Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

‘That’s right!’ he said, in a loud, brash Geordie voice. ‘That’s right! A big fellow with a bullet head! I heard you! I heard you in the cinema!’

     Sitting there, he seemed to rise out of the bed as sudden and irrelevant as a Triton; the rough grey jersey, the square, red, wind-whipped face, belonged not to a sanatorium but to ships, fields, stadiums.

     ‘I don’t know...’ I said, and stopped, the attack too strong and unexpected. I had probably made the remark, but then I had never seen him, had only heard about him, and the image I had formed was precisely that: a big fellow with a bullet head. Looking at him now, I could see that he was big indeed, but that the head was uncompromisingly square. In the bed beside him, Williams, a small, grey-headed Welshman, smiled a secret and diverted smile, and reached for the sputum mug on his pedestal.

     ‘I was right in front of you,’ Marshall said. ‘Now then!’ His expression was one of challenge, as though he dared me to deny it, his voice the same brass monotone, and it was several moments before I realized that he was not annoyed, that this vehemence might simply be his way of statement. But embarrassment had paralysed me; I mumbled quickly the message I’d been given for them, and left the room.

     A few days later I had cause to visit them again, this time with a trolley of library books. All those patients who were out of bed had jobs to do, and this was one of mine. Their room was at the very end of the long, dim ground floor corridor and when I reached it I hesitated before knocking on the door.

     ‘Come in!’ The voice was not that of a sick man; again I wondered what had brought Marshall here.

     ‘What, fetched us some books?’ he asked, without reproach. ‘Let’s see ‘em, let’s have a look at what you’ve got.’

     ‘Here you are, then,’ I said, annoyed that he should take it for granted.

     ‘Daphne Du Maurier? That’s no bloody good to me! Haven’t you got something new? Something by Micky Spillane? Something with a bit of meat in it?’

     ‘No.’

     ‘Then I’ll get ‘em from home,’ he said, ‘I will,’ and leaned back against his throne of pillows.

     I had planned to talk to him about his club — the one he managed, and the others he had played for — but at this I muttered, “All right, then,’ and wheeled the trolley from the room.

     ‘Here, come back!’ he called, ‘come back!’ but I took no notice.

     A week later Dr Cowley said to me, his lean, brown face alive with a joke he would not share, his smile private and condescending, ‘You can talk about football all day long now. Mutual therapy. I’m moving you in with a professional.’

     ‘Billy Marshall?’ I said. ‘But can’t I stay in this room?’

     ‘We need it,’ he said. ‘For a much more serious case than you. We’re only keeping you because we want to teach you some discipline anyway.

     ‘But isn’t there someone else?’

     ‘No one else,’ he said, his anger rising quickly, as it always did when he was opposed. He was at the door now, disdaining to look at me. ‘No one else. If you don’t want that bed, you can go home.’

     The next afternoon, I moved in with Billy Marshall.

     ‘Hallo, lad,’ he said. ‘I’m glad to see you here. I’d rather have you than that other fellow; coughing and spitting all the time, hawking into his cup. It was filthy; filthy.’

     I nodded morosely at him, and looked out of the window. Beyond the putting lawn, where a group of patients was engaged in desultory play, a rank of pine trees grew like watch towers, their pale, thick bark like the scales of immense crocodiles. Through them, again, one saw the Norfolk fields, pale and unemphatic, gently rising into a grey distance.

     ‘How old are you, lad?’ Marshall asked, behind me. ‘Nineteen? That’s a bit bloody young to be in a sanatorium. They tell me you’re an Arsenal fan, as well.’

     ‘I am,’ I said, turning round slowly.

     ‘You’re a bit of fan of something else, too. Eh? I’ve seen you here, from the window. I’ve seen you with that girl, that what’s it.’

     ‘Have you?’

     ‘Ah, and you needn’t try that,’ he cried, with pointing finger, ‘making out you don’t know what I’m on about. I’ve seen; I’m not bloody blind.’

     ‘I’m sure you’re not.’ I undressed in silence, got into bed, and opened a book, without another word.

     ‘Here, have you seen this?’ he said. There was a rustle, something landed on my bed, and, looking up, I saw that a green newspaper, a Football Final, was lying there, irresistible. I thanked him.

     ‘Two goals up,’ he said, ‘and let in three in the last twenty minutes. I know ’em. There’s no one there to talk to the buggers. They let up, it went to their head.’

     The paper came from the Yorkshire coast-town whose Third Division club he managed. There was a kick by kick match report, spreading over two pages — ‘Town were moving well now and a sizzling twenty yard drive by star forward Jimmy Wall smashed against United’s upright, United’s goal was bearing a charmed life’ — a honeycomb of local League results, a page of minute, compulsive team analysis.

     ‘You were unlucky to go down last season,’ I said.

