‘People will say anything.’
‘Why would I do that?’ he asked, amazed that they should think it. Why would he?
And then they let him pass them, though he felt their eyes on his back like needles, and all the time he was walking slowly to the grave he knew they had not moved but only went on watching him.
Jeannie Eliza Carr
Aged 3 years
Beloved daughter
He touched the stone tenderly. The wind blew across the hill with the sweet smell of the land on it.
Whatever he had wanted to find, he found it then.
The strangeness and bewilderment and confusion fell away and he was left as if he had been rinsed in clear water. He remembered the child pattering behind him down the path, taking his hand and laughing, remembered not with sadness but with a strange feeling of rightness and content. He could not understand any of it, but now that seemed not to matter. What had happened to them both had happened and that was all.
Something fell into place but he did not know what or where.
Something righted itself that had been out of true but he did not know how.
Behind him, the two women spoke in low voices but he no longer minded them.
The wind moved the grass beside the child’s grave.
In his surgery, the doctor attended to his patients diligently, listening, diagnosing, prescribing, bandaging, stitching, reassuring, and not one of them knew that his mind was elsewhere and not on them but on Tommy Carr. When the last woman and her children had trailed out into the street and he was tidying away the instruments and putting them in the steriliser, ordering the pharmacy shelves, setting the notes straight, he went over and over what he had seen, what had happened, and faced only bewilderment. He had no doubt at all that Tommy had been days or even hours from death, that he had had a cancer eating away his intestines and seeding itself throughout his body and bursting out in another swelling on his neck. No doubt. He would have gone to his grave without doubt, gone before the Coroner without doubt, been judged on his own certainty.
Yet the man he had seen early that morning had no tumours and though still thin and a little weak, was no longer a few breaths from his death.
Such things did not happen. He himself did not make such mistakes. He had known improvement, even cure with this terrible disease, but not like this because this was impossible.
It troubled him greatly. It undermined his confidence, in himself and in medicine. He felt as if he were trying to walk on shifting sands and sinking.
He had visits to make and then another surgery. By early afternoon he had begun to be sure that Tommy Carr would fall ill again and that the swellings would be as they had been and death pushing open the door. If he had not been sure of it, he fancied that he would have gone mad.
The sense of rightness and quiet stayed with Tommy as he walked steadily back from the churchyard, watched as far as they could see him by the two women, but quite unworried by that now.
He would make the tea for Eve, the first time he had been able to turn his hand to help her in the house for so long, and the next day he would be up and off to work early as always and perhaps there would be an end to it.
But when he reached the house he found it empty and silent. He took off his boots and called out but there was no one, until Eve came running to the back door, her face crumpled with anxiety.
‘Oh,’ she said, letting it out like a sigh, as if it had been pent up within her. ‘Oh.’
And then, ‘I was afraid you would never come back.’
‘Why should you think it? Of course I came back.’
‘I can’t ask you to go out again but I must, I need to fetch the doctor to Mary. She’s lying on the ground where Bert found her when he came in from the garden. He has to stay with her. I’ll tell him you’re back.’
Tommy followed her into 5 The Cottages. He saw Bert Ankerby first, his huge frame in the old flannel shirt bent over Mary, whose head flopped over to one side like a cloth doll, one leg bent.
‘Mary,’ Bert said. ‘Come on, Mary. Come on, girl.’
Tommy went closer.
‘Should we move her, lift her onto the settee, put a cushion under her head?’ Eve said. ‘She’s on the cold stone, it can’t be right for her like that.’
‘Mary, come on, girl.’ Bert had one of her hands between his, chafing it. He looked up at Tommy but hardly seemed to see him.
Tommy bent down. He had seen death before and this was not death but she was pale as wax and very still.
‘She’s not one for fainting,’ Bert said, his voice full of bewilderment. ‘She’s a strong one, Mary.’
‘Should we try and lift her?’ Eve said again.
‘It might be best,’ Tommy said. ‘Lay her down more comfortably. She could come to harm there.’
He reached out his hand to touch Mary’s arm, but as he did so, he almost pulled it sharply back, as if electricity had shot through him. He felt the current of it coming from his hand and passing to Mary.
They lifted her onto the couch and Bert fetched a woollen rug and draped it carefully over her.
She pushed it away, her eyes wide open, struggling to sit up.
‘Mary,’ Bert said. ‘I said you were a strong one, Mary.’
‘You’ll make yourself faint,’ Eve said. ‘Put your head back again, Mary, you’re not well.’
Tommy stood watching. He did not know what had happened to Mary Ankerby, but it seemed like a stroke or a fit and she had not been conscious, her face had been drained of blood. Bert said she had talked strangely, as if her words wouldn’t come out right and then she had fallen and not moved or spoken again. ‘I rubbed her hands and said her name only she couldn’t hear me,’ he said again and again now, ‘she couldn’t hear me.’
Mary lay back, a little colour coming into her face now, the woollen blanket on the floor.
‘Shall I get you a drink of water, Mary?’
