Going Home - Doris May Lessing [94]
That winter, the spastic child got pneumonia and went to hospital where he nearly died. Both parents were sick with worry, and good friends again because of it. Mrs Wharton visited the hospital three times a day, taking the baby with her.
When the spastic child came out, the bills were over £50, and now they really could not meet them. There was no money and Bob Wharton had to accept charity from a fund that existed for such needs, and to do it changed him in his own eyes from an independent man to a beggar.
But this was not the worst. During those weeks when the child was nearly dying, he neglected his trade-union work, and when it came to re-election, one of his mates got up at the meeting, and said that Brother Wharton was having too much personal trouble; he should be released from trade-union activities for the time being. And so Bob Wharton was no longer an official. He felt as if he had been condemned by his society.
He grew morose, and began to drink badly. Mrs Wharton nagged at him, and he shouted back; and they would sit together, frightened because they were hating each other. And things would be all right for a little while.
Then the eldest child, a girl, got ill for the first time in her life; and it was terrible, for there was no person in that family with the right to be ill but the spastic child. The bills were there again, the doctor’s bills and the hospital bills. And when the girl came out, they said she must go for a holiday, so she went to the seaside on charity.
But Alice Wharton was saying to Bob that they could have paid for that holiday on what he spent on brandy.
They quarrelled and bickered, and Dickson, our servant, would stand on his broom, listening, and say with a small shake of his head: ‘That child it should die. That sick boy, it is no good for them.’
Which is how everybody in the Mansions felt, but no one dared to say it.
Bob used to come over the iron bridge to our porch and sit and talk, not about the native problem now, but about his own.
There were two solutions to his difficulties, as he saw them. First, since all their debts and troubles came from illness, they should go back to Britain. There was no unemployment in Britain now, and above all, there was the health service. Of course, one paid for the health service indirectly, but one could go to a hospital and have a doctor and not have to face these heavy bills afterwards. But to pay the fares back to Britain would cost over £300. He had not got it.
The second solution was this: Bob had worked out that during his ten years in this country he had spent enough on rent to have bought a house by this time. If he had had the capital to buy a house in the beginning, or to put down a payment on one, he would be out of the woods now.
Capital. Capital was what he needed. It was not fair that capitalists had capital and the working-man had not.
It was extraordinary to hear Bob, a Socialist all his life, say these words, as if he had never heard them before, as if this was the first time he really understood them.
He would sit on our porch, railing against the capitalists like a man with a fresh vision.
And it was at this point that Mr McCarran-Longman came into our lives. Bob met him in the bar, and brought him up the long, winding stairs to meet Alice. She said to us that Bob was very taken with him. She said it drily, meaning us to understand that she was neither taken, nor taken in. And yet there was an uncertainty in her manner. Some time later Bob brought Mr McCarran-Longman to