The Poison Cupboard

by John Burke

  This Mrs. Swanton, now, was flushed by the wind, but not blotchy.

  She said: ‘I wish I knew more about the flowers and birds and all the rest of it.’ Then she giggled. ‘I meant on the marsh, of course.’

  He could not see why she had thought the remark was funny. Of course she had meant on the marsh; he had understood right away that that was what she must mean. But he had noticed that she had these odd fits of laughter that didn’t make sense.

  ‘Do you know a lot about them?’ she asked, looking at him sideways with an eagerness that was not just the usual grown-up eagerness to look interested. Too interested they looked as a rule, and you knew they were putting it on.

  ‘A bit,’ he said.

  They reached the house, and she held the gate open while he wheeled his bike in.

  ‘You must tell me all about it one day,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, a bit disappointed, because that was the sort of remark you didn’t believe in: you could bet nothing would come of it, and nothing was ever meant to come of it.

  He was wrong. It was hard to tell whether Charlotte and he met by accident or whether she arranged to be about when he went in a certain direction. What was certain was that their paths crossed far more frequently than they had done hitherto. Charlotte would stop and have a word with him in the house; she would be downstairs while he was having his cup of tea and slice of cake; she, like the older Mrs. Swanton, was now telling him not to try to carry too many things at once and not to overwork himself chopping sticks.

  Always she had that queer thoughtful look on her face. And Doctor Swanton, too: she had a way of watching when she came across the two of them together that was funny, as though she couldn’t make up her mind about something she was going to do or going not to do.

  None of this worried Gil. He was used to being watched: from his earliest days he had been conscious of his grandfather’s sharp, attentive face turned towards him. The heavy face and the shrewd, querulous eyes, always keeping him under observation. It had not bothered him. He had taken it all for granted — it was something adult, something the old fusspots couldn’t help doing — and now he took for granted the way the Swanton women hovered over him.

  One Friday evening Charlotte (Mrs. Swanton he called her to her face, and would have called her when speaking of her to the others if he had ever spoken of her to the others, which he hadn’t) said:

  ‘I’ll walk a little way along the road with you, Gil. I could do with a breath of fresh air before surgery.’

  Her ‘before surgery’ came out as crisply and professionally as though it were Doctor Swanton herself speaking.

  They walked slowly. Today there was the usual marsh breeze, muttering along the ground. Charlotte glanced up at the telegraph wires.

  ‘Look!’ she cried. ‘Those birds. Just like notes of music on a stave, aren’t they? I wonder what the tune would be if you could whistle it?’

  Gil looked up dubiously, and said nothing.

  ‘Don’t you think it looks like music?’ she said enthusiastically.

  He was suddenly frank. He said: ‘No. They’re just swallows.’

  She raised her eyebrows, and pouted. Her whole face twisted in exaggerated surprise. Then she laughed. ‘You’re very literal, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well . . .’ he muttered.

  He found that she was always doing that sort of thing. Whenever she saw anything she wanted to turn it into something else. Everything was ‘like’ something else. He didn’t see the sense of it. But when, a few days later, the English master at school talked about similes, it came home to Gil more strongly than it had ever done just what a simile was. Not that that made it any better. He had always been sure that stuff was a lot of nonsense, and now he knew. But after that he went on looking for similes until it became a game he couldn’t stop, like adding up the numbers on railway engines or motor cars and dividing them up and seeing if the last two figures added up to the same as the first two or could be divided into them or anything like that.

  Charlotte asked a lot of questions. One or two vague ones about his mother that he couldn’t make head or tail of. And what was he going to do when he left school? That was an old one, a dull and ordinary one that people were always asking, and it wasn’t made any better by the fact that he didn’t know what he was going to do. His grandfather had told him he was going to leave. His grandfather had said he would ‘speak to someone’ about him, get him ‘fixed up’. Gil had no idea who that someone might be.

