A Kind Man (14 page)

‘It is said you cured her after she suffered some form of stroke or seizure and was near to death.’

‘I cannot help what people say. I have not said it.’

‘People come to your door and you take them in and attempt to cure them of all manner of sicknesses. You go to houses in the town where desperate people will believe anything and resort to anything in their distress.’

‘No.’

‘And now you are casting your net wider and taking payment. You are a deceiver and a beguiler, you are
obtaining money from the weak and the poor and the sick, you are –’

‘NO.’ Tommy heard his own voice raised in angry denial. He did not shout. He was never angry. This was not as he knew himself to be, but what the doctor was saying was so untrue and so wrong that he could not have spoken in any other way.

‘Deny these things.’

‘I do deny them.’

‘I can call any number of witnesses. I am the doctor in this town. People speak to me. People ask me questions. People tell me things.’

‘I have done no wrong and made no claims. I only know what I do know.’

‘And what do you know, Tommy Carr?’

He knew that he had been dying, that the pain he had suffered over so many weeks, and the weakness and the sickness, the way he had been unable to eat and scarcely to keep down water and become as thin as one of his own bean sticks, all of those things had been real and his disease had been malignant and incurable. He knew it and knew that Dr McElvey had known it. He knew.

And he knew that he had felt a great heat course through his body and afterwards he had been well. He knew that whatever sickness had been with those people who were touched by him and by his heat
had immediately left them and they were well. He knew that he did not know how or why, but that he knew and they knew, he could not doubt.

That was all he knew.

Yet as he stood there, with the doctor’s cold eyes and hard voice confronting him, he also knew that he could not defend himself and nor could the people who had come to him defend him. If they were asked, perhaps they would speak for him, or perhaps they would not but instead would retreat out of fear and shame and because they were anxious not to upset the ordered way of things or to anger the doctor who had always served them without sparing himself or taking from them a penny more than he needed.

Tommy said, ‘I have taken no money and I have not asked for anyone to come to me. You will believe me or you will not and I cannot blame you for minding what you think I have done. You are the only person who has the right to do so. But I am saddened that you want to deny what we both know, not about anyone else, I cannot speak for them, but about me. You know how it was with me, as well as I know. I was to have died, perhaps that day or that night after you saw me. You know what you know as well as I and yet you deny it now and that is wrong and it grieves me. Why you do it I can’t know. It surely doesn’t reflect on you. You were goodness itself to
me, as you are to others. I don’t understand you but I could never pretend to you and I do not lie to you. And you know that.’

After he had left, Dr McElvey stood at the window for a long time, angry at first that Tommy Carr had defied him but gradually, as he calmed, struggling to admit to himself that he had spoken no more than the truth. He had been dying. His tumours would have overwhelmed his system and there had been little left in him with which to fight. Why had he pretended otherwise?

But as to the rest of it, that enraged him – the rumours and stories and fantasies the town was seething with, the tales in the papers. Tommy could not help what was said, but he added fuel to the flames by agreeing to see those who were sick and without any other hope and who turned to him in error.

He should refuse. He was wrong and he ought to pay for that wrong, or suffer for it.

Dr McElvey was a proud man and knew his own worth. He had liked Tommy Carr and felt great sorrow for him in the death of his child and in his own terrible sickness, but he could not tolerate a man such as he was taking the sick people of the town to himself.

His anger curdled his temper for the rest of the day and those who came to his surgery afterwards
felt the brunt of it. But late that night, walking out into the humid, close air before he slept, he had to accept that there was almost certainly nothing he could do other than warn Tommy Carr again and make it known about the place how much he himself was angered by it all.

In the middle of the night he woke. The air had not cooled and even with the windows wide open the closeness was oppressive. He lay still for a long time wondering what it was that had cured Tommy Carr and why. The questioning kept him awake until long after the breaking of a sultry dawn.

THE HENS
stopped laying and there had been no rain for weeks, so that the ground yielded less and less.

Eve went looking for work and found it, for the mornings from five to eight o’clock, swabbing floors and cleaning down machines in one of the works. It was hard and her arms and back ached so that at first she could barely walk home upright, but after a time she was used to it and stronger. The money was poor but it meant the worry was less, though Tommy felt shame that he could not find work himself and walked into the town twice a week asking at the different factories. He found nothing. At the printworks the gatekeeper told him there was no point in asking, men were now being laid off even there. The chair factory had shut down.

The town looked shabbier and more grey-spirited, the people down at heel and sad-eyed, though the children played as cheerfully as ever and boys still fished in the canal and roared about the streets on makeshift carts and kicked old shoes tied up with string.

The granite-grey church gave out soup and bread every day at noon and the queue began to form an hour before, the children hanging round for biscuits and extra crusts and racing away again when their fists closed over them. Tommy would not go and in any case they still had enough. When the hens laid, Eve brought eggs in, some to sell to the shop, a few to give away to the women she worked with.

The doctor did not come near them again and people still sent for Tommy and came to the house and Tommy still saw them, though never out of pride or defiance.

A few weeks after Eve had begun working, he received another letter from Mr Arnold, asking him to visit.

My elderly mother has recently come to live with us and is patience itself but is in great pain with arthritis, especially in her hands which she finds useless for any purpose as a result. If you would
come to see her and could do even a little of what you did for Daphne, we would be in your debt.

