The Land in Winter

Beyond the ward was the washroom. Martin looked for him there among the dripping taps, the smell of wet towels. There were no nightlights in the washroom but light seeped in from a lamp outside one of the frosted windows. There was a tap hissing. He found it and held his fingers under a twist of water. On the shelf above was a squat glass bottle. He lifted it, shook it. Half full? He set it back on the shelf and turned off the tap. The cubicles were behind him but he didn’t bother to search them. Even when completely still, completely silent, a human being crackles like a radio mast, and he knew he was alone.

Another door, sometimes locked, sometimes not. Tonight it opened to a push. No more brightly coloured tiles; from here you walked on stone. He felt for the light switch. It lit only a single bulb under a metal shade ten yards away where the passage was crossed by another. On either side of him were heavy doors with bolts and peepholes. Most of the rooms they led to were used for storage now, though they had kept one for its old purposes. He looked in through the peepholes, saw darkness heaped like coal in a cellar. Some parts of the building (this was one) were said to be haunted, but that didn’t trouble him. He thought if he could help a ghost he would, and he thought they would know it.

At the junction of the passageways he paused under the bulb. Go right and he would reach the fire door. Turn left and he would come to the laundry. He turned left. He could feel Stephen in front of him, quite close. As he walked away from the bulb the passage grew faint with shadow, but he could see his way and could have found it without the help of any light. The laundry’s double doors were open and he went in. The floor was rutted from the wheels of trolleys. He moved carefully between the steel tubs and the strange machines that wrangled and pressed the sheets. Women did the work. You could watch them as they processed in their blue housecoats back to their side of the hospital in the afternoons.

Next to the laundry was the drying room. Linen hung from wooden horses suspended under the ceiling. An electric light on the side of the boiler gave the room the cool blue glow of moonlight. There was a smell of lye, and a slight bitterness, as of things that cannot really be cleaned sufficiently. In the centre of the room was a table large enough for twenty to have sat down at and feasted. It was heaped with folded sheets and towels, a heavy drift of them. Stephen Storey was lying across the top, full-length, face up, dressed and bootless. His eyes were shut, his mouth not quite. One hand rested by his belt buckle while the other had fallen to the side and lay, palm up, beside the black cloth of his trousers. There was an envelope clipped to his tie with a clothes peg. To Whom It May Concern. It was a hospital envelope. At some point he must have gone to the office and asked a nurse for it.

Martin touched him, his cheek, his neck. The skin was not yet cold but cooler than the air around, like a knife in a drawer. He spoke Stephen’s name, softly, as though to a sleeper, and for a minute he stood there, a shade stalled among the muffled voices of his past. He thought of shaking out one of the sheets and spreading it over him, but Stephen could have done that for himself. And there was nothing indecent here. He had seen indecency, had stood in front of it seventeen years ago with his camera, a day in April, the midst of a forest somewhere between the Weser and the Elbe. Nothing here that needed hiding or hurrying into the ground. The room was friendly in its way, like the wings of a theatre, the sort of place he might have chosen himself, might still.

He stepped away from the table, paused, bowed as deeply as his stiffened back would allow, then returned to the passage. He walked beneath the single bulb and kept going until he reached the fire door. He felt for the cigarette in the cardigan pocket, rummaged in his jacket for a match, found one and struck it on the wall. When he had first come, he wasn’t allowed matches, for obvious reasons, though at some point (the second shock? The third?) he had lost his faith in fire.

He leaned against the wall and smoked. Woodbines were made in a factory in the city. It was a place you could usually get a job, women and girls in particular. Some at the hospital had worked there, and some had gone the other way, from the hospital to the factory. There was a kind of trade between them. He smoked until he could feel the embers against the skin of his fingers. He ground it out on the wall. The sparks fell to the floor.

Between the metalwork room and the fire door there was an alarm in a glass-fronted box. He struck the glass with a jab of his elbow, pressed the scalloped brass of the button, then shoved the bar on the door to let himself out into what was left of the night. The fog was heavy. You could barely see the chapel. The women’s wing was hidden entirely. A taste of ditches, winter fields. The sea? He walked. The fog opened and closed at his passing. So many dreams like this! At his back the first lights came on, and behind the thin curtains the place began to roar.

2

The dealer who sold him the car had called its colour bleu nuage, then glanced at Eric to see if he had understood. When it was obvious that he had, the dealer’s smile broadened, as if he knew the deal was done – done or as good as.

