A Kind Man Read online

  ‘The man, Mr Arnold, wrote again,’ Tommy said the evening she got home. ‘It seems as if his daughter will try to do away with herself if she suffers more.’

  She knew what he was saying.

  ‘You would walk to Hoargate and then catch a bus?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well.’

  She took the spade from beside the door and went to dig up potatoes. Bert Ankerby had two marrows for her which he was in the act of bringing and so they went down the garden together, talking of what she might grow for the winter for he was anxious to make sure they had as much as might be possible, anxious that if Tommy did not get work soon they should still manage. That they lived mainly on eggs and potatoes and whatever vegetables they grew bothered neither of them. The rabbits had gone for the pot and provided suppers for a week.

  The next morning Tommy got up at five and was at Hoargate waiting for the bus by six. He should be there by nine, though how long a walk he would have after the bus let him off he did not know.

  In fact the stop was not far from the gate of the house, which was called ‘Laverings’, and he was walking up the drive before eight thirty. He had not let them know he was coming, thinking that the girl would not have gone anywhere and that as they had asked for him he would not be turned away.

  He was not, but seeing the house, a large stone one with pillars at the entrance, long windows onto a lawn, a gravel drive round to stables, he almost turned round. He was not a man who ever felt troubled about his origins, he felt able to speak to anyone, hold his head up anywhere, and had always been respected for it. But walking up to this door he felt like a pedlar.

  There was no need. He asked for Mr Arnold and gave his name and within a few seconds the man came into the hall and took hold of both his hands, holding them warmly and stumbling over words of thanks.

  Tommy was offered breakfast but accepted only a cup of strong tea which he drank standing, hardly liking to glance round. But what he saw was not stately or imposing, it was solid and comfortable, everything good, everything well made, but still part of a proper home. Mr Arnold was a tall, broad man with a thick head of hair and a high forehead, a good suit, a watch chain. An honest look.

  ‘There is no one else,’ he said as they made for the staircase after Tommy had drunk his tea quickly and hot. ‘I had no one else to turn to. Daphne is little alone, though we try not to let her feel she is being watched, but when she spoke of taking her life …’ They went along a wide corridor with a window at the far end overlooking parkland. The sun was climbing up the sky now. It would be hot.

  ‘You were the only person I could think of turning to. Everyone speaks of you. You have done wonderful things.’

  ‘I don’t know what I do,’ Tommy said. ‘I came because I felt for you but I may have nothing to give. I may be of no help. I can make you no promises.’

  He felt nervous and as if he were some sort of impostor, for he had no confidence, no sense of sureness about what the outcome of it all might be. He felt a hollowness in the pit of his stomach. He had no right to have come and would have gone back down the quiet corridor and away if they had not stopped at a white-painted door on which Mr Arnold tapped, before beckoning Tommy to follow him.

  She was sitting in a deep armchair beside the windows. Her hair was dark and tied back from her face, which was a pleasing face and would have been young and might have been pretty, if it had not been marked by years of illness and pain and of sitting alone looking out of a window. A book was on the arm of the chair but it was not open.

  ‘This is Mr Carr,’ her father said. ‘I told you about him.’

  She looked round and directly at Tommy. ‘He was not going to come.’

  ‘We thought not but he has.’

  ‘Why did you change your mind?’

  Tommy hesitated. ‘I thought I should. I couldn’t rest.’

  ‘What happens now?’

  For a second he almost said that he did not know, that he had not been taught, that he was as unsure of it all as anyone, but then it came to him that he did know, and this was nothing new or strange. Miss Arnold was no different.

  He went across the room where an upright chair stood against the wall, and lifted it and set it down beside her.

  ‘Do you need anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you chant and say prayers?’

  ‘No.’

  Mr Arnold was still standing.

  ‘Give me your hand please.’

  She stretched it out to him and he took it. It was small and soft and cool to his touch.

  For a few moments they sat in silence until he felt a flutter of doubt, wondered if he would fail and why and what he might say to them.

  Her eyes were on his face and he saw despair in them. And then he felt the heat rush up through his body until his skin and flesh and even the blood in his veins burned, and as he felt it so he saw that she did, it transferred itself from him until he began to feel drained and tired. He took his hand away from hers and sat for a moment. The young woman had closed her eyes and her pale skin was slightly flushed.

  There was a great silence in the room.

  21

  MR ARNOLD offered him fifty pounds, which he refused, and then, assuming it was because fifty pounds was too little, Mr Arnold suggested one hundred, but Tommy would take no money except for his fare.

  Two days later, a letter arrived. Daphne Arnold had been in no pain since his visit and was now able to walk about the garden, though it would take time for her muscles to strengthen fully. The envelope contained a cheque which Tommy tore up at once before going out to pick the last beans and take down their sticks.

  Eve did not know what she felt. She was proud of him for refusing the payment, to which he said he had no right, but money was so short now and there seemed no chance of anyone employing him in the town, even if there had been work.

