by John Berger
‘He’s lucky to be alive,’ said Harry.
‘He could have got clear like that,’ said the third.
The doctor asked them if they could shift the tree.
‘I reckon we can if we are three now.’
Nobody was kneeling any longer. The three woodsmen were standing, impatient to begin. The mist was getting whiter. The moisture was condensing on the half-empty bottle of plasma. The doctor noticed that this fractionally changed its colour, making it look yellower than normal.
‘I want you to lift,’ he said, ‘while I put a splint on his leg.’
When the wounded man felt the reverberations in the tree as they levered it, he began to moan again.
‘We could injure him worse than ever,’ said Harry, ‘getting him out.’ He could see the crushed leg underneath like a dog killed on the road.
‘Just hold it steady,’ said the doctor.
Again the doctor, whom they knew so well, seemed the accomplice of disaster as he worked under the tree on the leg the fourth of them would lose.
‘We’d never believed you’d got here so quick, doc,’ said the third.
‘You know Sleepy Joe?’ asked the doctor. ‘He was trapped under a tree for twelve hours before any help came.’
He gave instructions on how to lift the wounded man on to the door and then into the back of the Land Rover.
‘You’ll be all right now Jack,’ said one of them to the wounded man whose face was as damp and pallid as the mist. The third touched his shoulder.
The ambulance was waiting at the bridge. When it had driven off, Harry turned to the doctor confidentially.
‘He’s lost his leg,’ he said, ‘hasn’t he?’
‘No, he won’t lose his leg,’ said the doctor.
The woodman walked slowly back up to the forest. As he climbed he put a hand on each thigh. He told the other two what the doctor had told him. As they worked there during the day stripping the tree, they noticed again and again the hollow in the ground where he had been trapped. The fallen leaves there were so dark and wet that it was impossible to distinguish the blood. But every time they noticed the place they questioned whether the doctor could be right.
She is a woman of about thirty-seven. There is just still about her the air of a schoolgirl: one of the less bright girls who is physically more developed than the others but whose physical maturity has already made her slow and maternal rather than shifting and sexy. There is just the last trace of this air about her. In two years it will have vanished. She looks after her mother and it is now for the mother rather than the daughter that the doctor usually visits the cottage.
He first saw the daughter ten years ago. She had a cold and cough and complained that she felt weak. Her chest X-ray was normal. He had the impression that she wanted to talk about something. She would never look at him directly but kept casting him quick anxious glances as though somehow by these to bring him closer. He questioned her but could not gain her confidence.
A few months later she was suffering from insomnia and then asthma. All the tests for allergy proved negative. The asthma got worse. Now when he saw her, she smiled at him through her illness. Her eyes were round like a rabbit’s. She was timid of anything outside the cage of her illness. If anybody approached too near her eyes twitched like the skin round a rabbit’s nose. But her face was quite unlined. He was convinced that her condition was the result of extreme emotional stress. Both she and her mother insisted, however, that she had no worries.
Two years later he discovered the explanation by chance. He was out on a maternity case in the middle of the night. There were three women neighbours in attendance. Whilst waiting he had a cup of tea with them in the kitchen. One of them worked in a large mechanized dairy in the nearest railway town. The girl with asthma had once worked there too. And it turned out that the manager – who was in the Salvation Army – had had an affair with her. Evidently he had promised to marry her. Then he was overcome by remorse and religious scruples and had abandoned her. Was it even an affair – or did he only once, one evening, lead her by the hand out of the creamery up to his leather-chaired office?
The doctor once again questioned the girl’s mother. Had her daughter been happy when she worked at that dairy? Yes, perfectly. He asked the girl if she had been happy there. She smiled in her cage and nodded her head. Then he asked her outright if the manager had ever made a pass at her. She froze – like an animal who realizes that it is impossible to bolt. Her hands stopped moving. Her head remained averted. Her breathing became inaudible. She never answered him.
Her asthma continued and caused structural deterioration of the lungs. She now survives on steroids. Her face is moon-shaped. The expression of her large eyes is placid. But her brows and eyelids and the skin pulled tight over her cheekbones twitch at every movement and sound which might constitute a warning of the unexpected. She looks after her mother, but very seldom leaves the cottage. When she sees the doctor, she smiles at him as now she would probably smile at the soldier of the Salvation Army.
Before, the water was deep. Then the torrent of God and the man. And afterwards the shallows, clear but constantly disturbed, endlessly irritated by their very shallowness as though by an allergy. There is a bend in the river which often reminds the doctor of his failure.
English autumn mornings are often like mornings nowhere else in the world. The air is cold. The floorboards are cold. It is perhaps this coldness which sharpens the tang of the hot cup of tea. Outside, steps on the gravel crunch a little more loudly than a month ago because of the very slight frost. There is a smell of toast. And on the block of butter small grains of toast from the last impatient knife. Outside, there is sunlight which is simultaneously soft and very precise. Every leaf of each tree seems separate.
