The Night Following (23 page)

I found him on the hall floor surrounded by the papers he must have dropped when he tripped on the stairs. He had dragged himself to the wall and lay propped against it, his head back and eyes closed. I must have cried out. I heard him groan in reply, so at least then I knew he was alive. There were no obvious signs of injury, but how could I tell how badly he was hurt? I couldn’t tell if he had fallen from the top of the stairs or slipped on the last tread. Worst of all, how long had he been lying there? Should I give him water? Ask him to move his limbs, wiggle his toes and fingers? It was fourteen hours since I had left the house. Even in my consternation for him I was swamped with shame at my own negligence.

I crouched down and took his hand, and whispered, “Arthur, I’m here now. I’m so sorry. Don’t worry, Arthur. You’re going to be all right.”My voice was remarkably calm. “Don’t worry, dear,”I said, stroking his head. “Stay calm. I’m going to get help.”

He didn’t open his eyes but he groaned again and raised a hand to my arm and patted it gently as if, whatever the effort, it were important to him that I should be reassured.

I got to my feet and dialed from the telephone in the hall. My voice began to shake, but after I had asked for an ambulance and given his name and address, I managed to give all the other information I was asked: was he conscious, was he having difficulty breathing, had he vomited, could he move unaided. Was anyone else there?

“No. There’s just the two of us.”

“Right. Can I take your name, please?”

“
My
name?”

“Yes, please. I need your name to log the call and activate an ambulance request. Can you give me your name?”

“
My
name…it’s…”

“Are you all right, dear?”

“It’s Ruth. Ruth Mitchell.”

“OK, thank you, Ruth. Are you a relative? Ruth, are you Arthur’s wife?”

“Yes.”

“All right, Ruth, thank you. Ruth, your request for an ambulance is now in the system, and the ambulance should be with you within seven minutes. All right? You’re able to stay with Arthur until then, are you, Ruth?”

“Of course.”

I got some blankets and pillows and tried to make him more comfortable. Still he didn’t open his eyes. I opened the front door a little and then I sat down close to him, holding his hand, and waited. I heard the siren long before I saw the lights.

“Arthur, they’re here now,”I told him gently. “I can’t stay, dear. You know why. They wouldn’t understand, would they?”

He squeezed my hand. I kissed his forehead and left.

I made it with only a moment to spare, out through the conservatory and into the shed. I watched the sky above the roof of the house flicker with pale blue flashes but of course I couldn’t see what was happening inside. I sensed some commotion but I prayed they wouldn’t waste time trying to find the person who had called for the ambulance when the important thing was to get him to hospital. After a while the siren started up again. The lights bobbed and moved and then disappeared. As the wailing faded to silence, a stout woman appeared in the kitchen; it was the neighbor, I supposed, alerted by the ambulance. I could imagine her waving Arthur off and telling the paramedics that she would lock up the house. She began searching through the cupboards. After a few minutes she brought out the enameled casserole dish that I’d scrubbed clean, put it under her arm, and left, leaving the house dark.

I let myself back in and stood quite still for while, shocked. In the space of a few minutes he had been taken from me. All I had wanted, entering the house half an hour ago, was to take care of him. I had been folding his clothes, thinking about what to do about his weight, wondering what he liked to eat, and picturing nourishing little suppers laid out for him in the dining room, but this seemed now to be over-weeningly ambitious and vain of me. From now on I would have to be much more protective. I would get him out of the hospital somehow, and after that I would never leave his side. I had been slow-minded not to realize that this must have been what I meant when I had told Jeremy I was planning to be away for a long time.

I had been slow-minded, too, in failing to see that I was repeating my old mistake, concentrating again on the wrong things and allowing my attention to drift away from where it most properly should have been turned. All the time I had been fretting about his weight I had forgotten how unsteady he was on his feet; what notice had I taken of that, what safeguarding instinct had alerted me to the danger of a fall?