  And every day someone came to the door, someone sick or with a sick child or husband or wife, wanting him to go back with them or sometimes to see them there and then. He always did.

  Word travelled further, people came from many miles away, letters arrived asking him to travel here and there about the country.

  ‘Miracle worker?’

  ‘The Healer.’

  ‘Is this man a saint or a fraud?’

  Those things were written in the newspapers and more besides and when he went into the town, he was shunned or embraced and did not know how to deal with either. He felt awkward and sometimes ashamed and would say, ‘I do nothing.’ Or, ‘I don’t know what happens.’ But most often he remained silent.

  One day, as he was coming out of the grocer’s shop with the few things they could not manage without buying, he saw Dr McElvey.

  ‘Tommy.’

  He stopped.

  ‘I have been hoping to see you.’

  ‘Doctor.’

  ‘Will you come to the surgery? There is something I must say.’

  ‘Say it here.’

  ‘No, it will not do for the open street. I have a patient to see. I will meet you there.’

  He had looked at Tommy out of cold eyes and they were cold when he greeted him without a word at the door of the surgery. The room was empty but somehow the air seethed with all the sickness and pain and fear that crammed it full for hours of the day.

  They went into the consulting room.

  ‘You know why I asked you here.’

  Tommy stood, as he had not been asked to sit, and did not answer.

  ‘You know what happened to you, Tommy?’

  Tommy shook his head for he did not but the doctor was not waiting for his answer.

  ‘I will tell you. My diagnosis was incorrect. That is perfectly possible, I am only a humble physician. I believed you to have malignant tumours but clearly you did not. Whatever the swellings were that caused your pain and weakness must have been benign – some form of cysts. Those can disappear as they appeared and why we do not know. Once they had disapp
eared you recovered speedily, as would be expected. And that is all, Tommy.’

  Tommy was so shocked that his throat seemed to close up and he could not speak. Thoughts swirled round his head but he stood dumb.

  ‘And now all this wildfire talk round the town of healings and cures … this is nonsense, and you know it. It goes against medical science and it goes against common sense. You are not a doctor.’

  ‘I know that,’ he said loudly and it was easy to speak it out. ‘I know that well and I have never pretended to it.’

  ‘Perhaps not, but you have gone along with what the people have said and never denied the rumours, you have visited sick people pretending to be able to cure them, you have –’

  ‘I have done none of that. None of it. I have gone with people when they begged me, but not easily, not without great doubts.’

  ‘Mary Ankerby.’

  ‘Mary is my neighbour.’

  ‘It is said you cured her after she suffered some form of stroke or seizure and was near to death.’

  ‘I cannot help what people say. I have not said it.’

  ‘People come to your door and you take them in and attempt to cure them of all manner of sicknesses. You go to houses in the town where desperate people will believe anything and resort to anything in their distress.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And now you are casting your net wider and taking payment. You are a deceiver and a beguiler, you are obtaining money from the weak and the poor and the sick, you are –’

  ‘NO.’ Tommy heard his own voice raised in angry denial. He did not shout. He was never angry. This was not as he knew himself to be, but what the doctor was saying was so untrue and so wrong that he could not have spoken in any other way.

  ‘Deny these things.’

  ‘I do deny them.’

  ‘I can call any number of witnesses. I am the doctor in this town. People speak to me. People ask me questions. People tell me things.’

  ‘I have done no wrong and made no claims. I only know what I do know.’

  ‘And what do you know, Tommy Carr?’

  He knew that he had been dying, that the pain he had suffered over so many weeks, and the weakness and the sickness, the way he had been unable to eat and scarcely to keep down water and become as thin as one of his own bean sticks, all of those things had been real and his disease had been malignant and incurable. He knew it and knew that Dr McElvey had known it. He knew.

  And he knew that he had felt a great heat course through his body and afterwards he had been well. He knew that whatever sickness had been with those people who were touched by him and by his heat had immediately left them and they were well. He knew that he did not know how or why, but that he knew and they knew, he could not doubt.

  That was all he knew.

  Yet as he stood there, with the doctor’s cold eyes and hard voice confronting him, he also knew that he could not defend himself and nor could the people who had come to him defend him. If they were asked, perhaps they would speak for him, or perhaps they would not but instead would retreat out of fear and shame and because they were anxious not to upset the ordered way of things or to anger the doctor who had always served them without sparing himself or taking from them a penny more than he needed.

  Tommy said, ‘I have taken no money and I have not asked for anyone to come to me. You will believe me or you will not and I cannot blame you for minding what you think I have done. You are the only person who has the right to do so. But I am saddened that you want to deny what we both know, not about anyone else, I cannot speak for them, but about me. You know how it was with me, as well as I know. I was to have died, perhaps that day or that night after you saw me. You know what you know as well as I and yet you deny it now and that is wrong and it grieves me. Why you do it I can’t know. It surely doesn’t reflect on you. You were goodness itself to me, as you are to others. I don’t understand you but I could never pretend to you and I do not lie to you. And you know that.’

