The Very Thought of You Page 10

  “I understand you have been playing a game – but a very dangerous game.”

  “Yes, sir, we’re sorry,” said Billy, shouldering the blame.

  Mr Ashton paused for A moment.

  “It sounds inventive, so I can’t blame you for that,” he said, glancing away – but then he faced them directly, each of them in turn, and fixed them with his eyes. “But I would so hate any of you to injure yourselves. you must learn to take better care – you could have knocked yourselves out. Now you must promise me not to do anything like this again, for your own sakes.”

  Annafelt herself relaxing: he wasn’t angry, just worried.

  “We promise, sir,” she blurted out. He nodded at her.

  “Is that what happened to you, sir?” euan’s question sprang out so suddenly, Anna could hardly believe what he had said. “I mean, was it… an accident, sir?” he went on, scrabbling for words, gesturing at the wheelchair.

  “No. No, I didn’t have an accident as such,” said Thomas, slightly taken aback. “I fell ill on aholiday. Just bad luck. that happens too, I’m afraid,” he added, with the shadow of a smile.

  Silence.

  “Off you go then, but please be careful from now on,” said Thomas, and the children turned to go.

  Closing the door behind them, Anna was relieved to be released, and yet stricken by Mr Ashton’s words. a holiday illness?

  17

  Thomas was shaken by the boy’s question.

  “One of the boys asked about my wheelchair today,” he volunteered to Elizabeth at dinner.

  “that was bold. Was he rude?”

  “No, just curious.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  He paused.

  “I just said that I had fallen ill on holiday.”

  Elizabeth felt her eyes welling, and she touched Thomas’s hand.

  “Don’t worry, my darling,” he said to her, and for Amoment they were gentle with each other.

  It was some time since either of them had mentioned Thomas’s disability. But their holiday to Bruges in the summer of 1931 still remained vividly present in their minds.

  It had begun as asimple treat for Elizabeth. Thomas had been working too hard at the office, and wanted to spoil his wife with ashort trip abroad.

  They had arrived in Bruges in the last week of August, when the town was torrid with heat. The picturesque streets were narrow, close, cobbled, with astonishing spires stretching upwards from hidden alleys. Through tall heavy doors they had entered the famous churches, marvelling at the expanse of space within buildings that appeared so compact from the outside. The high stone interiors were vaulted and bright, with white northern light falling onto the carved pillars and polished floors. All sound was muffed, and they felt solemn, heightened.

  “How beautiful she is,” Thomas kept telling himself as he watched Elizabeth in the fltered church light. The auburn glow of her hair was enhanced, and he saw in her face the delicate ivory of medieval art.

  Afterwards they walked out into the close, muggy streets, which were teeming now with summer visitors. a threat hung in the air, of storms to come, of menacing pressure.

  They took a boat ride to cool themselves, but the canals were stagnant and fy-blown, and brought no relief. It was as Thomas trailed his fingers through the water that he first noticed an irritation in his throat – just ascratch.

  On their second day they sought refluge from the heat in art galleries. They spent hours looking into the exquisite blue vistas of hans Memlinc’s paintings, serene Madonnas with feudal felds glimpsed behind. The pictures were so detailed, so crystalline, that they took on a dreamlike air. The strange blue views seemed to wash over Thomas, and his mind started to detach itself, drifting into asubaqueous world of vibrant colour and line and texture. He thought he could feel the silken folds of the Madonna’s cloak. Walking on the cool stone floor of the gallery, his footsteps rang out like distant bells in his head.

  “Is everything all right?” Elizabeth asked him.

  “Just acold coming on,” he said, clearing his throat.

  By the evening, his throat was sorely infamed, and in the early hours of the morning he lay semi-delirious with fever. adoctor was called to their hotel room, and his expression soon became grave.

  “It is polio,” he told Elizabeth. “We have an epidemic of it at the moment. you must not drink the water.”

  Why didn’t anybody warn us, thought Elizabeth as she watched Thomas fading further into delirium.

