A Girl Called Hope Read online

  ‘But he will improve, won’t he, Doctor?’ Marjorie asked. ‘There is hope of him walking again one day?’

  ‘The chances of him walking again are, short of a miracle, almost nil.’

  Ralph heard the whispered words and stifled a groan. When Hope and Marjorie took him his supper he threw it on to the floor.

  Three

  Over the following weeks Hope and Marjorie watched Ralph every moment possible. Rumours abounded as news of Ralph’s attempted suicide spread. These were swiftly quashed by Marjorie, Freddy, and Hope and her friends but they didn’t quite go away. Hope lived in a haze of exhaustion, day following day with nothing to distinguish them from each other.

  Ralph had an uninvited visitor one morning, an ex-soldier who had lost a leg at Arnhem. Ernie Preece came with the intention of encouraging Ralph to be positive about his injuries. He began by telling him of a friend of his who had similar injuries to Ralph’s own.

  ‘I’m not interested,’ Ralph replied rudely. ‘How d’you think it can help me by knowing others have had the same thing to cope with? It isn’t the same. I don’t have the epithet “hero” to help me cope, do I? I wasn’t injured doing something brave. I walked into the road and was hit by a car when my mind was under stress from the demands of a persistent wife!’

  Ernie Preece didn’t stay long and he walked past a white-faced Hope murmuring an apology, as though he’d been responsible for her husband's cruel remarks.

  People came out of curiosity as well as to offer comfort and sympathy, many remarking that she was fortunate to have Ralph’s parents to share her struggles as she cared for Ralph. Hope couldn’t tell anyone that although she tried to help her mother-in-law to cope, Marjorie avoided doing anything to support her, and spoke only to make it evident she considered her daughter-in-law to blame for her son’s situation.

  Marjorie had written several letters to Phillip begging him to come home, explaining the injuries Ralph had suffered, but there had been no response. Phillip just discarded them unread. Eventually he asked his friend Matthew Charles to find out if his brother was recovered. ‘Mother makes such a fuss, so I never take much notice of her wailing.’

  ‘I’ll be in Cwm Derw in a few days. I have to go home and see Sally and the girls, they’re in some play or other,’ Matthew sighed. ‘I find it all so boring but I have to show my face at regular intervals. Thank goodness I work as a rep and can stay away for days at a time. Families, eh?’

  *

  Ralph’s family had worked out a rota, managing to provide cover for all of the days and part of the nights. Marjorie sat with Ralph for much of the day but called Hope when help was needed.

  It was Hope who fed him, changed his position, washed and cleaned him. It was hard, heavy work made worse by Ralph’s determination not to assist her. Pushing when she asked him to pull, turning the opposite way from the one she wanted and all the time glaring at her with angry eyes.

  He was rarely alone and he hated it. He tried to find odd moments, but it was almost impossible. When he did find himself minus his watchful protectors, he tried to increase his movements, exercising the parts of his body that still had muscle strength. He had never been a strong man but now he was determined to make his body do as much as it could. He didn’t want anyone to learn about his efforts, knowing they would want to help and he would be smothered by their concern.

  He invented goals for himself, stretching as far as this marker, then that. Straining to touch the floor without falling out of bed. He learned to drag his useless weight up in the bed by pulling on the metal frame behind his head.

  The bookcase Hope had bought and which Freddy had fixed on the wall for her contained a book that Ralph wanted to read. The Old Curiosity Shop wasn’t a particular favourite, it was simply out of reach and therefore a challenge.

  His arms and shoulders were becoming quite strong and he stretched up and up until his fingers almost reached the spine of the book. A spine made of paper and thin imitation leather that was stronger than his own spine, he thought as he collapsed once more back on to the bed.

  Reaching the book, pulling it from the shelf by his own effort, became an obsession, and at every opportunity, but only when he was unseen, he tried to fix his long slender fingers around it to pull it free. Every time, his fingers slipped and came away disappointed. Another couple of inches, that was all he needed, just a couple of inches.

  He was tormented by the thought that if he asked it would be lifted with ease and handed to him. That was something he did not want. He couldn’t admit to such helplessness. After days of struggling to free it from its place between Hard Times and Oliver Twist, he no longer wanted to read it. He just wanted to get it down, hold it in his hands, something achieved by defying his ruined body. He began to believe it would be an augury: to succeed was a promise that he would eventually recover.

  At night, when the house was silent and there was little chance of being seen, he would force his body that little bit further, stopping when the pain was too much, then beginning again. A month after he had been brought home from hospital, Hope woke soon after midnight and went downstairs for a drink and to check on Ralph. She came into the semi-dark room silently and saw him struggling. She lifted the book from its place and handed it to him.

  ‘Don’t struggle, darling, you might fall. Just call if you need something, I’ll always hear you and come.’

  He felt a fury that was so strong, almost a hatred of her and everyone else upon whom he depended, he couldn’t trust himself to speak. It was as though by retrieving the book for him she had lost him the chance of ever walking again.

