Dead Man's Embers

by Mari Strachan

  Non can see that nothing will save this man. She swallows hard to keep from retching.

  ‘Go away,’ he says. ‘You do-gooders are useless. And I know what you Taffs are like. Lying, devious, thieving bastards the lot of you. Bad as gypsies, you are.’

  Every last bit of sympathy leaves Non as if it has been punched out of her. She wants to hurt this man back, but she turns away from him and leaves. Past the last two beds on the ward, ignoring their occupants, and out through the double doors. And then she has to stop because she does not know where to go from here.

  Angela catches up with her. ‘You see,’ she says. ‘Davey doesn’t have it so bad, does he? He’s home and he’s not injured.’

  Non feels the blood drain from her face. She has never felt so angry, not even with Catherine Davies at her worst. ‘Davey has no injury that you can see,’ she says. ‘But his mind has been wounded, I’m sure of it.’

  Angela shrugs. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I don’t know what anyone can do about that except Davey himself. He’ll have to pull himself together. Like young Johnny down there – he’d be able to see fine if he stopped his nonsense.’

  Surely there must be doctors who can cure damaged minds as well as doctors for damaged hearts here in this enormous hospital; surely there must be people who are concerned about what this War has done to soldiers’ minds as well as to their bodies? Surely Angela’s Edward would not have thought the way Angela does? Non cannot understand why Angela is not aware of the agony of mind that is the consequence of the War for men like Davey and young Johnny. Is it possible that Angela has hardened herself so that she can survive day after day as a nurse? Non knows very well what a slippery notion the mind is to deal with; it is not like an arm or a leg, or even a heart.

  ‘But look,’ Angela says, as if Non is not furious, as if Non must agree with her, as if there is nothing more to be said about the subject, ‘I’ve arranged for you to see my friend. He agrees with me that there’s something very odd about this heart thing of yours. Go straight there now, he’s free. Down that corridor, down the stairs on the left, turn right and it’s the second door on the left. His name’s on it.’ And she rushes away back into her ward.

  24

  Non’s heart is beating faster than she thinks is possible. She cannot read the plate on the door that Angela directed her to find, because her eyesight has blurred as it often does when she is angry or agitated, and anyway she cannot remember Angela ever saying his name, it was My friend or Edward’s friend. But she has followed the directions to the letter so this must be the correct door. She raises her fist and raps on it.

  A commotion on the other side of the door causes her to step back a little, but when it is opened she is greeted by a tall young man who instantly makes her think of Gwydion’s description of Aoife: bright blue eyes, pale skin, copious black curly hair. He is not her idea of what a doctor should look like, but he is wearing a long white coat and she recognises the stethoscope around his neck from her memory of the one her father possessed.

  ‘Yes? Yes?’ He moves impatiently from one foot to the other, as if he were dancing. Non sees he has one brown shoe and one black shoe on his feet. Why has no one told him?

  ‘I’m Angela’s . . . Angela sent me,’ Non says. She won’t claim to be Angela’s friend. ‘Rhiannon Davies.’ She holds her hand out to shake his.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ the young man she hopes is Angela’s friend says. He holds on to her hand and draws her into the room, which looks like a trap for the unwary. She flinches away from a skeleton twitching on a hook on the back of the door.

  ‘Don’t mind him, he’s been dead a long time.’

  Is that the skeleton of a real person? Should it not be in a grave? Non is not sure about this second plan of Angela’s any more than she was about the first. This young man does not have the gravitas she associates with the medical profession. Not that she has had much experience of the profession, having only once visited a doctor in her life, dragged to see him by Branwen, an experience never spoken of again by either of them, and never repeated.

  ‘I’m Seb O’Neill,’ the young man says, still holding on to her hand and now pumping it up and down in greeting.

  ‘Sebon?’ she says, feeling a nervous giggle bubbling up her throat.

  ‘Seb,’ he says, ‘easier than Sebastian.’

  She cannot help it, the giggle becomes a laugh, and she feels slightly hysterical, as if none of this is quite real. ‘Sebon,’ she says. ‘It means soap in Welsh.’

