The Chequer Board (3 page)

At last he said, “If it goes on getting worse, doctor, what’s it going to mean? What’s it going to be like?”

I knew that was coming, of course. I, too, had had time to think. “You say you first noticed this about six months ago,” I said. “The disability, so far, is not very great. I can’t estimate the actual rate at which it will progress you know.”

He said impatiently, “Yes, but what do you think, doctor? I mean, I’ve had it, haven’t I?”

I said, “I should say that there might be a progressive loss of faculties, Mr Turner. You might be able to carry on your normal life for another six or eight months, but these attacks of fainting will grow more frequent. You ought not to drive a car again. Generally speaking, I think you must expect all the symptoms to increase as time goes on.”

He said quietly, “After that, I’ll die.”

“We’ve all got to do that, Mr Turner,” I replied.

I
WROTE
to Dr Worth after I had explained his position to Mr Turner in the hospital. I said,

D
EAR
D
R
W
ORTH
,

I have examined Mr John Turner, and I have consulted with Mr Percy Hodder, who as a major in the R.A.M.C. performed the original operation on Mr Turner in 1943. I have considered the pathological report resulting from a lumbar puncture, and the X-ray photographs of the cranium, which I enclose with the radiologist’s report for your information.

You will see that there are three metallic fragments still lodged in the cerebrum; I have indicated with an arrow the one which I consider to be causing trouble. In my opinion, no operation could be undertaken with success to remove this fragment. A lesion in this vicinity is consistent with the apraxia and vertigo from which Mr Turner suffers, and with a marked papilloedema of the left eye which is apparent on examination with the ophthalmoscope.

I have known cases of this sort to remain static for many years and even to improve, but this is not the normal course. I should expect that all symptoms would increase in severity, resulting in death within a year.

I should like to see Mr Turner again in about four months
time. In view of the wartime nature of his injury and his general position, I should waive any further fee.

Yours truly,            
H
ENRY
T. H
UGHES

Mr Turner left the hospital while I was writing this. He went by underground to Piccadilly Circus and put his bag into the cloak room. Then he walked up Shaftesbury Avenue and turned into Dolphin Street, and to the Jolly Huntsman. He went into the saloon bar; it was only about noon and there were few people in the place.

“Morning, Nellie,” he said. “Gimme a pint of bitter.”

The barmaid, a cheerful woman about fifty years old, drew a tankard and wiped the bottom of it with a cloth, and passed it to him across the counter. Mr Turner took it from her, swallowed a quarter of it, and slipped on to a stool. He smacked his lips. “First I’ve had for a week,” he said with satisfaction.

“You don’t say,” said the barmaid mechanically. “Elevenpence. You haven’t been around here lately.”

“No,” said Mr Turner. “What’s more, I won’t be around at all after a bit.”

“Going away?” she enquired idly.

“That’s right,” he said. “Going a bloody long way.” He lit a cigarette, fumbling awkwardly with the lighter in his left hand.

“There’s no need to swear about it, anyway,” she said.

Only a man can know the help that barmaids give to men in trouble. “Sorry,” he said. “But you’d swear if you was me. I just come out of hospital. They say I’m due to pass out in a year or so. Kick the bloody bucket.”

She stared at him. “No …”

“Fact,” he said. “I’m telling you what they just told me.’

“But why? You don’t look ill to me.”

“It’s this conk I got on the old napper,” he said moodily. “It’s gone bad on me, after all these years.”

“Lord,” she said. “You got to have an operation, then?”

He shook his head. “There’s bits of shell inside going bad, or something. They can’t operate, they say.”

She said again, “Lord …” and then, uncertainly, “I don’t suppose they really know, Captain Turner. I mean, doctors say all sorts of things. Friend of mine, she thought she was going to have a baby, and the doctor said so too, but she never. They was all wrong. I expect they’re wrong with you. I wouldn’t worry my head about it, long as you feel all right.”

He took a drink of beer. “I don’t feel so good, sometimes,” he said quietly. “They done all sorts of things to me in hospital; I reckon they know, much as anyone can do.”

There was silence.

