‘Thank God I’m a camel,’ Artemis sighed. ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about.’
The child was passed back out to them again, and Ellie helped fix her clothes tidily before lifting her up and passing her back overhead. At the next station, the guard came round and shouted into every carriage that the train was overloaded and would not proceed until everyone who had got on at the last station got off and waited for the next train. No-one moved and the train stayed put. Finally two dozen or so people drifted out on to the platform and the train moved out, only for those who had stepped off to step back smartly on again. At last the train arrived in Salisbury, two and a half hours later than it should have done.
In the station car park there was a pony and trap waiting for them. ‘I suppose you arranged this,’ Ellie said to Artemis.
‘Yes,’ Artemis replied. ‘Or rather my great-aunt did. She lives just outside Salisbury.’
The dog-cart took them to the hospital where Hugo lay.
‘I’ll wait here,’ Artemis said, settling into a chair in the reception area. ‘When you want me, if you want me, just give me a call.’
‘Come with me,’ Ellie said, suddenly turning back. She took Artemis by the hand before she could sit down. ‘Please. I need you with me now.’
‘Don’t be silly, of course you don’t.’ Artemis looked at her shocked.
‘I do,’ Ellie pleaded. ‘Please. Please come with me.’
A doctor appeared at that moment and asked for Mrs Tanner. Ellie fell silent. Artemis signalled to the doctor. ‘This is Mrs Tanner, doctor,’ she said.
‘If you’d like to come this way, Mrs Tanner.’
Ellie refused to move, holding on to Artemis. ‘Artemis,’ she said. ‘Please.’
Behind her back, Artemis shook her head furiously at the doctor, who understood at once. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Tanner,’ he said. ‘Your husband is allowed only one visitor at a time.’
Ellie ignored him, and turned to whisper to Artemis. ‘Please. Just think – if he saw us both –’
‘I’ll be here if you want me,’ Artemis replied, easing Ellie forward. ‘Go on.’
After a moment’s hesitation, Ellie followed the doctor down the corridor. Artemis sat down in a chair and picked up an old magazine through which she flicked uncomprehendingly for the next half-hour.
When she saw him, Ellie’s heart missed a beat. Hugo was sitting up in bed doing a jigsaw puzzle, and apart from some strapping on his shoulder, just visible under his pyjama jacket, he looked gentle and handsome and donnish, like he always looked. Ellie’s heart started to race as she hurried to his bedside.
‘Hugo,’ she said, as she reached him. ‘Hugo?’ Hugo didn’t look up. He just continued whistling to himself and doing his puzzle. ‘Hugo?’ Ellie asked again, her heart now beating abnormally, but for quite another reason. ‘Hugo it’s me. Ellie.’
The doctor moved near to Hugo and tapped him on the arm. ‘You’ve got a visitor, old chap,’ he said, bending down to him.
Hugo looked up and saw Ellie. ‘Hullo,’ he said.
‘Hullo, Hugo,’ Ellie said gently, coming to sit on the side of his bed. She took one of his hands, failing to see the doctor signify for her not to, with a shake of his head.
‘It’s me, Hugo. Ellie.’
Hugo stared at her, his face unsmiling, and his forehead puckered. Then he slowly withdrew his hand, as if deeply suspicious of her touch. ‘Hullo,’ he said, and then returned his attention to his jigsaw.
‘Hugo, it’s me. Ellie.’ A note of desperation was creeping into her voice, as she racked her brain for something different to say, something which wouldn’t sound stupid, as stupid as the phrases which were going round in her head. ‘Hugo sweetheart,’ she whispered.
‘Don’t you know me?’
‘Who are you?’ Hugo asked, looking at the small piece of blue sky in his hand. ‘Why are you calling me sweetheart?’
‘I’m Ellie, your wife, Hugo. It’s me. Eleanor.’
Hugo smiled round at the doctor. ‘Who are you?’ he asked him. ‘Are you Hugo?’
Ellie looked up at the doctor for help, but all he could do was return her look with sympathy.
