‘I’ll want Cohan, as soon as I can have him,’ he said. She raised her eyebrows. ‘Once I’m home, I think they’ll try to kill me again.’
‘
‘Jarrold’s in a prison for the insane.’
‘Jarrold was just the means. There’s somebody else. I thought they might try to get at me here.’
‘They — not he?’
‘I don’t know — I don’t know.’ He couldn’t keep his face from showing his fear of losing her. ‘You’ll really come back?’
She kissed him again. ‘Really.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Denton thought that leaving the nursing home was the final humiliation — a litter carried by two men older than he, with two more to raise him shoulder-high and push him into the horse-drawn ambulance like a loaf of bread going into an oven — but going up his own stairs in his own house was even worse: humiliation turned into farce. Atkins had picked up three day labourers who put Denton into an armchair at the bottom of the stairs, and then, each man taking a leg, carried him with the chair tipped back so far he thought he might do a backwards somersault out of it. They rested at the landing with a lot of heavy breathing and exclamations and then picked him up and carried him the last seven stairs, depositing him in his own sitting room after almost taking his head off on the door jamb.
‘Well,’ Atkins said when he’d paid them off, ‘home again, home again, jiggety-jog.’
‘If I’d known you were going to do that, I’d have stayed in the nursing home.’
‘Listen, General, they wanted to carry you up on the litter. I’ve seen men dropped, seen the whole shebang go down a flight of steps. I thought the armchair was a stroke of genius.’
‘Help me up.’ Denton struggled; the bad leg was no help, and Atkins was not particularly strong. ‘It’s a good thing I’m skin and bones,’ he said when he was standing.
Atkins produced a walking stick. ‘You’re still about three stone too much for me. You’re bivouacked down here for the duration.’ He jerked his head towards the unused room next to the sitting room. ‘Never make it up and down those stairs day after day. Didn’t want to maroon you up there.’
‘Oh, hell — I hate that room.’
‘Yes, well, we do the best we can with what’s on offer at this hotel. Can you walk on that stick?’
Denton had tried a stick in the nursing home. He had taken a few steps, the right leg dragging behind, most of his weight hung from his shoulders and supported on his right hand. ‘Like running the mile race,’ he said.
‘We’ll have you fit in no time. Mrs O’Cohen has left a pot of soup you’re to eat six or eight times a day — very forceful woman.’ Denton, out of the habit of Atkins’s humour, needed two seconds to realize that O’Cohen was a play on the supposed Irishness of Cohan.
‘What’s she got to do with it?’
‘Oh, ah, she’s close to Mrs Striker, isn’t she? I’m going to get this armchair out of the way; you walk up and down for a while.’
‘I want to rest.’
‘Up and down, up and down, General. You’ve had plenty of rest, if you ask me.’
Denton struggled down the long room, turned at the window and struggled back. He had to pause at the alcove to lean against the cold porcelain stove that stood there, relic of an earlier tenant. Then he went up the room, past his armchair and the fireplace, to the window that looked out on the street. The pavements were wet, the gas lamps on; uneven wiggles of light reflected where the rain, now ended, had collected.
‘Let’s do it once more for old times’ sake, then I’ll bring up the tea.’
‘I’m worn out, Atkins.’
‘That’s why you’ve got to work. Let’s march.’
He laboured down the room again. This time he stopped at the window over the back garden, too exhausted in the right arm and shoulders to go on. The bullet wounds ached. ‘There are lights in the house behind,’ he said.
‘Oh, right. But no Albert Cosgrove.’
‘What’s going on?’
‘Workmen. Somebody bought it.’
‘Turn your back on the world, it goes right on without you.’ He swung around and dragged the leg to the alcove. ‘I’m done in. Help me to bed now.’
‘I thought I’d serve tea out here.’ Atkins’s voice became almost kind. ‘Look, General, you need to get back to normal. You don’t want to start living in a bed.’
Denton looked into his face, then put his left hand on a shoulder. ‘Help me along, then.’
He didn’t know how to sit down into a soft, deep chair. Now he found that if he put the right leg out in front of him and bent the left leg, he could fall backwards and land more or less in a sitting position; the left leg trembled from the effort. He said, ‘Do you know how embarrassing this is?’
‘We’ll practise that,’ Atkins said. ‘I’ll get the tea.’
He had made an effort. There were three kinds of biscuits, toast, anchovy paste, clotted cream, and a tureen of soup from which he lifted the lid. Steam rose and a remarkable odour drifted Denton’s way. ‘It doesn’t smell like the nursing home, at least,’ Denton said. He wasn’t sure what it smelled like.
‘Mrs O’Cohen’s speciality. Chicken and a lot of other stuff. She cooks “kosher”, if you know what that is. I don’t, so don’t ask.’ He ladled out a bowl. ‘Good for what ails you.’
‘They’ve been feeding me a lot of Bovril.’
‘Rare beef is what you need. Increase the blood. I’ve got a bit downstairs in the ice-cave would delight a cannibal. Thought I’d grill it on some coals.’
‘It’ll taste.’
‘Wood coals, General. Not a green recruit, you know.’
Denton ate the soup, then the toast and anchovy paste, then some of the biscuits. The soup, with enough salt, was edible but peculiar. The sharp saltiness of the anchovies was welcome after the stodge they’d fed him at the nursing home. When he was done, he tried to stand. ‘I can’t even get out of my own chair!’
‘Don’t mind my saying so, but you ain’t trying.’
Denton gave him a look of hatred. ‘I can’t bend this damned leg. What’s your brilliant idea?’
‘Stick it out in front of you and get up on the other one.’
The left leg was weak and his bullet wounds screamed, but he did it, the left thigh now vibrating like a plucked string. He stood looking down at Atkins. ‘You’ve appointed yourself my domestic scold?’
‘That’s the plan.’
Denton hobbled partway down the room and turned to the left and then left again into the room they never used. Most of the blind wall that was shared with the next house was books; on the street side was a single tall window; to his left as he stood in the doorway was a wall with a fireplace, coal burning in the grate. Opposite it, a divan he’d never seen before had been made up as a bed. ‘I’d prefer my own room.’
‘When you can go up and down.’
A big stack of mail stood on a table. Atkins said, ‘Lots of bills and invitations. Give you something to do.’
Denton felt too tired to respond. He’d given up the morphine, had refused chloral hydrate or laudanum. He was wondering, as he settled in the bed, if he should ask Atkins for some of the headache powders, and while he was wondering he fell asleep.
It was a struggle during the night to get from his rooms to the toilet that was tucked behind the alcove and across the side corridor. Atkins heard him and ran upstairs, trailing an unbelted robe behind him, Rupert plodding and breathing heavily behind that. The nursing home had had bedpans, not lavatories. Life was suddenly more complicated, more frustrating. Still, he fell again into deep sleep as soon as he was back in the bed.
The next two days were elaborations on struggle and frustration. The simple had become complex, the difficult impossible. He complained that he was getting his exercise simply by living, but Atkins chivvied him into
