"Little wee ones with all the crusts cut off?"
"As thin as tissue paper, little wee triangles with all the crusts cut off, I promise. Come on now."
It had been on the tip of her tongue to add "my love, my darling, my heart," but somehow she could never bring herself to utter the wild endearments which sprang to mind whenever, as now, he seemed upset or lost. Would she ever find it possible to treat him wholly as the lover he was, would she ever manage to lose that rigid, shrinking horror of making a total fool of herself? Why was it she could only relax completely with him when they were secluded at the cottage or in their bed? Dawnie's bitterness rankled, and all the curious, speculative glances she and Tim got as they passed down Walton Street still had the power to humiliate.
Mary's courage was not the unconventional kind; how could it be? Having nothing as her birthright, her entire life up to the moment of meeting Tim had been designed to achieve material success, earn the approbation of those who had started out much better endowed. It could not come easily now to fly in the face of convention, sanctified by the law though her union with Tim was. While she longed passionately to forget herself, smother him with kisses and endearments whenever the impulse came, his inability to encourage her in a mature way made it quite impossible if there was the least chance of their being disturbed. Her dread of amusement or ridicule had even led her to ask Tim not to chatter about his marriage to anyone not already aware of it, a moment of weakness which she had regretted afterward. No, it was not easy.
As usual, Tim wanted to help her actively as she set about making the sandwiches, getting out the bread and butter, rattling the china noisily as he searched for plates.
"Would you find the big butcher's knife for me, Tim? It's the only one that's sharp enough to cut crusts off."
"Where is it, Mary?"
"In the top drawer," she answered absently, spreading a coat of butter on each slice of bread.
"Ohhhhhh! Mary, Mary!"
She turned quickly, something in his cry filling her with heart-stopping fear.
"Oh, my God!"
For an appalled second it seemed as if the whole room was blood; Tim was standing quite still by the counter, staring down at his left arm in unbelieving terror. From biceps to fingertips it ran pulsating rivers of blood, the outflow of a fountain spraying from the crook of his elbow. With the regularity of a time-piece the blood spurted in a vicious jet halfway across the room, tapered off, spurted again; a thin lake of it was gathering about his left foot, and the left side of his body glistened wetly, dripping its share onto the floor.
There was a roll of butcher's twine on a spool near the stove, and a small pair of scissors hanging on a cord near it; almost in the same instant that she had spun around, Mary ran to it and hacked off a piece several feet long, doubling and quadrupling it feverishly to make a thicker cord.
"Don't be afraid, dear heart, don't be afraid! I'm here, I'm coming!" she panted, snatching up a fork.
But he didn't hear; his mouth opened in a thin, high wail and he ran like a blinded animal, bumping into the refrigerator, caroming off the wall, the gushing arm flailing about him as he tried to shake it off, throw it away so that it no longer was a part of him. Her cries blended with his; she lunged at him and missed, pulled up short and tried again. Spinning in fear-crazed circles, he saw the door and made for it, plucking at his arm and screaming shrilly. His bare feet splashed into the pool of blood on the floor and he slipped, crashing full length. Before he could rise Mary was on him, holding him down, beyond any further attempts to calm him in her frenzy to tie off the blood supply to his arm before it was too late. Half sitting, half lying on his chest, she grasped the arm and wrapped her string about it above the elbow, knotted it securely and put the fork underneath to twist the cord until it almost disappeared into his flesh.
"Tim, lie still! Oh, please, please, Tim, lie still! I'm here, I won't let anything happen to you, only you must lie still! Do you hear me?"
Between panic and loss of blood he was done; chest heaving, he lay beneath her and sobbed. Her head came down until her cheek was against his, and all she could think of was the times she had prevented herself from calling him all those lovely, loving names, forced herself to sit calmly opposite him when she longed to take him in her arms and kiss him until he gasped.
There was a pounding on the back door, and the Old Girl's voice; lifting her head, Mary screamed.
"I heard the weirdest noises all the way over in me own house," Mrs. Parker babbled as she pushed at the door, then as she saw the blood-washed kitchen she made a sound halfway between a gasp and a retch. "Jesus Christ!"
"Get an ambulance!" Mary panted, afraid to take her weight off Tim in case he panicked again.
Nothing Mrs. Parker could say would persuade Mary to get up; when the ambulance arrived not five minutes later she was still on the floor with Tim, her face pressed to his, and the two ambulance men had to lift her away.
Emily Parker went with her to the hospital, trying to comfort her as they rode in the back with Tim and one ambulance man.
"Don't worry about him, pet, he'll be all right. It looked like an awful lot of blood, but I've heard people say that a pint of it spilled looks like ten gallons."
The district hospital was only a short distance away, on the other side of the brick pits, and the ambulance reached it so quickly that Mary still had not recovered her powers of speech when they wheeled Tim away from her into" casualty. After his fall he had seemed to lapse into a kind of stupor, not aware of her or of his surroundings; he did not open his eyes once, almost as if he was afraid of what he might see should he open them, see that horrible thing which had once been his arm.
