the end of the evening visit. It was hot in the corridor. The woman was complaining about the tightness of her snowboots on the thick rubber floor. The radiators at the window were scorching, and visitors emerging from lemonade-filled wards complained of thirst. Beyond the swing doors one or two women patients were already wandering about in open, flowery dressing-gowns. The nurses looked warm and pink as sun-bathers. Tonight the hospital was like a huge, hot ocean liner, stranded in ice.
‘So our promised thaw has not come after all,’ said the woman.
‘I can’t say it worries me one way or the other,’ the man replied. The woman looked at him quickly and was encouraged by something in his expression. She waited for a bit and getting no further response said:
‘And your son. Is he reconciled … to the snow?’
‘Reconciled? Never! That is not his way. He reconciles himself to nothing. He takes his own view and always will. If he does change his mind he must think it all out for himself – through it and round and over it.’
‘Of course, of course,’ said the woman. ‘But what is his view – of that?’
The man looked in the direction of the bowling-green and away again. Yet the woman was still encouraged by something about him. She was now reduced to pointing directly down at the heart. The man consented to look at it again but said nothing. He was stubborn like his son.
‘Oh well then,’ said the woman. ‘What is your view of it?’
The man shrugged his shoulders and glanced down. He considered it as though measuring it, as though matching it up against all other possible shapes.
‘Oh – the size of that thing!’ he exclaimed at last. ‘The extravagance! Isn’t it a regular pantomime piece …?’
‘Yes, yes,’ agreed the woman, and waited.
The man shook his head as though finished with what he had to say. Nevertheless he put down the bag he was carrying and opened his arms wide, bringing them slowly together again into a circle with only the tips of his fingers joined. For an instant he enfolded the empty space in front of him. He demonstrated an almost imperceptible capture, an embrace.
‘It is a not unfriendly shape,’ the man said, dropping his arms and picking up his bag again.
But the woman seemed perfectly satisfied with these words. At once she began to move away from the window, taking care to do it with the least possible fuss or disturbance to the man looking down on the bowling-green. As she was a large woman and rather clumsy, it was not easy. It was a case of drawing on her gloves without moving her elbows, of sorting out a complication of handbag and carrier-bag straps while pulling down her helmet shaped cap over her ears. She managed not to open her mouth again. She didn’t look in his direction. Padded with clothes, strapped and helmeted, like a diver she moved, silently, in rubber boots over the rubber floor. Slowly, cautiously – yet with some hint of deep-sea buoyancy in her gait – she drifted off.
MR GARRAD HAD rung rather late in the day – some time after tea when the disorder had shown itself. But it wasn’t as late as all that, and anyway they’d had it in writing that in an emergency someone could always come right away. It was urgent all right – not something to be cured at home by a bit of tinkering and on-the-spot treatment. It was not the first time it had happened either. Garrad looked pained when he came back from the phone. His wife sat on the sofa nursing a pillow for comfort. She knew instinctively it would be a comfortless evening. The son and daughter had emerged from their bedrooms and hung limply on the banister to hear the diagnosis.
‘They will come this evening,’ said Garrad sitting down at the other end of the sofa, ‘and they will do something about it, if possible.’ That was the devil of it – the ‘if possible’ which sounded the dirge on hope. How many ‘if possibles’ had these two not heard – and yet weren’t used to it yet.
‘If possible?’ muttered his wife as though testing out a foreign phrase in her mouth.
‘That’s it. I’m giving you their word for word.’ They sat in silence. ‘What will you do then? Will you go out?’ said the wife after a bit.
‘I’ll wait till they come. If they come. Then I’ll go out.’
They waited fifty minutes until, as by a miracle, two young men turned up. The family watched them as they knelt and tested and talked together. Nothing came of it. All the others could see was the odd red streak that made the heart jump till they saw it was only the reflection of the bus-stop sign on the other side of the street. The men answered Garrad’s questions. They were very young. But it wasn’t their age that bothered him. It was their politeness, their gentleness. They had the cheerful gentleness of stretcher-bearers on a serious case as they lifted the set in their arms and carried it out. This same pair had actually put in the colour. Now, for the second time, they were taking it away. ‘How long this time?’ Garrad asked as they went past him, carefully manoeuvring it round the corner of the passage and shielding it from the sharp edge of the hall table. They shook their heads and smiled. He watched them go through the front door, careful not to jolt or trip. He watched the colour being carried further and further away until it finally disappeared into the waiting van.
‘Well, that’s that!’ he cried coming back, falsely cheerful, into the living-room.
‘Nobody minds a couple of nights without,’ said his wife. ‘But there’s Friday. It’s Friday I’m thinking about.’
‘And Sunday,’ he added. On Friday there was a thriller serial two episodes from the end. There was also a cookery demonstration which they all watched hungrily week by week, never mind whether they’d had their meal or not. They were hungry for the colour of this food – the familiar yellow yolks of eggs being broken into scarlet bowls, white cream poured into chocolate sauce, and all stirred with a blue spoon. In the background tomatoes were piled against aubergines, polished to ebony – on the side, platters of apples, grapes and oranges. Now and then the demonstrator would wipe her hands on an apron striped green and blue. Garrad’s wife was a good cook herself. She used milk and eggs. She could have got a scarlet bowl if she’d wanted it. She’d have been the first to admit that her milk was whiter, the eggs yellower than the screen ones. But that was not the point. Where was the comfort in it? For Garrad, who liked the country, there was a regular Sunday series of different landscapes filmed hour by hour from dawn to moonrise, showing the changing colours of sky, field and river throughout one day. The colour was not bad, in Garrad’s estimation. It was as real as you could get unless you actually had the thing behind you in the window. Yes, they’d done a good job on colour and the chances were it would get better as time went on.
‘You’re going out then?’ said his wife.
‘Might just as well.’ He stepped out into the street, into a warm autumn evening. His own street was made up of small modern houses with long gardens, well-known in the district for their new-planted trees. Most people were tending a sapling. Garrad was proud of this himself but this evening he had no eyes for the spindly branches beside him. In spite of himself he kept looking up at the TV aerials growing overhead, frail-looking yet tough enough to withstand the most ferocious blast. Not a house without these magic roof-twigs. All the same he was the only man for a long way round these parts who had colour. The first man. A kind of Adam of the new vision. Very soon – perhaps in a year or so, possibly in a few months, they’d all have it. But he was the first. He strode along quickly at first, then gradually