  ‘Soap?’ He looks at her, frowning, for a moment, then gives a brilliant smile. ‘Well, I do try to wash out disease, scrub it away, I suppose. Soap!’

  Non does not think this is an auspicious start once her nervous laughter has ebbed away, leaving her more nervous than before.

  ‘Sit down here,’ Seb says, indicating a chair in front of what must be his desk. ‘Now, how do you say your name, again?’

  ‘Davies,’ Non says. ‘Oh . . . Rhiannon . . . but most people call me Non.’

  ‘Non.’ He sits behind the desk, pushes aside a stack of journals that leave a trail of dust and leans over towards her. ‘Angela only had time to explain to me very quickly what the problem is. She was most concerned. She says you’re taking some drops your father makes up for you for a heart condition you have. A herbal remedy. Is that right?’

  ‘My father died when I was young,’ Non says. ‘But he’d shown me how to make the remedy, so I make it myself.’

  ‘What does your local doctor say?’

  ‘I’ve never had to see him for anything,’ Non says, heartily glad, as always, that she has not, though Dr Jones is well and fondly spoken of by those who do see him.

  ‘Have you the drops with you?’ Seb holds his hand out for them.

  Non is reluctant to hand her vial over to him; it is somehow a betrayal of her father and his years of work, all that he had done in a lifetime, and a betrayal of trust. But she does not know how to refuse the open hand stretched out to her across the desk. She takes the vial from her bag and lays it in his palm.

  He unstoppers it and sniffs cautiously at the contents. ‘What is it?’ he asks.

  ‘May Lily – Lily of the Valley some call it. It’s a distillation of the flowers. It has the same effect as foxglove only not so strong. I may have to use foxglove soon, I don’t think this is as powerful as I need it to be.’

  He does not reply. He stoppers the bottle but does not give it back to her. She would seem ill-mannered, she thinks, if she were to lean across the desk and take it. But she must not leave without it.

  ‘I’d like to count your pulse beat,’ he says. ‘Would you mind? It will tell me how quickly your heart is beating.’ He takes a watch from the breast pocket of his white coat, reaches over the desk for her wrist and lays two long, slim fingers across the inside of it.

  ‘It’s beating very fast now because I’ve just been visiting those poor men in Angela’s ward and—’

  ‘Shhh,’ he says, holding her wrist and looking at his watch. His lips move slightly, as if he were a child counting. He blinks rapidly, smiles at her, then counts the beats of her pulse again.

  ‘Your pulse is very slow,’ he says. ‘Abnormally slow, not fast at all. Tell me about your father, why he gave you this . . . remedy.’

  So she tells him. He is a good listener for someone who seems so scatterbrained, so good in fact that she tells him far too much about her father and his studies, his life’s work, his famous book on herbalism, the patients who returned to him time and again, his renowned cures, the scholars who came from all over the world, his own trips to far countries for new and exotic herbs to cultivate. She even tells him the story of her mother’s engagement ring, which is ridiculous, for the story has no bearing at all on why she is here.

  ‘He sounds an interesting man. But what made him think you had a heart problem?’

  ‘My heart sounded wrong to him the moment I was born. My mother was old when she had me and the birth wa
s a struggle for us both, he said. We were exhausted. If my father had not fed me the drops I would have died.’

  Seb gazes at the surface of his desk for a while, tracing patterns in the trails of dust on it. ‘Maybe your heart was beating faster than usual after your birth,’ he says, ‘but many babies are born with what is called a murmur to the heart, a slight sound defect to someone listening through a stethoscope. It goes away quite soon usually, within a few days. Did your mother recover well?’

  ‘She died,’ Non says. She has often wished that she could remember something about her mother, a touch, a smell, a sound, something a young baby would have recognised and held on to, but she cannot. ‘I was all my father had; my sisters had died except for one, and she was grown by then and had a child of her own.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Seb says, contemplating his desktop again.