  He waited in simmering silence as she adjusted his bedding and kissed him before going back upstairs. Then he stretched over, tumbled out of his bed on to the floor and reached for the poker. Rousing the fire by stirring its ashes he threw the book at the back of it and, still on the floor, watched the prospect of his recovery burn, tears of despair running unchecked down his face.

  He couldn’t sleep. He also knew he couldn’t face another day of this half-life. As the embers of the destroyed pages died he moved towards the chair. It took a long time to get into it. Usually he had reached it from the height of the bed or the couch; now the effort of pulling himself up from the floor exhausted him. After resting for an hour, getting himself out of the house and down the ramp was easy.

  The night was moonless yet there was enough light in the sky for him to see where he was going once his eyes became accustomed to the starlight. A sob escaped his lips once as he stopped to rest and saw a badger cross his path. It stared at him with curiosity before slipping into the hedge on the other side. It would belong to the sett that had given the house its name. Hope would have been delighted had she been with him. For a moment he wanted to go back and tell her, share the thrill of such an unexpected encounter, but bitterness returned and after a while he moved on.

  Apart from the crackling hum of his wheels on the gravelly surface the night was quiet, cold and clear. An owl passed overhead on silent wings; there wasn’t the slightest breeze and even the trees were motionless. The world was sleeping and he was utterly alone.

  He didn’t go down the narrow lane beside the wood, the scene of his previous attempt to end his miserable life, but continued on towards the railway line. There he went up the steep incline where the road bridged the rail that went from Cardiff to Swansea and the west. It took him a long time to get out of his chair and on to the parapet. Before he had achieved it, a train passed below him, rhythmically repeating the silly words they had chanted as children, tuppence a mile, tuppence a mile, and he felt again a sense of failure. A threat of hysterical laughter threatened as he thought, foolishly, that he had missed the train. Through the cloud of smoke that filtered up into the sky he continued to struggle free from the hated chair. Then he pulled himself painfully up and, balanced on the top of the low wall, he looked along the tracks and waited.

  An hour later, as dawn was lightening the sky, a
tramp saw the chair and, after glancing around and seeing no one to whom it might belong, he piled his collection of bags and string-tied bundles on to it. Like a child with a birthday treat, he sat on his worldly possessions and rode down the slope from the bridge then pushed it happily to the derelict house where he was living.

  *

  Hope was up very early and as usual she went straight in to see Ralph. He wasn’t there, and looking into the corner she saw with a feeling of dread that his chair was gone.

  She wrapped Davy in a blanket, ran to the telephone box and informed the police, then carrying a still sleeping Davy, she knocked on Kitty and Bob’s door.

  They dressed immediately, and with Bob carrying the child they went to await the arrival of the police. Bob left them to search the garden and those of their neighbours, opening sheds and going with some trepidation beyond the wood to where the brook widened and became deep before moving on to the field beyond.

  As soon as the details had been noted, one of the policemen went to tell Marjorie.

  ‘I’d hoped she needn’t know until he’d been found,’ Hope sobbed. ‘He’ll be found, I’m sure of it. He wouldn’t try anything… stupid, not now when he knows how it would distress us.’ Using a euphemism for suicide was a kind of protection. By not using the actual word it made it less likely to have happened.

  Two days and two nights passed without a sign of Ralph. Hope and Marjorie sat in the living room at Badgers Brook without a word being exchanged. People came and went, leads were followed, but no one had seen him since Hope had reached up and handed him the book he wanted, the ashes of which they had found in the grate. Then his chair was discovered in the possession of the tramp and fresh searches were made.

  On the fifth day he was found. Piecing together the bits and pieces of information, they gathered that he had fallen from the bridge where the tramp admitted finding the chair. He hadn’t been hit by a train but had fallen into a truck. The delay of manoeuvring his body on the parapet and throwing himself off had meant the train was already passing below him when he fell.

  Hypothermia had ended his life. Although it was March and winter had eased its frosty grip, the nights had been too much for him, injured, unable to move and wearing insufficient clothing. He had been found by a workman. Dirt and a light fall of snow had almost disguised him lying next to the small amount of coal left in a corner of the fifteenth wagon.

  *

  The days following the death of Ralph passed in a haze of bewilderment for Hope. His mother, red eyed with crying, rarely addressed a word to her and insisted on passing any necessary remarks via his father. When the news had reached them, Hope instinctively ran to Marjorie to hug and be hugged, seeking comfort in her grief, but she was pushed aside so fiercely she stumbled and almost fell. Days passed and still there was no chance for her to grieve as she concentrated on helping Marjorie and Freddy in any way she could. She had to be the strong one. Her own emotions were frozen deep inside her.

  When Marjorie’s outbursts were particularly hurtful Freddy looked embarrassed, but his own grief prevented him making a plea for sanity. Marjorie blamed Hope for Ralph’s death and he guessed that she would have been less able to cope if that transference of guilt were removed. He only knew he daren’t risk saying anything to support Hope in her grief, watching as the young woman tried to keep to a routine and protect Davy from the horrors of the tragic events.

  Hope’s first shock after hearing of Ralph’s lonely death was learning his bank account would be frozen. She had nothing more than the money in her purse. Kitty told her that was normal.

