by Roland Moore
With effort, he focused his eyes on the newcomer.
“Mrs Fisher?” he asked.
“Mrs Jameson,” Connie corrected.
Morgan nodded, looking none too convinced that Connie was right on the matter. He showed her through to his room, a room which was nearly as small as the medicine room at Hoxley Manor, although Morgan had somehow managed to fit a large mahogany desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet and a medical screen in. He edged himself carefully between the filing cabinet and the edge of the desk to reach his seat and waited for Connie to speak.
“I ain’t got an appointment. But I wondered about some advice.”
“Is it sexual?” Dr Morgan asked, a slight eagerness in his voice, which made Connie’s skin crawl.
“No it ain’t,” she snapped, keen to put that notion right out of his head. The man was incorrigible. None of the women in Helmstead liked seeing him for anything that involved taking off clothes. On the plus side, he didn’t have wandering hands like some doctors she’d heard about, but he certainly liked a good gawp.
At the vehemence of her response, Morgan recoiled in his chair. Trying to adopt a more business-like manner, he nodded for her to continue.
“I need to know something. How long do antibiotics take to treat an infection?” she asked.
“It’s a good question.” He pondered. “Well, it depends. If they are given intravenously – into the blood – they will work more quickly than if given in tablet form.”
“Right, so with tablets: how long would they take to kick in, then?” Connie asked.
“Maybe three days, a week even?” Morgan replied. “It takes time to build up the levels of the medicine in the body.
“I see,” Connie said, rising. “Thanks for your time, Doctor.”
Dr Morgan squeezed around his desk and opened the door for Connie. And as she was leaving, he asked:
“Why do you ask about this?”
“I was wondering about a patient at Hoxley Manor,” Connie smiled, again finding a lie springing easily to her lips.
It wasn’t until she’d gone and was making her way down the narrow stairs to the outside that Dr Morgan asked himself a question. He knew she worked at the hospital some evenings, so why hadn’t Connie asked a doctor at the manor house?
Back at the vicarage, Connie found Henry eating a sandwich at the dining-room table. He was about to leave on an errand, but waited to listen to Connie’s news. When he’d heard what Morgan had said, he looked worried.
“He should be getting better by now, then,” Henry said.
“I know. So maybe the medicine ain’t working, I dunno.”
“Or maybe-” Henry stopped himself from finishing the sentence. He shook his head, dismissing the thought and nodded his agreement to Connie.
“No, maybe what?” Connie pushed.
Henry fixed her with a hard stare; the logical pragmatist at the end of his tether. “Maybe he’s having us on.”
Could it be that Vince was better but somehow faking his illness? Was he buying more time? Connie thought it was unlikely, but Henry snapped that Vince was on to a good thing here: free bed and board, a place to lie low until he was sure it was safe to leave. Maybe he’d just used this to his advantage and decided to stay a while longer.
Connie wasn’t so sure. “He could just tell us he’s staying. He’s got a gun. Nothing we could do. So why play-act?”
“Maybe.” Henry mulled it over. He shook his head, weary of the whole thing. He didn’t hope to understand what was going on in Vince’s mind. Connie wondered to herself if he could be right. Maybe Vince was play-acting? Could he be wetting his brow with water when he heard her on the stairs? Putting on the whole delirious thing? She wanted to say that subterfuge wasn’t really his style, but feared that Henry would blanch from any reminder of the familiarity between Connie and Vince. She steered clear of saying anything, scared of stepping on land mines.
Suddenly they heard a thump from the ceiling. The patient wanted them.
Connie went to see what he wanted. Vince looked pale and was clammy with cold sweat. He blinked and struggled to focus on Connie as she perched on the edge of the bed to feel his brow. If it was play-acting, then Vince Halliday deserved one of them award things, Connie thought. But then a big meaty hand shot out with surprising speed and grabbed her wrist. He pulled her closer, nearer to his cracked lips. He started to mumble and Connie had to strain to hear the words.
