The Elderbrook Brothers (32 page)

The party now reached its destination, a narrow slip of a room lit by a naked jet of gaslight. The patient, a little fair-haired girl, lay in a bed in one corner. She whimpered faintly, turning large eyes towards her grandmother, who sat at the bedside with her lap full of knitting. To the prevailing stench a warm sweetness was here added. An effort at cosiness was
apparent in the room: a handful of glowing coals in the grate, a tattered hearthrug on the bare boarded floor. Grandmother occupied the only chair, and there was hardly room for another.

‘We've put her in the parlour,' explained Mrs Smith. ‘Nights are so bitter now.'

Dr Jakes nodded. ‘Very nice. Now … perhaps you could bring me a candle, Mrs Smith?'

He examined his patient in the light of a candle held by her grandmother, every now and again dropping a quick casual question. Having with a touch and a word or two won the ghost of a smile from the child, he lapsed into silence and stood looking down at her, at her and into her, probing for the secret. And Felix looked at him; for this was a Dr Jakes he had never seen before, silent, impersonal, a spirit poised, an energy concentrated, a mind focused on the problem confronting it. The stillness lasted only a moment, and then he was in motion again and the physical examination was resumed.

‘My pore sister was took just the same,' said Mrs Smith, in a hoarsely whispered aside. She stood at Felix's elbow, humble and grateful, and hospitably anxious to entertain him. ‘Gone in a week she was,' she confided, mournfully savouring the drama of her story, ‘and suffered something terrible, doctor.'

She imagined him to be Dr Jakes's assistant, and he did not care to correct the fancy. He felt it was not the moment for advertising his own wares.

Twenty minutes later he and Jakes were back in the street. They strode along without talking for a while, and at the lamppost where the roads joined their ways diverged.

‘She's a nice little thing,' said Jakes.

‘Has she any chance?' Felix asked.

‘A chance? M'yes. A chance.'

Felix waited, watching his face for a sign. An odd face, not unlike a gipsy's, but a gipsy who might easily be taken for a Roman emperor. Dante, if he had had mischief and humour in him as well as genius, might have had such a face. A broken
nose was the dominating feature. It had been broken by a drunken docker, indignant that his woman was in process of being delivered of yet another mouth to feed. Jakes had thrown the reluctant father downstairs, but not before receiving an ox-felling punch between the eyes.

‘There's always a chance,' he said, with a grimace of indifference. ‘But don't bet on it, son. You'll lose your money…. Good night.'

THE day of Ann's homecoming arrived at last. Matthew was to fetch her, and he could think of nothing else. He got up at his usual early hour and did all the various jobs about the farm which he always did before breakfast and always had done since he first became a farmer. He still did a large share of the milking, taking a far more than mercenary pleasure in any unlooked-for increase in the quality and quantity of the milk, and ready to be perplexed and disgruntled by any unaccountable falling-off in either. Dark though mornings were at this season, the cows at early milking-time were always ready and waiting for him. They would be crowded together in the orchard, where they had no proper business but which they must pass through to get from meadow to farmyard. They would stand mildly mooing or dumbly expectant on the further side of the five-bar gate, and in the morning dimness loom upon the vision like a group of fabulous sculptures. The iron of a man's boots would strike sharp and clear on the cobbles, a curiously lonely noise that made palpable the prevailing stillness, and, the gate flung back, the cows would lurch in and cross the yard to their long shed, where before very long they would be spending their nights as well as their milking sessions.

Matthew this morning did everything as usual, but with a mind preoccupied. When he thought of the sundry small things that had to be done or endured before he could take the road his impatience mounted to fever height. Milking,
breakfasting, harnessing the pony, driving to where Ann was, finding her, greeting her, bringing her back where she belonged, and re-establishing for all time the old dull satisfying order of things, this seemed in prospect a task so immense, an end so much to be desired, that to be held back from it by slow-ticking time, by petty pieces of routine, was a sort of agony. It was moreover a sort of agony to which he was a comparative stranger, and of which his neighbours, accustomed to his slow-going placid manners, would have supposed him hardly capable. With a persistence that made these lesser things a tiresome irrelevance, Ann filled his mind. She did not fill it with a thought, with a romantic sentiment. She filled it.