The Citroën ID: fewer features than the DS but to all intents and purposes the same car, just more affordable. And this one, sitting on the forecourt, had a couple of hundred miles on the clock. That knocked something off the price.

‘Didn’t they like it?,’ Eric had asked, and the dealer had shrugged as if to say not everyone is right for a car like this, not everyone could appreciate it.

Adjustable road clearance, air-oil suspension, rack and pinion steering, heating for front and rear passengers.

‘The front seats go all the way back, Doctor. You can sleep in it if you need to.’

Now, driving the winter lanes, the mud, the ruts, the spray, he had to wash the car at least once a week if he wanted it to show for the lovely thing it was. Bucket, sponge, hose, the wax the dealer had thrown in as a gift. It embarrassed him a little to be washing it so often. He did not think of himself as that type of man, suburban, prissy, obsessed with possessions, but there was something voluptuous about the car he couldn’t quite get over. He would in time, of course. In time he would think of it as just a car. Time would level it out, for that, he had learned (quite recently), was what time did.

The dashboard clock said twenty to nine. His first house call was scheduled for nine o’clock. It was Mrs Tallis, a schoolmistress who, he imagined, liked punctuality, but the fog was heavy still and he wasn’t going to hurry. On the wireless before he left the news was of a big London smog, the worst in months, visibility down to five yards, and during the night impossible. An Air Ministry warning of more to come. Listening, he had pictured it, the shrouded buildings, Eros in a cloud, the empty parks, and for the hundredth time wondered if he had given up on London too easily, if giving up on London had meant giving up on other things. Ambition? But he’d had no good connections there, no strings to pull. A provincial with a Midlands accent he had no intention of trying to hide. And London, of course, meant weekends with Irene’s parents, drinks with people he struggled to be polite to, who blathered about the impossibility of finding maids and gardeners, as if the war had never happened. And when they had first come down, the train out of Paddington, the height of summer, Gabby Miklos collecting them at the station (oh, that Mitteleuropean charm worked a treat on Irene) to take them to view the cottage, its empty rooms smelling of old fires, the garden half wild, it had felt in some way inevitable. On the train back up they hardly discussed it. They would go. Of course they would. He would be a country doctor and she would be a country wife. It seemed the solution to a problem they hardly knew they had. And if you wanted his opinion it had done her an immense amount of good to be out from under the shadow of her parents. More playful, more sure of herself, more like her sister, the famous Veronica. Or that, at least, had been the story of their first year. Slowly, somehow, the tide had turned. There had been an alteration. He had not worked out the cause yet; he had not had the leisure. Lack of something meaningful to do? She had complained of it once or twice. Well, that would be changing soon enough.

Up ahead, at a place where the road dipped and the fog might have passed for London smog, he saw the floating red lights of a stopped car. He slowed (disc brakes at the front, drum brakes at the rear) and came to a halt five yards behind the lights. He waited, sat there four or five seconds and was about to sound the horn when a figure in overalls stepped out of a coil of fog, peered, then waved uncertainly, a lost spaceman greeting the arrival of the aliens. Eric knew him. It was his neighbour, Bill Simmons, who had moved into Water Farm a few months after he and Irene had moved to the cottage. It had not taken long for the village to find him out – or for the woman who ran the village shop to do so, which amounted to the same thing. A rich man’s son playing at farming for reasons of his own. And the father not just any rich man but one whose name showed up in the papers from time to time, stories written with one eye on the libel courts. To complete the picture there was the little blonde wife, a patient of Gabby’s. She too had an interesting father, though hardly in the same way.

Slowly – and somehow with an air of resentment – the other car started to move. It was not a Land Rover but something like it, something inauthentic. It reversed, then swung off the road and bounced through the open gate into the field. Eric put the Citroën into gear. He lifted a hand, though didn’t look over. He gathered speed, no longer cautious. Under the grey looming of the trees, the car flowed like water.

Mrs Tallis lived in a villa off the main road. He parked on the gravel. The garden had the look of somewhere preparing for a long abandonment. It was like the corner of a Victorian cemetery. There was even a small stone plinth, a sundial presumably, but looking funereal, as if it should have a stone urn on top. It would be different in the spring, of course – crocuses, daffodils – but on a day like this the spring felt almost impossible to imagine.

She opened the front door within seconds of his ringing. He imagined she’d been standing close to it, waiting for him. It was what patients often did.

‘Good morning, Doctor.’

‘Morning, Mrs Tallis.’

‘This fog!’

‘Yes.’