  They took him to the local hospital. For two days Thomas drifted in and out of consciousness, incontinent, fed through a nose tube. He struggled for life like a fish without water, until the doctors had to puncture his throat with atube for oxygen.

  Elizabeth was frantic; she saw her beautiful husband lying there white and drained, so far wilted that he seemed sure to die. a boy two beds from him did pass away, his lungs giving in to the viral seizure.

  Day and night Elizabeth hovered by Thomas’s bed. In her limited French, she spoke to the doctors again and again, urgently, passionately. This is not just another englishman, she tried to explain, this is Thomas Ashton, adiplomat, and heir to agreat estate. Ce n’est pas possible de faire quelque chose?

  After a week there was still no improvement. Better care was available in Brussels, but the beds were all full. Elizabeth was desperate to move him home to England, and the Belgians did not try to stop her.

  Thomas knew nothing as he hovered in the plane between life and death, his face obscured by an oxygen mask. The throbbing of the engine shook through him as he lay there, limp, slack, sinking through his own body, close to death. Elizabeth looked down at Kent and Surrey spread out below them like a toy set, the roar in her ears forcing her inwards until Thomas was just abody beside her. She sensed her own heart closing off from him.

  At St Thomas’s hospital, the nurses immediately slid Thomas inside asarcophagus-shaped contraption which looked like an instrument of torture.

  “This machine will force the movement of his lungs,” the doctor explained, “To make him breathe mechanically. He should be safe now.”

  For five months Thomas lay inside the iron lung, on the edge of life. Elizabeth was a familiar fixture in the polio ward, as were Thomas’s mother and Norton. All of them urged Thomas to live, but privately dreaded the ravages of his disease. They could barely see him, encased as he was inside the machine. But the nurses who sponged him down watched his body wasting away, until his limbs were like sticks, with knobs for knees and elbows.

  For Thomas, trapped inside the iron lung, it was like being tossed about in an interminable storm. Sometimes his body was lost to him, as if he were falling from himself into anever-ending pit. yet any touch on his skin was like ascream of pain, as if his whole body was araw burn. His soul hung on while the virus swept through him like afre, ravaging his nerves and muscles.

  Just to be able to catch his own breath and push out his lungs by himself was aterrifying ordeal. Every time they took him out of the iron lung to clean him or feed him, panic seized him as he gasped for air.

  The rhythmic noise of the pump drove him inwards. His surroundings existed only as afaint echo, glimpsed as through a distant window. He slipped into his own world of dreams and visions. It seemed to him that his sister was very often by his side, and together they looked up at sunlight fickering through trees in Ashton Park. There was ascent of wild garlic. Sometimes, he was with his brothers in the trenches, wading through mud and corpses, before Claudiatook him back to the woods at Ashton. at other times, when he opened his eyes, he saw his mother’s ageing face looking down at him with unblinking eyes, while his father stood behind. Then he did not know if he was living or dead.

  Often, there was no refluge from the throb of his own pulse. Blood was beating through him – he was frantic, sweating, running over vast cracked plains. Sand slowed him down until there was no push against his legs – until he was falling through quicksand. Mother and father, brothers, sis
ter, all falling with him.

  On better days, he slipped towards atranquil oblivion, as if he’d been released into an eternal present. There was aspecial quality to that light – it sang – and his soul seemed to foat like a sphere. Those moments outside his body were blissful, euphoric. Seeing like asphere. It was light somehow connected with love, with loved faces, with the morning light of his childhood bedroom, and summer holidays, and the grey-gold sunlight of Oxford. Simultaneous memories, all known at once, bringing relief.

  After six months, he began to surface from his storm. He was weaned from the iron lung, and started to breathe for himself again. The nurses moved him into a convalescents’ ward, where he wallowed in abed with pillows. His head began to clear, and they sat him up. He made an effort to be wry and talkative, though his body was still emaciated and his strength shattered.