‘Sweetheart.’ Ellie put her hand under Hugo’s chin and tried to turn his face to her so that he could see her closely. Suddenly a hand reached up and clasped her wrist, with savage strength.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘I don’t know who you are or what you want, but I’m trying to do a jigsaw!’ He kept hold of her wrist for a moment, while he stared at her. Then he let go and returned once more to his puzzle. Ellie turned her head away quickly then rising walked away from his bed. The doctor followed.
‘I can’t tell you what to do, Mrs Tanner,’ he said, taking her by the elbow out of Hugo’s earshot. ‘And I can’t tell you what to say. I don’t really want to tell you anything categorical. Such as how severe your husband’s condition is, or what hope there may be or there may not be for him. That is, you understand, for him getting any memory back. Physically he is in very good shape. I don’t want to make what I could call an informed guess about your husband’s condition, because it would be wrong to do so, because I believe every case must be judged on its own especial merits. But I have to say something to you, otherwise I’ll only send you away full of false hopes. And what I say to you must be coloured by my previous experiences in this field, of which I have had plenty, I do assure you.’ He paused.
‘Which is?’
‘It’s very unlikely, I’m afraid, that there will be any significant recovery of memory.’
‘Ever?’ asked Ellie, and she took out a small lace handkerchief and wiped her lips with it.
‘It’s unlikely. I don’t wish to get too technical, because I don’t think it will help.’
‘Because you don’t think I’ll understand.’
‘That’s not what I think at all, Mrs Tanner.’ The doctor took his glasses off and slipped them into the top pocket of his housecoat before proceeding. ‘If it was just a simple blow, a case of concussive damage, then I could probably offer you a more optimistic and certainly a more accurate prognosis. But if, as I fear, it is something more subtle, such as an unrecognized subdural haemorrhage, then the problems are more severe.’
‘What is an unrecognized –?’
‘Subdural haemorrhage,’ the doctor repeated.
‘Thank you,’ Ellie said. ‘And why should it have gone unrecognized?’
‘A subdural haemorrhage results from a blow to the head, or as in your husband’s case a severe concussion caused by being inside a vehicle such as he was in when it is quite literally blown up. It’s bleeding, in or around the brain, and it can happen quite surreptitiously, over weeks, even months. The patient becomes sleepy, gets bad headaches, becomes confused, loses his memory, he may even become paralysed. Now please, don’t worry more than you have to.’ He stopped and looked her in the eye. ‘This isn’t going to happen to your husband,’ he said. ‘The point is, with the exception of any paralysis, I think it already has.’
The doctor then went on to explain that back-tracking as best he could under the conditions of war and distance, he believed that when Hugo was admitted to the hospital in Cairo, he was conscious, and that he fell into a coma there because no-one had diagnosed or even considered the possibility of a subdural haemorrhage.
‘With the result,’ he concluded, ‘there could be lasting damage to the cerebral cortex, more particularly to the part of the brain which controls various conscious processes, such as perception, thought, decision making and more particularly, memory.’
Ellie looked at the doctor then turned away to study the view out of a window. The April day had turned from sunshine to heavy rain, as if in keeping with the news. ‘You knew all this before you let me see him,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t it have been better to have explained first and then let me see him?’
‘I don’t think so, no,’ the doctor replied. ‘When I saw you, when I saw how . . . how beautiful you were,’ the do
ctor hesitated, anxious to sound neither foolish nor flirtatious. ‘It has not been unknown,’ he said, ‘for very positive images to produce a quite unexpected return to normality.’
Ellie turned back to him, and saw that he was blushing. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Then in that case I think we ought to reintroduce my husband to the person who came with me.’
When the two of them returned to the ward, taking Artemis with them, Hugo had almost finished his jigsaw.
‘Hullo, old chap,’ said the doctor.
‘Ssshhhh,’ said Hugo, putting a finger to his lips without looking up. ‘Damn it, there’s a bit missing.’ He started to look around the bed and under the blankets for the missing piece of the puzzle.
Artemis stared at him. ‘Hullo, Hugo,’ she said finally.
Hugo took no notice. Instead he suddenly held up the missing but now found piece of jigsaw triumphantly. ‘Got it!’ he said. And then he noticed Artemis.
‘Hullo, Hugo,’ she said again.
