8 THE LIMPING MAN

Two accounts of life and age

“We were hoping not to see you again for at least a decade,” said a cheery voice, the sort that makes a man who’s pretending to be asleep open his eyes and look up. Father Tinder was the man pretending to be asleep, his were the eyes that opened, and Dr Simpson was standing by his bed, looking down at him.

“Am I dying?” asked the Priest, pathetically.

“Now don’t be silly, Father, you did have a mild heart attack a few weeks ago which brought you to our attention, and you were referred back to us with chest pains that you didn’t like, but nobody has yet died of indigestion, which was what you seem to have had.”

“I thought I might meet my God this time,” muttered the priest, almost regretfully.

“Then you should have a better diet! Too much acidic fruit, my friend, and not enough roughage.”

“I was told to eat more fresh fruit!”

“Yes, but not exclusively. Just be sensible and follow the rule book and you’ll probably outlast me, and your deity will have to wait for the pleasure of your company for quite a few years yet,” murmured Doctor Simpson.

Then he sat down in the chair next to Father Tinder’s bed and indicated a patient at the other side of the small four-bed ward they were in.

“You see that gentleman?” he asked, “the one who’s always fast asleep?”

“He doesn’t have much to say,” replied the Priest.

“Then I’ll tell you about him. His story might well help you. He has spent the last goodness-knows how many years looking after his wife as the years trammelled her, caring for her in every conceivable way, terrified that she might die before him. You see, he loves her, always has loved her, since they were at school together. He told me about it, and his story was too touching for words. And some years ago he began to fear for her. She started getting forgetful, doing odd things, getting lost in familiar places, that sort of thing...”

“You mean … she became, what do they call it, senile?”

The doctor nodded. “That, indeed, is what she became, and still is. And that gentleman, and he is a gentleman, a true loving gentleman, spent so much time protecting his fair maiden from the ravages of time that he forgot all about himself. He never looked in the mirror to see how old he was becoming but carried on as if he was a man half his age. He cared for Miriam, that’s his wife, through illness and health, did everything for her, even attended to cleaning her after she had been incontinent, and all the time forgetting that he was getting older himself.”

“I suppose that happens quite a lot,” muttered the Priest, not comfortable with the subject and wondering where the doctor was taking it.

“She is alive still,” sighed the doctor, “if the state she is in can be called alive, because in every conceivable way she’s as good as dead. She can’t come and see the poor fellow, and I’m not breaking any confidences when I suggest that, well into his nineties, he hasn’t got long left. But he won’t see Miriam again. She won’t visit him and even if she did, when she looks at him she doesn’t know who he is and when she talks to him as far as she knows she is speaking to a stranger. It breaks his heart, but he loves her still, even adoring the woman she has become because in her broken mind he can see shadows of the sprightly, happy, laughing woman she once was.”

“Why are you telling me this, Doctor?” asked the Priest.

“Because it troubles me. They will both die, all people die, and if your Heaven exists, and I can’t believe it does, but if there is a chance for believers to meet their gods, will they spend eternity in the shadow world of a broken mind, for ever forgetting that there were good times?”

Father Tinder frowned and would have stamped his feet had he not been in bed.

“They won’t meet, doctor, it’s impossible,” he said, “his wife, no matter how hard he loves her, is a woman, and women don’t go to Heaven. There are books, papers, manuscripts from the Vatican in which such things are discussed at length. It’s quite clear...”

“Oh dear. I hadn’t realised that. So what happens to the fair sex, Father?” asked the doctor.

“They die and are buried. That’s all. And it’s enough,” replied Samuel.

Then a voice cracked out from across the ward. The old man, the one who spent his time apparently asleep, had opened his eyes.

“If that’s your religion, Priest, I want nothing of it!” he snapped, “and may you and your kin rot in hell!”

oo0oo

“I’m going to visit him,” said Sophia to Constance. It was the next day and talk had returned to the Priest in hospital.

“He’s back home again,” Constance told her, “apparently he only had a touch of indigestion, and it scared the Bishop who thought he was dying!”

“I suppose indigestion can be nasty,” murmured Sophia, frowning, “though I can’t imagine confusing it with heart failure!”

“I suppose after a scare like the one he had when you told him what you thought of him on the street it might be safer to get checked out,” asserted Constance. “So when are you going to call at the Presbytery?”

“I thought later… as long as there’s nobody like a Bishop tucking him into bed!”

“No, the Bishop’s gone back to his own place, or so I’ve been told. If you’re going after I finish here I’ll come with you if you like, you know, hold your hand in case he turns nasty!”

“Is he likely to?”

“I was joking, silly! According to everyone, he’s a softy, but with some very peculiar ideas.”

“What sort of peculiar ideas?” asked Sophia.

“I’m not sure and it’s only rumour, but someone told me that he’s got the notion that we’re all in the middle of a titanic war between God and Satan. This person said he really believes it and that the only souls to be saved are those that end up in Heaven. The rest go to Hell, and there’s no way out of that place!”

“That’s medieval! He can’t still believe that!”

“It was only a rumour, as I said. Other than that they say he’s a really nice bloke who’d do just about anything to help his parishioners, those that go to his church and are in need of someone to talk to.”

An elderly man in a waterproof gaberdine coat, eccentric bearing in mind it was a dry summer’s day outside the library, nudged up to Sophia. He had a walking stip with a carved handle in the shape of a parrot, and he walked with a pronounced limp. Constance knew him because he was a frequent visitor to the library, where he read the broadsheet newspapers for half the day.

“Good morning, Bernard,” she greeted him.

“Is that the Father you’re gossiping about?” he asked.

As there was only one Catholic church in Brumpton there could have been only the one Father they were talking about, so Sophia nodded.

“He’s a good man,” murmured Barnard, “and he saved my life once.”

“Really?” asked Constance, suddenly curious. She’d heard plenty of stories, but none involving matters of life and death.

“He didn’t know it, though,” continued the man, “but it all happened a few years ago, and I’d been to a drinking do at the pub with my work colleagues. I’d call them workmates, but we weren’t properly mates, if you see what I mean! Anyway, I was plaiting my legs on the way home after the do when I stumbled and fell into the road. The Father was walking along the same bit of pathway and he grabbed hold of me and pulled me back just in time. A lorry was roaring past me and, quick as he’d been he wasn’t quick enough to save my foot! The lorry smashed it to smithereens, it did. But without that Father I’d have been dead by now, and not just mourning my limp!”

“I’m sorry to hear about your foot...” began Sophie.

“It was a blessing, lassie, a real blessing,” grinned Bernard, “because, you see, it reminds me every day of my life about the evils of the demon drink, and I ain’t touched a drop since it happened. Nor will I, not ever. So that’s summat else the Father saved me from… a rotten liver!”

“At least you’re well now,” comforted Sophia, making a mental note to use this one old man’s experiences as an aside in the book she was writing.

“And you want to know why he reckoned he saved me, at risk to himself, may I add?”

“Tell us,” invited Constance.

“He said as how, in my state, I was in no condition to meet my maker, for the Lord don’t like drunks, and I was a very bad drunk!”

“And you’ve been sober ever since?” asked Sophia.

“Ever since that day as was,” grinned the old man, “now if you’ll excuse me, I need a read, and I’ll try this.”

He put his book before Constance, but it was Sophia who blushed.

The book was one she had written, and was a sentimental romance filled with suggested passion and, in common with all her writing, very little sex.

© Peter Rogerson 14.01.19