He stamped into the stone-flagged kitchen and sat down to his breakfast, but noticing that his hands were dirty got up again at once and went out to the scullery pump. On his return Hilda slapped down a plate of eggs and bacon in front of him. With no more than a grunt of acknowledgment he began eating.

‘I've done you a bit of bubble-and-squeak,' said Hilda.

She spooned a well-browned slab of that confection on to his plate. If he had had attention to spare for her he would have seen that she was in a state of not unhappy tension. His condition made him wonderfully blind to any special meaning the day might hold for her. But the sight of this unusual addition to his breakfast gave him a moment's surprise.

‘What's the idea?'

‘Must make a good meal, Mr Elderbrook.'

‘Um.' He was not interested, yet vaguely wondered what she meant. ‘Why?'

She shrugged her shoulders and answered, as to a child; ‘Never mind why.' And then, absurdly: ‘You're going a journey, that's why.'

The lameness of the remark made him look at her, made him aware of her as something more than the terminus of an arm that had handed him his breakfast. His mind was in a fret of nervous anxiety. Was Ann fit to travel? Perhaps she had
had a relapse since Wednesday, when he had last heard news of her. The pony would go lame. The weather might suddenly change: the long prayed-for rain might suddenly arrive. She would be cold, wretched, arrive home chilled to the bone and take to her bed and be ill again. He knew she was longing to be home, and now, after being patient and comparatively easy for a long time, he could not rest till her wish were fulfilled. As he glanced half-absently at Hilda, as a man might glance up from an absorbing book, it was suddenly present to his mind, without shock because almost without meaning, that this warmhearted abundant girl now stood in a special and secret relation to him. Without shock, because what he remembered seemed unreal, or real only as something in a well-told story is real. It was at any rate something that did not concern him now, nor her either, and he gave it no thought beyond perceiving, in a flash of mutual understanding, that Hilda as usual was at one with him in the tacit denial of significance to anything that might otherwise have made for awkwardness on this morning.

‘Hope to goodness,' said Matthew, suddenly blurting out his fear, ‘hope to goodness she's really better, and no nonsense.'

‘Why of course she is!' said Hilda warmly. ‘They said so, didn't they? Wouldn't be no sense in telling you a pack of lies.'

‘I know,' said Matthew. ‘But she might have had a setback since then. It's a trying little journey for a person that's poorly. I hope she won't come to any harm from it.'

Hilda said: ‘Of
course
she won't! Whatever next? My word, she won't half be glad, coming home.' Standing over the teapot she added, for his comfort: ‘And once she's back we'll keep good care of her, don't
you
worry!'

‘I know you will, Hilda,' he said humbly. He saw that her ‘we' had meant ‘I', and was conscious of receiving more kindness than he deserved.

‘You'll be taking some flowers with you, I expect?' Hilda said.

‘Flowers?' He was puzzled. ‘What for?'

‘What for?' She echoed him derisively. ‘To feed the pony with, I expect, don't you?' Before he could answer this sally she said, with simple kindness: ‘She'll like to have a few flowers, Mrs Elderbrook will.'

‘Seems a funny arrangement,' said Matthew, ‘taking flowers all the way there and then bringing them all the way back home. You'd get the same result, come to think of it, by leaving them where they are.'

‘That's
what you
think,' answered Hilda. ‘I'll make up a nice bunch anyhow. And if you don't want to take them I'll put them in the bedroom, against she gets back.'

He remembered Hilda's flowers an hour or two later, following at the heels of a prim trim young nurse into the ward where Ann was. He remembered that he had forgotten to bring those flowers. But the idea did not stay with him, for there she was, Ann, sitting alone, waiting. He caught a glimpse of her before she was aware of him, and his heart turned over. She sat pensive and patient, released at last from pain and ready to be taken home, her belongings packed away in a valise, her handbag on the made bed beside her, herself in outdoor clothes. Seeing her like that gave him a strange pang, deeper than any wish. In profile she was a child, forlorn among strangers, yet hopeful, trustful, looking for the happiness that was to come. All the youngness she had lost in her years remained written in that outline. Matthew suffered a pang of terror, seeing her threatened by something his fancy would not define. It came and went in a flash, like a voice heard in a dream and at once forgotten, like a half-seen face at your elbow that isn't there when you look at it.