Hugo stared at her, and then smiled. ‘Hello, Tom,’ he said, and then bent over his puzzle happily, to put the last piece in place.
The excitement was intense, electrifying, as the three of them waited in silence, hardly daring to ask Hugo another question lest they had all imagined the moment. For his part Hugo behaved as if nothing whatsoever abnormal had happened. He just pressed all the pieces in the puzzle flat with his hand, then turned the tray round for all to admire. The completed puzzle was a picture of Blenheim Palace.
‘Nice, isn’t it?’ he asked them. ‘Though I wouldn’t thank you to clean all those windows.’
The doctor nodded again to Artemis, to prompt her to continue. ‘Yes, it’s lovely, Hugo,’ she said. ‘But not nearly as nice as Brougham.’
Hugo took no notice. He just pushed the puzzle flat again with his hand.
‘Hugo?’ Artemis asked. ‘Hugo?’ She sat down a little awkwardly on the bed, on the opposite side to Ellie.
He stared at her, as if he’d never seen her before. ‘Yes?’
‘I just wondered if I could have another look at your puzzle,’ Artemis replied.
Hugo stared at each of them slowly and in turn, deeply suspicious once again.
‘Let Tom see your puzzle, Hugo,’ Ellie said, doing her best to smile.
‘Which of you is Tom?’ he asked.
‘I am,’ Artemis replied.
Hugo stared at her, and then burst into laughter. ‘Don’t be silly,’ he laughed. ‘Tom’s a boy’s name.’
In order to be near Hugo, Ellie moved into a hotel in Salisbury. It was full of what she later heard described as ‘rich refugees’, a caste of people who had even been attacked by The Times as a body of people who had fled from nothing, and who were just sitting around eating and drinking and making no effort to involve themselves in the war beyond the news they read in their newspapers. Ellie felt uncomfortable in their company, but she knew it was vital for her to be at hand lest there was any change in Hugo’s condition, or even more hopefully in case her presence might finally and quite literally bring him to his senses.
She visited him every day, and it took her no time at all to realize that to Hugo every day was exactly the same as the last, and as the one which had still yet to dawn. She would greet him and he would fail to respond to his name, she would introduce herself and remind him who she was and who he was, and on every visit he solved precisely the same jigsaw puzzle, while Ellie would go over in fine detail the life they had spent together before his injury.
Hugo would pay no attention. Occasionally he would look up from his puzzle and ask Ellie to pass him a drink, or to help him with his jigsaw, or simply to ask yet again who she was. He never once recalled her name, not even during the course of a visit, and when shown photographs of himself in the company of Ellie, on their wedding day, at Brougham, in London, or with Jamie, and snapshot after snapshot of himself as a child, he simply stared at them briefly and without any interest whatsoever, before smiling politely at Ellie and thanking her for showing them to him. He would then invariably turn his full attention back to his puzzle.
‘This is you, Hugo,’ Ellie would say to him, day after day as they went through the routine with the photographs. ‘This is you when we first met –’
‘I don’t think so,’ he said to her once, when Ellie had stopped at the photograph taken of them when they had become engaged. ‘No I don’t think you meant that. That isn’t right.’
Seeing this was a different sort of response from usual, Ellie immediately pursued it further. ‘Why don’t you think so, Hugo?’ she asked. ‘Why isn’t it right?’
Hugo stared at the portrait for seemingly ages, his finger tracing round both faces in the photograph. ‘That’s you,’ she said, as he traced his own image. ‘And that’s me,’ as Hugo ran his finger over the photograph of her.
‘No,’ Hugo replied, shaking his head slowly. ‘That isn’t you. It isn’t possible.’
She asked him to look at her, and he did so, more with a petulant frown than any real curiosity. And as he looked, Ellie then held the photograph up beside her face. ‘That is me, Hugo. And that is you.’ Hugo silently disagreed, shaking his head slowly. ‘Why don’t you think it’s me, Hugo?’ Ellie asked.
‘Oh why do you think!’ he said, suddenly impatient. ‘Your hair’s the wrong colour!’
That was as far as Ellie got that day, because when she tried to press him further, Hugo tipped his half-finished puzzle on to the floor and disappeared in a burrow under his bedclothes.
