‘I don’t know what has happened or will but I’m treated like a man with a running sore, that I do know.’
But in this he was wrong. He was not being shunned. People were puzzled and they were also respectful of him, not wanting to intrude, seeing the troubled look on him and thinking they would help by leaving him alone.
Only talk went on, talk and speculation and wonderment, and questioning and what had been vague and uncertain firmed as it was talked about and seemed to become clearer and better known. Mary Ankerby had had a stroke or a seizure and come round as if it were nothing more than a moment of dizziness. George Crab had been crushed almost to death and pinned to the ground by the weight of the metal racks, so that blood had been squeezed from his mouth and his eyes had bulged, and that night had walked out of the hospital and home, as well as anyone in the town.
And all of it, including his own recovery, had to do with Tommy Carr.
On hearing the tale from another woman in the street, Miriam laughed, her usual short, scornful
laugh, and would hear none of it, for the town was always swirling with talk of something.
The weekend after the accident to George Crab was as hot as it had been that year and Eve had got up just after first light because she could not sleep and she liked to be outside in the cool pearly dawn before the day staled. It was a morning when the presence of Jeannie was again as strong as strong, the child pottering after her, catching hold of her skirt and clapping her hands as the chickens came fluttering and flapping out of their house. Eve did not cry for her daughter now, but when it happened in this way a shadow of sadness fell over the day and she could not enjoy the sight or smell or taste of things. She thought she would walk across the fields and up to the churchyard later, in the cooler evening, and as she was thinking it, became aware that someone was coming along the path, she supposed a visitor to one of the other cottages.
But the woman continued past them to the gate of number 6. Eve did not know her but she saw women like her every time she went into the town, older than their years, grey before their time, a bad colour and with front teeth missing and twisted feet in shoes that were made to fit someone else.
‘Hello?’
Eve looked up.
‘I don’t want to trouble you. It’s Tommy I have to see, Tommy Carr.’
Eve was sure she had never seen the woman before and when she said her name, Doreen Willis, it meant nothing.
‘My husband’s in the house.’
Abruptly, the woman burst into tears.
Sitting in the kitchen, her hands shaking, clutching the mug of tea Eve had made, Doreen Willis took a long time to compose herself and Eve could only look on and wait until she heard Tommy’s footsteps on the stairs. The woman looked up, her face fearful. She had said nothing except that she must see Tommy but when he came into the small kitchen she got up in panic and backed away.
‘Mrs Willis,’ Eve said. ‘It’s you she has come for.’
She went to pour his tea. The mistiness of early morning had dissolved away and the sky was clear, the sun already bright.
Nothing was said by any of them. Tommy stood looking uncertain, Doreen Willis was standing as if frozen to the ground.
Then he said gently, ‘What is it I can do for you?’ She let out a small breath. ‘Leonard,’ she said. ‘You know my son. Leonard?’
‘Leonard Willis the apprentice, yes. I’m sorry, I should have known at once. But I haven’t seen him about the works for some while.’
‘He can’t. His lungs are full up with it. He can hardly catch any breath.’
Tuberculosis then, Eve knew at once, for it was rampant in the town where the air was thick and fetid with smoke and fumes and dust from the chimneys, and the germs bred in the small houses crowded with too many people. She had sometimes wondered how Miriam’s children survived it, but they always seemed fit as fleas no matter what the state of the house or the lack of decent food.
‘Will you come?’
Tommy looked embarrassed. He had not told Eve, feeling oddly ashamed, but it was not the first time he had been asked in the last weeks to go to someone who was sick, grown men, women, children, babies. Word had travelled. He was talked about. Suddenly, people needed him.
He had always refused, telling them they must see the doctor or the district nurse, go to the hospital, go to priest or parson even, for he could do nothing, why would they think it, and he had no right to try.
Doreen’s face had fallen in on itself with a desperate sadness. She sat down heavily at the table again.
‘You should see the doctor,’ Tommy said.
‘The doctor can’t help. He’s a good man but he can’t help. Fresh air, he said, sea air or the mountains. That’s what cures people but how can we give him those things?’ She looked straight into Tommy’s face. ‘You can help.’
Eve had taken no part, not believing it had to do with her, but now she said only, ‘You should go, Tommy.’
‘I have no right.’
‘If it does no good you won’t be to blame but if you don’t go at all won’t you blame yourself?’
After a long moment of silence, he nodded.
AND SO
it began, for he went to see the Willis boy, whose skin was damp and who coughed almost without ceasing, and sat with him, touching his forehead once. A look of astonishment came over Leonard’s face and he jerked away from Tommy’s hand as if it had burned him.
When Tommy had left the house the boy had fallen asleep. He slept for fourteen hours and awoke with his pallor gone and his skin cool and dry.
After that, there was someone at the gates of the works or at the door of 6 The Cottages every day, and sometimes two or three people, wanting him to go to someone sick, someone in pain, an old man dying, a woman with a tumour, a child with a fever, people
racked with coughs and people bleeding, and Tommy went to as many as he could manage.
Almost every time, the heat passed through him to the sick man or woman or child, though not every time were they well afterwards, for some died, but they died well, their breathing easy, their pain faded to nothing, and died as if that was what they had meant and longed to do.
Eve grew used to strangers coming to the door and having to tell them that he was not home. Some of them simply waited by the gate, others went away, to return in the evening. They troubled her. Once a woman brought a limp and sickly infant who lay inert in her arms and Eve was terrified the child would die.
