‘You should try and make yourself care. At least it would occupy your mind.’ Charlie got up from the bed and drew the bedclothes over the boy’s inert body. ‘What about when you walk again and have to go back to school?’ he said. ‘Think how behind-hand you’re going to be if you don’t keep up with your lessons now.’
But his words made no impression on Robert. The boy lay with his face averted and when Charlie said goodnight his response was barely audible.
Downstairs Charlie spoke to Linn.
‘That boy is beginning to brood. Something will have to be done about it.’
‘What can be done?’
‘I wish I knew!’
That winter Jack was laid off work again. It meant he had plenty of time on his hands, and every fine afternoon he would push Robert out in his wheelchair, all round the mazy Herrick lanes.
One afternoon they were caught in a storm and hurried home at a spanking pace with thunder crackling overhead and lightning flashing white in the clouds and a shower of hailstones stinging their faces. By the time they were safe indoors, Robert was in a state of excitement, his face glowing from the sting of the hail and his eyes alight with exhilaration.
He sat in his usual place at the window and watched while the thunderstorm spent itself; the hail bouncing against the glass; blanching across the purple sky; and pimpling the surface of the pond. He was quite disappointed when the hail stopped and the thunder died away in the distance.
‘How do we get thunderstorms?’ he asked when Charlie came in from work that evening.
‘It’s the electricity in the clouds.’
‘Yes, but how does it get there? What makes the hail? What makes the wind?’
Charlie made a wry face. He had to admit he didn’t know. He looked at the boy for a little while and then, suddenly, slapped the table.
‘I’ll tell you what, young Rob!’ he said. ‘We’ll go into town and look it up!’
‘Look it up where?’
‘In the library, of course.’
‘Aren’t you working tomorrow?’ Linn asked.
‘Any old time will do for work!’
The following morning, first thing, Charlie borrowed Clew’s van and took the boy into Overbridge. They went to the Public Library and returned with three books and all through that day Robert was deeply absorbed in them. ‘Do they tell you what you wanted to know?’
‘Yes, they tell you everything.’
‘I see you’ve been drawing diagrams.’
‘I’m making an anemometer ‒ when I can get the bits and bobs.’
‘What do you need?’ Charlie asked. ‘I’ll have a look round the garage scrap-heap and see what I can get for you.’
Before long, with Charlie’s help, Robert had his own little weather-station out in the garden. The anemometer whirled in the wind; the rain-gauge stood on a wooden box out in the middle of the lawn; the barometer hung on the woodshed wall.
‘Shall I be able to dry my clothes?’ Linn would ask when she did the washing, and Jack, on the watch for night-frosts, would ask: ‘What about my lettuces? Had I better cover them up?’
On clear nights Robert studied the stars. He sat in his bedroom, in the dark, gazing eagerly out of the window and finding his way among the constellations until they became as familiar to him as landmarks were in the daytime on earth. He could put a name to each of the groups that dominated the western sky ‒ strange, magical names, most of them, that had come to England out of the east ‒ and could plot their courses throughout the year.
Some nights he counted as many as thirty falling stars and was fascinated by their plight. Where did they go to, those swift specks, that slid across the sky and fizzled out, like dying sparks from a blacksmith’s anvil? Would the earth, itself a star, also fizzle out in time and be lost in the everlasting dark? Robert felt himself very small, under the teeming sky at night, yet the feeling brought him no distress. Instead there was a kind of comfort in it. He could forget himself, watching the stars.
Linn didn’t like it when the boy sat alone in his room at night. She worried about him constantly.
‘I’m sure it gives him strange ideas, staring at the stars so long,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think we should fetch him down?’
‘Why do you fuss so much?’ Jack said. ‘He’s happy up there. Just leave him be.’
