第20章 The Long List

The last ward of the Marrowden closed on a Friday in the autumn of 1970, and it did not close in the way the people who had worked there had imagined. They had imagined a day with a ceremony and a brass plate to match the one they had taken down from the old wing, and a paragraph and a photograph, and a small crowd on the slope. What came instead was three years of stages, of beds going out one bay at a time and never coming back, of wards closing and reopening as temporary accommodation and closing again, of corridors that grew emptier and lights that were turned off for good and doors that were locked and keys that were handed down to Hesketh or hung on a board in the office no one now used. By the last year there were four wards left out of the nine, then two, then one, and the one was Bellcairn, the children's ward, which was kept open to the end because the children could not be moved in stages the way adults could, and Effa Ivaline, who had come up from Craddon as a probationer in 1932 and had boiled her ward's linen in her mother's copper before she could read a temperature, closed the last bed of Bellcairn herself on the last Friday, and did not cry until the children had gone down the slope in the ambulance and the ward was empty. Hesketh had photographed the chalk wall before the boiler room was shut off, because Coline Marchen, who was seventy-five and had written to the board to ask, had said that the wall was the only record in the building of who had kept it warm, and the board had not known what she meant and had given permission anyway. Errol Wexcombe painted the window frame one last time in the year the water was turned off, and then took his ladder and his pot and went, because a foreman keeps the water out of the house he is standing in until the day the house is finished. The graves at Alderfield were kept, as the paper had recommended, and a low wall was built around them and a gate put in, and the two acres were left to the grass, and the rest of the hill was sold and the rest of the building came down over the following year, ward by ward, the iron beds going out through the yard gate the way the coffins had gone out for a hundred years, and out through it in the end went the last thing that had ever been carried up the slope, which was the framed photograph of Hespera Selvine's sister and her sister's child, taken down from the shelf in the matron's room by Effa and carried home to Craddon in a paper bag. But before any of that, on the last morning, a woman came to the yard gate with a child on her hip. Adela Hastrey was in the yard that morning, supervising the loading of the last of the beds, and the gate was open and the woman walked in as the people of Craddon had walked in for sixty years, without knocking, and stood in front of her and asked for a doctor for the child, and did not know, or had not understood in the way that people do not understand an announcement, that the Marrowden had closed. The child was hot and breathing quickly and the woman had come up the slope from the court off Craddon where Adela's own grandmother had lived, and Adela looked at the woman and at the child and then at the yard gate behind her and at the empty ward above her, and did the only thing the building had ever been for, which was to take the child from the woman's hip and carry her across the yard into the Quillock, where the clinic had opened that month with the door on the lane as Adela had asked, and where there was a bed and a nurse and a doctor now, because the condition had been accepted and the door had been kept open, and the woman followed her in and sat down in the chair by the desk and began, at last, to cry, which is what a mother does when the door she was afraid of has turned out to be open after all. Adela was in the old office that evening, in the room at the head of the stairs with the desk and the window that looked down over Craddon, waiting for the last of the paperwork to be taken down, and she took Fenmore's diary out of her bag, as she had taken it out almost every evening for two years, and read the last part of it again. She had read the two columns so many times that she knew the eleven names by heart, and she read the first column by the page the way one reads a list of the dead in a country church, past her grandmother, past the others, down to the bottom. And then, for the first time, she turned the page after the eleven names, to the leaf at the very back of the book, the endpaper, where Fenmore had begun something in the last year of his life and had not finished. There was a third column there, ruled like the others, and at its head, in his own hand, he had written nothing at all, no heading, no date, only one word, which was a name, and the name had no number against it and no cross and no entry below it, and the rest of the column was blank, and it had been blank since the year he died. The name was not one Adela knew. She took it down the stairs to Effa Ivaline, who was the last of the staff in the building and was sitting in the porter's lodge with a cup of tea and the log, and she showed her the page, and Effa looked at the name for a long time, and read it twice, the way she read everything, and shook her head. "I do not know it," Effa said. "And I have read every name that came up that slope for thirty years." The last of the beds went out through the yard gate at seven, and the gate was closed behind them and the lamp over it was taken down, and the building that had been the nearest door for a hundred years stood empty on the hill with its face turned away from the city and its door on the lane, where the clinic was open and would be open in the morning. Adela drove down the slope with the diary on the seat beside her and the name without a number still in her head, and behind her, in the town hall, in a drawer that would not be opened for a week, there was a letter that had been posted three days before and addressed to the Marrowden Infirmary, and it had been forwarded up the slope and had come back down again, and it was waiting for her, and no one had thought to say what was in it.