But Eve was already bringing it and sitting beside her to raise her head, help her drink.
Mary took almost half the cup and then looked around, as if the room were unfamiliar and she was trying to work out where she was, who they were.
‘Should I still go for the doctor?’
‘Who wants a doctor?’ Mary asked. ‘I had a turn, that’s all. People have them. Why would I need a doctor for that?’
Eve looked round uncertainly.
But Tommy had gone, back to their own house, back, dragging himself as if he were filled with sand, slowly, slowly up the stairs and into the bedroom. Taking off his jacket and boots again was harder than a day’s work, harder than any walk home in the face of a gale. He lay down and slept at once, an exhausted, drowning, dreamless sleep, and did not wake for nine hours.
17
WORD WENT round as word does, word of what had happened to Tommy Carr and of what Tommy Carr had done, though where the word first came from who could say. And word changed and grew extremities.
Dr McElvey was asked by a dozen patients a day about Tommy Carr and a dozen about Mary Ankerby, and word was passed to him as he went into houses and treated patients and listened and nodded but said nothing.
Tommy woke heavy-headed but still early and got up as he had always done, to riddle the ashes and fill the range and set the kettle on to boil.
‘You surely can’t be right to go back to work,’ Eve said. But he smiled and tied his bootlaces and set off and as she watched him walk away she could hardly remember how it had been with him only a couple of days before. He looked as usual.
Mary, coming down the path with a tin of scraps for Eve’s chickens, seemed quite as usual too, passing the tin across the fence, looking at the rain clouds building behind the peak, her face as bright as always. Eve could make no sense of it.
The staring began as he joined the rest of them walking in twos and fours towards the works. Nothing was said, a few nodded, and yet he could hear the whispers like smoke on the air. He felt as if he had committed so
me terrible crime and been found out, felt like a victim of the plague, felt like a leper among his old colleagues and friends. They moved slightly away. Tommy thought, they did that to witches.
But once in the works he could get on with the jobs in hand and the din of the machines meant no one could ask him questions. But they could still look and from time to time catch one another’s eye. Yet over days they would have got used to him again and soon enough it would be forgotten, because there would be some other thing, as there always was, some death or birth or accident or shame.
At twelve thirty he went out to drink his can of tea and eat the food he had packed for himself, and those who had gone at twelve returned to the din inside. He heard it but not first. Others who were on their way in heard it but the thud was muffled by the wooden doors. Then the doors opened and the shouting started, men and women, voices, names, cries for help. He rushed in with several others, dropping their food and running.
One of the twelve o’clocks had tripped and fallen and in falling, a pile of the huge, heavy metal pallets set against the wall waiting to be lifted, had come down and pinned the man by the chest. His face was swollen and turning black, his eyes bulging.
They heaved off the trays frantically, six or seven men at once, and it needed that many, the trays were solid, but it took time to reach the last, they had fallen on top of one another anyhow.
The machines were still running, they could only see the man, not hear him moaning and then falling silent, in the din.
Tommy was on the end of the last beam as they dragged it off the man.
‘George Crab,’ someone said, though it had to be read on his lips through the noise.
Another had run across the yard to the offices where there was a telephone, someone else running to the doctor’s surgery.
There was blood coming from the man’s nose and ears, and his bulging eyes were bloodshot. His arm was bent awkwardly backwards and one leg was twisted over. Someone knelt down and put his head to him to try to tell if his heart was beating.
And then, quite suddenly, as if it were the end of the day, the machines juddered and fell silent and there was only the faint ticking of the metal as it settled and began to cool.
The air seethed with dust. They heard their own breathing.
‘He’s dead, he’s dead,’ one of the women shouted. ‘It’s Ellen Crab’s man, someone go for her.’
But the man who had put his head on George Crab’s chest looked up, shaking his head.
‘His heart’s beating all right.’
‘Only look at the state of him.’
George Crab moaned, the sound seeming pushed out of his ribcage. The fresh blood trickled out of the corner of his mouth.
‘Go for Ellen.’
Tommy Carr was standing at the man’s right side, where he had helped to pull off the last metal strut, and as he stood, he felt the heat flood through his body, down from his head and out as if from his heart, and without knowing what he did, he knelt and touched George Crab, first with his right hand then with his left and kept his left hand there on the man’s coarse cotton overall.
‘Has someone run for Ellen?’
‘No, poor woman, leave her, she shouldn’t see him in this way, leave her to see him in the hospital.’
‘He’ll be a dead man by then.’
‘His heart was beating, I felt his heart.’
Tommy stayed quite still, the heat coming off him as if he had come out of a fire.
George Crab let out the soft moan again, but then there was the sound of the siren and the urgent voices shouting and the clang of the gates opening.
Tommy got to his feet and almost fell, his legs too weak to bear him. He reached out and clutched one of the wooden pillars and leaned against it.
No one paid him any attention. The footsteps came clattering up the iron stairs. Tommy took a couple of breaths and moved away and then there were the men in blue serge and caps and a stretcher and people saying this, saying that, telling, contradicting.