She lay in a four-poster bed: her face was ashen-coloured and her cheeks fallen in. Her eyes were tight shut in pain. She wheezed as she breathed, especially when breathing out.
The doctor stood looking and then asked for a cupful of warm water and cotton wool. As he injected morphia into her upper arm, she flinched a little. Strange that suffering so much pain in her chest she should flinch at the pin-prick. With the warm water and cotton wool he cleaned away the little droplet of blood from her worn, large arm, the colour of stone or bread, as though it had acquired the colour through its scrubbing and baking.
Then, using the same much-worked arm, he took her blood pressure. It was very low. She kept her eyes shut as if the light, so soft and so precise, was pressing between them. She had still said nothing.
He prepared a syringe for another injection. The fifty-year-old daughter was standing at the foot of the bed, waiting to be told what to do.
He inserted the needle into a vein near the wrist. This time she didn’t flinch. After half the injection he paused, holding the syringe in the loose fold of skin as if it were the skin’s feather, and with his other hand he felt her neck to check the strength of her pulse in the artery and the degree of congestion in the jugular vein. He then completed the injection.
The old woman opened her eyes. ‘It’s not your fault,’ she said very distinctly, almost crisply.
He listened to her chest. Her overworked brown arms, her deeply lined face, her creased strained neck were suddenly denied by the soft whiteness of her breast. The grey-haired son down in the yard with the cows, the daughter at the foot of the bed in carpet slippers and with swollen ankles, had both once clambered and fed here, and yet the soft whiteness of her breast was like a young girl’s. This she had preserved.
Downstairs in the parlour the doctor explained the medicines he was leaving. The old woman’s wheezing was still audible through the floorboards. Three dogs lay on the carpet, heads on outstretched paws, eyes open. They scarcely stirred when the old man came in.
He seemed dazed and sleepy. The doctor asked him how he was. ‘Not so bad,’ he said, ‘except for the screws.’
Neither father nor daughter nor the son outside asked the
doctor about the old woman. The doctor said he would be coming back that evening.
When he came back the parlour was in darkness. This disturbed him somewhat. He called out and receiving no answer felt his way up the stairs. The stairs led straight into the first bedroom. Across it he could see the light under the door of the second room.
The room smelt now of sickness: under the dressing-table on which stood all the family wedding photographs in leather frames and a nineteenth-century child’s mug with the Death and Burial of Cock Robin engraved upon it, there was an enamel bowl with urine in it, and spit stained a little with blood. The daughter explained that every time her mother coughed she peed a little involuntarily. The old woman was paler and a piece of damp rag was laid over her forehead. The room smouldered around her, all its comfort burnt and drenched and then burnt again.
The doctor listened once more to her chest. She lay back exhausted. ‘I am sorry,’ she said, not as though it were an apology but simply a fact. He took her temperature and blood pressure. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but you’ll sleep soon and feel rested.’
Her husband was sitting in the dark in the next room. The doctor had walked through it without noticing him, when he had come up the stairs. Now the daughter shepherded both men down, but still without putting a light on. For a moment it seemed that the stairs and the parlour were part of the outbuildings, unlit, unheated, belonging to the animals now stabled for the night. It seemed that the home was reduced to the four-poster bed in the lighted room above, where the old woman, the soft whiteness of whose breast had never changed, was dying.
When the daughter suddenly switched the light on, the doctor and the old man were dazzled. For each of them it was like finding himself on a stage. The familiar furniture was part of a stage set and both had to play roles which were utterly strange to what they thought of as their true nature. Both would have grasped any chance of reverting to the normal truth.
The old man sat down with an overcoat across his knees. ‘She has pneumonia now,’ the doctor said, ‘and she must take another medicine beside the ones I gave you this morning. Do you think she can swallow these pills? They are rather large. Or would she prefer to take it in liquid form? The liquid is made up for children but we can increase the dose. Which do you think would be best?’
The daughter, submissive and finding her only slight hope in trust, said: ‘It’s up to you doctor.’
‘No it’s not,’ he said. ‘I’m asking you. Can she or can she not swallow these pills?’
‘Perhaps the liquid then,’ said the daughter, abandoning her small hope. The doctor also gave her some sleeping pills – for her father as well as her mother. They would at least sleep tonight under the same drug.
The old man, whilst the doctor was explaining the medicines to the daughter, sat looking in front of him, his hands clutching and unclutching the heavy material of the overcoat across his knees.
When the doctor had finished his explanations, there was a silence. Neither father nor daughter moved to show him out or ask when he would be coming again. They simply waited. The doctor said, ‘The immediate danger is past – another half hour and she might have died this morning, now she’s got to pay the price of surviving the attack.’
‘It sounds a funny mixture,’ said the old man without looking up, ‘heart trouble and then pneumonia. A funny mixture. She was quite well yesterday.’ He began to cry, very quietly, like a woman can: the tears welling up in his eyes.
