Signals of Distress (32 page)

‘He might not last till Monday, ma’am, the state of him.’

Fidia raised her eyebrows for her guests – exasperated and embarrassed, but trying to appear amused. Aymer was a trial for her. She had no patience left. She laughed. She said, ‘The
family cuckoo. Can’t leave me in peace for five minutes.’

‘Perhaps you ought to see he is quite well,’ said Mrs Bellamy. Mrs Whittaker nodded in agreement.

‘Oh, I suppose I must disturb myself if we are to enjoy our privacy at all. Excuse me, ladies, while I attend to this,’ said Fidia. She would attend to Samuel, too. He needed
reprimanding and reminding that his place was out of doors. ‘Samuel is disposed to overcolouring the simplest things,’ she told her friends. ‘Where is my shawl? I should not want
to take a chill …’

Samuel, for once, was not exaggerating. Aymer was a dreadful sight. He looked as if a horse had kicked him in the face. Fidia had to take him in, no question of avoiding it – he
was
related. What had her brother-in-law done to deserve such a bloody face? She was in little doubt that the beating was deserved. She would have liked to have rapped her little fists on Aymer’s
jaw herself, on many occasions, if only to keep him quiet. He wasn’t talking now, though. His breathing was constricted, and he was moaning like a chimney pot. Was he sleeping, or
unconscious?

‘Why didn’t you express his situation, Samuel?’ she demanded. ‘You have caused me to seem cruel. I don’t believe that he is drunk at all. What made you speak of it?
There is no smell of drink. He is not a drinking man besides, despite his oddities. You had better hurry straight away to Fowlers and fetch the physician, if there is one on a Friday night. Do
hurry up. Haste is only vulgar within the house. You may run. And do not thrust your hat back on your head. It is rowdyish.’

A boy was sent to call sedans to take both of her visitors home. Emma made a bed up on the second floor. (‘Not the good sheets, Emma. Mr Smith is bloody, and …’ She would not
say what else.) The servants carried Aymer up two flights of stairs, his bare feet covered with a napkin. They put him on the bed, still in his coat, and Emma sat with him until the physician
arrived, a little after eleven and a little the worse for drink. Fidia sat in her drawing room, and waited. She couldn’t concentrate to read. It would not do to practise her piano or go to
bed. She played patience and finished the three half-glasses of Madeira while, two floors above, Emma and the doctor stripped her brother-in-law, washed him with warm water, applied poultices on
his bruises, cauterized his wounds with candle wax and checked his ribs and limbs for breakages. They missed the fractured ankle bone, but that would mend without them anyway and provide him with
an interesting limp.

Finally they turned Aymer on his side and laid his face on a surgical dish. The doctor swabbed his mouth out, cleaned the fragments from his tongue and lips, then left him to his dreams.

‘This will be a year of dentistry for him,’ he said to Fidia when he was ready to go. She shuddered at the thought. ‘I think you might sit with Mr Smith for tonight. He will be
feverish and certainly will be in pain. I will leave some Greenoughs Tincture for his mouth. And some powdered laudanum. I’ll come again tomorrow. Don’t be too concerned for him, Mrs
Smith. Your husband will be whole again in time, other than the teeth, of course …’

‘My husband, sir, is in the country,’ said Fidia, horrified for the second time that night. ‘That gentleman is a relation, that is all, and my concerns for him are only
charitable.’ She looked down at her game of cards. She had a decent run of hearts. Her spades had let her down. ‘Will he be fit enough to go back to his rooms tomorrow?’

‘No, Mrs Smith. I beg you, let him rest. He should stay in bed until this time next week. He will be feverish.’ Fidia went across to her piano and struck a single note. A black one.
Sharp. She must remember to warn her daughters and her son when they woke that Uncle Aymer was about. They should avoid his room.

When Aymer woke on Saturday the pain was hardly bearable. His chest and thighs felt as heavy and inert as iron. In this he didn’t differ much from King Swing who, contrary to all the bets,
had been defeated in fourteen rounds the night before by Massa Hannibal. But King Swing’s face wasn’t much harmed. He was only bruised around one eye. The upper part of Aymer’s
face was colourless. It hardly showed on the pillowcase. Both eyes were clear and moist. But everything below his nose was blue and swollen. His lips were a pair of overripe damsons, bloated,
syrupy and sapped together by dry blood, with stripy wasps of scab feeding at the juice. His cheek and chin were stripped of skin. His jaw was bruised. He’d almost bitten through his tongue.
It looked as if a three-inch worm was squashed across it. But his gums were worst of all. What teeth remained were shaken in his head, like gravestones in soft earth. The gravestones tilted and the
earth was lifted up and split.

It was odd that he could think and see so clearly, yet hardly breathe or move, and that he should be so reassured and in such brutal pain at once. It was the bed that settled him and made him
feel so like a child: its freshly laundered smell, its punched-up pillows, its quilted counterpane, its height and buoyancy. He looked around the room for clues to where he was. The windows were
ten feet tall at least – an opulent house – and the room was full of calming winter light, yellow, penetrating, cool. Everything seemed sharp and mutely colourful. A silver candelabrum
on a stand, which burned fine-smelling whale oil. A walnut dressing table and closet. Two brocaded chairs. A bedside table with a washing bowl and a pot pourri. A white marble fireplace. A
watercolour of some ochre church in Italy or Spain. Hand-painted wallpaper, the latest fashion. This was no hospital. It smelled of furniture and cloth – and money.

At first he thought he was in Wherrytown. Inside some better inn. The footsteps in the corridor would belong to Mrs Yapp. Or George. How happy he would be to see the parlourman. But when Emma
entered with fresh poultices and he saw his nephew and his nieces staring in and giggling, he knew exactly where he was.

Emma pressed cold flannels to his forehead and his face. She put him back onto the pillows. ‘You mustn’t move,’ she said. She pushed his eyelids up. She felt the temperature of
his hands and the nape of his neck. ‘You’re doing fine.’

‘What day is it?’ He sounded drunk. It hurt.

‘It’s Saturday. Excuse me, sir, but you’re not allowed to talk, not until your mouth is on the mend. Mrs Smith says I am to keep you quiet at all costs. You mustn’t
smile. You mustn’t talk or smile. You must just rest. Shall I draw back the curtains, sir? Don’t say.’ A wedge of light spread out across his bed. Emma took the flannels off his
face. She spooned some water in his mouth, and gave some Greenoughs Tincture and a draught of laudanum. He couldn’t swallow it. It made a sticky pool between his lips and then seeped into the
splintered cavern of his mouth. He had to fight a sneeze.

Then, while Emma changed the dressings on his wounds, he had sufficient time (before her draught of laudanum returned him to the night and to the sweetest dreams of all) to recall the details of
the Friday evening, the endless crack and thud of it. And he remembered every word they said. Shut up. Your name? Your name? You’re a thief and not a gentleman. Good boots. I know it’s
him. Say it, say it! Have you been recently in Wherrytown?

A
YMER
S
MITH
was at the end of tired. He was sleeping now, and truly dreaming: his landscape was a childish one. A beach, some
dunes, some kelp, a granite headland, gulls, the numbing blanket of a sea-stunned sky, a dog. He put his shoulder up against the Cradle Rock. He had the strength. He rolled it back onto its pivot
stone. He set the Rock in motion. He made amends. He put the world to rights again. Helped only by the muscle of the wind, and by the charity of dreams, the Cradle Rock ascended and declined.