Mrs. Parker helped Mary to a seat in the elegant waiting room, chattering all the time. "Ain't this nice?" she asked, trying to get Mary's mind off Tim. "I remember when this was just a couple of little rooms squeezed between X-ray and medical records. Now they've got this grouse new place, real nice. All them potted plants and everything make you feel like it ain't a hospital at all! I've seen worse hotel lobbies, pet, honest I have. Now you sit there nice and quiet until the doctor comes while I go and find me old mate Sister Kelly, see if I can get a hot cuppa tea and some bikkies for youse."
The admitting registrar came in soon after Mrs. Parker had gone off on her errand of mercy. Mary managed to get to her feet, licking her lips in an effort to speak; she still had not uttered a word.
"Mrs. Melville? I just saw the ambulance man outside for a moment, and he told me your name."
"Tih-Tih-Tim?" Mary managed to say, shaking so badly she had to sink into her chair again.
"Tim's going to be fine, Mrs. Melville, really he is! We've just sent him into the operating room to have the arm repaired, but there's no reason to fear for him, I give you my word. We've started him on intravenous fluids and we'll probably give him a pint or two of blood the minute we've got his type, but he's quite all right, just in shock from loss of blood, that's all. The arm wound isn't going to be too difficult to attend to, I've looked at it myself. A good clean cut. What happened?"
"He must have let the carving knife slip somehow, I don't know. I wasn't looking at him when it happened, I just heard him call for me." She looked up pitifully, "Is he conscious? Please make him understand that I'm here, that I haven't gone away and left him alone. He gets terribly upset when he thinks I've abandoned him, even now."
"He's under light anaesthesia at the moment, Mrs. Melville, but when he comes round I'll make sure he knows you're here. Don't worry about him, he's a grown man."
"That's just it, he's not. A grown man, I mean. Tim's mentally retarded, and I'm the only person he's got in all the world. It's terribly important that he knows I'm here! Just tell him Mary's outside, very close."
"Mary?"
"He always calls me Mary," she said childishly. "He never calls me anything but Mary."
The admitting registrar turned to go. "I'll send one of our junior residents in to tak
e some particulars for the hospital records, Mrs. Melville, but he'll be brief. This is a simple accident case, no need for too many particulars, unless he's got any health problems aside from his mental retardation."
"No, he's in perfect health."
Mrs. Parker came back with Sister Kelly behind her bearing a tea tray.
"Drink this while it's hot, Mrs. Melville," said Sister Kelly. "Then I want you to go along the corridor to the bathroom, take off all your clothes and have a good steaming bath. Mrs. Parker's volunteered to go home and get you some fresh clothes, and in the meantime you can wear a patient's bathrobe. Tim's fine, and you'll feel so much better after you've soaked awhile in a good hot bathtub. I'll send a nurse to show you the way."
Mary looked down at herself, only then realizing that she was as covered in Tim's blood as he had been himself.
"Drink your tea first, while Dr. Fisher takes some particulars for us."
Two hours later Mary was back in the waiting room with Mrs. Parker, clad in fresh clothing and feeling more like herself. Dr. Minster, the emergency surgeon, came to reassure her.
"You can go home, dear, he's fine. Came through the surgery with flying colors, and now he's sleeping like a baby. We'll leave him in intensive care for a little while, then we'll transfer him to one of the wards. Two days just to watch him, then he can go home."
"He must have the best of everything, a private room and anything else he might need!"
"Then we'll transfer him to the private wing," Dr. Minster soothed expertly. "Don't worry about him, Mrs. Melville. He's a beautiful physical specimen, really beautiful."
"Can't I see him before I go?" Mary pleaded.
"If you like, but don't stay. He's under sedation and I'd prefer it if you didn't try to rouse him."
They had put Tim in a huge, trolley-like bed behind a screen, in one corner of a room filled with a bewildering array of equipment that emitted muted clanks, hisses, and beeps. There were seven other patients, ill enough to trigger a momentary panic in Mary's mind. A young nurse was standing beside Tim unwrapping a blood pressure cuff from around his good arm. Her eyes were on her patient's face instead of on what she was doing, and Mary stood for a moment watching her obvious admiration. Then she looked up, saw Mary and smiled at her.
"Hello, Mrs. Melville. He's asleep, that's all, so don't worry about him. His blood pressure's excellent and he's out of shock."
The waxen pallor had gone from his face, leaving it, sleeping and smooth, softly flushed; Mary reached out to push the matted hair away from his forehead.
"I'm just about to take him down to the private wing, Mrs. Melville. Would you like to walk along with me and see him put into bed before you go home?"
