The Wooden Shepherdess (25 page)

Nobody really liked or trusted Churchill; but what a pity our arch-antisocialist should have left us just when we needed him most!

Pettier men might sneer at Winston, and call him a turncoat—indeed, a twice-over turncoat, because he had only crossed to the Liberal side in the first place just in time for the Liberal Landslide of 1906. But Gilbert was quite fair-minded enough to respect an integrity careless of cries of “Turncoat!” incurred on behalf of a Higher Loyalty.... Still, for himself he hoped that final sacrifice wouldn't be called for—
yet
.

Gilbert had got thus far when a white-faced Wantage asked him to come to the telephone. Testily Gilbert told him to take a message; but Wantage insisted, the Master must speak himself. The call was from Tottersdown—something had happened, there'd been an accident.

Then a voice on the phone told Gilbert that Mary had had a fall. They wouldn't know till the doctors had seen her of course, but she might have broken her back.

Mary hadn't broken her back, she had broken her neck.

The cause of her fall was that glowering Polly's-age child so low on her Shetland pony that Mary couldn't see her before she began the jump, and had had to swing her horse half-round in the air as she landed. She fell on her head, and at first they had thought she was only stunned as she lay awry with her bowler-hat crammed down over her face; but then they noticed she didn't seem to be breathing, and crowded round her telling each other to “Stand right back and give the lady some air!”

“Don't be a fool!” said the child (who hadn't even been touched): “Can't you see she's dead?”

“No I'm not!” (So Mary supposed she was saying, though only groaning hollowly into her hat.)

She even supposed she was struggling on to her feet, and was much surprised when she found that she hadn't moved. Her head was dizzy, she didn't know where she was but she felt no pain, and didn't even feel bruised except for her face. She was quite unaware that she barely breathed: it was just she apparently couldn't move, or feel—that neither pain nor volition could enter or leave her head, since the rest of her
wasn't there
.... “I must be a cherub!” she thought; and passed right out just as somebody felt her heart and sent for a stretcher.

*

In Tottersdown Cottage Hospital, X-rays showed the seventh cervical vertebra cracked: she was “gravely ill.”

For hours Augustine and Gilbert sat in the medical smell of the Superintendent's Office, each walled up in his own suspense and barely aware of the other; but then the doctor decided he'd have to allow them to see her now, or risk that they never saw her again alive.

When they reached the bed they found that pleasant, intelligent boyish face a swollen, unrecognizable black-and-blue with eyes too puffy to open. However she seemed to be conscious, and even endeavoured to speak though quite unable to make herself understood and dribbling over the sheet. When Gilbert tried to take her hand, he found her paralysis passed from the limp to a rigid stage like rigor mortis—as if her body already were really dead.

Yet the spark of life in her lingered on, and on. A few days later that rigor began to pass, the swelling and bruising began to subside: though even after her eyes could open again she still couldn't properly see as they wouldn't focus yet.

*

When a couple of weeks had passed and Mary was still alive (and had even begun to speak comprehensibly—just), the doctor began to call her a “hopeful” case. To Mary, he cheerfully talked about rest; but he told her husband and brother bluntly that though she now seemed likely to live the damage was done for good: the rest of her life would be spent in a chair.

He brought out charts. When that vertebra cracked, he explained, the dura mater (the sheath of the spinal cord) had got twisted and torn. Since the lesion was lower down than most of the brachial plexus she might recover the use of her arms: but certainly little more. Sensation as well as control was destroyed—except in time (perhaps) for her arms, and even some of her breast.... Meanwhile, however, she seemed to be making wonderful progress: her bladder already showed signs of working again unaided, which meant that the common danger of fatal kidney infection was almost past. In short, the autonomic system didn't seem badly affected: she shouldn't get gangrene or fail to digest her food, as the severed body was learning to work on its own.

When Gilbert asked how soon he could have her home, the doctor pointed out she would need a nurse for the rest of her life of course; and said that he knew of one he could specially recommend, who was used to spinal cases....