  For himself, he wanted to go in for farming. He wanted to do it properly, and go to the big Agricultural College fifteen miles away: that was the only way to make a proper job of it, like Ted Noakes’s older brother had done. But you had to stay on at school and take Advanced level in the G.C.E. for that, Mr. Cartwright had told him, and as he wasn’t staying on, that settled that. He had to earn some money. His grandfather couldn’t get about much nowadays after knocking himself on the leg, and his veins being bad anyway, so there would soon have to be some more money coming into the house.

  It was better when Charlotte asked him about the plants that grew up out of the ditches. Then he could give her the answers without having to think them out and fret about them. It was funny how little she knew. She kept stopping him in the middle of a sentence and asking him to explain something that everyone understood.

  But he liked her. He got to like her more and more while they went walking out of doors. She sounded interested in what he said, as though she really meant it. Although there were so many things she was ignorant about, she wasn’t what you’d call silly.

  He was glad that none of his school friends had so far seen him out with her: the things they’d have said would have been all wrong and would have spoilt the whole business. Yet at the same time he would have been proud, in a way, to be seen with her.

  Indoors it was a bit different. He didn’t think quite so much of her then. She showed up badly against the others. Doctor Swanton was tidy and liked everything just so, and she had made her mother fit in with her ways. But Charlotte wasn’t tidy. Magazines left crumpled on chairs usually belonged to Charlotte, or had been taken by Charlotte from the waiting-room to read, and not returned. A bottle of cleansing lotion on the stairs, or a dropped handkerchief, would prove to be Charlotte’s.

  More than once Gil had seen Doctor Swanton stop, frown, and stoop to pick something up.

  Once he saw her come downstairs and then hesitate, noticing, just as she was about to tread on it, a small perspex box filled with odds and ends. She paused. She had not seen Gil. Then, abruptly, she brought her foot down hard, and the box splintered.

  A moment later she was saying to Charlotte: ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve smashed something you left on the stairs.’

  ‘Oh, my little box.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t expect to find things in the middle of the stairs. I just came right down on it.’

  Still things were left lying around. Liking the orderliness of this house as he did, Gil was on the doctor’s side; but he felt a bit uneasy about that one episode.

  One afternoon he stayed somewhat later than usual. In a way he was hoping to be delayed: he wanted to walk out through the waiting-room just before surgery, past all the people sitting mournfully on chairs and waiting their turn.

  Upstairs, Charlotte was thumping about. As usual she had left everything until the last minute, and had now decided to have a quick bath. Gil envied her. She showed people in and out. She looked very trim in her white coat — he had only once seen her wearing it, but the picture remained clear in his mind — and he had heard folk say how pleasant she was. ‘A bit fussy, mind,’ and, ‘Gives herself airs — not a bit like the doctor,’ but he wouldn’t care what anyone said if he could be neat and efficient and perhaps make up medicines and in the end learn to be a doctor himself.

  No, that was no good. You didn’t get to be a doctor like that. The uneasy awareness came over him that he was nearing the end of his school li
fe: if he had wanted to be a doctor probably he ought to have thought of it earlier.

  Anyway, he didn’t really fancy the idea, when he came to think about it. It was only something that moved him when he walked through this house, sniffing at the antiseptic smell by the consulting-room door, and seeing the doctor’s bag on the ledge where she always dumped it when she came in.

  Doctor Swanton appeared from the kitchen.

  ‘Gilbert, will you run upstairs and fetch me a clean towel from the airing cupboard? Goodness knows what’s happened to them all.’

  ‘Yes, Doctor,’ he snapped smartly. It sounded crisp and military when you rapped it out like that.

  He went upstairs two at a time.

  Charlotte’s white lab coat was draped over the banister on the landing. One shoe projected into the corridor from a half-open door. He went towards the airing-cupboard, and at that moment the bathroom door was jerked open, and Charlotte came out.

  She had a dressing-gown loosely over her shoulders. It hung lopsidedly, and fell away from her as she moved.