  Bob said nothing. She would learn the rest all too soon: that as a suicide all his assets would be forfeited. She would have nothing. Bob and Kitty took ten pounds out of their savings and handed it to her in one pound notes. ‘With care it will see you through, pay it back when you can,’ Kitty said kindly. ‘No hurry, wait till everything’s sorted, right?’

  Hope dealt with every day and its problems with an outward calmness, which seemed to exacerbate her mother-in-law’s anger towards her. But Hope knew that for Davy’s sake she needed to keep everything as normal as possible. Davy asked where his father was but seemed to accept Hope’s vague explanation that his had gone away for a while without too much concern. Unbelievably, almost guiltily, Hope was thankful for Ralph’s recent lack of interest in his son, as it was making Davy’s acceptance of his father’s absence easier.

  Both Marjorie and Freddy wrote to Phillip several times. Surely he’d come home now Ralph was dead? Without telling either of them, Hope also wrote to her brother-in-law explaining everything that had happened, and ending with a plea for him to come home and comfort his parents. She marked the envelope urgent and hoped that if he had moved someone would pass it on.

  *

  Connie saw the letters thrown into the fireplace and asked, ‘Are you not just a bit curious?’

  ‘I can imagine what they’ll say. How much they miss me, and when will I be coming home, and have I sold much work lately, and how did the exhibition go.’

  ‘But you say one was your father’s writing, and another was from neither and marked urgent. There might be something seriously wrong.’

  He kicked the letters closer to the flames and watched them curl, blacken and burn. ‘They no longer interest me, Connie. Now, shall we go for a walk and find a pub for lunch? The day is perfect and I don’t want it ruined by thinking about my tiresome parents.’

  *

  Marjorie went every morning to the gate to wait for the postman. Surely Phillip would come home now? She saw Matthew Charles one morning as he went into Mrs Hayward’s grocery store. He and Phillip had been close friends when they were at school and he might have kept in touch.

  ‘Matthew, d’you know where Phillip is living? He must have moved and forgotten to tell us. I’ve written many times but never have a reply. He must have moved.’ she said. ‘He would have come home once he knew about Ralph.‘

  Matthew hadn’t heard about the suicide of Ralph, and was shocked. He promised to get in touch. He knew what happened to any letters Phillip received from home but he thought his own might rate a little more attention. ‘I’ll write to him and I’ll also write to a friend who might know where he is. I’m sure he’ll come, once he knows.’ He hid his doubts well. Phillip had decided to cut himself off from his family and even the death of his brother might not persuade him to change his mind.

  *

  Kitty called at Badgers Brook every day and, on the first occasion after Ralph had been found, she volunteered to help prepare food for the funeral. When Hope went to Ty Mawr and mentioned this, Marjorie told her angrily – via Freddy – that the funeral was nothing to do with Badgers Brook, the house that had caused his death, and that the funeral would leave from Ty Mawr. Hope was too weary of spirit to argue.

  Without saying a word against his wife, Freddy walked home with Hope and Davy that day and stayed a while, working on the garden. He gave her a list of the seeds he had ordered and wrote down when and where she should plant them. The garden was his comfort and he seemed to want it to be hers too.

  Freddy insisted to his wife that Hope must be the one to arrange the funeral, even if the food afterwards was to be offered at Ty Mawr. With ill grace, the three of them went to discuss the arrangements and were told, sorrowfully and regretfully, that the church would not be involved. A place had been set aside for the internment of those who had taken their own life – again the euphemism helped – and they were told that it was in a corner of the cemetery away from the main avenues of graves.

  Hope began to be aware of people looking at her strangely, and as soon as she realized they were uneasy at the way Ralph had died she determinedly smiled, ignored their uncomfortable demeanour, their superstitious fears, insisted on acting as though everything was normal until they reacted to her pleasantries without wanting to take flight.

  Snow held off and there was a mellow feeling of a false spring. Freddy began coming
every day, and in the garden the beds were neat and ready for planting far earlier than most years. While she waited for the results of the post-mortem, then the autopsy and finally for permission to arrange the funeral, Hope could do nothing and she began helping Freddy in the garden with a growing interest.

  Vegetable and flower seeds were sown in the greenhouse Freddy and Bob had repaired for her and tomato plants were coaxed by a small oil heater. Already sturdy broad beans and summer cabbage were set out in the neat beds. Hope, with Davy’s enthusiastic assistance, planted a herb garden, and the preparation for the summer months seemed to override the horrors of death with a plan for the future. Hope’s grief and the guilt, constantly reinforced by Marjorie, overcame her only at night when there was no one for whom she needed to be brave.

  *

  The funeral was a quiet affair, shameful and subdued. The undertaker was kind and did what he could, but without the comfort of the traditional service the memories were of a cold, indifferent and brief moment.

  Marjorie invited a few people to call at the house but most stayed away. A suicide made it difficult for people to offer their sympathy. Aware of Marjorie’s distress yet unable to find the words and not knowing how she would react to attempts to comfort her and Freddy, most settled for a card or a brief note.