The doctor, who had already picked up one of his bags, put it down again and leant back in the chair. ‘Can you make us a cup of tea?’ he said
While the daughter was making the tea the two men spoke about the orchard at the back and this year’s apples. When the daughter was there, they spoke about the father’s rheumatism. After the tea the doctor went.
The next morning was another autumn morning like the preceding. Every leaf of each tree seemed separate. The sunshine, filtered through a tree in the orchard, played on the floor of the old woman’s bedroom. She clambered out of bed and suffered a second attack. The doctor arrived within a quarter of an hour. Her lips were purple, her face clay-coloured. She died quickly, her hands very still.
In the parlour the old man rocked on his feet. The doctor deliberately did not put out a hand to steady him. Instead he faced him. The older man was the taller by nine inches. The doctor said quietly, his eyes extra wide behind his spectacles, ‘It would have been worse for her if she’d lived. It would have been worse.’
He might have said that there have been kings and presidents of republics who have never recovered from the death of their wives. He might have said that death is the condition of life. He might have said that man is indivisible and that, in his own view, this was the only sense in which death could have no dominion.
But whatever he said at that moment, the old man would have continued to rock on his feet, until the daughter lowered him into his chair in front of the unlit fire.
Only her feet betray her. There is something about the way she walks on her feet – a kind of irresponsibility towards them – which is still quite childish. Her figure is 36–25–36.
She was crying when she came into the surgery.
‘What’s wrong Duckie?’
‘I just feel sort of miserable.’
She sat like other girls had sat there crying because they thought they were pregnant. To make it easier for her, the doctor slipped the question between several others.
‘What’s getting you down?’
No answer.
‘Sore throat?’
‘Not now.’
‘Water-works all right?’
She nodded.
‘Have you got a temperature?’
She shook her head.
‘Periods regular?’
‘Yeah.’
‘When was your last one?’
‘Last week.’
The doctor paused.
‘Do you remember that rash you used to get on your tum? Has it ever come back?’
‘No.’
He leant forward in his chair towards her.
‘You just feel weepy?’
She inclined her head farther towards her own consoling bosom.
‘Did Mum and Dad put you up to come to me?’
‘No, I came myself.’
‘Even having your hair dyed didn’t make you feel better?’
She laughed a little because he had noticed. ‘It did for a while.’
The doctor took her temperature, looked at her throat and told her to stay in bed for two days. Then he resumed the conversation.
‘Do you like working in that laundry?’
‘It’s a job.’
‘What about the other girls there?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you get on with them?’
‘You get stopped if they find you talking.’
‘Have you thought of doing anything else?’
‘What can I do?’
‘What would you like to do?’
‘I’d like to do secretarial work.’
‘Who would you like to be secretary to?’
She laughed and shook her head.
Her face was grubby with tear stains. But around her eyes and in the muzzle of her face which terminates in her full lip-sticked lips there is evidence of the same force that has filled out her bust and her hips. She is nubile in everything except her education and her chances.
‘When you’re a bit better I’ll keep you off work for a few days, if you like, and you can go to the Labour Exchange and find out how you can get trained. There are all kinds of training schemes.’
‘Are there?’ she said moonily.
‘How did you do at school?’
‘I wasn’t any good.’
‘Did you take O-levels?’
‘No. I left.’
‘But you weren’t stupid were you?’ He asked this as though if she admitted that she was, it would somehow reflect badly on him.
‘No, not stupid.’
‘Well,’ he said.
‘It’s terrible that laundry. I hate it.’
‘It’s no good being sorry for yourself. If I give you a week off, will you really use it?’
She nodded, chewing her damp handkerchief.
‘You can come up again on Wednesday and I’ll phone the Labour Exchange and we’ll talk about what they say.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, beginning to cry again.
‘Don’t be sorry. The fact that you’re crying means you’ve got imagination. If you didn’t have imagination, you wouldn’t feel so bad. Now go to bed and stay there tomorrow.’
Through the surgery window he saw her walking up the lane to the common, to the house in which he had delivered her sixteen years ago. After she had turned the corner, he continued to stare at the stone walls on either side of the lane. Once they were dry walls. Now their stones were cemented together.
He had heard rumours about them. That they were on the run. That she was a prostitute from London. That the Council would have to act to turn them out of the abandoned cottage which the owner, a farmer, had given them permission to use (some said because he had met the girl in London) but in which they were living like squatters.
Three children were playing by the back door with some chicken wire. The mother was in the kitchen. She was a woman in her late twenties with long black hair, thin long hands and grey eyes that were both bright and very liquid. Her skin had an unwashed look which is more to do with anaemia than dirt.
‘You won’t be able to stay here in the winter,’ he said.
‘Jack says he’s going to patch it up when he gets the time.’
‘It needs more than patching up.’
There was a table in the kitchen and two chairs. By the stone sink there was an orange-box cupboard with some cups and plates and packets in it. Half the window above the sink was broken and there was a piece of cardboard across it. The sunshine streamed through the other half and the grey dust slowly rose and fell through the beam, so slowly that it seemed to be part of another uninhabited world.
