Depression rarely prevented him from working. Work, if not a cure, if not even an alleviation, was still all he could do, the only possible occupation for him, while the blackest period of the black time lasted. But now he had become almost inactive. An oval walnut table was before him and the wadded lint dipped into the french polish, but his fingers could scarcely form the figures of eight on the prepared surface. Stephen came upon him seated immobile, the lint in his hand, his sombre eyes staring sightlessly, a Samson idle at the mill.
For days he would be like that. Then, suddenly, a fever for work, for making up for lost time, would over-take him, and with it an explosive temper to be vented on Stephen. Afterwards, presents, lavishly bestowed, to take away his guilt. At the moment he was too far gone, Stephen thought, to reproach him for all the days he had taken off lately. He knew better than to speak to him and went on upstairs to his upholstering which had rather mounted up during the past weeks.
It was cool in Whalbys’ works, almost windowless and in a corner of the square where the sun scarcely penetrated. Dadda took himself off next door in the middle of the afternoon, and Stephen, who hadn’t stopped for lunch, thought he might as well go too. There was visiting at Hilderbridge General from three till five. After that he would go up on the moor and wait in the dale until dark. He would conceal himself as he had been doing for several evenings past in the George Crane Goe and wait, even if he had to wait until midnight, for the denizen of the chamber to appear. The moon was now beyond it first quarter and would offer partial light.
Half Market Square was in shadow, half in sunlight. Passing from the shadow into the light was a daunting experience, so hot and powerful was the sun. It was a screen of hot metal, dropped with a clang, that must be wrenched aside, it was a scorching breath on the skin. Stephen couldn’t remember such hot weather as this, such another August, unless it was when he was a child that first summer after his mother went and Rip came. There had been a heatwave then and another five years later when he was searching for Apsley Sough with Peter Naulls, but neither could have measured up to this one.
His car had been parked in the sun and the steering wheel was too hot to touch. He had to hold it with his handkerchief. He opened all the windows, looked at the very pale blue, white-hot sky. The drought had persisted for twenty days now and there were notices up telling people not to use hoses. Stephen drove along the High Street into North River Street and turned into the hospital car park.
It wasn’t until he was climbing the stairs which led to the geriatric wards that he remembered the jellies. He had forgotten to buy them and the nearest shops were half a mile away. It couldn’t be helped. There was just a chance one of her other visitors had brought her jellies since last he had, though it seemed unlikely, they never did.
The old women were all up. With lolling heads, with gnarled hands clutching shawls and blankets to them — for the heat was nothing to them, their skins and veins impenetrable — they were bundled into chairs so that movement might be maintained and bed sores prevented. All the windows were wide open, the flowered curtains drawn back, and the heat shimmered in the long room as if the hospital stood on the brink of an open furnace.
Stephen saw from the doorway that his grandmother already had two visitors. His aunt Joan and presumably some friend of his aunt Joan’s. He wasn’t entirely sorry to see them, for alone he never knew what to say, and there was also the matter of the forgotten jellies.
As soon as she saw him Mrs Pettitt jumped to her feet. She and her companion and Helena Naulls were all sitting in chairs on this side of Helena’s bed but Mrs Pettitt alone was facing him. She jumped up and there came over her face a look of shock. It was rather a violent reaction to his unexpected arrival at four in the afternoon, but Stephen wasn’t much interested in Naulls behaviour, or in any human behaviour, come to that. He said, ‘Hello, Auntie Joan,’ and went up to kiss his grandmother.
She wasn’t one of those whose heads were lolling. There was far more life in her than when he had last seen her. She was leaning forward, both hands clasping the arms of the chair, and in her eyes, as he withdrew his face, he saw a gleam of malice so sharp that it made him step backwards. It was a gleam as cruel as any he had seen there in the old days at Chesney Lodge, and it was as if the senility which had brought to her a softening and a sweetening of the personality had in a flash fallen away.
Before kissing her he had made some sort of apology for forgetting her jellies and now he thought that what he saw in that flat white face and small blue eyes was only simple anger. But from behind him there came a whispered, almost a whimpered, ‘Oh, dear, oh, dear,’ from his aunt Joan, and he turned round. The other woman, a plump woman in her late fifties with hair dyed cornfield gold, was giggling the way schoolgirls do, holding a handkerchief up to her mouth.
Until then Mrs Naulls had remained silent, though eager in her silence, very nearly trembling as she clung to the chair and slipped forward on to the extreme edge of it. She seemed to be trying to speak, to be struggling to get the words out, but now she succeeded and uttered in a high cracked voice, brittle with malevolence, a typical Naulls phrase. For years, all his life, Stephen had known Naullses to telephone — if they had telephones — and ask you if you knew who this was, or to show you letters and ask you to guess who they were from. Now his grandmother said to him, ‘I don’t suppose you know who that is.’
The fat woman stopped laughing and covered her mouth entirely with her hand. The explaining was left to Mrs Pettitt who plunged into the middle of things.
‘You were the last person we expected to walk in at this hour, Stephen. You could have knocked me down with a feather. I mean, I didn’t even know they were coming till I got this cable, and then here she was, and Fred and Barbara. Well, of course she wanted to come in and see your nan first thing what with them all going off on this five-countries tour Saturday which is why they’re here at all. I mean, I don’t want you to think you’d have been kept in the dark, it’s just that everything’s been like such a rush …’
He didn’t need her added, ‘… hasn’t it, Brenda?’ to know who it was. She was as fat as Helena had been before the processes of age had pared her down and shrivelled her. Now that she had moved her hand away he saw her face exactly like Helena’s, only a painted Helena, shaded in various beiges and touched up with scarlet and black. She wore a tight shiny jacket and skirt in some fussy, damask, transatlantic material with a frilly braid trimming, and in the armpits were spreading dark stains of sweat.
He wanted to cry, ‘I don’t believe it!’ but a robot voice spoke for him: ‘Good Lord! Good Lord!’
There was a silence that seemed endlessly to endure. The curtains swayed in the faint hot breeze. Sweat broke out in little beads on Stephen’s forehead and upper lip and prickled his skin. Brenda Evans broke the silence.
‘Long time no see.’
From the sigh she gave it seemed Joan Pettitt had been holding her breath. ‘Now, then, would you have known him, Brenda?’
‘He’s grown a bit.’
Helena uttered a thin shriek of laughter. Having pulled herself as far forward on her chair as she could without sending it skittering from under her, she reared herself up on to her feet and stood there, swaying, chuckling softly. It was perhaps the first time she had stood unaided for a year. She looked radiantly happy, as if she had waited all her life for this, as if she had seen Naples and now had nothing left to see. She swayed, giggling, turning her head to look from one to the other of them. And then Stephen saw what he knew he would remember all his own life, the fearsome spectacle of someone suffering an apoplectic stroke.