  Now that he had won back the simple power of breathing, Thomas felt that anything would be possible. He assumed that as he recovered his strength would return, and he would stand again.

  The convalescent ward was painted eau-de-nil. Sometimes he would wake up to glinting sunshine, which bleached the room white. Other times, the walls were pooled in shadow and appeared a rich turquoise, like adappled pool. The pale curtains fapped in the wind with little insistent sounds, while noises from beyond – tug-boat horns, distant cars, the clatter of trains over Charing Cross bridge – seeped through like adream. Through the window he felt the presence of the River Thames, with its slow tidal exhalations.

  In some ways this was a peaceful time. The doctors had long since warned Elizabeth that Thomas was unlikely to walk again, but nobody had broken this to him yet. It was only when his expectations began to return that the pain and grief of his new condition began to take hold. Some of his muscles had shrivelled away to nothing. He could barely move his legs, nor could he feel any spark of strength returning to his limbs.

  Finally, he confronted his doctor.

  “Do you think I will make a full recovery?”

  His doctor paused.

  “Do you mean will you walk again? We will have to wait and see.”

  “Am I to be permanently crippled? I need to know—”

  “I’m afraid we’re not sure yet.” the doctor averted his eyes. “Olusters of your nerves have been damaged by the polio virus. Only gradually will we know which of your muscles might recover, and which ones will be lost to you.”

  Months of rehabilitation began. Daily a physiotherapist would pull and stretch his deadened limbs, trying to unravel their tightened knots. Every part of his body ached: his bones, his muscles, his nerves. It became clear to Thomas that he would recover the use of his arms and hands. But the muscles he needed for standing upright, let alone for walking or running, were ravaged beyond repair.

  He would never be able to walk again.

  It all felt quite unemotional in the hospital, where there were dozens of others in the same position. But whenever he had a visitor from outside, then he felt a pang of shame and humiliation for his physical change. Never had his familiar smile seemed so forced, nor so helplessly ironic.

  An outside nurse arrived to take a plaster-cast mould of his back, and she returned some weeks later with a leather back brace for him. She fitted it onto him and he sat up in his wheelchair. The brace gave him support and an unnaturally erect posture. When Norton came to visit and saw Thomas looking out of the window, his heart crumpled. There was his friend, sitting so straight in his wheelchair, his hair freshly cut and brushed away from his face, his legs wasted and useless. Thomas looked so dignifed and brave, and so utterly emasculated.

  Thomas hoped he might walk with callipers, and he tried many times to stagger along the hospital’s parallel bars, against the advice of his doctors, but he lacked the strength to carry himself, even with crutches. Eventually he surrendered to his wheelchair.

  At first, in hospital, he had felt euphoric still to be alive. One breath of life is better than none at all, he told himself. He balanced his ill luck with all the many misfortunes of this world, and fought his way back to hope. But little by little, a horror at his condition began to overtake him. acripple confned to awheelchair. When the nurse changed his sheets and he looked down the bed, the sight of his big knee joints and emaciated thighs and calves disgusted him.

  He carried, too, a dull, barely articulated conviction that he was paying the price for surviving the war which had taken his brothers. An atonement.

  Ten months after the fateful holiday to Bruges, he was ready to leave the hospital and all the patient nurses, who had respected his natural reticence. But he was apprehensive about his return to daily marital intimacy.

  The evening before he came home, Elizabeth checked over their house in regent’s Park. She had ordered an abundance of fowers to greet his return, cheerful bowls of tulips and yellow roses. She had also removed from the drawing room a photograph of Thomas in his Oxford running team.

  Thomas’s months in hospital had been terrible for her too, and she had felt her heart detaching itself from him. She had at times been sunk with fear that he might die – but now, instead, he was coming home a different man. She had spent many evenings crying for him. But she had cried for herself too, and for the death of her own happiness, even though she was ashamed of such selfishness. For she had hitched her life to Thomas, and from now on all their mutual hopes would be compromised. Even in the most glorious moment, there would always be the wheelchair.