  After he had left, Dr McElvey stood at the window for a long time, angry at first that Tommy Carr had defied him but gradually, as he calmed, struggling to admit to himself that he had spoken no more than the truth. He had been dying. His tumours would have overwhelmed his system and there had been little left in him with which to fight. Why had he pretended otherwise?

  But as to the rest of it, that enraged him – the rumours and stories and fantasies the town was seething with, the tales in the papers. Tommy could not help what was said, but he added fuel to the flames by agreeing to see those who were sick and without any other hope and who turned to him in error.

  He should refuse. He was wrong and he ought to pay for that wrong, or suffer for it.

  Dr McElvey was a proud man and knew his own worth. He had liked Tommy Carr and felt great sorrow for him in the death of his child and in his own terrible sickness, but he could not tolerate a man such as he was taking the sick people of the town to himself.

  His anger curdled his temper for the rest of the day and those who came to his surgery afterwards felt the brunt of it. But late that night, walking out into the humid, close air before he slept, he had to accept that there was almost certainly nothing he could do other than warn Tommy Carr again and make it known about the place how much he himself was angered by it all.

  In the middle of the night he woke. The air had not cooled and even with the windows wide open the closeness was oppressive. He lay still for a long time wondering what it was that had cured Tommy Carr and why. The questioning kept him awake until long after the breaking of a sultry dawn.

  22

  THE HENS stopped laying and there had been no rain for weeks, so that the ground yielded less and less.

  Eve went looking for work and found it, for the mornings from five to eight o’clock, swabbing floors and cleaning down machines in one of the works. It was hard and her arms and back ached so that at first she could barely walk home upright, but after a time she was used to it and stronger. The money was poor but it meant the worry was less, though Tommy felt shame that he could not find work himself and walked into the town twice a week asking at the different factories. He found nothing. At the printworks the gatekeeper told him there was no point in asking, men were now being laid off even there. The chair factory had shut down.

  The town looked shabbier and more grey-spirited, the people down at heel and sad-eyed, though the children played as cheerfully as ever and boys still fished in the canal and roared about the streets on makeshift carts and kicked old shoes tied up with string.

  The granite-grey church gave out soup and bread every day at noon and the queue began to form an hour before, the children hanging round for biscuits and extra crusts and racing away again when their fists closed over them. Tommy would not go and in any case they still had enough. When the hens laid, Eve brought eggs in, some to sell to the shop, a few to give away to the women she worked with.

  The doctor did not come near them again and people still sent for Tommy and came to the house and Tommy still saw them, though never out of pride or defiance.

  A few weeks after Eve had begun working, he received another letter from Mr Arnold, asking him to visit.

  My elderly mother has recently come to live with us and is patience itself but is in great pain with arthritis, especially in her hands which she finds useless for any purpose as a result. If you would come to see her and could do even a little of what you did for Daphne, we would be in your debt.

  ‘He should be paid,’ Miriam said, spreading dabs of dripping onto toast. The eggs Eve had brought were for the two of them. John Bullard still slept, as he did most days until ten or eleven in the morning. After that he went to the men’s club.

  ‘You working until your fingers are raw and him doing sweet nothing.’

  Eve looked at her in amazement but Miriam did not see the irony of what she had said.

  ‘Tommy does more good than most, why shouldn’t he be paid?’

  ‘He doesn’t see it
in that way.’

  ‘You can.’

  ‘He wouldn’t live with himself.’

  Miriam shouted for the boys. The youngest clung to Eve’s legs trying to haul himself up. She lifted him though her back ached badly, as ever after the morning’s work.

  The boys poured in and grabbed their food, piled out again noisily. School began the next week which gave the older ones a hot dinner. It made a difference. Any small thing that did so was welcomed.

  The kitchen went quiet. The baby slept, the toddler sat under the table chewing his bread, the other young ones on the step eating and playing with a small heap of stones. If she could always have felt at ease like this in her sister’s company Eve would have come often, but the peaceful times were rare. Miriam was usually angry or resentful, bitter or full of complaint, and she was not to blame for it though she had made her own choice. But how do we know how our choices will turn out for us? Eve thought. The luck falls one way or it falls the other.

  ‘You could take him,’ Miriam said, as Arthur George came in for more bread. ‘He’s the best of them. He’s kind and loving and quieter than the others.’

  Eve did not realise what her sister was saying. ‘Take him where?’

  ‘Home. It’d fill the space she left you.’

  ‘You think Jeannie Eliza just left a space to be filled? You’d send one of yours away without a thought?’

  ‘I have thought.’

  Arthur George had gone out to the others and the heap of stones.

  Miriam’s face was set hard.

  ‘He’s yours. You’re his mother and he has his brothers. He has his father.’

  Miriam laughed.

  ‘You’d give him away like that?’

  ‘You’re my sister. You’re family. It’s not like giving away.’

  Eve got up and because she could not trust herself to speak, because she might have burst into tears of rage and bewilderment at what her sister had said as if it were nothing of consequence, she went out and was half way home before she knew it.