At first he carried her like a groom bearing his bride across the threshold, but she was a bride who struggled every inch of the way. So much so that he was forced to swing her over his shoulder into a fireman’s lift.
It shocked him to discover how little weight there was to her. She could have been made out of crumpled foil for all she weighed. No, it was not her weight that made her hard to carry; it was the tensioned kick of her body, every muscle wrought and spasming at once.
A small group of the other residents had been drawn by the commotion, including Messrs Timberley and Appleby. ‘One of you run ahead!’ shouted Quinn. ‘Flag down a cab on the Brompton Road. We have to get her to the infirmary.’
But the two young men seemed incapable of movement, like the specimens they pinned at the Natural History Museum. ‘What’s the matter with her?’ asked Mr Timberley, his face contorted with distaste.
‘She’s dying. She will die, unless we get her to St George’s.’
‘Dying?’ Timberley regarded Miss Dillard with a scientist’s interest, as if he had always wanted to see someone die and this presented a rare opportunity.
‘For God’s sake, will one of you not go for assistance?’
Timberley held a balled fist over his mouth and coughed. If the cough was forced, it soon turned into an uncontrollable hacking fit. He turned reluctantly from the interesting spectacle and began to make his way slowly downstairs, one hand on the wall to steady himself against the crashing waves of his coughing.
‘Hurry, will you! This is a matter of life and death!’
Timberley waved a hand, an impatient gesture that seemed to convey that he was going as fast as he could. Quinn had to accept that he seemed like the wreckage of the man he had once been. He turned to Appleby and directed his gaze meaningfully towards the invalid.
Appleby seemed to take the hint. At any rate, there must have been something in Quinn’s gaze that spurred him on. ‘I say, Timberley, wait for me. I’ll come with you.’
‘I suggest you run ahead,’ wheezed Timberley through his coughing. ‘I cannot run. My doctor will not allow it. Mr Quinn will have two corpses on his hands if I am forced to run.’ He was projecting this back over his shoulder. Clearly it was intended for Quinn’s benefit. ‘I am perfectly serious, you know. Perfectly.’ He pressed himself to the wall and allowed his friend to thunder past.
By the time he got to Brompton Road, Quinn was staggering. Not under her weight. But under the certainty that he was too late. She was hammering against his shoulder, and her breath came in a rasping, strangulated whine. It was not the death rattle. It was something worse than the death rattle. It was the sound a body makes when it rebels against the action of breathing.
Appleby was in the middle of the road, shouting and waving both arms to stop the traffic. At last something of the urgency of the situation seemed to have struck him. Timberley stood at the roadside and hung his head disconsolately. He cast sly, fascinated glances towards the heaving burden over Quinn’s shoulder.
At last Appleby persuaded a motor taxi to stop. He screamed the destination at the driver, who when he saw the intended passenger seemed about to refuse the fare.
‘I am a police inspector,’ said Quinn. ‘If you don’t take us to St George’s I will kill you.’ He had meant to say ‘arrest you’, but the stress of the moment had added a certain bluntness to his words.
‘What’s wrong wiv ’er, guv? She ain’t gonna be sick in me cab?’
‘You had better hope that she does not die in your cab.’ Quinn was bandying death around like loose change, in the hope that it would get things moving.
It was a hard job getting her into the back of the taxi. Her arms were flailing everywhere, her feet kicking out. Quinn received a punch to the eye and a knee in the groin that fair took the wind out of him. The blows landed so expertly that if he hadn’t known better he would have said she had aimed them. At one point, one of her legs locked itself in an acute angle around his thigh. Eventually, he and Appleby together managed to prise it loose. They put her in head first and laid her down on the back seat. Quinn went round the other side and eased himself under her now freakishly juddering length. He nestled her wracked and quivering head against his chest and tried to soothe away her spasms by stroking her hair. Her feet kicked rhythmically and violently against the door. The driver’s anxious glances back weighed his concern for his taxi against his fear for his life. In the event, the latter won out. He said nothing.
‘Hudge up!’ said Appleby, squeezing himself in beside Quinn. It meant somehow rotating the angle of Miss Dillard’s rigid body closer to the vertical. Timberley peered in with a forlorn expression, like a child deprived of a treat.
‘Drive as quickly as you can, without occasioning undue shocks,’ directed Quinn.
The taxi lurched off. It was soon apparent that the driver wanted them out of his cab as quickly as possible. Quinn’s admonition for caution was largely ignored.
The strangulated sound at the back of Miss Dillard’s throat tightened. Her hands became claws, clutching at their own pain. One somehow lodged on to Quinn’s forearm and again he was astonished by the strength hidden away in this frail, ruined woman.
He clung on to her as tightly as she clung on to him. He was trying to close down her convulsions with the firm press of his embrace. But also, he was aware that he was trying to hang on to the life in her. That if he let go of her, he would lose her.
The high pointed tower of the St George’s Union Infirmary, with its arched windows and weather vane, gave the building the appearance of a massively enlarged church. No doubt its vaguely religious architecture was meant to inspire hope. Now it was just a looming shape in the darkness. A shadow within a shadow.
Appleby sprang out and ran towards the great cathedral of medicine.
Quinn extricated himself more carefully. As he laid down her head, her body was wracked by its most violent convulsion yet. The foam at her mouth had blood in it now. There was every chance that she had bitten through her tongue.
In the dark, he could not see her eyes. He was unable even to imagine the beautiful shimmering grey of her irises. It was as if the blackness of her hugely dilated pupils had spread out and swamped everything. He felt a wrench at his heart at the thought that the beautiful pewter grey was lost forever. If only he could see her eyes, that grey, she would live. Everything depended on his being able to see her eyes. He wanted to call for a lamp, or a torch, to shine into her face. To dispel the blackness that had seeped into everything.
Her legs gave a final double kick against the inside of the cab, then stiffened. Her arms formed jagged shapes, and held them, as sharp and permanent as the branches of petrified trees. The strangulated gurgling in her throat was no more.
FORTY
The next day, inside the curtained house, he could not dispel the blackness from the corners of his vision. He looked for the gleaming pewter grey of her eyes everywhere. But the only grey was the dour cheerless grey of an empty English Sunday. A godless, lifeless grey.
There were murmured consolations, though why it was felt that he needed consoling more than anyone else he could not grasp.
The other lodgers wanted to discuss why she might have done it. They sat in the front parlour drinking tea. The question came to their lips as regularly as the bone china.
‘But why, that’s what I cannot understand?’ Clink.
‘Why would she do such a thing?’ Clink.
‘What on earth could have possessed her?’ Clink.
And all the other variations of why? punctuated by the chinking of cup against saucer.
The question was never answered, except by a furtive, meaning look in Quinn’s direction.
Were they placing her death on his conscience? But how could it be his fault? All he had done was offer to pay her rent until she was in a better position to pay it herself. How could that be the reason she had killed herself?