Frankly, Gilbert was marvelous: even Augustine was forced to admit he'd misjudged him when Gilbert—the arrant careerist—told the doctor he'd never resign the intimate care of his wife into other hands: for the rest of her life he would nurse her night and day, and sacrifice everything else. True he had little nursing knowledge as yet but surely could learn; and what a paralyzed wife would have need of most was love.

*

So Runciman, Howard and Roberts were left after all to fight Lloyd George on their own; and Gilbert informed the Whips they must write him off as a Liberal vote in the House. They could but respect his decision, but begged him at any rate not to resign his seat—it was much too precarious.

Meanwhile he studied medical books and badgered the Matron to teach him that kind of jiu-jitsu which nurses call “lifting.” However, the doctor insisted still that there must be a proper professional nurse in charge in case complications arose; but when Mary was moved to Mellton at last and the nurse arrived, that only served to show how right Gilbert was. There was little she didn't know about nursing, but almost nothing she knew about anything else—and if Gilbert had not been constantly there as well, her talk would have driven intelligent Mary mad.

Indeed as it was Mary had “glooms” which were next thing to madness, spells of a nightmare confusion which couldn't tell life and death apart. In these “glooms” her protective belief in total extinction at death should surely have saved her; but now that collapsed in the face of a bodiless conscious state so like the traditional soul-after-death. Perhaps its roots had never been more than emotional, deep in forgotten childhood terrors of hell: for now these ancient terrors raised their forgotten heads. Again and again they caused her to “dream” wide-awake she was dead, and helplessly being sucked into hell like a child in her bath down the plug-hole.

Augustine had rescued his pictures from Paris to hang in her room. The Renoir and even Cézanne were all right; but in Mary's “glooms” the late Van Gogh made her worse, and it had to be moved. In her glooms there was one thing only could bring her back to reality: Susan Amanda's weight, the first thing her arms had faintly begun to discern; and the baby's warmth on a partially-sensitive breast.

Gilbert was blissfully happy: it seemed like a second honeymoon having Mary entirely dependent upon him at last. And at night it gave him a strangely elated feeling I can't describe to be handling Mary's body while Mary slept without it possibly waking her. Added to which, that awkward question of whether the errant Liberal Party deserved his support any longer was decently shelved: this couldn't have come at any more opportune time.

Nowadays Joan was settled at Tottersdown running her widowed half-brother's house, and in general keeping him company now that Whitehall was just about to swallow up Jeremy. Ludovic, Joan and Jeremy called at the Chase to inquire; and Gilbert was struck by the beauty of Joan just as everyone else was.

*

Before he landed, Augustine had meant to indulge his nostalgia for Wales as soon as Christmas at Mellton was over; but Mary's accident stopped him. Meanwhile his agent was urging him: dry-rot had started in part of the Newton roof and it ought to be seen to at once, so now that Mary seemed out of danger he made up his mind to go there at least on a fleeting visit. But little time could be spared there enjoying the salty fresh air: for the first few hours at least must be spent with the expert he'd sent for, crawling about in the Newton rafters.

There they found dry-rot fungus far more extensive than first supposed. It was going to cost the earth to get rid of, for after such long neglect it would mean re-roofing at least one wing—of a house that size! The only alternative seemed to be pulling the whole wing down; but that would leave him with only a measly twenty-nine bedrooms as well as new kitchens to build, and the cost might be even larger. Augustine had never spent more than a tenth of his income, yet even so....

The land at Newton was strictly entailed and none, he knew, could be sold: he was lucky indeed in possessing another perhaps more viable property. This had once been a minor country estate on the fringes of ancient Swansea, which Swansea had swallowed and built-on and now was a thriving part of the town. The ground-rents brought him in little; but soon the earliest leases must start falling in (which would one day make him a very rich man indeed by the standards of West Wales gentry); and meanwhile, money could surely be raised....

Augustine was anxious to get back to Dorset as soon as he could, but perforce must stop overnight in Swansea to call on the lawyer who held all the deeds and collected the ground-rents and so on. Bright as that lawyer turned out to be, legal business can seldom be done in a hurry: as well as the builders to keep an eye on, Augustine's first visit to Swansea was hardly likely to prove his last one....

