‘No,’ said Jason, wrinkling his nose. ‘I want to do a shit on your head.’ He laughed a crass adult laugh.
‘Ron was sarky like that,’ said Lorna.
‘Look,’ said Hood to the boy, ‘you want to go to a playgroup. I know you do, so take this’ — he gave the boy a five-pound note — ‘give it to the lady and you can go.’
‘Keep digging,’ said Lorna. ‘It costs twelve quid.’
It rained the next day, a heavy downpour ending a week of sun and dropping autumn on to that part of London, chilling the trees and darkening the brickwork of the angular terraces and washing all the traces of summer away. Where there was green, as in the park on Brookmill Road, it was sodden and depleted; and the city looked smaller and fragmented in the mist — it was a sea of sinking islands. Hood put on his black raincoat, turned up the collar and trudged around the corner to Lorna’s.
She said, ‘I knew you’d be over today.’
Hood entered and opening his coat, took out a paper bag that was flecked with rain.
‘What’s that?’
‘I’m going to do some cooking.’
The house was cold and unusually quiet; the toys were put away; he could hear the clock ticking in the kitchen. He looked across the parlour and said, ‘It’s a good place for him. He’ll like it.’
‘So will you.’
‘What makes you say that?’
She looked at him; resignation tugged at her smile. ‘I know what you want.’
Hood ignored her and opened the paper bag. He took out a thick blackened pipe, some tweezers, a candle and a cigarette lighter. He pulled the cushions from the sofa and spread them on the floor; and he squatted, setting out the simple apparatus. She watched him and shook her head.
Her voice was flat: ‘You’re going to do me.’
Hood lit the candle and broke off a piece of opium. He took it with his tweezers and heated it in the flame. It sparked, then grew black, but it did not light. It thickened to a rounded blob and became glossy and then was encircled by fire. He said, ‘Lie down.’
Lorna came near and sniffed. ‘What is it?’ She lay beside him propping herself on a cushion. Hood took the pipe, poked the softened plug of opium inside and clicked the lighter over the hole.
‘Put it in your mouth,’ he said, handing her the pipe. He told her how to puff it, and they passed it back and forth until the fragment was reduced to a coal. Then he scraped the bowl and started again. The candle lit her face, the flame giving her cat’s eyes: she was lovely, feline in this small light. The rain pattered against the window, while they lay on the floor smoking. She did it with her lips, holding the pipe-stem tentatively, using her tongue, kissing the smoke, and he was half in love with her as the room filled with the aroma of sweltering poppies. They lay side by side, barely touching, breathing slowly; they puffed the pipe and did not speak. He felt an urgent shudder, a dumb hilarity in his groin. Then it weakened and passed through him, warming him. There was thunder from the river, but the warehouses hid the lightning flashes. In the rain and opium smoke he smelled Hué, the fleeting gulp of a bobbing boat. She was the first to sleep. He watched her as he prepared a fourth pipe, then he moved very close to her and kissed her still lips: they were cool with sleep. He puffed and closed his eyes and he was travelling to the drum and whine of a raga, an Eastern lament, sorrowing for a love that was distant and danced like flame in water. He opened his eyes: already the dream had begun to roll.
10
Pitchforked awake by a sharp pain in her back, Norah sat up in bed quickly, pushing at the mattress with her hands, making Mr Gawber’s whole body leap. She switched on the bright bedside lamp, blinding her feebly enquiring husband, who turned and groaned. He lifted his pocket watch from the side table and swung it to his eye. It was just past eleven-thirty — he’d had one hour’s sleep. Norah, motioning to stifle a sigh, managed to amplify it. She jerked on the bed, testing her back, drummed her legs and sighed again, drawing the noise slowly through a grievous scale, high to low, the sound of a person spinning down a deep shaft and never striking bottom, only whimpering at the end and growling into silence. They were both fully awake now, and in pyjamas and night-dress, their hair fluffed into tangled white wigs, they looked blanched and ancient, whitened by frailty, two-hundred years old. Mr Gawber quaked. The light jarred him like noise. Norah said, ‘I can’t sleep.’
Mr Gawber pretended not to hear; but how typical of her to wake him to tell him that! She was no solitary sufferer. She demanded a witness, involving him in her discomfort, made him endure it. Invariably she touched him with her pain, and there was not an upset she’d had that he had not somehow shared. She sighed, he groaned. It was in part the penalty of the double bed, marriage’s narrow raft.
‘Wake up, Rafie, I can’t sleep.’
‘What is it?’ He exaggerated his drowsiness.
‘I feel ghastly. Yes, I think I’m coming down with something.’ She tried her fingers, tasted her tongue, blinked — to locate symptoms.
‘Probably’ — he yawned: a stage-yawn, almost a pronouncement — ‘probably just wind.’
‘No,’ she insisted. ‘I’ve pins and needles. A splitting headache. I’ve gone all hot.’ She got a grip on her head and out of the corner of his eye Mr Gawber saw her swivel it. She looked as if she might be trying to unscrew it.
‘Leave your head alone. You’ll just make it worse.’
‘I’m feverish.’
‘Poor thing.’ Without wishing to he yawned again, an authentic rebuke.
‘You don’t care.’ She started to cry softly. ‘Oh, my head. It won’t stop.’
He said, ‘I believe you’re coming down with something.’
‘It’s flu,’ she said and was calm. She listed her symptoms once more.
‘I’m not surprised. There’s a lot of it around. Thornquist was out all last week.’
He wanted to be sympathetic, but Norah’s illnesses were always so laborious that it annoyed him to hear her complain of their annoyance. He resisted consoling her. Then her aches and pains gave him some satisfaction — she deserved them for the pain she caused him. By a queer process of reversal, charity made antagonistic, he came to enjoy hearing her say how it hurt.
The bright lamp knocked against his eyes. He said, ‘Do turn the light off.’
‘How can I find my medicine in the dark?’
She thumped the mattress again, bouncing him, and went to the bathroom, switching on lights. She returned with a bottle of Doctor Collis Browne’s Mixture. It was an old bottle, containing a fluid now unlawfully potent, the active ingredient being opium. She was a regular user of patent medicines and pills: green lung tonic, fruit drops, stinging ointments, syrup of figs, dragées that stained her tongue purple. She was troubled by wind; she took iron for her blood. Old ailments, old cures. She measured the Collis Browne into a soup spoon and sucked it noisily.
‘Do you a world of good,’ Mr Gawber muttered.
Norah lay panting. Mr Gawber reached across and turned the light off. She snored.
But he stayed awake, alert, panic preventing sleep. Perhaps it would happen like this, a fiscal cramp that couldn’t be unknotted with a dose of the old mixture; a sickening for which there was no name or cure; a fever that couldn’t be shaken off. The workers all down with something, brokers with their fingers badly burned, industry halted at a stage of senility, a hardening in the usually swift canals, blockage, and the old country supine, helpless on her back like he himself in a ridiculous parody of repose.