Would I never learn, was there to be no end to this accretion of guilt and the amassing of secrets I had to keep? A meaningless spillage of fruit and eggs on a bright day had blinded me to the presence of a living woman. Putting my faith in miracles and magic, I had let my uncle walk through the snow to his death. In the same hour that I had been concocting a ridiculously Gothic explanation for the torments of my mother’s life, my grandmother’s had slipped away.

   It was in a biology lesson on the tapeworm when I was twelve that I saw for the first time the point of school. I was aghast to learn of the peril I was in. We were told how the tapeworm’s eggs lurked on dogs and cats and how a single lick from a pet (already less fluffy and harmless, already a little less beloved) might be all it took. One touch of a finger on the lips could do it. Disgust made monuments of us. We sat like stones while The Life Cycle of The Parasite spilled from Miss Lawson’s mouth and reeled through our heads like a horror film. Once the eggs were in you, you’d had it. This worm went to work in your gut, gobbling up whatever you put in your stomach. Its ribbon body elongated segment by segment until it wriggled a way right through you, and it just went on eating. You’d gorge on quantities that would make normal people sick, and never be satisfied. You’d be twitchy and gaunt and unable to smile, but you wouldn’t die, you’d just look as if you were about to. In civilized countries (lucky us) the tapeworm was rare, but in certain parts of the world people went around like that for years. Then Miss Lawson rescued us. There was a cure.

I danced home. At last I knew what was wrong with my mother. When she fell unconscious it wasn’t because she was drunk, it was from sheer fatigue and desperation because there was a tapeworm inside her, soaking up every last drop. It wasn’t really
her
drinking at all, it was the tapeworm. Now I could explain the slow-drowning look on her face; something deep in the lakes of drink she swallowed down was dragging her under. That must be why her thinness was not like other people’s thinness but seemed like something at work in her, using her up before my eyes. She was perishing from the inside, and now that I knew why I could tell my grandmother. It could be spoken of at last. My grandmother would speak to the doctor and everything would be put right.

She wasn’t there. She had died in her chair that morning, probably quite soon after I had left her, newly washed and talcum-powdered. My mother hadn’t thought to bring me back early from school because what would be the point? She was dead and that was enough to be going on with.

So even before the biology lesson it had been too late. Maybe at the very moment I was putting two and two together about the tapeworm, they were pulling her knitting from her lap, folding her hands, and lifting her from her chair. I imagined her smiling under a layer of scented white dust as they took her away. That evening, looking at my mother’s stone eyes, I thought about the tapeworm again, but I felt much too guilty to mention it.

   I wandered around downstairs for a while longer. Earlier at Beaulieu Gardens I had found it difficult to sleep; it had been one of those days of hard weather when the sky was white and gray and shone like tin. Now darkness lay across the furniture in Arthur’s house and reached into the velvety corners of every room, and all the doors stood open. I walked around and closed them, and the sound that made seemed distant and dull and furtive as if I were hearing from elsewhere in the house a gentle wind blowing through its spaces, nudging the doors shut.

But everywhere was utterly still, as if nobody had lived here for years. The house smelled different, like powder or ash; I should not have been surprised to find dry leaves or bones lying in forgotten rooms. It seemed I had been away for ages, it seemed I had never left. Maybe I had been preparing myself for this, for a night that was bound to come, when I’d understand that whatever I needed it was not to be found in the world Jeremy lived in and where I had found myself stranded for a while, waiting on the vaguest of terms, becalmed by the painting of butterflies and my many other narcotic and listless habits. Unbearably empty though the house was, I knew I had come home. I could be no more nor less in possession of this house if it so happened I were roaming around on the other side of its walls. I could be no more nor less in possession of myself if I were adrift on an ocean.

