He had called out for me at last.
Still I didn’t go to him. I stayed in the dark of the stairwell, unable to move. Arthur swayed across the hall below me and disappeared into the kitchen. I guessed he had gone out to sit in the conservatory. I slumped down on the stairs, leaned my head against the wall, and waited.
After a while he returned, clutching the letter. He dropped it on the floor, looked up, called my name again, and shuffled away. The borrowed light in the hall was somehow absorbent; he seemed to be sinking and losing form in a way that might be irretrievable. I hurried down and read what he’d written in the glow from the street lamp.
12:30 am
Dear Ruth
I’ve called for you and you won’t come, but I know you’re still here. I know you’re still here.
I have to talk to you. TALK.
PLEASE ANSWER.
It’s all up. Done with.
Still you’re not answering-you’re here, aren’t you?
We’ve got to do something.
Ruth, they’ll be back in the morning.
The Tony fellow. I hadn’t got my bandages on, that was the start of it. I was minding my own business, getting through a burnt sausage in a bun. Was perched on their swinging garden seat thing so ankles on display,and T leans forward, grabs my trouser bottom, pulls it back, and says AHA! As if finding a leg inside a pair of trousers required some special brilliance.
Thought so! Chronic ulceration!
Very officious.
There’s your National Health Service for you!
You know the way people get offended when they find out something they think you should have told them? Especially when it’s none of their business?
I tried to stand up for myself but it was no good.
Chronic ulceration! he says again, meaning “I’m the medical expert round here and don’t you forget it.” Here’s a condition directly related to personal care and nutrition and what’s the Primary Care Trust’s answer to that!
He was the only one not embarrassed. Even Mrs. M (she of elephant hide) said, Now Tony, Arthur’s here for a nice quiet time, you leave him alone.
Which didn’t shut him up.
Bloody PCT hasn’t bloody got one, that’s my point! Look at the poor bugger!
Then even HE knew he’d said enough. Mrs. M starts flapping around offering people more of everything. The women start making stupid remarks in big surprised voices, mainly about the food-you’d think Mrs. M invented potato salad. Tony leans in and says, Sorry about that, mate, but I’m not letting this go, we’re gonna get you taken care of, right?
Other people still milling around, laughing too much. I just ate my pudding and took no notice. You were the one for the small talk and the laughing. Mrs. M gave me a second helping of peach pavlova and when I’d finished everybody had gone. The Great Tony insisted on walking me back over.
You saw.
Ruth, where are you?
And then I was sick in the hall. Too much excitement, I suppose, not used to rich puddings. Tony cleaned up.
But I WOULD NOT LET HIM help me upstairs and I LEFT HIM IN NO DOUBT that I could get into pyjamas unaided-did not reveal that I have no need of pyjamas as am generally up and about while others are snoring their heads off.
But Tony says he’ll be back over again first thing and he’s going to phone the doctor and get something done. He says he’ll be making a strong case for hospitalization because I’m deteriorating, and if the doctor doesn’t visit and arrange it ASAP he’ll call an ambulance personally. Or he’ll get me into an A & E himself even if it means picking me up bodily and shoving me in the back of his car.
We’ve got to do something. Nobody listens to me and they’ll take me away again.
I can’t leave you again. We’ve got to stay together.
You’d have liked that pavlova. Wish you were around more.
We have got to do something.
With love
A.
So I went to him at last. He was rocking to and fro in an armchair. I kneeled down and pulled his hands away from his face, and closed his arms around me. He wept, and clasped my head against his neck. I could taste his tears and feel the loose, mulchy lips and his cheeks, so flimsy against the faintly rotten flaps of his mouth and the chipped bones of teeth. I embraced him as was my due and my right. I kissed his face and head, I pressed my mouth against the salty hide of his neck and chin, the skin flaking and wrinkling like cloth over gristly bones, over transparent veins and blood vessels like pulled threads. I breathed him in as if I were swallowing all the minute ebbings of fluids, the smells of wax and little trapped signs of age and illness, the thinning muscle that would one day slough and fail.
We said nothing. After a while his weeping subsided, and in one movement I drew away, took his hand, and led him upstairs. In the bedroom we arranged ourselves as if resuming a lifelong pattern after a period of abstinence or absence. I took him to his side of the bed and settled him on the pillows with a single kiss and a stroke of his hair. He smoothed the sheet for me and turned and smiled as I got in. I watched him fall asleep and then I lay awake thinking, trying to still my breathing.
I let them form, the thoughts that are born of the middle hours of the night, I let them grow firm and real in my mind and become the plan for what I realized was now the only possible course of action against our circumstances. Everything had been leading to this, though nothing had prepared us for it, but no matter; it was as if we were making our way into an obscuring white mist that would disperse before us and show the way ahead. I could see that our path had been there all the time, merely hidden.
Before it was light I got up. First I climbed the ladder to the attic. Apart from the nest of dusty curtains where I had been sleeping, there was hardly a space not strewn with rubbish: papers, books, journals baled and tied with hemp string, plastic binders of Reader’s Digest and National Geographic, but mainly notebooks and photographs and loose typed sheets, covered with crossings- out and annotations. I was pleased that Arthur, in all his rummaging and ransacking up here, had not had the strength to dislodge the heavy things. There was furniture: a kidney-shaped coffee table set upside down, its spindly gold legs splayed like antennae, a chair half re-caned, two dismantled beds whose slats, poles, and headboards lay sloping in against the roof beams. Everything was threaded together by wispy brown loops of cobwebs. I also found, stashed behind a bundle of tied tent poles, more than I had hoped for: a mattress with rusty-edged stains, and shaded with what looked like charcoal or soot. I cleared the books and papers off the floor with the edge of my foot and shoved them into heaps against the walls, then I hauled the mattress onto the floor. It fell with a whump, raising a cloud of its own sticky dust that smelled of dead grass and feathers and dried blood.
I went back to the spare room and collected bedding, which I pushed up the ladder ahead of me. I returned to the kitchen and made sandwiches and two flasks of tea. I found a jar for milk, and filled a large plastic jug with water. All these I carried up the ladder and set neatly next to the mattress. I got cups and plates and paper napkins, biscuits and fruit to go up, too. We could have nothing hot to eat, I had decided, in case the smell carried. I liked to give Arthur a hot meal every night, but he would miss it only this once. As soon as it was dark again we’d be on our way.
