The Night Following Read online

  That was all. We both listened to the sound of it dying on the air. He called again. I didn’t go to him. He was sending out the name like a flare. He was experimenting, testing the house Ruth had arranged and kept for half her life to see if it would withstand the speaking of her name, if the sound of its one syllable wafting through the darkness to the edges of the walls and curving back would lapse and cease eventually, or would prove restless, an unruly echo roused easily from the corners. The quiescent, returning silence was like watching a white curtain fall back to stillness after the air has been disturbed.

  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.

  There was one other practical consideration that could not be ignored. I brought o
ut the largest bucket from under the sink, emptied half a bottle of disinfectant into it, and added some water. I got the bucket up the ladder and set it in a corner behind as discreet a screen as I could devise from stacked boxes and an upended decorating table.

  It was now after five o’clock and the sky was yellow. Birds were already screeching. The new day was burning the condensation off the skylight and soon would be reaching in and pasting the mattress with a rectangle of buttery sunshine. I pulled one of the old curtains from the pile of carpet scraps and burlap and underlays, and rigged it up against the glass, wedging it in tight. It was patterned in red and yellow and green; light shone through and cast glowing jewels across our bed. Suddenly I feared that Arthur might wake and find me gone, so I hurried back down.

  He was asleep on his back. My entering the room roused him. At once his eyes were upon me, searching and finding, and they closed again.

  Ruth? he said, though he seemed still asleep. Ruth, Ruth. I whispered to him that it was time to wake up. His eyes opened, and closed again. His mouth wriggled and settled into a thin pout.

  Come on, I said. Wake up. It’s time. I pushed the bedclothes back. He turned over, gathering what was left of sleep tight into himself. I stroked his arm and gave his earlobe a little pinch.

  Wake up, Arthur, I said. It’s time.

  I pulled his feet to the floor and drew him upright but he kept his eyes closed, and when I let go he sank back into the pillows. To the east on the other side of the house the sun was almost risen; through this eclipsed window the light had begun to gleam sullenly.

  Arthur, wake up! Come on, it’s time to go.

  He didn’t say anything or even open his eyes, but he allowed me to help him up again until he was sitting on the bed. I found his slippers and fitted them over his feet, as stiff and grey as dead flounders. There was a delta of purple veins reaching across both of his ankles. I pulled him up by the hands and he stood swaying and unquestioning as if he’d given up all resistance and all sensation in his desire to stay asleep. When I led him along the landing and indicated the attic ladder, he went on ahead of me without haste or curiosity. By the time I had drawn the ladder up after us and dropped the trapdoor in place he had crawled onto the mattress and was lying curled and still.

  I expected Tony to be a man of eager habits and that we would not have long to wait. It was still early when I heard the doorbell. I waited for some other sound, fearing something rushing and cataclysmic, some rapacious incursion, but at first there was nothing, not even the key in the lock. Then came the sounds of Tony and his mother talking and moving, it seemed casually and at random, through the house: feet on the stairs, opening doors, calling from one room to another. By degrees, voices were raised and grew urgent.

  Have you checked the bathroom? See if he’s got stuck.

  Wait. Look in there.

  Arthur! Oh, God, where’s he got to?

  I’ll try the garden.

  Maybe he’s had a fall.

  Go and check the bedrooms again. Check the sides, in case he’s fallen out.

  The sounds receded for a while but I knew the two of them were still there. They would be thorough. Even after they had finished searching, they would not leave. They might check the hospitals to see if somehow Arthur had been transported away in the night. They would probably call the police. We had hours still to wait.

  I did not dare move for fear of the floor creaking. I watched Arthur, praying he would go on sleeping, but he shifted and turned, groaned and woke up. For a wild second or two after his eyes focused, he didn’t know where he was. I leaned across, smoothed the side of his face with my hand and quieted him with a finger to my lips. I pointed downward and pressed the finger to my lips again, and then placed it gently on his lips.

  He nodded. Nosey parkers, he whispered.

  They can’t stay forever, I said. They’ll go soon.

  Then it’ll be just us, he said, smiling.

  I reached for his hand. It felt dry and loose as if his finger bones were afloat in a paper glove.

  Around us the attic air grew grey and silky, and the sounds of voices and movement resumed in a dreamy way and swam like warm dust in the ether. Later, there were new voices and more footsteps, and the searching began again. All this was progressing at a time when we were used to sleeping and so we listened only half awake, half dreaming, to these warnings we didn’t need, that below us, another day had got people in its crass and ruthless grip and was propelling them through the hours, using them up with things that didn’t matter. We listened, and waited, and rested together untouchable, answerable only to each other.

  All is quiet. Arthur is turned away from me, on his side. Now and again his hand flutters on his hip and a soft whistle or scraping noise emerges from his throat. I lie awake in the stained glow through the curtained glass and think of the shimmering sky and the surface of life beyond the strange warm altar of our mattress. Around me the air ripens with heat, and atoms of dust spin and glitter in it, and I sense a thousand secret quickenings in our attic universe of abandoned things and all their gummy folds and crannies and crumbling fibres, all the microscopic barbs of disintegrating matter on which the tiniest living things will catch and cling. Below me the house sighs with solitary, daylong weariness.

