The doctor said they shouldn’t have waited so long. Merton had a severe chill. “Get that stuff from the chemist and see he takes it. I’ll call in tomorrow.”
The weather kept damp and cold, and despite a banked-up pit-fire in the bedroom, Merton stayed down. When Mary came in with bottles of medicine, he mustered strength to throw them one by one out of the window; they landed on the kennel and caused the contemporary Gyp to rattle into the open and prepare to sell itself dearly. “That’s nowt but bottled piss,” he said to the empty room. He fell to the floor, and only with tremendous effort reached the bed.
The cold deepened and gripped him in the vice of double pneumonia. The house was silent for a week, and they began to wonder whether he’d get over it — asking the question of themselves at first, but not to each other. George and Lydia, at any rate, remembered the hard times he had given them, the peremptory flames of his volatile temper. Yet talking to each other late one night, they had to admit that they had at times been boggers and deserved it — though their wondering whether or not he would get better was still less interested than Mary’s. In turn they sat with him and talked, told him what news or gossip came from town or factory or coal mine, reassured him that the chickens and garden were being well looked after. Everyone met by George and Lydia on the street — round the district and even in Nottingham — asked about Merton with great concern and weren’t slow in saying what a good bloke he was and how he’d worked all his life for the good of his family and how much of a crying shame it’d be if owt ’appened to such a fine outstanding chap. Well, Lydia said to herself, in one way nobody can deny all that. “But he’ll be all right, ma,” she cried. “He’s as strong as nails.”
“But he’s a good age, you know.”
He couldn’t listen long to their talk. Something inside stoked up the fires of his coughing, weakened him so that he lay back stiffly in sleep after a dose of medicine he no longer had strength to sling away. Mary exhausted herself caring for him, wept downstairs in the kitchen while the others were at work, and wondered however he could possibly get better from such a black and wicked cough. The rotten winter had worn them all out, frozen their guts on short rations and the wet cold misery of snow and ice. Now the weather had broken, and brought this.
The doctor said it was touch and go. But this winter had killed thousands and would kill more, though it was having a hard job with Merton. He slept easier one day, and Mary thanked God he was getting better. “He’s peaceful,” she said to George and Lydia when they came home for tea. “He’ll be all right, mother,” George said. Lydia went out later to the pictures. Mary dozed by the fire, her face wrinkled and tired, her white hair falling down. George sat at the table playing patience, a sheet of uncompleted football coupons held down by a bottle of ink and a wooden-handled pen.
In the pitch-dark bedroom Merton slept, moaning when a spark shot off the tight ball of his lived life and wheeled towards his eyes spinning away and buried in a universe of impenetrable blackness that in some ways he wanted to enter but didn’t because he knew he’d never come out of it. Then there was a light growing ahead that he tried to reach, something desirable that he sensed he could live within — though not in his lifetime. The pain seemed intent on forcing him to some course of action, but at the same time made him so weak and wish for such complete and everlasting sleep that he couldn’t take any. The light he saw was hardly a light, more a speck of lighter darkness which wasn’t so dark as the other mass of atmosphere. In spite of the prison he was locked in, he reached up to his eyes and felt tears, and knew what they were. He thought of Mary down in the kitchen: “How are you feeling?” she had asked. “A lot better,” he had told her. He thought of Oliver, who had been killed in the war, sensed that he might be about to go, and suddenly the spark of light expanded and blinded him when he fell into it. Maybe I was on his mind as well, Brian thought, as he stopped to take down a call-sign from Singapore.
He rode in a tri-shaw almost the whole way to the widow’s house, walking the last hundred yards silently through the bushes and climbing into Mimi’s room like a bandit. She took a few days off from the Boston Lights on the excuse of a cold, and they lay in bed, smoking and talking the dark hours away, drinking the bottle of whisky he usually managed to bring in his back pocket. The many hours were sweet, yet when he wasn’t there he wanted them to end and reach the day when, with kit packed, he could feel the slow train move under him on the first mile to Singapore. He wanted to rush away, because he felt ill. It was nothing he could say was eating any particular part of his body, but a slow omnivorous corrosion attacking equally his physical and mental self, so that if the lingering leave-taking of Malaya lasted many more weeks he would walk to the door of the sick quarters and say: “For Christ’s sake, I’m whacked and finished and can’t stand up any more.” Nothing serious, he laughed, watching the dawn soak itself over the palmtops from the door of his DF hut — only hypochondria, or whatever it’s called, or maybe just plain sickness of the sort that this poxetten country is drenched with. As soon as that boat gets into the Mediterranean Sea, I’ll feel fine, quick-minded, and strong again like I’ve always been.
Malaya was a battlefield whose values had no part of reality, wasn’t life to him any more, and he had to get away by taking a slow boat to England. He hoped the Communists would get Malaya, though he had no more wish to help them at the moment than he had to fight them, having dreamed the bad dream that maybe the same one who had escaped him on the mountain had later circuited back to the acid drop of an aeroplane and taken the fatal potshot at Baker. If anybody was to blame, though, it was, as far as he could see, the government who had seen to it that they were dragged up and bundled like unthinking sackbags to do guard-duty in worn-out parts of the British Empire. Maybe the government’s fed up and weary and don’t know what it’s doing. He could believe that, anyway, having long hours to ponder on such things during empty and interminable nightwatches. But the Communists aren’t weary and that’s a fact, never will be either, because they’ve got an up-and-coming vision that our side can never have any more. They used to spout outside the factory — and still do, according to Pauline’s letters — which is more than the conservatives dare do, because a lot of the Communists are working-men like ourselves and know what’s what. They’d got the kitty right enough — the whole works of his brain and heart spinning — bells, lemons, keys — back and forth like jackpots on a fruit machine. I didn’t much know what I was doing when I let that bloke go, though I’m glad I did what I did, no matter what happened. Only underneath my mind did I really know what I was doing, but that was enough and good and marvellous, because when things occur like that, it must be what I’d do anyway if I had the brains to calculate things properly like sums.
Out of the confusion of his brain grew the tangible and valid fact that between now and England he would have the human warmth of Mimi to help him stay sane and solid. It would end soon and they knew it, so they saw each other as often as possible. He went quickly through the trees to the widow’s house (BEYOND THIS POINT OUT OF BOUNDS TO ALLIED FORCES) even when the widow was there, silently making his blindfold way up the veranda and along to the unlocked window behind which Mimi waited. They lay naked together in bed, Mimi with her long blue-black hair down and her warm well-appointed breasts flattening against him, whispering softly, and both, even in the bliss of love, making no more noise than could be covered by night sounds of Malaya from the bushes and trees outside.