A Kind Man by Susan Hill

watched the life seep out of him over the past months, and she put it down to the death of the child, after which he had seemed to shrink into himself and lose heart for anything, though he had always tried to encourage her not to do the same but to enjoywhat she could for Jeannie’s sake, and remember her with gladness. Neither of them needed words, each knew well enough what was in the other’s heart and neither could forget or hold out any hope for the future. She would have liked another child but sensed that there would not be one. That was for Miriam. All they could do was fill the quiet house with her boys from time to time, bringing some noise and life to it that way. But it was not the same. Jeannie had been a quiet, watching child.
    Eve took her hands out of the suds and held them up and the soft iridescent bubbles slid down her wrists and back into the water as she watched and thought about Tommy, trudging into town and to work, and then across the town to the doctor and then back home, and wondered how he would have the energy in him.

11
     
    KNOWING BETTER than anyone how things were in the town, Dr McElvey had a surgery every evening at six for those who could not pay and those surgeries were packed to the doors and out of the doors, with men coughing and women white and stooped and underweight, rickety children and infants too lacking in energy to cry. He was never done until nine and then opened the windows wide to let out the smell of sick human beings and of misery and poverty and distress.
    Tommy was among the first, finishing as he did at five and going straight down, though the room was starting to fill up even so, the benches round the walls taking as many as could be fitted onto them pushed up together. No one spoke, though many knew one another well enough, out of pride and a respect foreach other’s privacy, and out of the need to conserve energy, which talking drained too readily. People stared at the floor or the wall or fussed over their children and did not meet anyone else’s eye, though when the door opened to admit yet another there was a quick glance and then glance away as the identity of the newcomer was noted. Tommy was known to several so that the eyes were on him as he walked in and to one, who had not seen him for some time, his thinness and the deep hollows of his face and his poor colour were a shock and it was all the woman could do to keep from staring. She would say later, at home and to the street, that Tommy Carr had the look of death upon him, and so word would spread.
    He had brought an evening paper and held it up high so that the swelling in his jaw could not be inspected.
    And if he had been in the street and heard what was said, that he had the look of death upon him, he would only have agreed because that was what was happening to him surely, the slow sideways movements of death towards him, the gradual tightening of its grip. But in the last week or two not so very slow at all.
    He waited not more than half an hour and felt the eyes on his back as his turn came and he went in and the unspoken collective desire to follow him throughthe door into the surgery, to hear and have suspicions confirmed. But the door was a heavy one and there was a curtain across the corner where the couch was.
    Dr McElvey watched him come into the room, taking in the thinness and the slight stoop, the candle colour of Tommy’s skin and the gleam of the swelling above his jaw, the expression in his eyes. He remembered Jeannie Eliza. He had not seen either parent since the child’s illness and death but he was not surprised at the way the father looked now. A shocking death could have all manner of repercussions – or none. He had known families where a terrible death had occurred and other than the immediate tears and mourning, there had been no apparent effect on anyone, life had simply continued, though who knew what dark currents ran deep below the surface. But he saw the opposite too,