’ She began to cough again, putting the sheet up to her mouth.
He smiled to reassure her and spoke gently in her ear. ‘I’m going to have you moved, Mrs King; to a quiet room where your cough will get better.’
Fancy her calling him son. Some women did speak like that, he knew, but oddly enough even his own mother had never called him son. Always Edward. The nurse gave him a flirtatious look. ‘She’s rambling. Mrs King’s been rambling since she was admitted. It’s worse in the night when she can’t get to sleep,’ she told him.
‘Send for Dr Hart, will you, nurse? I think he should come and examine her again,’ Edward said, not responding to her smile. ‘It’s urgent. Go quickly. Go to the office and have them send a messenger or telephone his home.’
She returned in minutes, flustered and pink. ‘Dr Hart will be here in half an hour. He says I’m to assist you until he arrives.’ She smoothed her apron and pulled back her shoulders.
‘I want her moved to a small ward,’ he said. ‘There must be a quiet room somewhere.’
They lifted Rosie into a wheelchair and covered her with a counterpane and took her to a little warm room near to the office, where a bed had been made ready. There were pictures on the wall and a high shine on the polished floor.
She was light, frightening in her weightlessness, and yet she held on to his hand tightly and would not let go when the nurse arranged the covers over her.
‘I’ll sit with her until Dr Hart comes,’ Edward said and saw that his words brought relief into the eyes of his patient.
They had cut her hair, too, into the fringe the other women had, but already it was beginning to curl and it gave her a young, girlish look. She still had hold of his hand and lay, smiling at him, her head resting against the heap of white pillows.
‘You look like him,’ she said. ‘You’ll be about his age. About his age when I knew him.’
‘Oliver?’ Edward asked, suddenly afraid to hear more, yet wanting to know.
‘Yes. Oliver Wainwright. I loved him. I loved him so much, son. You’re like him. So alike.’ She closed her eyes and drifted off into a sleep and Edward had to hold himself back from waking her, from asking more. He knew now that she held the key to the mystery of his birth. And he knew that when she had rested she would tell him all he wanted to know. He was normally calm, in control of his feelings yet now, he looked at his watch, and prayed that Dr Hart would come.
He sat for half an hour, holding his slumbering patient’s hand, until the specialist arrived.
‘I don’t take kindly to being disturbed on my day off, Wainwright,’ Dr Hart said, but there was a smile in his eyes as he added kindly, ‘I knew you’d not call me unless it was important. Is this the patient?’ He moved Rosie’s hand where it lay, loose on Edward’s, and took his place at the head of the bed.
‘Is this the patient we saw at the fever hospital?’ he asked. ‘Did I send her here?’
‘Yes. She has a history of mania, but I think she has a fever as well,’ Edward said. ‘I hope you don’t think it presumptuous of me, sir, to question the diagnosis?’
‘You were right to do so, Wainwright. She has a fever.’ Dr Hart took him aside after he had examined Rosie. ‘It’s far advanced though. It’s an industrial disease. We can only ease her symptoms. We can’t cure her.’
‘Her husband’s coming to visit her later,’ Edward said. ‘We should be able to get more information then.’
‘Keep her here. She’s not in any condition to be moved if Mr King wants her home,’ Dr Hart said.
‘You don’t mind if I come in and take notes, do you, sir? I thought I’d write up a case history on her for my exams,’ he asked. He would visit her anyway, even if he was not to be involved in her care. He wanted to know more about her.
‘You can work with me, Wainwright. Though she won’t recover,’ he added quietly. ‘Poor soul. She’s been a beautiful woman in her day.’
‘She knows my brother, sir. She keeps confusing me with him, I think.’
‘She’ll have periods of mental confusion, even if the fever does predominate her mental disorder,’ Dr Hart said.
A nursing sister came to them. ‘Mr King’s waiting in my office, doctor,’ she said. ‘Will you see him?’
‘Come along, Wainwright. We’ll talk to her husband.’
Edward did not like the look of Gregory King. He looked a nasty bit of work; slimy and untrustworthy. He cared nothing for his wife, or why had he left her to wander, unknown, in the streets of London? There was a woman with him, a brown-haired woman who looked like Mrs King.
‘My wife’s a strange woman, doctor,’ he began, as if apologising.
‘Your wife is a sick woman, Mr King,’ Dr Hart was curt. ‘She won’t live to the end of the week.’
The woman by Gregory King’s side began to cry but there was no compassion in the man who swiftly turned on her. ‘Don’t you start, Agnes. It’s bad enough hearing your sister snivel without you starting.’