Henceforth though he spent all the time he could in Dorset with Mary he'd have to keep dashing to Wales with so much to attend to there, being born with this silver millstone hung round his neck....

Yes, the ways of the rich man are known to be full of trouble; but even the poor have their cares. As the Coventry winter slowly gave way to spring Syl showed no signs of beginning to talk; and when his mother tried with a ticking watch it appeared that perhaps his measles had left him deaf. However, young as he was (he wouldn't be two till October), the doctor assured her the drums should heal now the discharge had dried provided she took good care that he didn't get chills.

So long as the March winds lasted all she could do about that was keeping him in, though the room was damp and it hadn't a door (only a makeshift barrier stopped him falling downstairs); but once the weather was really warmer and less conducive to chills she wrapped him up and wheeled him out in the open whenever she had the time. Often, too, Norah would borrow him, cramming her brother's football-stocking over his head so it thoroughly covered his ears: for Norah agreed that fresh air must do the ailing baby good—always provided it couldn't get near his ears.

This was the season when Coventry families worked their allotments from dawn till dusk, pausing only to stir their bonfires into a blaze for cooking their midday stew with leeks and parsnips straight from the ground. Norah's Dad's allotment was one of the ones out Quinton way (down Little Park Street, and out on the Quinton road): it was well within reach with a pram, and so this is where Norah mostly took little Syl. Part of the time he slept while everyone dug: part of the time she lifted him out to crawl in the sun: part of the time she tried to teach him to walk. As well as a careful succession of things to eat (and Mum's little patch of medicinal herbs, such as comfrey for poulticing sprains), Dad grew daffs for the market. Often Syl would arrive back home still smelling of bonfire smoke, with a single wilting daffodil clutched in a muddy fist—“as a present for Mum.”

Of course these crowded strips of allotments weren't like the open country, only the next best thing; but soon the real picnicking season would come, when droves of Coventry children out of the slums—some of them barely able to toddle, and nobody older than Norah in charge of twenty or thirty or more—would fill their pockets with bread-and-jam and spend all day in the Warwickshire meadows whenever there wasn't school. A century back, the moribund city was shrunken away from the line of its ancient walls like a shriveled kernel inside a nut: since then the population had grown ten times but the bounds of the area built-on had hardly extended again at all, so green fields weren't too far from these crowded tenements even for tinies. Often these (piperless) Pied-Piper parties wouldn't get home till dusk: for what harm could they come to, in lanes and woods and fields—if they kept a good look-out for bulls? It was better than having them run under horses' hooves in the trafficky streets, or moitherin' Mum.

On these occasions all babies had to be left behind, for you can't push prams through hedges or drag them across ploughed fields. But next year perhaps, once Syl was able to walk....

*

And next year perhaps, once the Nazi Party had been rebuilt.... But meanwhile the first thing Hitler had to do was to get the legal ban on his Party lifted by promising good behavior. This was conceded less out of trust in his word than contempt for so sorry a rump as the Nazis had now become: for his tactic of setting his friends by the ears, till nowadays few of them loved him any more than they loved one another, had paid: as a menace Hitler no longer existed.

He chose, for dramatic reasons, the Bürgerbräukeller to hold his first Reconstruction Meeting. But almost none of the Nazi big-wigs showed their faces: Ludendorff, Strasser, Röhm and Rosenberg all stayed away, and Göring was still abroad (he was also struck off the rolls).

Lothar was there, in a modest corner, and saw how Hitler's eloquence swayed the faithful: the women sobbed, and disruptive elements stumbled tearfully on to the platform to pump each other's hands. But after all, who were these “faithfuls” apart from second-rate scamps like that Carl whom Reinhold delighted to tease, and a handful of dewy-eyed youths like Lothar himself? The only Nazis present of any importance were Frick and Esser and Streicher—pretty small beer when compared with those others who stopped away.