Eve took her hands out of the suds and held them up and the soft iridescent bubbles slid down her wrists and back into the water as she watched and thought about Tommy, trudging into town and to work, and then across the town to the doctor and then back home, and wondered how he would have the energy in him.
KNOWING BETTER
than anyone how things were in the town, Dr McElvey had a surgery every evening at six for those who could not pay and those surgeries were packed to the doors and out of the doors, with men coughing and women white and stooped and underweight, rickety children and infants too lacking in energy to cry. He was never done until nine and then opened the windows wide to let out the smell of sick human beings and of misery and poverty and distress.
Tommy was among the first, finishing as he did at five and going straight down, though the room was starting to fill up even so, the benches round the walls taking as many as could be fitted onto them pushed up together. No one spoke, though many knew one another well enough, out of pride and a respect for
each other’s privacy, and out of the need to conserve energy, which talking drained too readily. People stared at the floor or the wall or fussed over their children and did not meet anyone else’s eye, though when the door opened to admit yet another there was a quick glance and then glance away as the identity of the newcomer was noted. Tommy was known to several so that the eyes were on him as he walked in and to one, who had not seen him for some time, his thinness and the deep hollows of his face and his poor colour were a shock and it was all the woman could do to keep from staring. She would say later, at home and to the street, that Tommy Carr had the look of death upon him, and so word would spread.
He had brought an evening paper and held it up high so that the swelling in his jaw could not be inspected.
And if he had been in the street and heard what was said, that he had the look of death upon him, he would only have agreed because that was what was happening to him surely, the slow sideways movements of death towards him, the gradual tightening of its grip. But in the last week or two not so very slow at all.
He waited not more than half an hour and felt the eyes on his back as his turn came and he went in and the unspoken collective desire to follow him through
the door into the surgery, to hear and have suspicions confirmed. But the door was a heavy one and there was a curtain across the corner where the couch was.
Dr McElvey watched him come into the room, taking in the thinness and the slight stoop, the candle colour of Tommy’s skin and the gleam of the swelling above his jaw, the expression in his eyes. He remembered Jeannie Eliza. He had not seen either parent since the child’s illness and death but he was not surprised at the way the father looked now. A shocking death could have all manner of repercussions – or none. He had known families where a terrible death had occurred and other than the immediate tears and mourning, there had been no apparent effect on anyone, life had simply continued, though who knew what dark currents ran deep below the surface. But he saw the opposite too, and that almost every week, in a sudden death from heart failure, a suicide, a fit of madness, a series of infections that became progressively more serious until they overwhelmed their victim, who had been left with no more strength or inner resource to fight them and perhaps did not even wish to survive. Or there was this – the way Tommy Carr looked now.
He asked questions first, sitting calmly with his notepad and pen, glancing at the man every so often to try to gauge his reactions, read his mind. Eating,
drinking, sleeping. Tiredness. Pain. Discomfort. Aching. Head. Neck. Throat. Chest. Breathing. Stomach. Bowels. Bladder. Limbs. And then the feelings. Sadness. Grief. Melancholy. Pessimism. Fears. Nightmares. Hallucinations. Changes of mood.
Tommy replied quietly, readily, and his face remained expressionless, until Jeannie Eliza was mentioned and then the physician saw the pain in his eyes, the stabbing of memory, the grief which was no age at all but fresh as yesterday.
‘If you would slip out of your things and lie on the couch, I’ll take a look at you, Tommy.’
He left the swelling beneath the man’s jaw until last, concentrating on the emaciated body, feeling soft tissue and bone, pressing gently, his hands seeking out here and there, what he expected to find, and finding it.
‘Now then, this swelling here.’ He touched the lump with a forefinger, traced it lightly along. The skin was taut, the swelling firm.
‘You can get dressed now. Thank you.’
Tommy had not spoken or made any movement other than to wince once or twice.
‘I think you must have had indigestion for a while, Tommy.’
Tommy looked straight into the doctor’s eyes, each man reading the other clearly there.
‘Just a little while after eating.’
‘But now?’
‘Maybe a bit more … In the night I’ve felt it. I shouldn’t eat toasted cheese before I go up to bed.’
Neither of them smiled.
‘Do you get much relief from it?’
‘I took bicarbonate of soda in milk a time or two, that helps a bit.’
‘Harsh on the stomach lining though it is.’
Tommy did not answer and for a few moments the doctor looked at his notepad, pen in hand, working out what to say, how to say, whether to say. He set the pen down and leaned back, resting the tips of his fingers together. Watching him, Tommy remembered how he had been with the child, his tenderness and the way he had stood silently looking down at her, looking for some hope and finding none.
‘I’m going to give you a mixture to settle your stomach and a bottle of tablets to help with your sleeping. And something for any pain you may have.’
‘Will the swelling go down here?’ Tommy touched his face.
‘Give it a while. Give it time.’ Dr McElvey got up and went over to the far corner by the window where the shelves and cupboards held the pharmacy, and washed his hands in the basin.
‘I don’t have a lot of difficulty in sleeping,’ Tommy
said, ‘so maybe just the medicine to settle my stomach? If I wake, I can make a cup of tea, you know.’
What he was saying, as the doctor knew, was that every bottle and pot and box full of this or that added to the cost.
‘I won’t give you many,’ he said. ‘You may find you’re glad of them.’
When he handed the medicines over he said, ‘If things worsen, we may have to get you looked at in hospital, Tommy. They’ve more tricks up their sleeve than I have.’
‘I’ll be right as rain.’