  Thomas left hospital on a glittering day in June. He was waiting for his wife in the hospital hall, dressed in new fannels which fapped around his legs. Elizabeth arrived in their most spacious car, and Thomas was lifted into the back seat by Carter, a sturdy young chauffeur who had been designated as his manservant.

  The car drew up outside the house in Sussex Place, and his mother came out to greet him, along with the butler, ropner. Even the servants were apprehensive about seeing Thomas for the first time in his altered state.

  “Hello ropner – very good to see you again.”

  “It’s so good to have you home, sir.”

  Thomas felt wretched and ashamed, but smiled politely and dredged up all his natural courtesies to make them feel at ease. Carter helped to move him out of the car and into his chair, then up the steps.

  Once they were inside, Thomas wheeled himself around the ground floor, stopping to admire the new lift which Elizabeth had installed. It took them up to the drawing room, where Thomas cordially thanked the housekeeper, Mrs Bruton, for the lavish display of tulips on the rosewood table.

  “It was Mrs Ashton’s suggestion, sir.”

  “Well, thank you, Elizabeth. And that has always been my favourite table,” he said, searching for commonplaces.

  Through the windows he saw again the familiar view onto the lake and bandstand of regent’s Park. Some late blossom still graced the trees, and swans eased through the water.

  “Has it been agood year for park blossom?”

  “I haven’t noticed an unusual fowering—”

  “I see the black swans are still there.”

  “Yes, two of them this year.”

  He smiled and talked amiably to Elizabeth and his mother, yet felt entirely remote from both of them. He retreated to read the paper while his small case of belongings was unpacked.

  Later, getting downstairs for lunch was such a business. Then what would there be to do afterwards, he wondered?

  He asked to go out, and Elizabeth wheeled him off to enjoy the summertime glory of the park. But Thomas could still recall how his first outing as A man in awheelchair quickly turned into atrial. As his wife wheeled him past the lawns and along the lake, he felt the curious gaze of the strangers they passed – sensed their snatched glances of pity for him. He sat up straight, and chatted pleasantly to Elizabeth, but felt sliced to the marrow by humiliation.

  He could remember feeling compelled to keep up a banter of good cheer, not just slump into forlorn silence. But it was so hard even to sit in a
comfortable position in his chair, because he had to twist his shoulders round to talk to Elizabeth, or else look ahead and talk with an unnaturally loud voice, like an idiot. More, he could feel that the chair was heavy for her to push, and this offended his natural gallantry.

  Later, after dinner, there was the terror of the bedroom. A fierce modesty overcame Thomas – he could not bear his wife to see his back brace, nor his wasted legs. He had help with bathing from Carter, which was humiliating, but better than the emasculating attentions of a wife. Then he heaved himself from his chair into bed. Elizabeth joined him soon after from her dressing room.

  Theirs was Amarriage which had been founded on mutual beauty, yet now Thomas dreaded any physical intimacy. And Elizabeth – she was haunted by afear of his altered limbs. He had always been covered or clothed during her hospital visits, but now she was afraid of seeing his naked body, and not knowing how to respond. She assured herself that she still loved Thomas, but now she quailed at their changed life together. And she had given up any hope of children.

  But Thomas knew he was not impotent. On their third night together, under the cover of darkness, he rolled over to his wife and caressed her until their mutual timidity dissolved. Then she gripped his shoulders hard, and cried out as he penetrated her. Afterwards, they lay close together, both of them relieved to have broken through their awkwardness.

  The next morning he let her dress him. When she saw his legs properly for the first time, her fear was over. They were the same legs, just thinner and slacker. Nothing particularly disgusting or odd, nothing to be afraid of. They laughed about them, and she stroked his thighs affectionately.

  Thereafter, Thomas tried to begin his life again. All through the summer of 1932, he worked to build his strength, through whatever exercise he could manage. aphysiotherapist came three times aweek to stretch and massage his muscles. Alone in his study, he repeatedly gripped arubber ball to strengthen his hands.