‘You carry the lantern, and unlock the door for Mr Higgs. She’s heavy for you, my love.’
The gravel-digger took the body from Jonathan’s failing grip and lifted her as though she weighed no more than a goose. Jonathan lit the way out and round the side to a small stone outbuilding. A thick wooden door gave on to a narrow, windowless store room. The floor was plain earth, and the walls had never been plastered or panelled or painted. In summer it was a good place to leave a plucked duck or a trout that you were not yet hungry for; on a winter night like this one it was bitter. Projecting from one wall was a stone slab, and it was here that Higgs laid the girl down. Jonathan, remembering the fragility of the papier mâché, cradled her skull – ‘So as not to hurt her’ – as it came into contact with the stone.
Higgs’s lantern cast a circle of light on to the girl’s face.
‘Ma said she’s dead,’ Jonathan said.
‘That’s right, lad.’
‘Ma says she’s in another place.’
‘She is.’
‘She looks as though she’s here, to me.’
‘Her thoughts have emptied out of her. Her soul has passed.’
‘Couldn’t she be asleep?’
‘Nay, lad. She’d’ve woke up by now.’
The lantern cast flickering shadows on to the unmoving face, the warmth of its light tried to mask the dead white of the skin, but it was no substitute for the inner illumination of life.
‘There was a girl who slept for a hundred years, once. She was woke up with a kiss.’
Higgs blinked fiercely. ‘I think that was just a story.’
The circle of light shifted from the girl’s face and illuminated Higgs’s feet as they made their way out again, but at the door he discovered that Jonathan was not beside him. Turning, he raised the lantern again in time to see him stoop and place a kiss on the child’s forehead in the darkness.
Jonathan watched the girl intently. Then his shoulders slumped and he turned away.
They locked the door behind them and came away.
The Corpse without a Story
THERE WAS A doctor two miles from Radcot, but nobody thought of sending for him. He was old and expensive and his patients mostly died, which was not encouraging. Instead they did the sensible thing: they sent for Rita.
So it was that half an hour after the man was placed on the tables, there came the sound of steps outside and the door opened on a woman. Other than Margot and her daughters, who were as much a part of the Swan as its floorboards and stone walls, women were a rare sight at the inn, and every eye was upon her as she entered the room. Rita Sunday was of middle height and her hair was neither light nor dark. In all other aspects, her looks were not average. The men evaluated her and found her lacking in almost every respect. Her cheekbones were too high and too angular; her nose was a bit too large, her jaw a bit too wide, her chin a bit too forward. Her best feature was her eyes, which did well enough for shape, though they were grey and looked at things too steadily from beneath her symmetrical brow. She was too old to be young, and other women her age had been crossed off the list of those suitable for appraisal, yet in Rita’s case, for all her plainness and three decades of virginity, she still had something about her. Was it her history? Their local nurse and midwife, she had been born in a convent, lived there till adulthood and learnt all her medicine in the convent hospital.
Rita stepped inside the winter room of the Swan. As if she were not aware of all the eyes upon her, she unbuttoned her sober woollen coat and slid her arms out of it. The dress beneath was dark and unadorned.
She went directly to where the man lay, bloodied and still unconscious on the table.
‘I have heated water for you, Rita,’ Margot told her. ‘And cloths here, all clean. What else will you want?’
‘More light, if you can manage it.’
‘Jonathan is fetching spare lanterns and candles from upstairs.’
‘And quite likely’ – having washed her hands, Rita was gently exploring the extent of the gash in the man’s lip – ‘a razor, and a man with a gentle and steady hand for shaving.’
‘Joe can do that, can’t you?’
Joe nodded.
‘And liquor. The strongest you have.’
Margot unlocked the special cupboard and took out a green bottle. She placed it next to Rita’s bag and all the drinkers eyed it. Unlabelled, it bore the signs of being illegally distilled, which meant it would be strong enough to knock a man out.
The two bargemen holding lanterns over the man’s head saw the nurse probe the hole that was his mouth. With two blood-slicked fingers she drew out a broken tooth. A moment later she had two more. Her searching fingers went next into his still-damp hair. She explored every inch of his scalp.
‘His head injuries are just to the face. It could be worse. Right, let’s first get him out of these wet things.’
The room seemed to start. An unmarried woman could not strip a man’s clothes from him without unsettling the natural order of things.
‘Margot,’ Rita suggested smoothly, ‘would you direct the men?’
She turned her back and busied herself with setting out items from her bag, while Margot instructed the men in the removal of his clothes, reminding them to go gently – ‘We don’t know where else he is injured yet – let’s not make it worse!’ – and undid buttons and ties with her maternal fingers where they were too drunk or just too clumsy to do it. His garments piled up on the floor: a navy jacket with many pockets like a bargeman’s but made of better cloth; freshly soled boots of strong leather; a proper belt, where a riverman would make do with rope; thick jersey long johns; and a knitted vest beneath his felt shirt.
‘Who is he? Do we know?’ Rita asked while she looked away.
‘Don’t know that we’ve ever set eyes on him. But it’s hard to tell, the state he’s in.’
‘Have you got his jacket off?’
‘Yes.’
‘Perhaps Jonathan might have a look in the pockets.’
When she turned to face the table again, her patient was naked and a white handkerchief had been placed to protect his modesty and Rita’s reputation.
She felt their eyes flicker to her face and away again.
‘Joe, if you would shave his upper lip as gently as you can. You won’t make a perfect job of it, but do your best. Go carefully around his nose – it’s broken.’
She began the examination. She placed her hands first upon his feet, moved up to his ankles, shins, calves … Her white hands stood out against his darker skin.
‘He is an out-of-doors man,’ a gravel-digger noted.
She palpated bone, ligament, muscle, her eyes all the while diverted from his nakedness, as though her fingertips saw better than her eyes. She worked swiftly, knowing rapidly that here, at least, all was well.
At the man’s right hip Rita’s fingers inched around the white handkerchief, and paused.
‘Light here, please.’
The patient was badly grazed all along one flank. Rita tilted liquor from the green bottle on to a cloth and applied it to the wound. The men around the table twisted their lips in little expressions of sympathy, but the patient himself did not stir.
The man’s hand lay alongside his hip. It was swollen to twice the size it ought to be, bloodied and discoloured. Rita applied the liquor here too, but certain marks did not come away, though she wiped once and again. Ink-dark blots, but not the darkness of bruising, and not dried blood. Interested, she raised the hand and peered closely at them.