Robert certainly had plenty to occupy his mind now and Mr Maitland, calling at the cottage once a fortnight, was much impressed by the change in him. The boy had chosen his own field of study and the schoolmaster now brought him work that covered his new range of interests. Robert could not have enough of it. There was always some ‘project’ in front of him. And in the essays he wrote at this time there were little touches of boyish humour: ‘Copernicus, Pole Star of Astronomy, left the University of Cracow …’ Whereas before he had rarely if ever read a book, now, Linn felt, he was reading too much. Often Charlie bought them for him and soon the boy had quite a collection: books on wildfowl, the weather, the stars; on physics, mathematics, chemistry: he devoured them all eagerly. There was always a book in the seat of his wheelchair; always one beside his bed.
‘You’ll ruin your eyes with reading so much,’ Linn said, scolding him, and at night when she blew out his candle she would take the matches away with her. ‘No more reading for you tonight. It’s time you settled down to sleep.’
But the boy smuggled matches upstairs and relit the candle when she had gone. He read and read until all hours. It was easy enough, at the first sound, to blow the candle out again.
One night, suspicious, Linn went up and looked in on him. The boy lay quite still, as though asleep, and when she went closer to the bed, with her own candle in her hand, he stirred and pretended to blink at the light. Linn, however, was not deceived.
‘You’ve been reading, haven’t you?’
‘How do you know?’
‘I can tell by the smell of the candle,’ she said. ‘You’ve only this instant blown it out.’
‘I wanted to finish a chapter, that’s all.’
‘I won’t have you reading by candlelight. It’s bad for your eyes. How many times have I told you that?’
‘Hundreds of times,’ Robert muttered.
Charlie, having followed Linn upstairs, lounged in the doorway, listening. He moved towards Robert’s bed and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper.
‘What you should do is this,’ he said, and, after licking his finger and thumb, he pretended to pinch out a candle flame. ‘That way it won’t smell so much and then your mother will never know.’
It was a joke between him and the boy, delivered with many a wink and a nod, but Linn became furiously angry and rounded on him with blazing eyes.
‘Why do you tell him things like that? He never used to disobey me. Now he does it all the time. And it’s all your fault for encouraging him!’
‘Laws, where’s the harm?’ Charlie said. ‘If he’s got a chapter he wants to finish ‒’
‘I know these chapters!’ Linn exclaimed. ‘He’s been reading for over two hours!’ She set her candle down on the table and thrust her hand under Robert’s pillow. She drew out his book and opened it, showing Charlie the printed page. ‘Look at that print, how small it is! Do you want him to be blind as well as a cripple all his life?’ Charlie was silent, staring at her, and she was suddenly overcome. She stood for a moment, struggling with herself, then turned and hurried down the stairs. Charlie sat on Robert’s bed and the boy spoke to him bitterly.
‘So there’s the truth of it, out at last! I shall be a cripple all my life!’
‘No,’ Charlie said. ‘It’s not the truth. We’re damn well not going to let it be!’
‘Mother thinks it, anyway, and she was a nurse so she ought to know.’
‘She didn’t mean to say what she did. It just slipped out, the ways things do, because she hates to see you like this, laid up helpless as you are.’
‘Does she? I ent so sure of that! I reckon it suits her to ha
ve me like this. It means she can keep me under her thumb!’
‘Here!’ Charlie said. He was shocked and grieved. ‘That’s no way to talk, young Rob!’
‘Maybe not but it’s what I feel!’
‘Then you’ve got it all wrong,’ Charlie said. ‘All she wants is for you to get well. If you knew how she prays for you every night ‒’
‘Prays!’ Robert said, with bitter scorn. ‘What good does that do I’d like to know?’
‘Well,’ Charlie said, helplessly, ‘not much so far, I must admit.’ He put up a hand and rubbed his jaw, which was bristly and harsh for want of a shave. ‘I reckon we’ll have to try something else.’
Under Charlie’s bright blue gaze, Robert’s bitterness slowly melted. A reluctant smile tugged at his lips. Charlie, with his quiet jokes, could still unpick him even now, and soon he was giving a wry, sheepish grin, although the hurt still remained in him and was seen as a shadow in his eyes. ‘I was getting in one of my moods again.’
‘You were,’ Charlie said, ‘and not without cause.’
‘Feeling sorry for myself …’
‘You’re bound to get those moods sometimes. You wouldn’t be human otherwise.’