“You’ve got to.”
She was thrown, it didn’t make any sense. “What have I got to?” Connie asked, struggling to hear as his mouth tried to make sound.
“Get it. The key.”
“What key? What are you talking about?”
Vince grimaced and gasped for breath and collapsed into a fitful slumber almost immediately. Connie realised Henry was standing in the doorway.
“He’s not faking it,” Connie said. Henry nodded, weighing up the implications in his head.
The two of them went downstairs. For a while they debated their options. Vince was weak and delirious. He may even be dying. Should they go against his wishes and just get Dr Morgan to visit? Or should they just call the Home Guard now? Surely now he wouldn’t be in any position to shoot the first person who came to get him?
“Part of me would love to turn him over,” Henry said, uncharacteristically coldly. Immediately he shook his head, as if trying to dispel the thought from his head. It wasn’t right for a man of the cloth to speak in such a way, but Connie could see how much Vince’s presence had stressed Henry. Her husband composed himself, offered a small, apologetic smile and continued: “But for one thing, he grabbed your wrist pretty quickly. I wouldn’t trust that his reactions had slowed that much. Certainly I don’t want to gamble an innocent man’s life on it.”
They decided, despite their desperate wishes to be free of him, and the strains that it was putting on their marriage, that the only course of action was to obey the man with the gun.
Bright late-evening sun poured through the French windows at Hoxley Manor, as if making a last fantastic flourish before the oncoming night. Connie pulled the curtains, shutting out the possibilities of a sunset and walked back into the ward. Once it had been a large drawing room, framed by easy chairs and sofas. Now the only remnant of those luxurious and relaxed days were the well-stocked bookshelves obscured on the perimeter of the room by heavy hospital beds and the ill and the dying. Connie found Joyce and Dolores making two empty beds. She started to help them. Joyce was quizzing Dolores about music. What singers did she enjoy? What was her favourite song? As usual, she was getting nowhere, with Dolores refusing to reveal anything personal about her tastes. Connie wasn’t in the mood to join in. She worked silently, a troubled look on her face.
Joyce’s low-key and fruitless interrogation was interrupted as Dr Channing breezed in. He needed one of the girls to help him move a patient. Dolores was happy to volunteer and get out of the spotlight.
“I’m never going to find out anything about her, am I?” Joyce huffed.
Connie shook her head, too full of darker and deeper thoughts to get involved. Joyce looked at her friend, wondering what was wrong.
“Penny for them?”
“It’s nothing,” Connie said, shutting the question down.
Joyce and Connie finished the beds in silence, with Connie lost in her own thoughts. Possible futures. She saw glimpses of what might happen if she’d got the Home Guard. About what Henry had said about Vince still having fast-enough reactions. She saw the three elderly soldiers, in their mismatched uniforms, their makeshift weapons, moving towards the vicarage with their uneven gaits. Enjoying themselves with the heady rush of a proper mission that reminded them of their younger years and the missions of real danger overseas. But while their minds may have been energised, you couldn’t disguise the fact that they moved like old men: too stiff to properly crouch over when running for cover; too slow to get out of the line of fire. Connie imagined a massacre in her spare ro
om. Vince could unload his gun into the three old men before they even got near the bed. No, it wasn’t an option. She couldn’t risk it.
Other images fought for space in her head. Other options.
She saw herself snatching the gun from the bedside table, maybe quicker than Vince could stop her. He was smiling, hands in the air. But Connie shot him anyway. She saw his big, dumb, incredulous look as he realised he had a spreading patch of red on his chest. Could she do that?
As she plumped a pillow on an empty bed, Connie imagined Vince lying there. She pushed the pillow down on his face, using all her weight to keep it there as he thrashed about.
“What are you thinking about?” Joyce wasn’t going to accept nothing for an answer.
“You don’t want to know,” Connie replied, smoothing the pillow over.
Joyce shrugged. Suit yourself.