‘This is Dr Wainwright. He’ll be working with me in the treatment of your wife.’
Edward felt a glow spread through him as the great man said, ‘Dr Wainwright’. He hoped he’d deserve the title one day.
‘If I’m not here and you have questions you can speak to him,’ Dr H
art said. ‘Don’t upset the patient. Stay only a short time. You may go in now.’
Edward and Dr Hart walked down the corridor together.
‘You should be at my lecture on Monday, shouldn’t you, Wainwright?’ Dr Hart said.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You’re excused. Sit with Mrs King. Listen and observe. You’ll learn more about industrial lung disease and psychological sickness at her bedside than I can teach you in a month of lectures.’
‘You don’t think it’s true mania, then, sir?’
‘No. Something happened to her, something that took her reason. Some women have no balance, Wainwright. They need a quiet life without too much emotional shock.’ He smiled at Edward. ‘They have to have it, you see. Security, stability. If they don’t …’ He threw his hands in the air in an explosive gesture. ‘They sacrifice a lot for it, too.’
Edward thought of Lizzie. Did she need this same security, the stability that would prevent her from losing her reason? Had she gone away to find peace of mind?
‘I think I’ll call back tonight, sir. I’m going to the theatre first but I’ll see the patient afterwards,’ he said.
‘Good man!’ Dr Hart replied. ‘Call me if you need to.’
The music hall performances took Edward’s mind off the woman who waited for him, but only for a few minutes at a time. As soon as he courteously could, he bade goodnight to Charlie and the two pretty girls who had failed to distract him and returned, through the now-quiet, icy and moonlit streets to the hospital.
He closed the doors quietly behind him and made his way along the dimly lit, silent corridor to her room. She was asleep, breathing with a light sighing sound. He took his place at her side and regarded the pale features of the woman who had recognised him the minute she set eyes on him as a Wainwright. And yet he was not the son of Joe Wainwright, so from where did her conviction spring?
She opened her eyes and smiled at him. ‘I knew you’d come back,’ she said. ‘Did you go for Oliver?’
‘No. Oliver’s in Middlefield with his wife and family,’ he told her.
She seemed to be searching his face and he held his breath, fearful of what he might hear. He lifted her high on the pillows to relieve the deep, troubling cough and waited for her to speak.
‘They called you Edward, didn’t they, after I left? Iris kept in touch with me for years, you know. She sent me the photograph and the diaries.’ Her voice was not much above a whisper. ‘I’ve still got them. They are here. I asked Agnes to bring them here for you. You’ll understand; you’ll forgive me, son, when you’ve read them.’
Her eyes never left his face as she spoke. She was not rambling. There was truth and love in her face and he knew she felt this love for him. His hand closed on hers and a feeling he had never known before came over him, there in that dim little room, lit only by three nightlights.
It was as if a veil had silently been drawn back; not a dark, heavy veil but a light-as-air, gossamer thing and he knew in that blinding moment that he was looking into the eyes of his mother. In a second revelation, which came without shock but with a sense of happiness and gratitude that swelled in his heart, he knew that Oliver was his father.
He leaned over and gently kissed her and saw a flush of warmth return, momentarily, to her cheek.
‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Tell me all about it.’
They talked in whispers. He did not want to tire her but her time was running out and he knew that she must tell him why she had deserted him, before it was too late.
She told him of her torment, of her need to return to the three sisters he must one day get to know, of her fear that if she had waited until Oliver returned after his birth she would not have had the will to leave them both.
She told him of the fierce, protective love that Oliver had had for him before he was born and of the fear of losing him that had driven him to bring his own stepmother to take her place.
And finally, amid tears, she asked him to pass her the handbag that lay in her bedside drawer. He handed it to her and held a nightlight up so that she could find the vellum envelope, sealed and ribbon-tied, that, she told him, had never left her possession for twenty-one years. She smiled with relief as he opened it carefully and read that he had been registered, all those years ago, as Oliver Hadfield.
And when she had told him all, and he had told her that he loved her, she sank back upon the pillow and fell into the quiet sleep from which she never awoke.
He held her hand long after she had gone, until it was cold. Then he picked up the parcel she had brought and returned to the hostel.
It was five o’clock. Edward switched on the light in his room and looked at the photograph of Rosie Hadfield, for he could not think of her as Mother – that title was sacred to the woman who had brought him up as her own. Rosie had been a beautiful woman and, beside her, younger and very like himself, Oliver.
