Will Self - Grey Area

Then the large, velvet-robed woman started to cough. It was, Dave-Dave Hutchinson noted — being now as adept at judging the nature of a cough as any doctor — a particularly hoarse and rattling cough, with an oil-drum resonance about it, admixed with something like the sound of fine shingle being pulled this way and that by breakers on a beach.

‘Now there — there, Mrs Dykes, please don’t upset yourself, please. .’ He pulled the little brown bottle of codeine linctus from his pocket and showed it to her. ‘I have some linctus here — that’ll help us all to stop coughing for a while.’

‘Ach-cach-cach-cach-Oh Mr ach-cach-Hutchinson, you are too kind, too kind. Christabel-Sharon, kindly fetch the linctus glasses.’ Christabel-Sharon exited. The two of them were left regarding one another over the chaise-longue; on which the child lay, her laboured breath wheezing contrapuntally to the choof-choof of the nebuliser.

‘Did you say,’ asked Dave-Dave Hutchinson, by way of making polite conversation, ‘that you had an oxygen tent?’

‘It’s nothing really,’ she replied, ‘hardly a tent at all, more of an oxygen fly-sheet.’ They both laughed at this, and it was a laughter that Dave-Dave Hutchinson was profoundly grateful for. It ruptured the rather fraught atmosphere of the room, earthing the static sheets and flashes of his hostess’s spiritual intensity. But his gratitude didn’t sustain for long, because even this trifling response to her witticism, this strained guffaw, was enough to give him a coughing fit — this time a bad one.

He sat back down on the armchair, both hands clasped against his mouth. Dave-Dave’s lungs heaved so, they threatened to turn themselves inside out. He laboured to retain some element of composure, or at any rate not to void himself on the Dykes’ Persian carpet. The edges of his visual field turned first pink, then red, and eventually purple. He felt himself losing control, when a cool, white hand was placed on his arm and he heard a voice say, ‘Here, Mr Hutchinson, pray take one of these, it looks as if you could do with one.’ It was Christabel-Sharon. She had materialised back inside the room and was proffering him a neat pad of gauze. ‘You’ll doubtless need it for the — ‘

‘Buh, buh —’ he laboured through his hands to express his shame and embarrassment.

‘Now, now, Mr Hutchinson, you musn’t worry about a bit of sputum with us,’ said Jean-Drusilla Dykes firmly. ‘We know how it is, we understand that the normal proprieties have had to be somewhat relaxed during the current situation.’ He gratefully seized the pad and as discreetly as he was able deposited several mouthfuls of infective matter into its fluffy interior. When he had finished Christabel-Sharon passed him a bucket lined with a plastic bag.

Simon-Arthur Dykes came back into the room. ‘Did you sort the children out, Simon-Arthur?’ asked his wife.

‘Ye-es.’ he sighed wearily. ‘Henry and Magnus are back in the small room, so Storm can go up to the oxygen tent whenever she’s ready; and then Dave-Dave can take a turn with the nebuliser. He obviously has need of it — and I’m not surprised, coming out on this vile night.’

‘Is the humidifier on in the boys’ room?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘And the ioniser in ours?’

‘Yes, yes, dear Jean-Drusilla, please don’t trouble yourself.’ He crossed the room to where his wife stood, and taking her arm, bade her sit beside him on a divan covered with brocade cushions. Their two heads leaned together and the four feverish spots on their cheeks reached an uneasy alignment.

‘Look, Simon-Arthur,’ said Christabel-Sharon, gesturing towards the round silver tray she had brought in from the kitchen, ‘doesn’t the linctus look pretty?’

It did look pretty. She had poured the thick green liquid out into tiny, cut-glass linctus glasses. In the yellow-and-blue light from the fire the whole array sparkled the spectrum. She offered the tray to Dave-Dave Hutchinson. ‘Mr Hutchinson, will you have some?’

‘Thank you, Ms Lannière.’

‘Please, do use my matronymic — and may I use your patronymic?’

‘Certainly. . Christabel —’

‘Christabel-Sharon,’ she said with her ever-so-slightly affected voice, ‘and you are Dave-Dave, aren’t you?’

‘That’s right.’ He blushed.

Taking one of the tiny glasses, Dave-Dave sipped judiciously, savouring the thickness and sweetness of the stuff, whilst assaying the weight of the crystal it came in. At home he and Mrs Hutchinson drank their linctus from Tupperware. Christabel-Sharon handed two glasses of linctus to the Dykeses and took one herself. Then they all sat together in silence for a while, contentedly tippling.

It was a good little party. One of the best evenings that any of the inhabitants of the Brown House could remember having in a long time. After Storm-Christabel had gone up to the oxygen tent and Dave-Dave had had a good long go on the anaboliser, Simon-Arthur set up a small card table and they played whist for a couple of hours. Christabel-Sharon paired off with Dave-Dave, and there was an agreeably flirtatious character to the way they bid together, often taking tricks through shared high spirits rather than any skill at the game.

There was no discussion of weighty matters or what really preoccupied them all. The mere presence of Dave-Dave at the Brown House was a sufficient reminder. The codeine linctus helped to free up the constrictions in their four pairs of lungs, which did necessitate frequent recourse by all parties to Christabel-Sharon’s supply of gauze pads and the attendant bucket. But such was the bonhomie that the linctus engendered that none of them felt much embarrassment, or awkwardness.

Only when Jean-Drusilla went out to the kitchen to ask the maid to make them some ham sandwiches, and her husband followed her to get a bottle of port from the cellar, was there any exchange that alluded to the wider issue. ‘It is strange, is it not, my dear,’ said Simon-Arthur, leaning his head against the wall and fighting the dreadful torpor that threatened to encase him, ‘to have a newsagent for company of an evening.’

‘Yes, dear, I suppose it is,’ she replied distractedly — she was helping the maid to de-crust some slices of bread, ‘but he is a very nice man, a very Christian man. I don’t imagine for a second that simply because we receive him in this fashion that he imagines we think him quality for an instant.’

‘Quite so, quite so.’

‘Christabel-Sharon seems to have taken quite a shine to him — is he married?’

‘Oh yes, but I fear the poor man’s wife is in extremis. He told me this afternoon that she was getting Brompton’s — hence his oversufficiency of linctus.’

‘I see. Well, while in the normal course of things such a flirtation might not be seemly, I think that in these times we live in, almost anything — within the bounds of propriety, of course — that serves to inculcate good feeling can be accepted.’

‘You are entirely right, my dear,’ replied Simon-Arthur, who had, like so many men of his age and class, long since abandoned the matter of making these practical moral judgements to his wife.

But late that night when Simon-Arthur was in his dressing room, readying himself for bed, the fog and all the awful misery that hung about it began to impose itself on him once more. He slumped down in a broken rattan chair that he kept in the little room — which was barely more than a vestibule. The codeine linctus was wearing off and he could feel the tightness in his chest, the laval accumulation of mucus, flowing down his bronchi and into each little sponge bag of an alveolus. Felt this fearfully, as his nervous system reintroduced him to the soft internality of his diseased body, its crushable vulnerability.