It alarmed Connie that most of her options for getting Vince out of her life involving killing him. Wasn’t that an over reaction? An immature response to an adult problem? Perhaps it was born out of futile desperation to save her marriage. But what was the alternative? Would Vince just leave when his hand got better? Connie couldn’t imagine the sunlight dappling the vicarage hallway as Vince said his peaceful goodbyes to her and Henry. “Thanks for having me.” No, she couldn’t see that happening. Would he want to take her with him? Relive their glory days in some damp hovel. It was a possibility.
Joyce offered a friendly smile. It was a look that said, you don’t have to tell me what’s on your mind, but I’m here if you need me. Ironically it made Connie want to open up to her.
“Do you ever have bad thoughts?” Connie broached the subject.
“All the time.” Joyce considered. “Sometimes I’ll think about how bad someone looks in a dress, or how old someone’s looking. All uncharitable stuff that I’m ashamed to admit really.”
“No, really bad thoughts.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you think about that Ulrich bloke?” Connie didn’t mean the question to sound as bald as it came out, but that was the danger when you’d been thinking for a while before voicing your thoughts. Questions became the tip of an iceberg of thought, presented with no context to back them up. Joyce raised her eyebrows. An unexpectedly deep and unwelcome question while she was making beds.
Ulrich had been a German airman who had bailed out from his plane in the countryside around Helmstead. While hiding out, he found Joyce on her own as she was riding through with a pony and trap. He forced her to conceal him on the cart and drive him cross country. He had a gun and made it clear that he wasn’t afraid to shoot her if she betrayed him or disobeyed. They had driven in icy silence, the only sound the clip clop of the horse’s hooves. Then Ulrich began to pass the time by asking about Joyce. She’d revealed that she’d lost her family in the German bombing of Coventry. And that’s when Ulrich made a massive error. But the airman made a big mistake in taunting Joyce about it. He implied, whether it was true or not, that he was part of the bombing team on that fateful night. The night that had killed Joyce’s parents and sister. Incensed and upset, Joyce careered the pony and trap into a tree, sending herself and the airman flying. Joyce recovered first and got the man’s gun. And in a moment, another life was lost as she shot him dead. Did she think about him?
“Sometimes,” she said, pondering.
“Do you mind me asking, you know, what it felt like?” Connie asked, taking care to couch the question a little less bluntly than her opening question.
Joyce saw the flash of fire from the pistol.
The airman collapsing.
She remembered the feeling of watching a life disappear at her feet in the woods.
“I did what I had to do.” Joyce bit her lip. Connie knew there was more going on in her friend’s head, but now wasn’t the place to get there. It was Joyce’s turn with the iceberg: presenting only what she wanted to be seen on the surface. “I had to keep telling myself, he’d have killed me otherwise. Never know if he would have done, of course.”
Connie mulled over the words. Joyce brought her back to the here and now by saying that one of Connie’s corners was loose. Connie fastened the bed sheet, realising that Joyce wouldn’t talk any more about Ulrich tonight.
Connie wondered what she was capable of. Could she kill Vince to get rid of him? And then perhaps an even more worrying thought rose to the surface: would she want to?
Someone else wondering what he was capable of was Reverend Henry Jameson. He stood at the end of Vince Halliday’s bed, watching the large man sleep fitfully. The revolver sat on the bedside cabinet, its handle turned in towards Vince. Henry felt disappointed in himself for feeling hatred for the man. But since he’d arrived, everything had turned sour. And, sure, he and Connie had their problems before he turned up, but things were untenable now. He knew he should stand by her; they should face adversity together. But something was stopping him. And at this moment, he didn’t know what it was. Why wouldn’t he unreservedly stand by Connie, his wife, and face this hurdle together?
For her part, Connie was trying to find the normality in this abnormal situation, and Henry knew that. And yet he wouldn’t let himself give her support; preferring a taciturn demeanour to her rather than an encouraging smile.