“What are you going to do, then?” asked the woman gently, at last.

“I dunno—I got to think it out.” He blew a long cloud of smoke. “Got to go home and tell the wife, first thing of all. She don’t know nothing about it, yet.”

“Didn’t they tell her nothing at the hospital?”

“She never come to see me in the hospital,” said Mr Turner briefly. “I was only in a week.” He paused, and then he said, “We don’t get on so well—not like I thought it would be, one time. I don’t reckon this is going to mean much to her, except she’ll have to start and think about a job again.”

“She’ll be terribly upset,” the barmaid said softly. “You see.”

“Maybe,” said Mr Turner thoughtfully. “I dunno.” He swallowed down the remainder of his beer. “Got to see the firm, too, sometime, I suppose.”

“I wouldn’t tell them while you can go on working.” said the barmaid shrewdly. “Some firms turn funny, you know. Ever so mean they can be, sometimes.”

“We get three months’ pay, I think,” said Mr Turner. “Sick pay, I mean. Of course, you don’t get the commission … I don’t know as I want to go on working, though.”

“No?”

“Well, would you? I mean, what’s the sense in going on?”

“Well, I dunno,” said the barmaid. “You got to do something.”

“I dunno what I want to do,” said Mr Turner moodily. “I dunno that I want to go on selling flour right up to the end. I’d sort of like to chuck it up and do something better ’n that, even if there wasn’t any money in it. After all, it’s not for long.”

“You don’t want to chuck up the job and then find you get well again,” said the barmaid practically. “I don’t think any of these doctors really know.”

“You don’t want to pack up at the end and find you done nothing but sell flour all your life, either,” said Mr Turner.

He pushed his tankard to her across the bar. “I must be getting along.”

“Want another?” she enquired.

He shook his head. “I got to go back and have it out with the wife,” he said. “She don’t like beer.” He slid off the stool, and grinned at her. “All be the same in a hundred years,” he said quietly. “That’s what I say.”

He went out into the busy, sunlit street. He had intended to telephone from the nearest box to his firm, Cereal Products Ltd., and possibly to go into the office that afternoon. On the pavement he hesitated, irresolute. He did not want to go into the office; he wanted to think for a little before going back. He bought an evening paper and walked slowly down towards the Circus again, and turned into the Corner House and had a steak and chips with another pint of beer.

By three o’clock he was at Watford, on his way home. He lived in a small detached villa in a row, No. 15 Hyacinth Avenue. It was a fairly pleasant little house, one of many thousands around London, with a small front garden with a cyanotis tree and a larger back one with a lawn and a laburnum tree and rose bushes. He let himself in with his latchkey, and called rather gruffly, “Mollie?” The empty house echoed back at him; he did not call again.

He went out moodily into the garden. The lawn needed cutting, but he did not feel that he could tackle that. In that suburban place of gardens it was pleasant, that warm, sunny afternoon. He did not know a great deal about gardens. His work had made great inroads on his leisure time; so many evenings had to be spent late or entertaining buyers from the provinces that he had never taken seriously to gardening. There was always something more
Important to be done, the sheer, insistent business of living that stood before the things he would have liked to do. A jobbing gardener came in one afternoon a week to do the garden for him.

He stood looking at the roses; they were coming into bloom. He stooped down to smell one; it had a fragrance wholly alien to the world he knew. He straightened up, and then stooped down and smelt it again. “Be nice to have a lot o’ them,” he muttered to himself, and his mind travelled to a vision of a rose garden between tall trees without a house in sight, a quiet place with crazy paving and a fountain, a managing director’s garden. And then he thought that he had better make the best of what he’d got, that next year’s roses would not interest him much.

“Takes a bit of getting used to,” he said quietly to himself.

He went back into the house and fetched a deck chair from the cupboard under the stairs, and took it out and set it up under the laburnum tree. It would be nice, he thought, to sit in his garden for a little and look at the flowers, a thing that somehow he had never had the leisure for. He took the Evening Standard with him; within ten minutes it was draped across his face, and presently he slept.