They told her not to visit him until the following day late in the afternoon, for he continued to sleep and Mary knew her presence could be at best a yigil. When she arrived she found him gone from his room, away to undergo tests; she sat and waited for him patiently, refusing all the offers of tea and sandwiches with a polite, strained smile.
"Does he realize where he is and what happened?" she asked the ward Sister. "Did he panic when he woke up and found I wasn't there?"
"No, he was fine, Mrs. Melville. He settled down very quickly and he seems to be happy. In fact, he's such a sunny, bright person that he's become the ward favorite."
When Tim saw her sitting in the chair waiting for him he had to be discouraged from leaping off his trolley to hug her. "Oh, Mary, I'm so glad you're here! I thought I might not see you for a long time."
"Are you all right, Tim?" she asked, kissing his brow quickly because two nurses were standing watching.
"I feel fine again, Mary! The doctor made my arm all better; he sewed it all together where the knife cut it, and there's no more blood or anything."
"Does it hurt?"
"Not much. Not like the time a load of bricks fell on my foot and it got broken." Early the following morning Mary got a phone call from the hospital, telling her that she could take Tim home. Stopping only to tell Mrs. Parker the good news, she flew to the car with a small case containing Tim's clothes in one hand and her breakfast toast in the other. Sister met her at the ward door and took the case, then ushered her into a sitting room to wait.
She was just beginning to become impatient when Dr. Minster and the admitting registrar walked in.
"Good morning, Mrs. Melville. Sister told me you'd arrived. Tim ought to be ready very soon, so don't worry. They won't let you out of this place without a bath and a fresh dressing and Lord knows what."
"Tim is all right?" Mary queried anxiously.
"Absolutely! He'll have a scar to remind him to be more careful with carving knives in the future, but all the nerves to the hand are intact, so he won't lose power or sensation. Bring him to my rooms in a week's time and I'll see how everything is going. I may take the stitches out then, or leave them awhile longer, depending on how it looks."
"Then he really is all right?"
Dr. Minster threw back his head and laughed. "Oh, you mothers! You're all alike, full of worry and anxiety. Now you've got to promise me that you'll stop flapping over him, because if you let him see you've been reduced to this sort of state you'll give him ideas and he'll begin to favor the arm more than he ought. I know he's your son and your maternal feelings are particularly strong because of his special dependence on you, but you must resist your tendency to cluck over him needlessly."
Mary felt the blood welling up under her skin, but she pressed her lips together and lifted her head proudly. "You've misunderstood, Dr. Minster. Funny that it didn't occur to me, but I suppose you've all misunderstood. Tim isn't my son, he's my husband."
Dr. Minster and the admitting registrar looked at each other, mortified. Anything they tried to say would sound wrong, and in the end they said nothing, just got themselves to the door and slipped outside. What could one possibly say after making a gaffe like that? How ghastly, how absolutely ghastly, and how embarrassing! Poor, poor thing, how dreadful for her!
Mary sat in a haze of tears, fighting their tendency to spill over with every ounce of what strength she had left. Whatever she felt, Tim must not see her eyes all red, nor must any of those pretty young nurses. No wonder they had all been so open to her about their admiration for Tim! One said some things to mothers and quite different things to wives, and now that she thought about it they had indeed treated her like a mother, not a wife.
Well, it was her own stupid fault. If she had been her usual calm, collected self throughout those agonized hours of waiting and wondering, it would never have slipped her attention that they all assumed she was Tim's mother. It was even possible that they had asked her and she had replied in the affirmative. She remembered the young intern coming up to her and asking if she was the legal next of kin, but she could not remember what she had answered. And why shouldn't they have assumed she was his mother? At her best she looked her age, but with the shock and worry of Tim's accident weighing her down she looked sixty at least. Why hadn't she used a personal pronoun which could have offered them some clue? How odd the quirks of fate; she must have said and done everything to reinforce their misapprehension, done nothing to dispell it. Mrs. Parker must have done the same, and Tim, poor, anxious-to-please Tim, had absorbed her lesson too well when she had impressed on him that he must not rave about marrying her. They probably thought his calling her Mary was just his way. And no one had ever asked her if he was single or married; hearing he was not the full quid, they simply took it for granted that he was single. Mentally retarded people did not marry. They lived at home with their parents until they were orphaned and then they went to some sort of institution to die.
Tim was waiting in his room, fully dressed and very eager to be gone. Steeling herself to an outward calmness and composure, she took his hand in hers and smiled at him very tenderly.
"Come on, Tim, let's go home," she said.
COLLEEN McCULLOUGH is the internationally known author of six novels:
<
br /> TIM,
THE THORN BIRDS,
AN INDECENT OBSESSION,
A CREED FOR THE THIRD MILLENNIUM,
THE LADIES OF MISSALONGHI, and the most recent,
THE FIRST MAN IN ROME.
She lives with her husband, Ric Robinson, on Norfolk Island in the South Pacific.
Colleen McCullough, Tim
(Series: # )
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