‘And if you need me …’
The waiting room was packed now, with half a dozen men standing and more coming through the door. He slipped out without catching anyone’s eye, the medicines in his jacket pocket.
Dr McElvey did not call the next patient at once, though he had seen the rows there were, patiently waiting. He stood looking through the net curtain of the surgery window onto the street and at Tommy Carr walking down it, shoulders hunched.
How long would it be? A month or less? The cancer was a great mass inside his gut, eating what was left of him away and there was precious little to go. He would not send him into hospital unless he must. There was
nothing to be done, no tricks up their sleeve, and who in their right minds would want to go there to die? He was better off at home with the view to the peak out of the window and his wife to tend him.
He glanced at the notes. Thirty-one years old and looking seventy now. But out there, among those who coughed and ached and grew as thin as Tommy, there were plenty of the young looking old and the old with even less time to live.
Dr McElvey opened the surgery door and called for the next of them.
Tommy walked more slowly home than he had ever done and as she watched him from the window Eve had a piercing moment of fear that he would not make the journey again and then she realised a truth she had never before understood. Everyone has a time when they are in their prime of life. Everyone has as little as one year when they are the best they will ever be, the healthiest, strongest, most handsome, most full of energy and hope, when they might do anything and it can be seen upon them, this prime, in their eyes, on their skin, in their walk. But they do not know it. Perhaps they cannot know it. If they could they would not wish the time away, as people do, even children when they are unhappy or sick or trailing through some tedium of growing up. No one can know it about themselves but
others may know. Others can see it on them and envy them. But it may even pass them by and then it is over and can never be recalled. And years later, they look back and know, recognise it as having been their prime, but of course by then it has gone and cannot be recalled.
Tommy had had his prime, she had had hers. Not Jeannie Eliza. When she had met Tommy Carr that had not been the time, it had come a little later, after they had moved into number 6 The Cottages. The year they had made things as they ought to be and he had gone striding off early every morning and back at night as if the distance were nothing at all.
And now it had gone.
He came in wearily and she helped him off with his coat.
‘I thought you might have been later,’ Eve said, putting the teapot down. Nothing more. He would talk in his own time.
He sat at the table sipping the tea and there seemed to be barely a flicker of life in him, but after a time, he reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out the medicines.
Eve felt a spurt of relief, as if there, in the golden-coloured liquid and the small box, was the answer to everything, to the pain in his stomach and weakness, his poor colour and lack of appetite, his thinness.
‘He spoke of the hospital,’ Tommy said, ‘but he would rather me stay at home. I was glad of that.’
‘Why would he think of the hospital at all?’
‘Perhaps they’d find something.’ He touched the medicines. ‘I won’t go.’ He reached out his hand and touched hers briefly. ‘Don’t worry. Eve.’
He ate two spoonfuls of a thick stew she had made and a square of bread before he said he was too full to manage much, sounding apologetic, as he always was for not taking more after the trouble she went to, and then he read the label of the bottle carefully before taking some of the liquid in water.
‘I’m going to do the chickens,’ Eve said.
He came with her, though not all of the way to the bottom of the garden where the run was, and then stood watching. The rabbits had gone and they would not be replaced.
As they went back into the lighted kitchen, Tommy said, ‘I wish she was here still.’
Eve was silent.
‘I don’t want to think of you being on your own.’
‘I’m not on my own, I won’t be, I’ve you. What are you saying?’
His expression as he turned to look at her was infinitely gentle, infinitely sad.
‘Well, maybe for a while longer, Eve, maybe with the medicines … he didn’t seem too sure.’
‘Sure of what? How? Tell me.’
But he only shook his head and made for the stairs and she watched him climb as if he had weights tied to his legs and his body had turned to stone and the tears ran down her face for the sadness of it.
The next morning he left for work as usual though she did not know how he got down the stairs. He drank a mug of tea but ate nothing and it was painful to see him draw his jacket on as if every movement were an effort so great he might never finish making it. But he left.
Eve could not bear to watch him go but turned away from the window and tidied the dresser until she knew that he would be out of sight.
It was not usual for her to feel that she did not dare to be alone, but this morning she washed the pots quickly and went to the Ankerbys, not only because she was worrying about Tommy but because, suddenly, alone in the house meant alone. Jeannie Eliza, who had been there, always just behind or just ahead of her, always just out of sight but laughing somewhere, and calling out, ever since the day she died – Jeannie Eliza had gone. There was no child. No footsteps. No cry. No sudden laughter.
‘Ah, my dear.’ Mary Ankerby put out her hand and touched Eve’s cheek the moment she saw her, and pulled back a chair for her and set the kettle on. Bert looked at her, shaking his head, and touched her shoulder, before going out of the door and into the garden.
‘He went to the doctor,’ Eve said.
Mary waited
‘He got some sort of medicine. For the pain in his stomach and to help him sleep. But they don’t seem to have done much for him.’
Mary Ankerby sighed. ‘And the price of the doctors,’ she said.
‘He’s very kind. That doctor. He came when … he was very kind.’
‘I’ve watched Tommy.’ Mary poured the tea out. ‘He goes so slowly.’
‘He doesn’t complain at all but I hear him sometimes, he makes a little moaning noise and puts his hand on his belly.’
They sat in silence after that, watching the sun move round, until Bert came back in and sat with them and the sun moved further, touched the scarlet petals of the geraniums on the sill and turned them to fire.
A little after that, Tommy passed by the window, half bent over and his walk so slow he seemed hardly to move at all.