Ellie could not even get him to recognize himself. When she realized the photographs meant nothing, she tried sitting with a mirror held up to him, followed by a framed portrait of him. But all Hugo did was stare in silence at both of the images and then at Ellie.
‘That’s you,’ she said. ‘That is you in the mirror, and that’s you in the photograph.’ Once again Hugo just shook his head in contradiction. ‘Why don’t you think it’s you, Hugo?’ Ellie persisted. ‘This is a mirror, so the mirror’s not going to tell you any lies, is it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Hugo said slowly. ‘But that isn’t me. I don’t look like that.’
‘No?’ Ellie asked, carefully. ‘So what do you look like, Hugo?’
‘I know what I look like!’ he shouted. ‘And I certainly don’t look like that!’
Doctor Allen’s explanation of Hugo’s refusal to look his real self in the face was that since he no longer mentally knew who he was, and since he had no recollection of anybody or anything, his brain had also lost the ability to make a decision as to what he might or could look like. ‘This probably all sounds like something out of Lewis Carroll to the layman, Mrs Tanner,’ he explained. ‘But when it comes to dealing with injuries to the brain, be they injuries caused by direct concussion, explosive concussion, or in some cases simply by trauma, we’re dealing with uncharted territory. Who knows? There could also be a reason for your husband not wanting to remember. Imagine the shock of what happened to him in that armoured car at a moment when he most certainly thought they were out of danger. Perhaps it was an event which his brain, particularly since now it’s malfunctioning, perhaps his brain wished to blot it out altogether. And by erasing that terrible moment when he stared death in the face, along with that his brain could also have removed the memory of all past and present history.’
‘And there is nothing you can do.’ It was a question Ellie had found herself asking so persistently, it had now become a statement of fact rather than an interrogative one.
‘Just hope,’ Doctor Allen would answer. ‘And pray. Miracles do happen.’
‘I’m sorry, doctor,’ was Ellie’s response to this. ‘I think if we believe in miracles, or the need for them, then that’s a criticism of our own ability.’
‘So what do you think we need, Mrs Tanner?’
‘I think we need to apply ourselves even more to the problem, Doctor Allen, and to keep applying ourselves, even if it appears that all hope has actually gone.’
>
The doctor promised that for his part he would keep on doing everything he could to effect a cure for her husband, but Ellie, who had been wise since childhood, had grown wiser by the moment, and she knew that with a war which was worsening daily, the amount of time any one doctor had to devote to one patient must by necessity and rightly so be limited. She determined to take charge of Hugo’s welfare.
For once fortune chose to smile on her. While she was in Salisbury, she learned Brougham was to be requisitioned as a military hospital. She immediately returned to the house to make all necessary arrangements with those of the staff who still remained. Hugo’s blue print for times of crisis had already been implicated, and all the art treasures and fine furniture had been stored away in the vaults as planned. Knowing that no-one understood the house as well as she did, Ellie volunteered to stay on as the hospital’s administrator, an offer which the hard-pressed authorities were only too happy to accept. Within a week, helped by her loyal skeleton staff, the house had been converted into a hospital, with the main drawing room, the dining room and the music room adapted into wards, the upstairs bedrooms into secondary wards, part of the stable block into a gymnasium, and the library into a recreation room. The only rooms which Ellie left unaltered were Hugo’s and her suite of bedroom and dressing rooms.
By the end of the second week, there was a full complement of Red Cross nurses, under the supervision of two nursing sisters and a matron, the idea being to run Brougham as a convalescent home for soldiers, sailors and airmen. Porter, while more than keen to do his bit, was however, very pessimistic as to what the end result would be.
‘They’ve done terrible things to Heathdown, ma’am,’ he informed Ellie. ‘From what I’ve heard.’
‘Heathdown’s not a hospital, Porter,’ Ellie had been forced to remind him. ‘Heathdown’s been requisitioned by the Army.’
‘I know, ma’am,’ he had replied. ‘But the things they’ve done. They’ve chopped up the bannisters of the great staircase for firewood, and shot all the eyes out of the portraits. And last week, I’m told, they near as anything burned the whole place down.’
In Sunshine Or In Shadow Page 49