I made my way upstairs. I had never been in the house alone before and now its gloating darkness was mine; even while Arthur’s absence was growing like an ache in my body, I felt safe. I could tell that Ruth had felt this, too, sometimes, in the moment following the closing of the door. She would pause while a shiver of solitude ran through her and she thought of the lightless rooms proffering their spaces for her alone, and anticipated her body alone disturbing the cool, resting air. Like me, she thought of the dark not as dark but as an element, pure, neutral, white—yet miscible, were she but to enter it and let herself dissolve into its shadows. I wondered if she had been tempted, as I now was, to go naked through the house touching nothing and feeling nothing, guilt shed like clothing, aware only of the changing textures of floors underfoot and the tingle, as doors opened, of the air of each room releasing a sigh over bare skin.

I went into Arthur and Ruth’s bedroom, into the faint oily damp of fingertip sweat and the aroma of hair and skin-softened bed linen and worn clothes. I undressed. I tried to remember undressing for Jeremy, as distinct from merely taking off my clothes while he happened to be present, and couldn’t. I could not remember a single occasion when he had looked at me in a way that made me conscious I was becoming naked rather than just removing garments, but nor did I remember grieving for the want of his scrutiny. I could not remember, even once, when the notion of his contemplating my body occurred to me at all.

I walked naked to the bathroom and showered under a flow of water that felt astringent, sharpened by the darkness. Ruth liked her soaps and lotions to be leafy-scented but with a cut of something spicy and medicinal: calendula, lavender, clove. I used two or three. Arthur’s towels were in the wash, so I took her robe from its peg behind the door and wrapped my wet body in its clothy smell of dried perfume. In the pocket I found a fluffy throat pastille.

With Arthur gone, it was hard to believe there was anything much to do. I lit candles and tidied up a little, but I had no heart to tackle the chaos of paper littering the place. I picked up a few pages here and there and read them, going over and over bits of his letters to me. Then I thought maybe I should try to rest, to refresh myself for his return, but when I lay down I would suddenly be certain I should keep busy, and I would get up again. I would start toward the stairs with something to carry up or I would begin to fold a tea towel or put away spoons, but come to a standstill, staring at what was in my hands. I turned over plates and cups as if I had to memorize something about them, in case I might never in my life see their like again. I stopped at windows and thought how wrong it was that I should be here and Arthur not, and how like and unlike an earlier time this had been, waiting for an ambulance, sedated by my own helplessness.

   It was Grace’s eighteenth birthday, and a Saturday in July. Summer lay like a warm haze over the sleepy little corner shop. The blinds had been drawn half down over the windows to protect the contents from the sun, but still the heat burned through, sending the warm sickly smells of powdered sugar and tobacco mixed with dust into the dark stuffy air. Grace had slipped into a doze in her chair behind the counter. There had been few customers all day, perhaps because the shop did not sell ices. There was an ice-cream kiosk a few yards up past the station and Uncle Les said they couldn’t compete on price. They moved quite a few bottles of pop in this kind of weather, but in general business was slack. Nobody wanted melting chocolate, bags of sweating barley sugar, or warm, prickly twists of sherbet.

Grace didn’t care. She despised the shop and that extended to its customers, too. Three years ago she had left school and come to work in the shop full-time. Her mother very seldom served behind the counter anymore, and many of the regular customers had dropped away. Only a handful of the old gents came in for their pipe tobacco anymore and Grace was none too pleased to see even them. To her they were a bunch of stinky old men and she couldn’t be bothered making herself pleasant. She hated their wavery voices and their coughing and their shuffling feet. She hated their lips clamped over their rotten pipes, and most of all she was repelled by their hands. She couldn’t bear to take money from them in case there was an accidental brushing of their skin against hers. She placed a plate on the counter for them to drop their money into, and she paid out their change in the same way.

The women and children who came in for sweets were scarcely less offensive. Grace had strict rules about finger marks and shopping baskets on the counter, and about children taking gobstoppers out of their mouths on the premises. She put up a sign threatening the direst consequences if bicycles were left against the window or if chewing gum was dropped on the pavement.

The ringing of the shop bell woke Grace up. Uncle Les strode in, rubbing his hands. “What, not cashed up yet, young lady? Resting on our laurels, are we, and on our birthday?”