“Bed sores?” asked Henry, and was told I need not stay so still that those developed. Hating hospitals I asked when I could get home. The doctor said, “Probably the day after tomorrow, if you have someone dependable to nurse you.”
“She has,” said Henry.
That ended my last day with the firm, which survived my departure by not much more than a year. I doubt if Sanker or McGeeky tried to visit me in hospital, and I have since only seen them in bad dreams. Some correspondence must have ensured the pension due me so Henry must have seen to my side.
Our bedroom and bathroom had been upstairs so he bought and put into the kitchen (luckily a big room) a hospital bed with mattress that could be raised or lowered by pressing a switch. Each night before joining me in it he gave me a bed-bath which I enjoyed, for his handling was so gentle that even relieving myself in a bed-pan became pleasant. It was reassuring to have him working near me in the house or garden all day and I needed reassurance. The relief of freedom from an impossible job was mixed with rage that my whole working life had ended in wasted time. Nightmares in which I still grappled with McGeeky and The Smug bothered even my waking hours. Henry placed the TV set where I could see it but now what I saw on it enraged me. Presenters, newscasters and celebrities all seemed versions of The Smug or women they promoted for flattering them. To end my nightmares of the whole world being ruled by Sanker and his parasites Henry finally got rid of the set and I began reading the novels of Agatha Christie. She had written so many that at last I found myself halfway through one I had read a fortnight earlier. I switched to the less repetitive thrillers of Ian Rankin, Val McDermid and Louise Welsh, finally gorging on the anodyne novels of Alexander McCall Smith, who seemed able to write them faster than I could read. But the only really good times were after dinner when Henry, after spending half an hour with a computer in our old bedroom, sat beside me pondering over magazines with such names as The Allotment Holder.
Noticing one night that he hardly ever smiled in his old sly way, I asked, “Are you tired of the T.L.S. and The March of the Mind?”
Again he jerked as if wakened from a dream and said, “Not exactly. I was thinking about shit. Ours, and where it went.”
“Do you mean sewage?”
“Yes.”
“Why should I know where it goes?”
“Everybody should. Do you remember sewage farms? Big open circular tanks with sprinklers revolving above? I haven’t seen one for years. They used to supply farmers with manure. Farmers nowadays use artificial fertilisers, a bad idea. When you started using the bed-pan I fitted a chantie into the lavatory pan so none of ours is wasted.” “You are spreading our shit in the garden? Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I cried.
“I knew you would need time to get used to that wise and ancient practice,” he said soothingly. “Chinese and Italian peasants have been doing it for thousands of years.”
“Haven’t the neighbours complained about our stinky garden?”
“Have you ever smelled it?” he asked, and I did not answer. On sunny days when he wheeled my bed out onto the patio I had smelled nothing odd. However, I promised that when fit to walk upstairs I would remove his chantie and shit straight into my own flush lavatory pan.
“A pity,” he said musingly, then added in a voice that seemed to be quoting: “Soil should be dunged and dunged and dunged until it is the colour of my trousers.”He had recently given up blue jeans for black corduroys. This was a conversation I neither could nor wished to continue, but he wanted to and said, “You enjoy the meals I make but don’t seem to notice they are vegetarian. With a bit more land I could make us self-supporting in the way of food.”
“Henry,” I told him, “I am still not well, and don’t think I will ever be well enough to discuss expensive new notions.”
On that day he said no more.
I have never liked large breakfasts. Each day began with Henry bringing a cup of tea and saucer of fruit cut into thin little slices and arranged in patterns that became more and more fancy. “Why waste time making it fancy?” I asked. “Just tip the stuff onto the plate and I’ll enjoy it just as much.”
“I like making patterns and thought they would please you,” he said.
“They don’t. They’re unnecessary — a waste of your time.” He shrugged his shoulders and said, “I’ll stop making them.”
“Good!” said I.
But next morning the fruit was arranged as fancy as ever. I stared at him. In a miserable voice he said, “I couldn’t stop doing it. I tipped what you call the stuff onto the plate and the result affronted my sense of decency. I had to make a pattern of it.”
“You did it to please yourself, not me!”
“Yes,” he admitted, “but why let it bother you? Why resent patterns you destroy as soon as you start eating them? I expect you to destroy them. I want you to.”
“I hate them because they show you are acting like a fool! Like a, like a, like a … like an artist!” I concluded, glad to have found the right word.
“O no!” he said, shocked, then added thoughtfully after a pause, “You’re right. As a chef and gardener, yes, I am becoming an artist. Luckily. I used to be very miserable most of the time.”
Hardly believing my ears I wept and wept and wept. He embraced me, said he was sorry, swore that before becoming a househusband he had never thought our marriage miserable because like me he thought it was normal, but now he had useful things to do and saw the past differently. He ended by saying with a touch of disgust, “I used to be completely selfish.”
“Nonsense!” I cried. “You were the most unselfish man I ever met.”
“You’re wrong. I tried to be kind to everyone but apart from that I just hung about feeling superior to them. I had no initiative.”
“You think being unkind to me shows initiative?”
“I am not unkind! I am only telling the truth! And it is you who changed me! And I am grateful! Can you not see how much better we both are and be glad?”
“I am still very sick,” I said, weeping, “ and I wish you had stayed as you were.”
He stared at me, then began trembling and shaking his head from side to side, then jumped up yelling, “This is impossible! You are making me impossible! Can I not be allowed to love you AND domestic economy?”
With clenched fists he began punching his head from side to side as hard as he could. In our four years together he had never raised his voice or acted madly. I screamed at him to stop, tried leaving the bed to stop him. He stopped at once, joined me in bed and we wept together. I promised I was sorry for having made a stupid fuss about the fruit breakfast, he said he was sorry for explaining things tactlessly. We became lovers and friends again. That was our first and worst quarrel and probably our last. I knew he would never be unfaithful to me, but I still worried about the future.
A week later he started talking as if in the middle of an argument with a beginning I had missed: “You see, the county of Fife was once a separate Scottish kingdom. Some Fifers have noticed it could be made economically self-supporting. So could Orkney. And Shetland. So could Aberdeenshire, if the farmers stopped turning fertile earth into beef for export by passing grass through cattle. Kitchen gardens are the most productive and sustainable way of turning soil into food. Factory farming is the worst way.”