She asked if he would care for some tea. He thanked her. He fancied a cup; he also thought it would be useful to watch her making it, that it would give him a sense of how she was managing, her range of movement. She was fifty-six. During the war her husband, too old for the regular forces, had found a post as an auxiliary fireman and was killed in Bristol’s Good Friday raid. Six weeks ago she had started getting pain in her shoulders and hips. It was worst in the morning, and it was sometimes difficult to get out of bed. He had examined her (he was good at all that, could handle people physically in a way that seemed to calm them). There were various possibilities. Rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, even Parkinson’s. When he looked at the results of the blood test and thought about her symptoms, her age, he settled on polymyalgia rheumatica. He tried it out on Gabby. Though not exactly the senior partner, Gabby Miklos had a few more years’ experience and a good instinct for diagnoses. It was usually worth checking the tricky ones with him. When Gabby concurred, he started her on prednisolone. The effect, which had been rapid, was proof enough of the diagnosis.

He watched her now from the kitchen table. How precise she was! Her dress, her bearing, the way she scooped tea from the caddy with the coronation teaspoon, the careful way she answered his questions. Did that come from her life as a schoolmistress? Was it about setting an example? He assumed she was lonely. She didn’t smoke, but he wondered if she drank, a few schooners of sherry after dark to ward off the demons. The kitchen smelt thinly of fish, perhaps from last night’s supper, a bit of grilled sole. Through the window, wintering songbirds moved in a blur around the feeder.

He enquired about headaches, pain in her jaws when chewing, any disturbance in vision. He had been reading up and knew that temporal arteritis was a possible complication. Her answers reassured him. He glanced at his watch. They went back to the hall together. On the table was a silver-framed photograph of a man in a black uniform. He had seen the picture before but only this time did he realise that the shadow at the side of the man was the plinth in the front garden.

She opened the door. ‘Is it starting to lift?’ she asked.

‘I think so,’ he said.

They stood side by side, looking out at the garden. It was the moment, a small lapse in the ritual of the visit, when something might have been said, but nothing was.

It was a five-minute drive to his next patient, just long enough to finish his smoke and smuggle the butt out of the car window. A red-brick house, two up, two down, the far end of an Edwardian terrace. There was a small garden with a pair of plaster gnomes fishing in an empty pond. At one of the upstairs windows, as usual, the curtains were half closed.

Here, he didn’t even need to ring the bell: the door was opened before he reached it. The woman stood holding the edge of the door. She wore no make-up; she did not look well herself. When he had entered and wiped his shoes on the mat, she shut the door. In the dimness of the hall (a carpet of purple swirls, the dark stairs with the painted banister, the school photograph on the wall of a boy with the same dark eyes as her own), she stood close to him, as if she almost imagined he might hold her and comfort her.

‘How is he today?’ He spoke softly. She shrugged. A curious look came onto her face, a smile of rage. It was only there for a second.

‘In and out,’ she said.

He moved towards the stairs. ‘I’ll go up, then.’ She didn’t offer to accompany him and this had become their pattern. She would wait in the kitchen, a few minutes to herself when she didn’t have to listen out for the ringing of the little bell.

On the upstairs corridor he felt oversized, a deep-sea diver in a Harris Tweed jacket and brogues exploring the wreck of a modest pleasure-craft, one that had foundered years ago but where everything was delicately preserved, each thing its own memorial. For form’s sake, he tapped a knuckle on the door at the end of the corridor – it was always left ajar – and went in. The room’s only light came from the eight inches between the curtain edges. The bed was watery greys, the man in it likewise, what could be seen of him. There was an electric heater by the end of the bed that sent up a dry, dusty heat. There was the usual paraphernalia of a long sickness, the usual smells.

‘It’s Dr Parry,’ he said. He went to the window and shook the curtains open another few inches. He glanced down at the top of his own car, then turned back to the room. On the pillow, the man’s head was a skull. His eyes were shut. Eric wondered if perhaps he was dead, and if that was the news he would take down to the man’s wife in the kitchen. But the eyes opened and the gaze – the gaze of some stubborn intelligence trapped or hiding in a corpse – held Eric where he was for a moment.

‘How are you today, Peter?’

A long pause. Small movements of the hands, the fingers. The gaze roamed dreamily around the light on the ceiling. Peter Gurney was thirty-eight – two years older than Eric. He had been a foreman at a quarry, one of those on the bluffs behind the surgery whose sirens they could hear even at the cottage if the wind was in the right direction, an eerie swell somewhere between raiders-approaching and the all-clear. He had still been working at the quarry six months ago.