‘D’you really think I shall walk again?’
‘I know you will,’ Charlie said.
‘You’re just saying that to buck me up.’
‘So what if I am? That’s the start of it, being bucked up. If the doctors can’t do any more for you ‒ and they’ve said they can’t ‒ then it’s going to be your own private battle and it starts up there in that mind of yours.’
Charlie got up and went to the cupboard. He took Robert’s ice-skates out of their box and hung them up by their leather straps from a hook in a rafter in the ceiling.
‘Whenever you feel down in the dumps, you just take a look at those skates. Next winter you’ll be putting them on. You’ll go skating like mad on the ice on the ponds. Can’t you imagine the feel of them, the ice underneath you, like green glass, and the trees flashing past all white with frost?’ Robert looked at him doubtfully. It was easy enough to imagine such a thing but the reality seemed a long way off.
‘Will it really happen like that?’
‘I’m as sure about it as if I was God. But it’s up to you to be sure as well. You’ve got to feel it in your gills. And if anyone tells you you’re not going to walk ‒ you just tell them to go to hell!’
‘Even my mother?’
‘Yes, even her.’
When Charlie had gone downstairs Robert, with his hands behind his head, lay looking up at the dangling skates which, swinging gently from their hook, caught a faint gleam of candle-light.
‘I will walk again. I will! I will!’
Charlie, in the kitchen, spoke to Linn.
‘You shouldn’t have said that in front of Rob, about his being a cripple,’ he said.
‘I know! I know!’ She was full of remorse. ‘I say these things! I could kill myself!’ She looked at him with anguished eyes. ‘Is he very upset?’ she asked.
‘Of course he’s upset! What d’you expect?’ And then in a gentler tone he said: ‘You’d better go up and put things right.’
Every Friday morning an ambulance called at the cottage and took Robert into hospital. He remained there all day, undergoing treatment.
‘What do they do to you?’ Charlie asked.
‘They put me on a special bed and hang weights on my feet. The idea is to stretch my spine.’
‘Is it doing any good?’
‘I dunno. It’s hard to say. I still can’t feel anything they do.’
Regularly, once a month, he was examined by Mr Tate, and at the end of the third month, Linn and Charlie asked to see him.
‘It’s six months since his accident. Isn’t there anything more to be done for him?’
‘Mrs Truscott,’ the surgeon said, ‘I believe you were once a hospital nurse?’
‘Yes, I was. It was during the war.’
‘Then you must know, better than most, the limitations of medical knowledge in cases of spinal injury.’
‘But that was fourteen years ago. Surely there’s been some progress since then?’
‘We are doing all we can.’
‘God knows, it’s little enough!’ Linn exclaimed harshly.
‘You are keeping on with the exercises?’
‘Yes, yes. Every morning and night. For all the good it ever does!’
‘He’s certainly very fit and strong, all things considered,’ the surgeon said.
‘But there’s still no improvement,’ Charlie said. ‘Still no feeling in his legs.’
‘I did warn you that it might take some time.’
‘You mean there’s still hope, then?’ Charlie said. ‘Even now, after six months?’
The surgeon’s smile was inscrutable.
‘There’s always hope, Mr Truscott,’ he said.
He excused himself and went away and after a while Robert was wheeled out to them by a nurse. They went home with him in the ambulance.
After these days at the hospital, Robert was always quiet and subdued. Linn said the treatment exhausted him but once, when he was alone with Charlie, he confessed that the hospital made him afraid.
‘It’s the other kids I see there. One boy ‒ he’s about my own age ‒ has been in a wheelchair for eighteen months. He thinks he’s going to walk again but I don’t think he is.’
‘Why not?’ Charlie asked.
‘His legs have gone a funny shape. He’s growing and they’re not.’ Robert gave a lopsided smile. ‘I reckon I shall get like that if I’m stuck in this chair for another year.’
‘You feeling down in the dumps again?’
‘Well, yes, just a bit, I suppose.’