  Non looks around his room, his consultation room, she supposes. It does not inspire confidence, she thinks, yet in some way, despite the odd-coloured shoes and the lack of gravitas, the man does. There are books and journals piled haphazardly on the floor. The walls have large drawings of men flayed so that the gruesome secrets below their skins are visible. She averts her eyes but not before she sees the heart in several of the drawings. She recognises it from having cooked so many of them. How strange that the human heart should look so like an animal’s heart.

  ‘How do you feel, generally?’ Seb suddenly asks, making her jump slightly. ‘How is your health from day to day?’

  ‘I couldn’t manage without my drops,’ she says. ‘My father called them my lifeblood – did I say? I get very tired, exhausted really, and I haven’t much strength. I find I’m having to take more of my drops in this heat. The heat makes me feel much worse.’

  ‘Do you suffer from headaches?’ he asks.

  Non shakes her head.

  ‘Nausea? Faintness?’

  ‘The heat has brought on some faintness recently And blurs my eyesight. I’m sure I shall be better once the heat breaks.’

  ‘Hallucinations?’

  Hallucinations! She shakes her head again.

  ‘Do you mind if I listen to your heart? With my stethoscope.’ He takes the stethoscope from around his neck as he speaks.

  Non is not sure what to answer. Where is all this leading?

  Seb takes her silence for assent. ‘I’ll call my nurse in,’ he says. He leaves the room, and returns almost immediately with a nurse who wears a hat as white and starched as Angela’s.

  ‘Nurse Reynolds will help you get ready,’ Seb says, ‘and you can lie down on the couch.’

  Nurse Reynolds unfolds a screen between the couch and the rest of the room and, when it becomes obvious that Non does not know what is expected of her, she helps her to take off her blouse and to lie down on the high couch. Then she calls Seb, to tell him that they are ready.

  ‘Now then, just breathe normally,’ Seb says, ‘and don’t speak.’ He places the stethoscope over her heart and listens intently, moving the instrument to different positions and listening as intently each time. Non sees the concentration in his narrowed eyes and compressed mouth. ‘Thank you,’ he says eventually, ‘you can get down from the couch now and Nurse will help you dress.’

  Non does as the nurse tells her and wonders what is to come after all this examining. What has Seb being trying to tell her – that her father had made a mistake? She sits in the chair before the desk again.

  Seb leans forward and says, ‘You are poisoning yourself with this.’ He raps the vial with his pencil.

  Non gasps and strains back from him in the chair. Is he saying that her father was trying to kill her? No, she thinks. No.

  ‘I’d like to keep some of this distillation to test in my laboratory,’ he says. He takes a glass tube from a drawer in his desk and drips some of her lifeblood into it, then stoppers the tube and the vial. ‘But from what you’ve told me, and from my examination of you, I would say that the symptoms you describe – the fatigue, the weakness, the faintness, the blurred eyesight, and the abnormally slow heartbeat I’ve just measured, come from these drops. You are doing yourself a great deal of harm by taking this medication. You will have to stop taking it.’

  ‘But . . . my father . . .’ She stumbles to a halt and feels tears gathering in a lump in her throat. What is she to do? Believe this man that she does not know, or believe her father who loved her and cared for her?

  ‘How old are you?’ Seb asks.

  ‘Twenty-nine,’ she says.

  ‘So, you see, though twenty-nine years is not that long ago, things were quite different then. Medical and other advances have meant that we know a great deal more about how the heart works, for instance. But I do feel that your father probably . . . misdiagnosed your condition in his fears for your life and in his pains to save you.’

  Non stares at him. She cannot just stop taking her drops. She needs them, she depends on them to carry her through each day. He must be wrong. She reaches out for the vial but he stays her hand.

  ‘You must stop. But do it gradually. Take less each day. You are bound to feel strange, you will think your heart really is racing. But it means it is beating as it should in a healthy person. I am as sure of this as I have ever been of anything – you must stop taking these drops if you want to live. You’ll find, quite quickly, that you won’t be so fatigued nor so weak. You must do it.’ He releases Non’s hand, and she takes hold of her vial and places it in her bag.

