A Kind Man by Susan Hill Read Free Book Online Page B

to the market for the boys’ presents and while there got material to make a frock and a couple of new aprons. She had not bothered before but Tommy had urged her. ‘You have something nice. It’s what you deserve, Eve,’ and put his hand into his pocket to pay at once, and suggested they have new curtains in the kitchen too. But she could not face changing anything in the house yet. The curtains were the ones Jeanniehad known and sometimes pointed to for their brightness.
    He had been eating less than usual, she was aware of that, scraping the leftovers from his plates into the bin. She made smaller portions, though not so much that he might complain, but even these he did not finish.
    That same night, she went out into the scullery and found him putting fresh notches in his belt with the awl.
    ‘You work too hard. You need to eat well.’
    ‘Look at you, Eve,’ he said, ‘how thin you got. The weight dropped off you after … it’s maybe just catching up with me.’
    She shook her head. ‘What should I tempt you with? The eggs are so good just now and I’ll put more than a scrape of butter on your bread. Bread and top milk, that’s what the old women swear by, with a sprinkling of brown sugar.’
    But Tommy only laughed, threading his belt back through his trousers.
    Still, over the following weeks, he grew worse.
    He never talked about Jeannie, but one night he said, before putting out the lamp, ‘I miss the little sounds she made through her sleep. I sometimes wake and think I’m hearing them.’
    She reached out her hand and rested it on his arm.‘You’re bone,’ she said then, feeling along, ‘just bone. You should see the doctor, Tom.’
    ‘No, no. We don’t need to spend money that way. Maybe you can make the bread and milk and sugar? That will soon set me up again.’
    So she made it. She beat up two fresh eggs with milk and poured it over the buttered bread and got brown sugar specially. Every night before he went to bed he ate it slowly from one of the white bowls and told her it was good, even for invalid food. But she noticed that he scraped it round with the spoon until the china gleamed clean. It gave her pleasure to watch and she thought how strange it was, that she had had heart for nothing since Jeannie Eliza, but only gone heavily through the days, and now her heart should lift to watch him eat a bowl of bread and milk.
    The weather turned warm and the leaves fanned out on the trees almost overnight. The swallows returned to nest above the door and the martins under the eaves. She saw Jeannie, pointing up to the skimming birds.
    Tommy grew steadily worse. One morning, taking him a cup of tea, before he could be up first to fetch hers, Eve noticed a swelling just beside his jaw which seemed to have blown up overnight like a boil. She said nothing, just touched it gently with her finger. It was shiny-smooth and firm but there was no core or redness like any abscess.
    He drank the tea carefully on the other side of his mouth and when he got up, said only, ‘I’ll be a bit later then, Eve, if I’m to take this for the doctor to look at.’
    She almost told him to tell the doctor about everything else, the weakness and the fact that he was barely eating any food and the way he had to keep punching new notches into his belt, but she did not. He would say, or else the doctor would notice for himself and as one visit cost what it cost no matter how many things you took in to the surgery to be sorted out, Tommy would make the best use of it. But she watched him dress slowly and had to urge him to eat a small spoonful of porridge, a few scraps of bacon, before he set off, going without his old energy down the path and out of sight, his head bent, shoulders stooped, where they had always been straight and his step springing.
    She filled the sink with suds and then stood, hands in the warm water to her wrists. She had lost Jeannie. Now she was to lose him. She had little doubt about it, having