From the far end of the long room, he watched them carry George Crab away.
Gradually the machines started up and people went silently back to them, gradually things settled to normal, except that no one laughed across a machine at someone else or made a gesture, waved their arms in some joking sign, and when they went for the afternoon breaks, they sat on the iron stairs or the ledge outside the machine room and drank silently, not meeting one another’s eyes. They had seen George Crab, seen the blood trickle and the way his chest had looked caved in and even though his heart had been beating they had no thought that he could be alive, or if his heart still managed to pump, then alive for long.
Tommy worked through the afternoon in a daze of exhaustion. People glanced in his direction and away. He was one of them and yet apart, and still a pariah because of what they had heard. They preferred to think about George Crab.
Just as the machines began to shut down at six, word came that he was not dead but terribly injured and that Ellen Crab had been fetched to the hospital. People shook their heads and took off aprons and overalls, lifted jackets and scarves and caps down from the pegs and went home quietly and the air and dust settled in the long room as the door closed.
18
THE WEATHER changed and the sun shone. At midnight, Eve sat on the back step looking at the moonlit garden and the air was still warm, the sky pinpricked all over with bright stars. Bert Ankerby had told her what he knew of the names in the sky – the Bear, the Pleiades, Cassiopeia – and now she tried to pick them out on her own but it was only a pattern and confusion again.
Somewhere on the far side of the field a fox barked.
Tommy was sound asleep in the same way he always slept now, heavy as a stone, never seeming to stir and sometimes scarcely to breathe. He slept like it from the moment he lay down.
The past few weeks had been the strangest he had ever known. He walked off in the morning as usual and for the couple of miles that he was alone he felt free and light of heart, things might almost have been as they used to be. He looked ahead to when he could make out the chimneys and gantries of the works and the smoke and the dust stained the sky, and at once, he changed, he felt anxious and wanted to shrink away, to turn back, to slink close to the walls and fade into them. People saw him. People looked and looked away, or glanced to one another, though plenty peered at him, said this word or that before moving on swiftly.
Strangely, once he went in through the gates of the works he could lose himself among the others and then he felt safe. They worked with him, they had talked themselves dry about him and perhaps there was nothing more to be said. But he knew that the calm could not last and all the time he was working, or sitting out in the sun on the iron staircase or the flat roof during his breaks, he felt uneasily that he would not be left alone like this, that something else would happen to turn his unsteady world upside down again.
George Crab had arrived at the hospital half dead yet with the life reviving in him minute by minute. His wife Ellen had come, her face stained with tears and her eyes full of fear, but when she had seen him sitting up, had said they had no right to try and prepare her for the worst when he was nowhere near death, anyone could see. He was a good colour, he looked himself, apart from a graze on his brow.
‘They said you were crushed by the metal racks.’
‘I don’t recall.’
‘They fell on your legs and chest and half crushed you to death, you could barely breathe, you had blood coming from you.’
‘I knew I was dying.’
‘You cannot have been.’
George shook his head. He spoke the truth when he said he could not recall but he recalled the terrible pain over his heart pressing the breath out of him and the feeling as if a knife were cutting down on his leg. He recalled a man’s head bent close to his own, as if he were listening. He had seen blackness and then a terrible redness in front of his eyes and nothing had been clear to him, he could not make out wh
ere he was or why.
But then he had felt a few seconds of searing heat, as if they had opened one of the furnaces close to him so that it seemed the whole place was on fire. After that, there had been no pain only a lightness and the desire to sleep and the name of Tommy Carr on his lips.
He had opened his eyes and seen the sky tip from side to side and thought that he was falling forwards but now he realised that he had been carried on a stretcher down the iron staircase.
That was all. He had closed his eyes and slept.
He had tried to sort out words to talk to Ellen about it and the nurse or the doctor, but there did not seem to be words and when a few came out they shushed him, though kindly, so he had fallen silent and let himself drift back to sleep. When he woke next the blinds had been drawn down against the windows and he had a terrible thirst. They brought him a pitcher of water and he drank it all but did not try to say anything else.
They had wanted to keep him in the hospital but he was having none of it, he was fit. He got out of the bed and walked up and down to prove it to them, so that they let him go, striding out through the doors into the street with Ellen a step behind.
Word was fire and raced round town as it had done before and no one knew what to make of any of it, or what to do or say, and so George Crab was feted and clapped on the back and Tommy Carr was left alone, for you never knew.
It had taken Tommy a long time to walk home one night and when Eve saw him from the window her heart turned because he looked as he had looked before, his shoulders bent, his head down. But he came into the house with a light enough step and she saw that he was not as he had been, he was stronger, and although he would never be a stout man he had lost the terrible thinness, his belt was fastened a few notches looser.
But she asked ‘Tommy?’ as he sat down, for there was surely something. Something.
He shook his head.
‘Has something happened? Has something been said? Are you not well?’