He woke at about five o’clock, aware in some way that his wife was coming down the garden to him. He brushed off the paper and sat up. “Hullo,” he said, with no great cordiality.

She said, “Hullo. You got back?”

“Aye,” he said. He did not get to his feet, but rubbed
his hand over his face. It was for her to make the first approach, he felt. She had not been to see him in the hospital.

“Did they find anything wrong with you?” she asked.

“I dunno,” he said briefly. “I’m not going to die next week, anyway.”

She said a little scornfully, “Well, that’s something off your mind.”

“Aye,” he said. “Been to the pictures?”

“I went with Mrs Kennedy,” she said. “It was ever so good.”

He nodded. He liked the pictures well enough, although he had not her devouring passion for them. She was eleven years younger than he, only twenty-nine. She still lived in the dream world of romance, and flew to it at every opportunity as an escape from her realities. He could not follow her; the true world was more real to him, and more interesting. That made a breach between them, increased by the many occupations of his work and by her idleness. At one time she had been a typist in his office; they neither of them realised how much she missed the work.

“Been busy this week?” he enquired. He was bitterly resentful, deep inside him, that with so much time to spare she had not been to see him in the hospital. He had paid for a private ward for that reason only, and he had been lonely there; he liked plenty of company, and would have been happier in a public ward with many other patients.

“I been over helping Laura most mornings,” she said defensively. “She can’t do much.”

Laura was her sister, and about to produce an infant. She lived at Bushey, not very far from them, and she was a thorn in Mr Turner’s flesh in that she was a constant excuse for all the errors of omission that his wife fell into. Whenever the dinner was not cooked, the beds unmade, or the house dirty, it was because Laura wanted help. This had been going on for some time now because Laura produced a baby regularly once a year, and Mr Turner was getting very tired of it indeed.

“Well, put the kettle on and let’s have a cup of tea,” he said, “—if you’ve got time for that.”

She flared out at him, “That’s no way to speak to me, after being away all week.”

“If you’d found time to come ’n talk to me in hospital during the week,” he said evenly, “you might have got talked to better. Now go ’n put that kettle on, unless you want me to go out.”

She stared at him for a minute, and then walked slowly to the house. Mr Turner sat on in his deck chair in the garden, the great wound in his forehead throbbing a little. The sordid little quarrel had upset him. He wanted to get rid of all that sort of thing. In a short time now he would have to slough off all experience, both good and bad; since everything must go soon, he wanted to get rid of the bad first in order that he might be left free to enjoy the real and the good. He wanted to get rid of Laura, and the quarrels with his wife, and the office routine. He did not want to go on nickering after small commissions. He did not want to be mixed up again in the sly, illegal deals in pastry flour for East End confectioners that had proved profitable for him in the post-war years. He had some
money saved. He wanted to lay off the business of petty earning now and do something different.

He had about three thousand pounds in savings. He had never told his wife the extent of these riches because they had been amassed in a variety of dubious ways; only a small fraction came from legitimate saving out of his income. Full of ideals gleaned from the cinema, she was so rude about his way of life in general that he could not bring himself to tell her how he had built up their joint security, and now things had reached that pitch between them when he did not even want to tell her what he had achieved to safeguard them in sickness or old age. He knew that three thousand pounds would not go far to meet her needs after his death. Safely invested, after income tax it would not provide her with much more than a pound a week; she had been making five pounds a week in the office when they married, and five pounds ten by the end of the war, when she had retired from work. She could earn that again if she went back to office life; she had not treated him so well, he felt, that he need fear to spend his money for the sake of giving her another pound a week on top of the five or six that she could earn.

The little bell rang from the house; he heaved himself up from his chair and went in to tea. She had laid it in the dining room, tea and cold sausages, and salad, and bread and jam, and cherry cake. They usually had it cold in the summer; in winter it was a more generous meal, with a hot kipper or bacon and eggs. Supper was a light meal that took place when they wanted it.

Mollie was already seated when he came into the room. He sat down heavily and forked a sausage on to his plate;
she passed him his tea and he buttered a piece of bread, “What about a run in the car afterwards?” she said.