‘He should be paid,’ Miriam said, spreading dabs of dripping onto toast. The eggs Eve had brought were for the two of them. John Bullard still slept, as he did most days until ten or eleven in the morning. After that he went to the men’s club.

‘You working until your fingers are raw and him doing sweet nothing.’

Eve looked at her in amazement but Miriam did not see the irony of what she had said.

‘Tommy does more good than most, why shouldn’t he be paid?’

‘He doesn’t see it in that way.’

‘You can.’

‘He wouldn’t live with himself.’

Miriam shouted for the boys. The youngest clung to Eve’s legs trying to haul himself up. She lifted him though her back ached badly, as ever after the morning’s work.

The boys poured in and grabbed their food, piled out again noisily. School began the next week which gave the older ones a hot dinner. It made a difference. Any small thing that did so was welcomed.

The kitchen went quiet. The baby slept, the toddler sat under the table chewing his bread, the other young
ones on the step eating and playing with a small heap of stones. If she could always have felt at ease like this in her sister’s company Eve would have come often, but the peaceful times were rare. Miriam was usually angry or resentful, bitter or full of complaint, and she was not to blame for it though she had made her own choice. But how do we know how our choices will turn out for us? Eve thought. The luck falls one way or it falls the other.

‘You could take him,’ Miriam said, as Arthur George came in for more bread. ‘He’s the best of them. He’s kind and loving and quieter than the others.’

Eve did not realise what her sister was saying. ‘Take him where?’

‘Home. It’d fill the space she left you.’

‘You think Jeannie Eliza just left a space to be filled? You’d send one of yours away without a thought?’

‘I have thought.’

Arthur George had gone out to the others and the heap of stones.

Miriam’s face was set hard.

‘He’s yours. You’re his mother and he has his brothers. He has his father.’

Miriam laughed.

‘You’d give him away like that?’

‘You’re my sister. You’re family. It’s not like giving away.’

Eve got up and because she could not trust herself to speak, because she might have burst into tears of rage and bewilderment at what her sister had said as if it were nothing of consequence, she went out and was half way home before she knew it.

But when she got there, and found Tommy gone and the letter from Mr Arnold on the table, and the kitchen bright with sunlight, then she cried, for Miriam’s unloved brood of boys and for the death of her own child, and for the empty house. If she had not known quite surely that it would be wrong, she would have gone straight back and fetched Arthur George and had him for company and, she realised suddenly, to fill the silent space that indeed Jeannie Eliza had left.

The air was heavy with sulphurous clouds gathering like a boil over the peak. She sat on the step as Miriam’s boys had done, and finding a few stones around her feet made them into a small pile and moved them into lines and rings and squares. Before long she would have to scrat around in the dry soil for any last potatoes, though she had done so already for days and found none. The carrots were shrivelled and full of holes, the marrows small and hollow. Rain would come now but it was too late to save anything.

Bert Ankerby came down his own path whistling.
No man was more cheerful, day in, day out and no matter what.

She scooped the stones up in the hollow of her hand and tipped them out again to see how they would fall, did so again, and then again. Thunder rumbled in the distance and the sky darkened.

THE STORM
broke as he walked from the bus, so that he arrived at the door with his clothes soaking wet and his boots, which he had tried to patch and mend himself, letting in the rain.

It was not Mr Arnold who opened the door but a servant, who looked at Tommy with disdain before leading him to a back room to take off his wet things. He handed him an old gardening jacket and a pair of rubber boots. Tommy felt embarrassed under the man’s scrutiny, ashamed when his clothes were taken away to be dried while he was led back into the hall.

It was empty. The man disappeared on silent feet. He heard the murmur of voices from a room nearby. The sky beyond the two long windows was blue-black and once or twice lightning zigzagged down it and
with the thunder seemed about to crack it open, like a fissure running down a rock.

And then Mr Arnold came across the hall.

‘Will you come through? My daughter is away but I know she would wish me to give you her greeting. She is quite well, quite well. We cannot thank you enough.’

‘You need not.’

Mr Arnold lowered his voice. ‘You did not cash my cheque. It troubles me that you have gone without any reward.’

‘I want none.’

He was anxious to dismiss the subject, as always feeling fraudulent when he was thanked or people tried to pay him in whatever way.

They went into a small bright sitting room with windows onto the side lawn.

‘My mother.’ Arnold gestured to an old woman, small and frail as a bird, who watched the storm from a straight-backed chair. She had a puff of fine white hair like the head of a dandelion, the pink of her scalp showing beneath it.

‘Mr Carr?’

Tommy nodded. He felt a stranger to himself, standing in this elegant room wearing a garden jacket and boots that were not his own.

‘Are you in pain?’

Her eyes were bright, her skin papery pale as the discs of honesty.

She nodded and put out her hands to him. The joints were swollen, shining and horribly bent.

‘I can only give you what I give to everyone. I don’t know how or what it is but it seems to be of help to people. I will hold my hands out to you and you take the heat from them into yourself. Nothing else.’

She nodded.

He reached out and took her hands and held them lightly in his own.

The storm was drifting away, the room was lighter, with rain on the windows.

People asked him if he prayed but he did not and he thought of nothing, he merely touched and felt the heat flow from him. Nothing else. Nothing more.

Tommy held the small hands in his own and after a moment the heat rose through him until he was burning. He saw Mrs Arnold’s eyes widen with surprise and she stared down at their hands as if she might see fire.