‘Are you getting much pain?’

‘Not much,’ said the skull, a voice like a breeze.

‘That’s good,’ said Eric. There was a chair by the side of the bed and he sat in it. In his training he had been taught that patients, even terminal cases, should not be given regular doses of strong opioids. It was Gabby who had changed his mind about it. Gabby gave his patients diamorphine – basically heroin – as much as was needed, and as often as it was needed. Why wait for the pain to become unbearable? There were side-effects, of course, risks (respiratory arrest), but if his patients died as addicts, they were not first driven mad by pain. The old pharmacist by the surgery had found ways to make his disapproval known, and Gabby being a foreigner (and possibly that sort of foreigner) didn’t help, but the new man, Tilly, was happy enough to order whatever was asked for. With Peter Gurney, Eric or the district nurse used to inject him; now there was a bottle and a spoon and it worked just as well, if not better. Mrs Gurney was in charge. He had wondered if she might be tempted to try a little herself. He didn’t think it very likely, though he would be careful to collect the bottle from her when it was over.

‘Is there anything you’d like me to do, Peter?’

‘Sometimes,’ said the skull, the breeze beginning again, ‘I feel people . . . close by.’ He gestured, a slow fanning of his fingers to indicate the narrow spaces around the bed.

Eric waited. ‘Is it a dream?’ he asked. The skull rocked slowly from side to side and smiled.

The last call was to the estate. The fog was thinning fast – more mist than fog now. In the RAF he had been taught the distances you could see, could hope to see, through fog and through mist. Fog is a cloud, visibility down to a thousand yards or less. On airfields, with bombers trying to come in at night, they would soak the edges of the runway with fuel and burn it off. It worked, apparently. He’d never had to try it for himself, thank God. The war had had the decency to end before anything like that was necessary.

But even without fog it was easy enough to get lost on the estate. Hard to know what guided the planners, what shape or pattern, if any, they were trying to follow. At one end, the older houses were immediate post-war and already starting to look tatty. At the other end they were still building – brick boxes, handkerchief gardens, some gardens neatly tended, others, most, just a patch of thin grass over builders’ rubble. In the Herald or somewhere, he had read that the population of Britain was now fifty-two million. He had no sentimental ideas about the English landscape. He had grown up in a city, had moved from its rough centre to its smarter suburbs. People going into a swoon over the Cotswolds or the Yorkshire Dales, that wasn’t for him. But fifty-two million! The whole country covered in little boxes like these! Was that the future?

He found the house. He had, he now realised, been there before. There was a swing in the garden and the remains of a rocking horse. The doorbell seemed not to work. He rapped on the wood. A teenage girl answered the door. He frowned at her. ‘Julie?’

She smiled gappily. He had seen her last spring when she told her mother she’d taken an overdose of aspirin. She hadn’t. She looked happy now, and he wondered vaguely at its source. Just being young, perhaps, just being alive.

They went into the front room. There was a television in there.

‘She’s waiting for it to start,’ said Julie, nodding towards the girl curled on the sofa. ‘I’ve already told her there’s nothing till dinner time.’

‘Hello,’ said Eric. He put his black bag on the arm of the sofa. ‘What’s your name?’

‘She’s Paula,’ said the older girl. ‘She can’t speak ’cause her throat’s so bad.’

‘Your sister?’

‘Half-sister.’

She was, he thought, nine or ten. Short brown hair in little waves, enormous brown eyes. She was comically beautiful. He wondered if she’d keep it as she grew up or if this was her moment, her little flare of perfection. If she did keep it, she wouldn’t be hanging around the estate for long.

‘She’s been crying,’ said the other girl.

‘Well, we can’t have that,’ he said. ‘Shall I take a look?’ He reached for the bag, opened it and took out a wooden spatula and a pencil torch. He crouched in front of the child. ‘Nice and wide.’ He pressed down the restless tongue, shone a light on the back of her throat, squinted.

‘That does looks sore.’ He took out the spatula, turned off the torch. She let him feel her neck, this little animal. She watched him with an intensity that brought him close to laughter.

‘It’s her tonsils, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Eric.

‘She’ll have to have them out. I did when I was her age. She doesn’t want to. She’s frightened of it.’

‘Let’s try something else first,’ said Eric. ‘It all depends on what’s causing it, the soreness. We’ll try this. It may be all she needs.’ He sat on the sofa, prescription pad on his knee. He wrote out a prescription for penicillin, signed it, tore it off and handed it to Julie.