  Gil stopped, appalled. He could not retreat. He saw her breasts and the shadows of her body, and the flash of her legs as they twitched back the trailing folds of the dressing-gown.

  She gave a little squeal of laughter and hurried past him. The laugh echoed on in his head. There was a swirl of soapy perfume about him.

  He found that he was breathing fast. He felt queer inside. Automatically he opened the door of the cupboard and took out a towel. When he had it, he did not at once go downstairs. He had to lean against the door for a minute. He was almost frightened of going back along the corridor, past Charlotte’s door, which she had not closed properly.

  ‘Gilbert!’

  Doctor Swanton was at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Yes . . . coming.’

  He went down, clutching the towel.

  She looked at him curiously. ‘Anything wrong?’

  ‘No, miss. Nothing.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Here’s your towel.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Her eyes glanced past him, up towards the landing. The sweet, steamy, soapy smell leaked faintly down from the bathroom. The lab coat on the banister was suddenly tweaked away by an unseen hand.

  ‘Well, it’s about time you went home,’ said Doctor Swanton in a hard, toneless voice.

  ‘Yes. I’ll be off.’

  Of course she could not know, could not have guessed what had happened. If she did, it hadn’t been his fault anyway. But there was something savage and accusing in her eyes. He hurried away, leaving her standing at the foot of the stairs, looking up, not even answering his ‘Goodbye, Doctor.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Laura took out her scissors and indicated to Mr. Drysdale that he should stretch his leg out. Then she began to cut down the adhesive bandage.

  ‘Lot o’ fuss,’ said Mr. Drysdale ungratefully. ‘Doctor Swanton would never ha’ made all this fuss.’

  Doctor Swanton was always, to him, Laura’s father. She was just Laura — in his own mind, for he never addressed her by any name at all.

  ‘Healed very well,’ said Laura. She was surprised at the way the ulcer had cleared up in the past ten days. He was a tough, healthy old creature.

  ‘Good job, too. Now I can get about properly again.’

  ‘You’ll still need your elastic stocking —’

  ‘Oh, them things.’

  He scowled down at his right leg as, though it did not belong to him. The skin was pink and puffy where it had been swathed in bandage. It made a bright contrast to his weather-beaten face and hands; and to the thick, knotted blue veins that twisted like grotesque cables up his leg.

  Laura thought for a moment. The recovery had been remarkable, but in many ways that was going to make her task more difficult. She knew he would be furious at the suggestion she was going to have to make.

  She began: ‘You can’t go on like this, Mr. Drysdale.’

  ‘What’s wrong now? You jus’ said yourself it’s healed up proper.’

  ‘But the next time you go out and give yourself a bang on the leg —’

  ‘It was an accident, that last one.’ Mr. Drysdale was furious that he should be considered so inept. ‘That’s one thing that won’t happen again, I lay.’

  ‘Accidents happen whether you want them to or not. With your veins in their present condition, a hard knock against a chair could make another hole like that last one. Another ulcer — more bandages.’

  She snapped the words out as brusquely as he himself might have done.

  He answered in the same way. ‘I’ll keep me wits about me, thank you. It’s high time I was doing something useful.’

  ‘It’s high time you were in hospital,’ said Laura.

  His mouth worked. He was trying to summon up some devastating remark that would put paid to all fancy notions of that sort. Finally he managed:

  ‘Never heard of such a thing. Can’t afford it, anyways.’

  ‘Hospital treatment is free nowadays.’

  ‘Can’t afford the time,’ he swiftly amended.

  ‘If you go on as you have been doing, your veins will get worse. You’re nearly crippled now —’

  ‘No such thing.’

  ‘You can’t walk four miles up to the woods and do your work properly in your condition. The only treatment that will put you right is what they can do for you in hospital.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going, and that’s all there is to it.’

  It was definite. There must be no further argument. He clipped his words off with a little contemptuous expulsion of breath like a brief laugh. Nothing, said his face, could possibly make him change this decision.

