Chapter 19
In St Mary’s Paddington, they made him lie on his back for two days without moving at all and then for two weeks, barely moving. A nurse fed him food through a straw, mopped up the water streaming from his eyes, wiped his bottom. It was like being a baby again.
He wondered about those women, the nurses, for the rest of his life; he would never recognize them, or the thin, reedy house doctor who cleared his throat repeatedly and, in a monotone, told him he would never regain his sight.
He did not know what any of them looked like.
But bits of his time in hospital were always with him.
On his wedding day, when he put on his shirt and the smell of the starch on the collar made him want to cry, or whenever he caught the edge of the sweet, boiled smell of school food, or when he was dying and could smell disinfectant in the hospital ward and could not remember why it made him want to shield his eyes repeatedly, hold his hands up to his eyes as if to guard them from further damage – throughout his life there were tiny reminders always of what had happened, of how it had been, of the madness of the sensation of being helpless.
His retina had detached: someone should have spotted this, apparently.
The reedy-voiced doctor hadn’t known what he was talking about, thankfully: Tom’s left eye was saved; in time, with plenty of rest, and because those wonderful nurses were so strict about his lying on his back at all times, the retina reattached itself.
But the right eye, which had been nearest to where he’d landed when he fell or was pushed over: his sight did not come back in that eye.
Sometimes he thought he could make out shapes, or colours, but it was always a delusion.
Tom used to wonder what would have happened if he’d left the scene by Ladbroke Grove with Uncle Henry a minute earlier. But not often. He had told Gordon he was waiting for something to happen.
This, it turned out, was it.
The first night Tom screamed so loudly in his sleep that the following day, when his father arrived, Sister Partridge requested he read aloud until Tom fell asleep.
Edward read him books he wouldn’t have tried before: The Go-Between , Animal Farm , The Day of the Triffids .
He listened to the Proms every night on the wireless: The Dream of Gerontius , the premiere of a Shostakovich piano concerto, Stravinsky’s Firebird suite, Vaughan Williams’s London Symphony , which made him cry – for what was lost, and for the love he had for the city that was now his home.
He cried a lot, in those strange days. His father came in one day to find him sobbing over Hancock’s Half-Hour .
Eventually they gave Edward a cot bed, and he slept next to his son, and when Tom dangled his hand over the side of the bed, his father’s hand would shoot up to clasp it.
When he left hospital, he could not see in one eye and barely with the other.
But he didn’t want to leave, to end this glorious, wonderful expanse of time he had been given with his father, the person he loved more than anyone or anything in the world.
The smells, sounds, feel of the ward was like a cocoon, a beautiful holiday from an existence he mostly found bewildering.
He couldn’t explain it to anyone for a long time, but for the rest of his life Tom would see the day he lost his sight in one eye as a blessing, not a tragedy.
It was a bright September day, fresh as summer. It had rained heavily while he’d been inside all that time. As they descended the steps of the hospital, Tom drank in the wet autumn air, greedily.
‘Where are we going now, Dad? Back home?’
‘I thought,’ said his father, hailing a cab with a whistle, ‘we thought it’d be awfully jolly to go somewhere special for a few days. Somewhere where you can recuperate.’
‘Where?’
‘A place I’ve always wanted to show you,’ said his father. ‘I thought we might go to Sevenstones. Hmm?’
Tom was not sure. Though he was furious at Aunt Jenny for not passing on his father’s letters, he wanted to go back to Montpelier Crescent, to the safety of his little room with the drawings of Galloway and the hills on the walls.
Being outside was already overwhelming – the sounds of the city, the people pushing past them.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, stepping carefully aside as a commuter dashed towards him, late for a train. ‘What does Aunt Jenny say about it?’
‘Aunt Jenny says she’ll meet us there,’ his father said, and that was all.
The train was cold: another passenger wanted the window open and there was a sharp breeze.
Tom sat on the scratchy seat with his thin knees knocking together.
It felt like his first time on a train, when he’d left Scotland.
The claustrophobia from his reduced vision worsened with the noise, the smell of coal, the rocking motion, the stares of other passengers.
‘We’ll be there soon, old boy,’ his father said. ‘Rest up and catch your breath. Jenny is driving down. She’ll meet us at the station. We thought the train would be smoother for you than the car.’
‘I don’t want to see her.’
