The Man Who Was Left Behind by Rachel Ingalls Page B

and reached the top of the stairs, choking. He went into his room, closed the door and leaned against it, coughing with his head down and his hands up against his mouth. He felt something like a hollowness inside him and a knife going through it. The coughing stopped and he opened his eyes, all the room jumping with spots. He sat down at the table, put his head down on it, and waited until he remembered what he had come home for.
    The book. It was lying in front of his face. Plutarch. He hadn’t read it, just flipped through it, catching a sentence here and there. That was the way he read everything now. He put out his hand for it. What was that on his hand, had he bumped into something? It looked like blood. How did that get there? He got up and went into the bathroom, to the basin, and washed his hands. Then seeing himself in the mirror he washed his face and rinsed out his mouth. There was blood there, too. He picked up his watch, lying next to the toothbrush. It had not been running for eight months and he had not worn it for three. He put it in his pocket, deciding to set it as soon as he saw a clock, and remembering four o’clock. Then he sat down at the table again.
    He needed some paper but couldn’t find any. He found his pen and a bottle of ink and thought perhaps he would tear a sheet out at the end of the book. But they’d notice it at the library and there would be a fuss.
    I must do it now, he thought, otherwise I’ll forget. And he opened the drawer where Bessie put his shirts and untacked the lining paper, a good large sheet of it. Hespread it out on the table, took up his pen, and wrote a will.
    He left something for Mitsy and something more for her child, enough money for Bessie to get a divorce and keep herself comfortably for the next five years. He went down a list of people, the names all crowding into his head at once as though he had remembered them all the time, people who had need of a small sum of money and would know exactly what to do with it. Then he left a fixed amount for flood relief, some more for disabled veterans, left the miscellaneous stocks and shares to be divided among relatives, writing down the names he knew and making provision for the ones he had forgotten or not been told of. That still left what young Bender would call a sizeable sum. He put it aside for the building of a new library, his old books to be installed in it. And then he thought of everything else in storage and started to deal with that. At the bottom he signed his name. He ought to have it done formally and witnessed, he supposed, but it was too much of a bother and he’d probably forget. Never mind, it would hold good as it was. He folded it up and put it in the pocket with his watch. Then he took up the book and went to the library.
    The wind was bitter and made his walking slow. Sit in the reading-room, that was another idea, except that the place had small windows and he didn’t like the thought that he couldn’t get out if he wanted to. He had seen old people sitting in there for the warmth, but they were not tramps, all the holes in their clothes had been darned. If he sat there, probably he’d be shooed out.
    It was the older woman behind the counter. He liked her better than the other one. She had grey hair and glasses and pudgy hands with normal fingernails. She took his Plutarch and he went over to the shelves. What he really wanted was a book that played to him like a tune, so that he did not feel his eyes scanning on the surface seeing nothing, or leaping from word to word making him turnthe pages so quickly because he was finished with the ones that could not hold him there.
    He stood between the walls of books and tried to concentrate. His eye was doing the same trick with the titles that it did with the pages, gliding from left to right, from right to left, noticing the colours but not really reading. He must have stood there a long time because all at once the other one was there back from