Long Summer Day (2 page)

The M.O. said they had indeed, a few, but they were occupied.

‘Be so good as to move someone out,’ Zorndorff said, ‘someone with a better chance of recovery.’ Then, before the surgeon could either agree or disagree, ‘Can you recommend a specialist, a good one, who will make himself available for a second opinion?’

The surgeon hesitated, clutching the rags of his pride, but the prospect of the honours list jogged his elbow just in time and he said, sourly, ‘I was at Barts under Sir Jocelyn Ferrars but he would be extremely expensive!’

‘His fee would not, I think, amount to more than twenty-eight thousand pounds,’ Zorndorff said, and the surgeon’s resentment was swamped by a grudging tide of admiration for such preposterous insolence.

They were out in the cool hall again, where the smell of disinfectant followed them but the temperature was twenty degrees lower and suddenly Zorndorff was being very civil again, thanking him gravely for his courtesy, and begging him to convey his respects to the Countess. Then, in a twinkling, he was gone, and the porter lumbered forward to open the door and run down the steps to the visitor’s carriage. The M.O. waited just long enough to see the fellow get a tip for his pains, which from the man’s expression was at least a florin, possibly as much as a crown.

He thought, as he plunged his hands into his cluttered overall pockets, ‘Damn him! I ought to have torn out a handful of beard and thrown it in his face!’ but the mood of bitterness did not last as far as the Matron’s door for by then his attention was fully occupied with other matters. Who could be ejected from a private ward with the least fuss? And how much should he offer Sir Jocelyn on that arrogant little bastard’s behalf?

II

F
or a man lying flat on his back, with one leg suspended from a pulley, the ceiling looked incredibly far off, yet not so far as to prevent Craddock conjuring fantasies from stains etched into the plaster by leaks that were stopped a century ago; during the long, hot afternoons, when pain and drugs were doing battle with one another inside him, the ragged edges of the damp areas resolved themselves into charging lines of infantry and squadrons of cavalry, with here the burst of a bombshell, there an angled standard.

The battle overhead distressed him far more than pain or weakness resulting from his wound, for in the months between the present, and the day he had pitched headlong into the dry water-course beside the railway line, he had come to terms with pain. There never seemed to have been a time when small, darting flames were not searing the nerves between shin and groin. The battle overhead was something different. It would never resolve itself. The opposing armies were always on the point of advancing but when he looked again they were still ranged in lines, with bayonets advanced, officers’ swords upraised, drums beating, bugles braying, and the smoke from the batteries billowing between the two hosts. It was a set-piece, but there was about it an immediacy that compelled him to cock an ear for the sob of breathless men and the screams of wounded. It exhausted him but unless he closed his eyes he found it difficult to look elsewhere, for the pulley, and the narrowness of the cot, exacted a penalty in terms of pain. Yet often enough he paid the fee, pressing his left cheek to the pillow to bring his right eye in line with the french windows opposite and staring out at the prospect beyond the terrace, where convalescents played their interminable games of pontoon.

Beyond them he could see the park sloping down a field or two, then up to a line of woods on the horizon. Nothing much happened at there. Sometimes a cow browsed into view, and occasionally a farm waggon crawled along the hillside track, moving so slowly that it seemed to take a very long time to cross his restricted line of vision. He could see clouds drifting above the elms, and patches of blue through the rents and somehow, as though to counter the poised strife overhead, the view brought peace and sanity, for he was aware that the stillness outside was real. Whereas the battle on the ceiling was not.

Gradually he began to relate the two vistas, the one fraught with anxiety and stress, the other bringing him joy and tranquility, so that, as the days passed, and the hillside view slowly began to assume mastery over the armies above, he knew that he would live, drawing more reassurance from the contrast than from anything the surgeon said or the soothing remarks made by the plump nurse who brought him drinks. And with this growing belief in his survival the battle on the ceiling lost its horrid significance, and the vision of serenity framed in woods resolved itself into a kind of Promised Land where he, Lieutenant Paul Craddock, whom they had given up for dead, roamed in the splendour of his youth.