‘I’ll soon shake you out of that!’ It was time for Robert’s exercises. Charlie pulled the bedclothes back and took a firm hold of the boy’s left foot. ‘I’m going to give you what-for tonight!’
He began to bend the boy’s leg at the knee.
As the spring weather improved, Robert sat out of doors again, often with a sketchbook in his lap. He had an aptitude for drawing, especially for capturing the life in things. He drew Linn on a windy day, wrestling with the washing on the line; he drew his grandfather working the pump; and he drew Charlie, all arms and legs, chasing Mrs Ransome’s dog, who had run away with the copper-stick. He was helpless, trapped in his chair, but his drawings were full of energy and the swift bright movement denied to him.
Early in May, Jack was taken on again at Bellhouse Farm, and at this same time Linn had the offer of a job, cleaning at the vicarage in Herrick St John. It meant she would be away all the morning and she was worried by the thought of leaving Robert so much alone.
‘That’s no problem,’ Charlie said. ‘I’ll take him up to the garage with me.’
So every morning when he went to work, Charlie pushed Robert in his wheelchair up to the garage, and the boy sat outside in the sun, with his schoolwork or his sketchbook to hand. There was plenty to watch on the five roads and plenty of things for him to draw.
One day a motorist drew up for petrol and oil and to have his tyres checked. While Charlie was dealing with it, the driver got out to stretch his legs. He was a man of fifty odd, bald save for a ring of grey hair that hung in crisp curls over his collar, and with a pair of piercing dark eyes. He saw Robert in his wheelchair, just outside the repair-shop door, and went to exchange a few words with him. He came back to the car again and stood over Charlie as he pumped up the tyres.
‘That your boy in the wheelchair there?’
‘He’s my stepson,’ Charlie said.
‘What is it that’s wrong with him?’
‘Both his legs are paralysed. He fell on his back and fractured his spine. The fracture healed but he still can’t walk.’
Charlie moved from one wheel to the next and the motorist followed him round.
‘How long is it since he had the fall?’
‘It’s about s
ix months.’
‘What do the doctors say about him? I suppose there’s some damage to the nerves?’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ Charlie said. He straightened up and faced the man. ‘You a doctor yourself?’ he asked.
‘Not exactly. I’m a homoeopath.’
‘Ah,’ Charlie said, somewhat blankly.
‘Many people would call me a quack.’
‘That’s honest, anyway.’ Charlie glanced across at Robert. The boy was well out of earshot. ‘What the doctor says is this ‒ if the nerves have been cut, there’s no hope for him, but if it’s a question of bruising, then there’s a chance he’ll walk again.’
‘What treatment is he having?’
‘Exercises at home every day. Traction at the hospital once a week. None of it’s done any good so far.’
‘You should take him swimming,’ the man said. ‘As often as you like. Every day if you can. I’ve had some experience in this field and I can vouch for its benefits.’
‘Are you serious?’ Charlie said. ‘How can he swim if he’s paralysed?’
‘He’ll soon learn if you give him a hand. You’ll be surprised what he can do. I suppose there’s a swimming-bath in your town?’
‘We’ve got a pond right next to our house. Will that do?’
‘Oh, yes, as long as it’s clean.’
‘Ought I to check with the specialist first?’
‘Check by all means. Certainly. But it won’t do any harm, I assure you, and it may do some good.’
‘Yes,’ Charlie said. ‘Thanks a lot. I’ll give it a try, anyway.’
The man paid for his petrol and oil, got into his car, and drove away. Charlie stood for a moment in thought. Then he went into Clew’s bungalow.
‘Can I use your telephone? I want to ring the hospital.’
‘Help yourself,’ Norah said.
Charlie and Jack built a wooden platform, jutting out from the bank of the pond, with three shallow steps going down from it into the water. Under the water, to cover the mud at the foot of the steps, they laid three big slabs of stone. On the platform itself they erected a sturdy wooden rail, forming three sides of a square, so that Robert, on coming out of the water, could stand supporting himself on his hands while Charlie rubbed him dry with a towel.
Seedtime and Harvest (The Apple Tree Saga Book 5) Page 8