‘Tom,’ said his father sharply. ‘She was trying to help, in her own way. I think she believed it’d be easier for you not to hear from me. Go easy on her, old thing.’
‘She’s cracked, Dad. She should have stayed out of it. Out of the whole business,’ Tom said in a low, choking voice. He folded his arms, gritting his teeth. ‘She didn’t need to come and take me away in the first place. I was jolly happy where I was.’
Tom found it hard to speak. To express quite how angry he was, how unfair it had been to the kid he was, how wrong it felt, still, in ways he couldn’t explain. He shook his head. ‘All those years, Dad. No letters from you. I thought you’d just forgotten about me.’
‘And I thought what I was doing was for the best,’ his father said.
He took Tom’s hand, their knees touching, joined.
Tom moved on the scratchy seats, his legs itching.
He felt hot, and strange, and tired, and raring to run around, like a wind-up toy.
But his father’s hand was warm, and calm.
‘Tom, Jenny and Henry love you. They loved their sister. They feel it’s their duty to look after you, to raise you as Irene’s son should be raised. ’
‘I’m your son, Dad!’ Tom said, trying to control his voice. This was the central point, the heart of it all, and yet it didn’t seem to matter to anyone else. ‘I want to be with you! Not them! Can’t you –’
His father gave a small, painful smile. ‘’Course you are. First and foremost. We’re the Ravens. Us two. You listen to me, Tom. You’re my boy. But I made promises that I broke. Jenny wants to do right by you. That means giving you the best chance in life.’
‘But I want to be –’
‘Tom!’ his father said, his voice slightly sharp.
‘What’s best for you? Growing up in a shack?
No money for wood or a square meal at the end of some months?
Going to school with farmers’ children and the tinker’s boy?
Or living in London, in a beautiful house surrounded by important paintings, going to a school with the sons of prime ministers and lords and boys who’ll run the country one day?
Don’t you see? You’ll have the world at your feet, if you just stick it out.
’ His grip on Tom’s hand tightened. ‘I’ve failed to provide for you at some times, my boy – oh, I know,’ he said, seeing Tom about to protest. ‘We were happy enough, weren’t we?
But to say no to this – to say no to what Irene wanted for you too – then I really would have failed you. ’
‘They don’t behave like they’re bothered about me,’ said Tom.
‘That’s just who they are,’ said his father. ‘But trust me. They’re bothered. I’d say it’s the only thing that matters, to Jenny anyway. They – oh, here we are.’
‘What were you going to say?’
‘I was going to say about Jenny, and me and your mother. We all make mistakes. That’s the thing about Sevenstones: why it was wonderful, you see, was because you were always forgiven.
You were just yourself.’ Edward stood up straight, his air force bearing still evident, and took down their case, then brushed the seat.
All the little, precise details that made his father so special, so thoughtful, so bewildering.
‘Wait till you see it, that’s all.’ He was smiling. ‘You’ll understand.’
He helped Tom up. ‘Gordon said almost the same thing,’ Tom said, holding on to the table by the window, as he looked out at the chalk downs, the golden autumn afternoon.
His father flicked a speck of dirt from Tom’s coat. ‘Gordon was right.’
They had arrived at a station called Tallboys, and Edward leaned out of the window to unlock the carriage door.
His father had said Jenny would meet them, but Tom was still surprised to see her there, in a loose long linen dress, quite unlike her silk London frocks, a straw hat jammed on to her piled-up hair, her cheeks shiny. She held out her hands.
‘Dear Tom,’ she said, eyes burning. ‘I am so glad. So glad. You’re here.’
Tom stared at his aunt. Waves of fury roiled inside him. His father got off the train first. ‘Here we are,’ he said, and he helped Tom down. Tom hated how pathetic he felt, not even able to judge the steps correctly, but he took his father’s hand.
‘Hello,’ he said, barely audible, surly.
Jenny said something very quietly. He stared at her.
‘What did you say?’
She scratched her nose. ‘I’m sorry. I said I’m sorry. I thought if you weren’t close to your father any more, because you believed he had sent you away, that it would be easier for you to adjust,’ she said blankly.
It took Tom a moment to realize what she was talking about. ‘But –’ he said, moving out of the way as another passenger brushed past them. ‘But that’s … that’s crackers, Aunt Jenny. That’s not how families … work .’