A Kind Man by Susan Hill Page B

his gut, eating what was left of him away and there was precious little to go. He would not send him into hospital unless he must. There wasnothing to be done, no tricks up their sleeve, and who in their right minds would want to go there to die? He was better off at home with the view to the peak out of the window and his wife to tend him.
    He glanced at the notes. Thirty-one years old and looking seventy now. But out there, among those who coughed and ached and grew as thin as Tommy, there were plenty of the young looking old and the old with even less time to live.
    Dr McElvey opened the surgery door and called for the next of them.
    Tommy walked more slowly home than he had ever done and as she watched him from the window Eve had a piercing moment of fear that he would not make the journey again and then she realised a truth she had never before understood. Everyone has a time when they are in their prime of life. Everyone has as little as one year when they are the best they will ever be, the healthiest, strongest, most handsome, most full of energy and hope, when they might do anything and it can be seen upon them, this prime, in their eyes, on their skin, in their walk. But they do not know it. Perhaps they cannot know it. If they could they would not wish the time away, as people do, even children when they are unhappy or sick or trailing through some tedium of growing up. No one can know it about themselves butothers may know. Others can see it on them and envy them. But it may even pass them by and then it is over and can never be recalled. And years later, they look back and know, recognise it as having been their prime, but of course by then it has gone and cannot be recalled.
    Tommy had had his prime, she had had hers. Not Jeannie Eliza. When she had met Tommy Carr that had not been the time, it had come a little later, after they had moved into number 6 The Cottages. The year they had made things as they ought to be and he had gone striding off early every morning and back at night as if the distance were nothing at all.
    And now it had gone.
    He came in wearily and she helped him off with his coat.
    ‘I thought you might have been later,’ Eve said, putting the teapot down. Nothing more. He would talk in his own time.
    He sat at the table sipping the tea and there seemed to be barely a flicker of life in him, but after a time, he reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out the medicines.
    Eve felt a spurt of relief, as if there, in the golden-coloured liquid and the small box, was the answer to everything, to the pain in his stomach and weakness, his poor colour and lack of appetite, his thinness.
    ‘He spoke of the hospital,’ Tommy said, ‘but he would rather me stay at home. I was glad of that.’
    ‘Why would he think of the hospital at all?’
    ‘Perhaps they’d find something.’ He touched the medicines. ‘I won’t go.’ He reached out his hand and touched hers briefly. ‘Don’t worry. Eve.’
    He ate two spoonfuls of a thick stew she had made and a square of bread before he said he was too full to manage much, sounding apologetic, as he always was for not taking more after the trouble she went to, and then he read the label of the bottle carefully before taking some of the liquid in water.
    ‘I’m going to do the chickens,’ Eve said.
    He came with her, though not all of the way to the bottom of the garden where the run was, and then stood watching. The rabbits had gone and they would not be replaced.
    As they went back into the lighted kitchen, Tommy said, ‘I wish she was here still.’
    Eve was silent.
    ‘I don’t want to think of you being on your own.’
    ‘I’m not on my own, I won’t be, I’ve you. What are you saying?’
    His expression as he turned to look at her was infinitely gentle, infinitely sad.
    ‘Well, maybe for a while longer, Eve, maybe with the medicines … he didn’t seem too sure.’
    ‘Sure of what? How? Tell me.’
    But he only shook his head and