  It was all so familiar; all in keeping with the smug, exasperating, self-applauding local saying, ‘We won’t be druv.’ The locals — the true locals, the older people who were still, in this modern world, a sullen tribe apart — would not only not be driven: they could hardly even be led, coaxed or cajoled.

  ‘For your own good . . .’ began Laura, and then sighed.

  They would not be told. Time after time she had been faced with this unreasoning stubbornness. Often she longed to leave such pig-headed folk to their fate. All right: let them have it their own way; let them see what happened when they disregarded her advice.

  Of course she never, in the end, left matters like that. Always she persisted. Always her reluctant professional pride drove her on. She jeered at herself, but persevered.

  Now she said: ‘It’s silly to be obstinate. They’ll only keep you in for about three weeks.’

  ‘Well, I’m just not goin’ to —’

  ‘In that time your veins can be tied and injected. It’s safe and simple, and when you come out you’ll be yourself again.’

  ‘There’s the boy,’ said Mr. Drysdale with absolute finality. ‘There’s Gilbert. What about him, eh?’

  Laura moistened her lips. What about Gilbert, indeed? She had not thought of him until now — and now she wished she did not have to. The challenge had been thrown suddenly across her path; she felt as though she had stumbled and were now lurching forward trying to regain her balance.

  Mr. Drysdale glared triumphantly at her. ‘What about him, eh? Couldn’t go off and leave him on his own, specially with the Easter holidays comin’ on. Who’d look after him, eh?’

  Now she must back down. She could, and must, stop insisting. Already she was aware of danger — of what a stay in hospital would mean, not for Mr. Drysdale but for herself. The implications assembled themselves in her mind.

  But her professional integrity was as saving as a painful inoculation given many years ago, an inoculation which had not weakened but had somehow stiffened its resistance over the years.

  She said: ‘There’s room for him at our place. We can look after him. It will only be for three weeks or so.’

  No, said some part of her — that part of her which was not the doctor but Laura the woman, Peter’s sister. No. This was unthinkable.
>
  But she had spoken, and now would not draw back.

  Mr. Drysdale had been taken quite off guard. He wriggled, and made dubious noises in his throat.

  ‘Couldn’t think of it,’ he said at last. ‘Very kind of you, but —’

  ‘If you don’t go into hospital now and get it over with,’ said Laura firmly, ‘you’re going to be a nuisance to Gilbert in the future. He already does more than his share of the household . . . oh, yes he does’ — as he tried to interrupt her — ‘and soon he’ll have to devote his entire time to looking after you. There’s no telling when you may be completely laid up: perhaps the very week he’s starting his new job and needs to have no home worries to distract him.’

  He was retreating. His eyes avoided hers. Once more he was staring with bitter enmity at his leg, which was betraying him so shamefully.

  He said: ‘I can’t be beholden to you —’

  ‘You know very well,’ said Laura remorselessly, ‘that we have certain responsibilities where Gilbert is concerned. We’ve done what we could —’

  ‘You’ve always done what’s right by him.’

  ‘We want to continue. And I say that Gilbert must come to us now.’

  ‘You agreed,’ said Mr. Drysdale, making a last attempt, ‘not to interfere. I was to have the say in what he did — in everything about the lad. That’s the way we agreed it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Laura. ‘But in the present circumstances . . .’

  He was defeated. From the moment she had committed herself to the decision that, all other considerations firmly set aside, he needed to go into hospital and must go into hospital, he had been defeated.

  She had done what had to be done. The results of all this, like the results of Charlotte’s arrival in Brookchurch, were hazy and far off; but somehow, somewhere, it was all going to add up, and there would be an answer.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Gilbert was given the small room at the end of the landing, overlooking the path by the side of the house. On very stormy days the wind would force rain through the window-frames, which in the course of many years had been reduced to the consistency of blotting-paper. For some reason the whole room smelt faintly of damp newspaper. But it was nevertheless, Laura knew, far better than Gilbert’s room at home.