That was after they had moved him to a private ward upstairs, a small room where his view was greatly enlarged and he could lie hour upon hour looking across at the great bow of the woods, and the brown, green, drowsing patchwork, between woods and park. By then the tide of pain had receded a very long way, but had been displaced by boredom and acute discomfort, arising from the angle of his leg, slung to the damned gallows at the foot of the bed. Dressings brought pain but also relief from the tedium of lying there alone. If it had not been for the magnificent view he would, he thought, have died of boredom. Yet there were adequate compensations. The leg, they told him, had been saved after all, and although the surgeon warned him that he would almost certainly suffer a permanent disability resulting from partial atrophy of the joint, it would not be much more than stiffness and he would walk with a slight limp, and could certainly ride; in fact, the more exercise he took the better. He had, they said, been extraordinarily lucky, not solely to have escaped amputation above the knee but to be alive at all. His cure, they explained, was due to a third operation performed by one of the most brilliant surgeons in the country, brought here at enormous cost at the insistance of a Mr Franz Zorndorff, some five days after his arrival from South Africa. He noticed that they all spoke of Mr Zorndorff with awe and this puzzled him, for all he recalled was a secretive and rather flashy little Austrian Jew who, during his boyhood and youth, had been in close partnership with his father.

They let him ponder this for a day or so and then, with every manifestation of sympathy, they broke the news that his father had died the day he had landed in England. He was shocked by the news but not overwhelmed. He had not seen his father in almost three years and, on the last occasion they had met before he embarked for South Africa, their mutual antipathy, so long banked down by mutual distrust, had flared into a shouting match, with Joshua Craddock calling his son every kind of a fool to stick his nose into the Imperial quarrel, and Paul talking a good deal of vainglorious nonsense about his patriotic duty to assist in the chastening of Kruger and Kruger’s Bible-thumping farmers. Since then there had been a letter or two, and an occasional draft of money after his commissioning, but no exchange of affection, no show of warmth on the part of either one of them.

After they had left him with what they imagined to be his grief Paul found that, for the first time in his life, he could think of his father impersonally, a big, broad-shouldered, taciturn man, with a squarish face, deliberate hands, a large, walrus moustache, a deep voice that disguised a Bermondsey accent, and above all, a baffling inaccessibility due, as Paul now realised, to his obsession with business affairs that never seemed to bring him any real satisfaction for all the time he lavished on them. He had never, for instance, told Paul anything of his mother, who had died when the child was five, or how it came that he, Joshua, had fought his way from the top strata of the artisan class, a plumber with two or three men in his employ, to that of city merchant, or a kind of city merchant, for Paul had no knowledge of how his father earned a living, apart from some connection with scrap metals near the centre of his original endeavours as a plumber. It seemed to him, lying trussed up under this infernal gallows, a very strange thing that he should know so little about his family, particularly as Joshua had been insistent that he should come into the business on leaving the undistinguished little private school, where he had been sent as a boarder when he was eight years old. He had resisted this pressure solely because he had a strong disinclination to work in an office under artificial light, and had dismayed his father by announcing his intention of entering the artillery. He had already made application for entry to Woolwich when the war offered all young men a chance of immediate service overseas. One of the few accomplishments he had learned at the pretentious little school he attended (Joshua, in his ignorance, had always referred to it as ‘a public school’) was how to sit a horse, so that it had been easy, under the impetus of Black Week and its humiliating defeats, to join the Yeomanry. Later, because of the gaps torn in the ranks by the enteric fever epidemic, it had been almost as easy to get a temporary commission, but for all that he had not seen much active service. By the time his training period had expired the war had degenerated into ding-dong encounters between patrols and Boer Commandos and it was in one of these scuffles that he had received his wound. Before that, however, he had changed his mind about a military career. He was unable, he discovered, to take pleasure in harassing the wretched Veldt farmers and their families, and it was not long before doubts obscured his vision of Imperial infallibility. He wondered sometimes, what he would do with his life now that a gammy leg barred him from most outdoor occupations, yet his prospects did not dominate his thoughts during the earliest stage of his convalescence, when he was learning to walk again on sticks and a network of lines rigged along the terrace. What occupied his mind more often was the curious deference shown him, not only by the volunteer nurses but the Countess, the Chief Medical Officer, and the junior physicians. It puzzled him, for instance, that he alone, apart from one or two high-ranking casualties, had a room to himself, and also that any request he made—for a book, a magazine, or a variation of hospital diet—was granted, when in the crowded general wards below other junior officers, especially the non-professionals like himself, were treated like tiresome children and reacted accordingly, cursing the impulse that had involved them in a war for which many serving soldiers now felt a slight disgust, causing them to ask themselves if, after all, the pro-Boer Lloyd George and his following had not been justified in condemning the adventure from the outset.