At the gates of the works, people were turned away, and inside, Tommy was left alone to his work but sometimes given strange glances. When the looks were hostile, he was hurt and wanted to stop the machines and, while the long room was quiet, try to find words to tell them that he was the same man, the same friend, and beg them to treat him as they used to. But how could they?
The town buzzed with story after story, often exaggerated and embroidered, for sometimes a sickness was little enough or only fleeting and nothing Tommy’s presence did affected it. People were well again as they would have been in any case.
He tried to hide himself among the mass of the others coming out of the works after the hooters sounded at the end of the day, but they moved away from him, revealing his presence to anyone who was waiting to ask him to come here, go there. He wanted only to dodge down a side street to the canal towpath and so out onto the country road, walking steadily alone and relishing the clearer air and the quietness as he got nearer and nearer to The Cottages. He was tired. The work was hard and relentless, his ears hummed with the constant noise and sometimes his head ached. In this he was the same as they all were, battered into exhaustion by the din. He longed to feel his hand on the gate and his feet on the grassy path and to see Eve in the window or among the plants or at the chicken house. And always he remembered Jeannie Eliza there with her.
People who needed him were not the only ones who came to the house. The newspapers were sent to talk to him, and when he would not see them, tried to get words out of Eve’s mouth. She would not speak for Tommy or say anything for herself, and so in frustration the papers printed lies and told tales and the word spread further and letters began to come. People read about Tommy and asked him to travel to them. The letters lay opened on the table and Tommy looked
at them, read them again, turned them face down or put them back into their envelopes in despair.
‘I can’t,’ he said.
Eve touched the back of his head gently. ‘No. People have no right to expect it.’
But he was eaten up with guilt that he refused anyone.
The heat broke with two nights of tremendous thunderstorms and rain that washed the stones down from the peak and filled the ditches to overflowing. The sky was livid night and morning and Eve was afraid that the lightning would rip down through it to strike the chicken house or their own chimney.
In the morning the air was warm and soupy with moisture and the sky hung low over the houses. Tommy had been more tired than usual and got himself ready slowly and did not want to leave.
At the works, the gatekeeper handed him an envelope. He stood to one side, turning it over anxiously. Someone else wanted him to go to them, someone he would agonise over and long to avoid but see out of guilt, though why he should feel guilt he did not understand.
But the envelope did not contain any letter begging him to visit someone sick. It held only his dismissal.
* * *
Tommy understood. There had been talk since the beginning, his presence distracted some and then there were the people at the gate waiting to see him and even those inside the works wanting his advice, though he had none to give. He had nothing to collect, no reason to go in, he simply signed the paper that was put in front of him and turned away. A few stragglers running in late glanced at him but most did not, they were preoccupied with their own hurry. Before he had walked far, the streets had emptied of any who had work to go to and were being taken over by the workless and the women gossiping at doors and the children. He was dazed and walked slowly, a stranger at this hour in the town, feeling the sidelong looks and hearing the murmurs.
The canal was gleaming under the sun, the grass dry and rubbed away with the absence of rain and the trample of feet. Boys fished. A barge slid past. Tommy sat on an old beam that served for a bench and looked into the water, not knowing. Not knowing. He knew that he had been dying. His stomach had been like a bag full of red-hot coals and his chest had hurt him when he breathed, he had barely been able to turn his head. He had wanted to die in order to escape through a door which would lead to the absence of pain and because there was nothing left in his life to hold to, even Eve. And then those few moments of
burning heat through his body had changed everything and he was well, fitter and stronger and more full of energy and life than he thought he had ever been.
But then? He did not know. Why could it not have stopped there? Being able to restore health and even life back to other people, which is what he seemed to do now, should have been a gift and a blessing. Instead, it had led to his being here, idling by the canal, workless and ashamed.
He had no need to feel shame. He knew it. He was not responsible for any of it, not guilty of anything, but knowledge and reason had no power over him when set against the shame.
He had been proud of his trade which he had done since he had been a boy apprentice and he was skilled for nothing else even if there had been any other work in the town. Now he was one of the many hollow-eyed men with worn-out clothes and shoes and dirty caps, hanging about the streets, gathering by the war memorial, saying little, passing a single roll-up round among themselves.
He got up and went along the towpath. A white dog with a black ear stopped to sniff at him and crouched to be patted. When he walked on, it followed him a little way before disappearing fast up a ginnel after a thin cat. He had wanted a dog. When Jeannie Eliza
had been older, they said, then it would be right to get one, company for her and to get her properly used to animals other than the rabbits and chickens, for those were not pets and she would have to learn it.
Every so often Tommy felt a moment of strangeness and wondered briefly what he was doing out here in the sunshine and the quiet, watching the boys fish and the barge slide by, before he remembered. He could not take in that he was not going back to the works. He had never known anything else.
He would have to go home soon, tell Eve, see the fear on her face, that they had become what they had never thought to become, one of the households with a jobless man, struggling, making do, and having no hope that it would change. They were better off than many, if having no family meant being better off, and they lived simply, bought little, had one another for company. They would manage and Eve would never reproach him for his dismissal, no matter what the reason – and no reason had been given to him. But he did not need one. He knew. They all knew.
Yet still he felt ashamed.
WORD SPREAD
again and again, brought people to number 6 The Cottages. After a week it brought a letter, from someone living in a village on the other side of the peak, to which word had also travelled.