  ‘Take a drop less each day until you are taking none. I shall write to you with all I have diagnosed and the results of the laboratory tests. Angela has your address? Fine.’ He scribbles on his pad of paper and looks at his watch. ‘I’m afraid I have to see another patient now. Maybe you should find somewhere to sit for a little while. The hospital grounds are cool in the shade.’

  He leads her to the door of his room, ‘Goodbye. I’ll be in touch as soon as I have results for you, I promise.’

  She stands outside his closed door, resting against the door post, until Nurse Reynolds walks along the corridor with an elderly woman leaning on her arm, and Non has to move out of their way.

  25

  Non had not wanted to come out this evening. It was only the desperation spilling from Angela – a softer, less high-handed Angela – that persuaded her. She had wanted to go to bed, to go to sleep, to forget about the whole day and wake in the morning just in time to catch the train home.

  The room into which Angela has brought her is dim and crowded, Non’s seat is hard and too small, and she is jammed up against a large woman sitting next to her on one side and Angela in the aisle seat on the other. She refuses to be drawn into conversation by Angela. The noise is already at a pitch, every single person must be chattering. It is too much.

  Today has been one tribulation after another. First, that dreadful ward with those poor men. How could Angela use them in that way as a lesson to Non? Is that how a nurse should behave? And for her to end hating them, or at least hating what they represented, that was wrong, too. Then Seb – her cheeks burn at having mistaken his name so stupidly, he must have thought she was foolish from the start – and his diagnosis; she is still not sure what to think about that. And third and worst, her visit to Burlington House.

  After coming away from her consultation with Seb she had done as he suggested and found a seat in the shade of the rose-red building. People – patients and their visitors, she supposed – milled about as they seemed to do everywhere in this huge city, reflecting the turmoil in her mind. The young doctor was brilliant, Angela had told her. Non remembered people saying that to her about her father. She wished she knew more about Osian Rhys the man, rather than the father or the romantic or the herbalist. After he died she soon learnt that her sister would not talk about him. When the young Non had made even the most innocuous mention of her beloved father, Branwen had flown into a rage. There had to be a reason for that, she had thought, as she closed her eyes and leaned against the back of the seat, and when
she next saw Branwen she would find it out. It was here in this great city that her father had bought her mother’s ring – the ring that had enabled Non to be here. She had opened her eyes and sat up straight. Had her father sent her here? She had banished that foolish thought the instant it came into her mind, but it had made her consider what she should do. She had not been able to find out much more than she already knew about Davey that was useful – except, and her heart had skipped a beat, that she had cast a spell upon him – but perhaps she would be able to find something out about her father, something that would help her to decide what she should do with Seb’s advice. She had heard Branwen’s voice telling her to think, for goodness’ sake, not to be headstrong, the voice rising to a crescendo until she had closed the doors of her memory against it. She had walked up the stairs to Angela’s ward, to ask her for directions to the place where the Royal Society resided, and told her she would be back at the lodging house in William Road in time for Angela’s return late in the afternoon.

  Go back the way we came this morning, Angela had instructed, as far as that Underground station I pointed out to you – Warren Street – and take the Hampstead line to Leicester Square. You can change there to the Piccadilly line and get off in Piccadilly Circus, it’s not far from there – just ask someone on the station. Non had no recollection of passing Warren Street station that morning and had to ask for directions as soon as she left the hospital. But after that her journey was uneventful. The underground train was fast and noisy, and she was curious rather than nervous as the train rattled and screeched through its wormhole tunnels. She was glad to sit down, to rest, to watch the reflections of the other passengers in the windows, to read the posters decorating the carriages, to memorise the information that, last year, underground trains travelled the equivalent of eight thousand times around the world – eight thousand! – to tell Wil when she returned home before she recollected, with a physical jolt, that she could not do that. When she reached Piccadilly Circus she lost her way twice trying to leave the station and find Piccadilly. Eventually, after asking for directions, she arrived at Burlington House.