  So we sleep, or wake and lie looking at the slopes of the roof, and turn to each other sometimes, and twice we stir ourselves as if by agreement and sit up and eat together, shyly at first and then with the silent, slight formality of people accustomed to sharing food but a little reticent and tongue-tied about the sharing of pleasure.

  Arthur and Ruth conduct themselves over their meals with the same good manners that would attend all their mutual habits, with a decorum that, whether governed by constraint or by orchestration, is certainly consensual. She unpacks everything and arranges it on the mattress. He looks to her to preside. He waits while she chooses what he is to have and passes it to him. He starts to eat before she has arranged food for herself, this being a picnic after all, but he waits until she has finished before he judges it not inconvenient for her to provide him with what he wants next. He points to this and that- another sandwich, a tomato, a biscuit with cheese-and eats them in that order. At the right moment he leans across and takes charge of the flask and cups. His fingers cannot grip properly. He brushes his hands across his chest several times and shakes them and blows on them to get rid of the pins and needles, and tries again to unscrew the top. He can’t see to pour properly, either, and a considerable amount of tea falls on the mattress and wets his clothes, which he dabs with a napkin. I am watching anxiously but I don’t interfere, any more than Ruth would step forward and relieve a tremulous priest of the Communion cup and bless the wine herself.

  We sleep again, and later I wake to a darkness that presses on my eyes. Even though I think Arthur is still asleep I whisper to him to lie still until I come back. I clamber over the floor, lift the trapdoor, and send the ladder down on its squealing metal slope to the landing. I hear the thud as the feet hit the carpet but I can’t see anything clearly. I wait for a moment before launching myself down, each tread heaving a creaky sigh. From the bedroom window I see that lights are on in most of the houses in the road. It’s not nearly as late as it seemed to be in the attic. The sky is a milky violet and the trees along the avenue are restless in a breeze. A few doors down a woman comes out with a watering can for the hanging basket on her porch. A young man walks past under a lamppost, hands pushed hard into the pockets of his short jacket. Mrs. M has not drawn her curtains.

  By now I can work well enough in the dark. I start to search out heavy warm things. Ruth of course keeps a methodical eye on the storage of clothing and when I reach deep into the shelves in the spare bedroom wardrobe I find paired thick socks, woollen sweaters put away for the summer, and winter blankets folded in plastic bags. I pack as if we were about to depart for another time and season which, in truth, we are; perhaps something different, something tenuous and icy and
autumnal, has entered the wind tonight.

  Arthur doesn’t wait for me. I hear him lurching down the ladder and meet him on the landing. Down here, he looks worse. His hair is swirled and matted as if he’s been half drowned. When I approach and press my lips to his cheek, he trembles, and his skin is sweaty and sharp with salt and a trace of vomit. His mouth harbours a sour, flyblown smell and would be dark and sticky inside. One of his eyes wants to close. He wants to speak, I think, but he has trouble controlling his tongue and so lifts a hand into the air instead. He is listing a little to one side and stays on his feet as if standing up were a painfully achieved trick of balance.

  But he nods at me and turns away to the spare room and soon I hear him paddling around among books and papers. He comes out with an untidy bundle and holds it out to me, mumbling. A string of saliva wets his bottom lip and descends in a slow cascade to his chest. He wipes at it with the papers in his hands and that’s when I see that he’s holding pages of maps, and when I take them from him I discover there’s also a battered paper folder.

  He manages to say, Just to be on the safe side.

  The folder is labelled Group Leaders Information Pack: Overdale Outdoor Education Centre. I open it and find a mass of photocopied drawings of birds waiting to be coloured in, some homemade booklets, loose pages, and stapled sheets. Arthur starts sifting through it all. He lifts out a sheet headed Directions to Overdale and waves it at me. I close the folder and hand it back to him.

  Arthur moves off down the stairs. He hasn’t finished; I hear his feet sifting through the papers littering the hall and sitting room. When I’ve finished packing I follow, bumping the luggage down the stairs. There is a note for us in the kitchen. I find it on the floor; it must have been swept off the table in a draft from the door.

  ARTHER

  PHONE ME WHEN YOU GET THIS (07834 793922) OR BETTER COME AND KNOCK ON MY DOOR, I’LL BE IN.

  V worried to know you are alright. Couldn’t find you and doctor wasn’t notified so Tony called police. They sent someone but as no sign of forced entry they can’t do anything. Told them you NEVER go out but they say adults entitled to leave own home without notice and to wait another 24 hours. Tried to make doctor talk to them re yr mobility, legs etc. but no go. Well later on nurse turned up for yr legs, she said not to worry as it’s not Alzhimers, you’re a bit confused but still independent, also they’ve been encouraging you to get out so you probably have.