Henry felt a wave of remorse as he remembered the night Connie had tried to make him feel better about the situation by suggesting they make love. Now, in hindsight, Henry realised that it would have been so good for their relationship, for the feeling of being united against the darkness. But, at the time, his resentment got in the way.
With the bedroom door closed, Connie was desperate for Henry to tell her how he was feeling. She knew that he had been taciturn and distant. At the time, Connie hoped that they would only have to tolerate Vince for a short while longer. This was before he became ill. With Vince downstairs, drinking in front of the fire, the couple spoke in their room in whispers, all too aware of how sound could carry around their small cottage. This subterfuge further curdled Henry’s mood; any inclination he had anyway. He couldn’t voice his feelings to Connie, scared they might somehow open her eyes to his inadequacies. But he felt weak and powerless. He’d prayed to God to deliver him from this foul man, but the prayers hadn’t been answered. And even that action had felt like a shifting of responsibility. The plain fact was, it should have been his responsibility as man of the house to force this intruder out. But he saw it as Connie’s problem. Her past. So he felt that she should be the one who got rid of him. If he could have discussed his feelings, even these feelings, to Connie, then things might have got better between them. But instead, Henry clammed up, as he always did, somehow expecting his wife to guess.
“Let’s go to bed,” Connie said, pulling off her clothes. Showing willing, Henry pushed the bedroom chair against the door handle. He knew that it would be good for them, for their bond, if he could. But he felt at his most vulnerable in bed and the last thing he wanted was the chance of Vince bursting in.
Once under the sheets, Connie nestled into him. She started to kiss his neck. Henry tried to respond, but a noise from downstairs broke the moment for him. He stopped kissing Connie and sighed.
“Come on. It’s been a while,” Connie whispered.
Henry knew exactly how long it had been since they’d last made love. It coincided exactly with the arrival of the monster downstairs.
“Forgive me if I’m not in the mood.” Henry pulled back the bed sheets and rubbed the back of his tense neck.
“He’s not here, though, is he?”
“He’s near enough, Connie.”
Connie urged Henry to forget about him. “He can’t take this away from us.”
“Don’t you see? He already has.” And Henry turned away. He didn’t want to see the sadness and the shock on his wife’s face. And at that moment, Henry Jameson, mild-mannered Reverend of the Parish of Helmstead, felt a deep rage welling inside of him. Vince Halliday had taken away everything he had. His home,
his marriage, the intimacy of making love to his wife.
And now, here he was, with potentially the upper hand at last. Vince was sick in bed, and his pistol was within reach. Henry took a step closer. Maybe he could grab it? Maybe he could force Vince to leave? Henry reached out a tentative hand. Edging forward, his fingers were a few inches from the gun when –
- BANG BANG.
Henry’s heart nearly burst out of his chest. Vince awoke groggily and grabbed the pistol, curious eyes focusing on Henry. What was he doing here?
BANG BANG.
There was someone knocking on the door downstairs.
Vince struggled to place the noise, time and space falling back into place around him.
Before Vince could ask any questions, Henry bolted from the room and took the stairs two at a time, his heart beating like a steam-engine piston in his chest. He’d come so close. Could he have done it? He suspected that he knew the answer. He wasn’t man enough, was he?
Henry flung open the front door with a look of annoyance – but it was focused mainly on his own feelings of inadequacy. He couldn’t stand up for his wife, morally or physically. He lacked backbone.
A surprised Gladys Gulliver was standing there. Suspicion in a beige coat and pillbox hat.
“Have I interrupted anything, Reverend?” she said, her beady eyes scanning Henry for any clues. The village busybody – Mrs Gulliver was a self-proclaimed upstanding member of the community with an opinion on everyone. She would gossip about anyone and everything – all with the self-justified motivation of it being her Christian duty. For his part, Henry felt pity for the old woman. He knew she had been parted from her beloved husband too soon and he suspected that her life was empty without him. Other people’s business had filled the void of loss.
“What can I do for you, Mrs Gulliver?” Henry said, trying to control his fast breathing.