At sound of the nurse's approach Ann turned her head: not sadly, but with the meek patience of one well schooled in disappointment.

The nurse said slyly: ‘A visitor for you, Mrs Elderbrook.'

She looked and saw him. Her happiness burst into flower. It was not many days since his last visit, but today was different:
today he was to take her home. These were her thoughts and his too, a shared knowledge brimming the moment with light.

‘Hullo, Ann. Ready, are you?'

Supporting herself with one hand on the bed, she stood up and faced him, with a trembling smile. Though her face had lost something of its roundness, and all its bloom, the pleasure in her eyes made her seem young again, and somehow—for a reason beyond his fathoming—pathetic.

‘I've been ready over an hour,' she said.

It was not a complaint: merely the measure of her gladness at seeing him.

‘Really?' He gave her a bantering half-grin. ‘I reckoned you'd be still asleep.'

‘An hour and thirteen minutes,' said Ann happily.

The nurse had already slipped away, in response to a call from another patient.

Matthew picked up Ann's valise and with his left hand cupping her elbow piloted her across the narrow room and into the corridor. There she said suddenly ‘I've forgotten something,' and turned back. He put down his burden but did not follow her, thinking she could only be a few seconds gone. In her passage across the room he had been astonished by the limpness and slowness of her movements, though recognizing that to be astonished was unreasonable. He was apt to think in definite categories, ignoring the more-or-less, the gradations from one to the other. Well was well, and ill was ill. His fears of not finding her well enough to travel had been set at rest by seeing her out of bed and sitting in a chair fully clothed, even to hat and gloves. But she was evidently still very weak, and waiting for her to come back he became suddenly anxious again, thinking she had been gone a long while. In fact she had been gone about thirty seconds.

He turned back and put his head in at the bedroom door. ‘Are you all right, Ann?'

The answer was scarcely audible. He Went quickly in.
Ann was drooping against the bed, one hand on the handbag she had gone back to fetch. She looked up and gave him a wan smile. The smile was meant to be reassuring, but it had the opposite effect.

He went and put an arm round her shoulder.

‘Do you feel bad?'

‘No. Oh no. I was just tired for the moment, that's all.'

His old anxiety, that they might not let her come away, burst into flame; and Ann as if reading the thought and sharing it said quickly in a half-whisper: ‘Don't tell anybody. They've been very kind.'

‘H'm.' He was dubious.

‘I'm all right again now,' she said brightly. ‘Shall we go, Matt?'

Before he could answer her the little nurse was back, a dark young woman. A lock of hair straying from under her cap was raven black, and the gleaming darkness of her eyes seemed to fill the room with a mysterious vibration. Matthew had hardly noticed her before, though he had seen her on other visits; but now, though for an instant only, he was conscious of the violent contrast between her glowing vitality, which the prim garb and impersonal manner could not altogether hide, and the pale wraith, the shadow of a woman, that Ann had become. He had a moment's unease, a sense of desolation, and looked at the girl sharply, thinking he saw suspicion in the darkness of her glance.

‘Everything all right?' she asked.

‘Yes, thanks,' he said. ‘We're just off.'

‘How are you feeling, Mrs Elderbrook?' said the nurse cheerfully. ‘Not sorry to be leaving us, I expect.' She took Ann's arm, to help her to her feet again. ‘Mind you don't let her do too much, Mr Elderbrook.'

‘Oh, I'm splendid now,' said Ann. ‘You've all been so good to me, nurse.'

Responding to her glance Matthew entered into conspiracy with her against this gleaming girl.

‘We'll soon have you home,' he said. ‘Come along then. We'll be on our way.'

He gave her his arm, as he should have done (he thought remorsefully) from the beginning. She leaned on him heavily but stealthily, hoping the nurse would not notice, and together they made steady progress.