He opened the first of the three exercise books and read of her thoughts and her fears over the months before his birth and he saw, quite clearly, that she had been a tortured soul and that the decision she had made was the only possible one for her. And he silently thanked her for not taking him with her, for leaving him with Oliver and Mother and Lizzie.
It was not until he had read her words and wondered what the new knowledge would mean to him that he thought again of Lizzie. It had not been his first thought when he learned that they were not brother and sister; that they could be married. His only consideration had been the story that had unfolded before him and pity of the doomed love affair between Oliver and his mother. Now he wondered how he would reveal the facts of his birth to Lizzie.
When dawn came he walked around the quiet London streets, trying to understand his new emotions. For now he felt himself to be a different person, not merely because he knew his true identity but rather, he thought, he was a wiser man. He forgave Oliver and Mother for what they had done to him. He found that, instead of the resentment he had been harbouring against Oliver, he could admire him again and feel, not gratitude, but respect for his father.
There was no bitterness in him now. He saw that there was no other way in which Oliver could have given him the life of contentment that he’d had. He knew now that he would have to reveal his love for Lizzie and that he must face them all with the truth.
He waited until nine o’clock on Monday morning before going to a telephone and asking the operator to call Wainwright and Billington. His hand was shaking and his pulse was racing as he spoke. ‘May I speak to Mr Oliver Wainwright, please?’ he asked the old clerk.
‘Who is calling?’ the old voice crackled across the miles.
‘Tell him it’s his son,’ he said.
He heard footsteps and a jumble of sounds, then the receiver being lifted and Oliver’s voice.
‘Hello, hello,’ Oliver said. ‘Who’s there?’
Edward’s voice was unsteady. ‘Hello, Father,’ he said, ‘Edward here.’
There was a silence and Edward held his breath in case he had been mistaken and Oliver did not want to recognise him as his son.
‘Edward?’
‘Yes, Father?’
‘You know … who told you?’ There was another silence and after it, in a voice that was hesitant as well as proud, Edward heard his father say, ‘I love you, son. Can you forgive me?’
There was a knot in Edward’s throat. ‘I love you, too, Father.’
‘Have you met her? Your mother?’ Oliver said.
‘She died. I was with her,’ he replied.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s all right. Mrs King – my real mother – she was a lovely woman. I’m glad I found her,’ Edward said, and his words sounded strangled to his ears. ‘I’ll go to the funeral and then travel straight up to Southport. Will you be there?’
‘Oh, yes. I’ll be there,’ Oliver assured him. ‘I’ve a lot to tell you. And, thank you, Edward.’
‘Oliver?’
‘Yes.’
�
��Let me tell Lizzie.’
‘When James comes in I want him shown the office work. I’m bringing him in, Albert. He’s an awkward devil but – you were right – he must learn the work here at my side,’ Oliver told Albert before he left twenty-three Churchgate to return to Florence and tell her, at last, about his years of deception.
Friday’s confrontation with James appeared, after two nights’ sleep and the events of the morning, to be an inconsequential event. He should have been more tactful, more sensitive to James’s predicament. He’d give him his head a little when they worked together, show the lad that he had not meant to curb his spirit, just point him in the right direction. He grinned as he recalled the scene.
‘It was like looking in a mirror, Albert,’ he said. ‘I saw myself all over again. If you’d seen him … The boy’s in love.’
‘What are you going to do about his other activities, Oliver? Is he still in the union?’ Albert asked.
‘He can’t be on both sides. I’ve told him that. You can tell him I’ll not take any action against the men on the list. I’ll not make it harder for him. He must deal with the union himself – tell them he’s dropping out but that he can look after their interests just as well from the management side.’
‘And now,’ Oliver said. ‘I’m going home.’
The Wallgate had been swept clear of slush and Oliver ran down it. He raced through the cattle market, between the empty, iron-railed pens and caught the ten o’clock train that would take him back to Suttonford.
He looked with unseeing eyes at the familiar scenes that rolled past the window; the rows of workers’ cottages whose damp roofs were level with the railway line, the winter stretches of ploughed land beyond the town, the withered grass, dull brown and grey on the embankment, the blackened places where sparks from the engines had ignited the banks in the autumn.
In time with the rushing wheels his thoughts came together in the question that repeated itself, that rhymed with the sound of the train, ‘How shall I tell her … how shall I tell her …?’ For the future of his marriage depended on Florence’s response to the truth. He’d have no reproaches once the tale was told. She must accept it.
The Runaway Page 43