He found the key to all this within a few minutes of receiving his first visit from Franz Zorndorff.

The little man strode on to the terrace unannounced about a week after Paul had been allowed downstairs. He was not wearing his city clothes today but had got himself up in what he imagined to be correct country-house attire, a pepper-and-salt Norfolk suit, a wide grey cravat with a diamond pin, and a billycock hat sporting a pheasant’s feather. The staff made way for him as though he had been the Emperor of Japan or, at the very least, a racegoing friend of the new king, Edward. He seated himself in a creaking basket chair and opened his pigskin attaché case, producing a sheaf of papers tied with pink tape.

‘Delighted to see you’re making such excellent progress, my boy!’ he began, gaily. ‘We’ve a little signing to do first of all. I trust you read all the letters the solicitors sent on?’

‘No,’ Paul admitted, a little irritated by Zorndorff’s brashness and the fact that he made no mention at all of his partner’s death. ‘I began to read them but I found it difficult to concentrate. You wrote promising you would come over soon, so I decided I’d ask you to summarise them. They looked damned dull to a man who has read nothing heavier than the
Strand Magazine
for three years.’

He saw to his amusement that he had succeeded in disconcerting the Jew, who now looked somewhat startled and then, recovering himself, uttered a short, neighing laugh.

‘Then you won’t know? Unless, of course, the whisper has gone round, as I rather thought it might!’

Paul asked him to explain, adding that visitors were only allowed a bare half-hour before the bell rang and the terrace had to be cleared.

‘Oh, don’t concern yourself over that!’ Zorndorff said, contemptuously, ‘I’ve tamed everybody in this charnel-house, including that fraud of a matron! They won’t shoo me out, I can assure you!’ And then, placing his shapely hands on his knees and looking directly at Paul, he added, ‘You’ll probably be surprised at the extent of your patrimony. I was myself, somewhat, although I realised of course that Josh spent very little over the years. That was his trouble, I think; he could never cease to think in sixpences, or free himself from the notion that he was still waiting on a plumber’s harvest—a hard frost that is!’

‘You haven’t told me how my father died,’ Paul said, not altogether liking the half-veiled patronage of the man yet understanding now why he had been treated as a favoured patient.

The Jew lost a little of his ebullience. He said, seriously, ‘I suppose I owe it to you to admit that Josh Craddock died fulfilling what he imagined an obligation to me. As to the facts, he killed himself heaving a two hundredweight water-cistern from a cart!’ He hissed through his teeth, one of the few Continental habits he had retained after forty years in England. ‘Imagine that! Josh Craddock, with cash and assets totalling something like forty-thousand pounds, killing himself to help a lazy oaf of a carter empty a cart!’

The figure stunned him, and Zorndorff, enjoying the confusion his casual announcement caused, smiled as he waited for Craddock to recover a little. The Jew had a well-stocked wardrobe of smiles; this was an occasion for his thin one. He said, finally, ‘Well, and how much did you think he was worth?’

Never having given any thought to the matter, Paul guessed, reckoning the ugly house in Croydon, at £750 and his father’s share of the business at about £3,000. ‘Certainly not more than five,’ he said, ‘and hardly any of it in cash! You wouldn’t be having a little quiet fun at my expense, Mr Zorndorff?’