     ‘Unlucky? We weren’t unlucky, we were swindled down, it was a bloody scandal. What about the team that stayed up, eh? What about the last match of the season, the one they won away from home, when their centre-half went round the other dressing-room with a bundle of five-pound notes? — You can’t prove it, you can’t get at them, but when I see bloody Stewart, I’ll tell him, he’ll hear something. I’ve never had time for that bugger.’

     ‘The manager of Rovers?’

     ‘If I had my way, he’d be manager of bloody Dartmoor. I’ve told him so, I’ve known him twenty years. He’s a rogue, that’s what he is, a rogue. I knew him when we were both running clubs in the Lancashire Combination; he was with Runcorn, I was player-manager of Rossendale. We went there for a match one day and the gateman said, “Where’s your card? You can’t come in without your card, Mr Stewart’s orders,” and I said, “Bugger Stewart, I’m the manager. You go and tell Stewart I’m here.”

     ‘So he came out and I said to him, “What’s all this about?” and he said, “You know you’re meant to have your registration card, you know it’s a League rule,” and I said, “Bugger that,” and I pushed him in the chest, I pushed him all the way down the corridor.’

     I could imagine him doing it. The first, giant tactlessness, the sudden gesture, and now this anecdote, revealed him as a force of nature, devoid alike of ruth and malice, so that the common courtesies were not disregarded, but simply unknown. Thus, our days together were pregnant with suprise; my own surprise at brutal violations of tact, and his surprise at my resentment. Then there would be temporary silences, each of us prisoned in our own astonishment, until the silence would change in quality, from hostility to armistice, and a gesture — usually his — would bring peace again.

     He had two visitors during our first week together. One was his wife; she was his own age, a blonde matron-figure, fitting shapessly into shapeless clothes, all smiles and mild, clucking amazement. Her cheeks were heavy with rouge. She, too, was from the North East, but she had its soft, persuasive accent, where his was vehement and hard; they talked together with a quick, low intimacy. Now and then, there were moments of apparent tension. I could not hear what they said, but she seemed to be pressing him, and his voice would rise, with a note of obstinacy. For all his present illness, I had an impression that she had somehow abdicated from life, while he had not.

     There was a son, born late in the marriage, ten years old, but he hadn’t come; when Marshall spoke about him it was with a certain reluctant pride, as though he were aware of an Achilles’ heel. ‘Kicks well, he does that; left foot or right.’

     The second visitor was less expected. She came one afternoon when Marshall was asleep, her auburn head peering round the door a moment, uncertain. Then, opening the door a little farther, she tip-toed into the room, a tall, handsome, large-breasted woman, perhaps in her early thirties. ‘Billy?’ she whispered, and again, a little louder, ‘Billy?’

     His head turned on the pillow, he gave a snort, then sat up very quickly, looking at her. ‘I’ll be buggered. I was asleep.’

     ‘I wrote you I was coming.’ She spoke with a Yorkshire accent.

     ‘I know you did, I know.’ He gestured at me and said, ‘This is Brian.’

     ‘The other one’s gone, then.’

     ‘Well, tell me,’ he said. ‘Come on, tell me.’ He took her hands and she sat down by him, on the bed. I picked up a book and turned my back on them, in deference to their intimacy, but they spoke very little, only a murmur now and then, and once their silence grew so protracted and intense I imagined that they must be kissing.

     When she’d gone, he did not talk about her, and it was three weeks before she came again. I wondered if his wife knew, and had a notion that she did; at times I’d sensed in her attitude a lurking reproach, and in his an evasive guilt.

     It wasn’t long before he, too, was allowed to get up and begin the series of graduated walks across the bland, flat country; to the white gate, the stone bridge, the village, and at length, beyond it, to the windmill, the church, the railway station, the sea shore. Marshall would put on corduroy trousers, his jersey, a tweed cap; sometimes he would carry a stick. He walked with a slow, heavy stride, saying, ‘Go on, lad, go on, I can’t keep up with you. I wish I had your wind.’

     There was something about him that was vaguely obsolete, and at the same time, reminiscent. Later, I identified this feeling with an old, forgotten photograph — of footballers abroad on a Continental tour, between the wars; flat caps, baggy suits off the peg, an impression of stiffness and unease, the Depression invisible in the background. It was from these years that Marshall had emerged, as player, first, then manager, one of the ‘old school’, cut off from the new wave of blue blazers, muted accents, quiet conformity — ‘If you eat peas with a knife, now, they won’t put you in the England team.’ He’d been born in one of those little Northumberland mining villages where footballers sprouted like dragons’ teeth, had turned professional — ‘Newcastle bloody daft and I signed for Sunderland’ — played five times for England, become a player-manager, then a manager.

     While we walked, he would talk about all this; of goals, games, players, great victories, unjust defeats. Through his whole narrative ran a thread of rough acceptance; you were hard and football was hard, and football was hard because life was hard, too. ‘I had bloody Dougald with me, three year before the war; there was still no one could play like him when he wanted; he could still have played for Scotland, only they’d never have him again after what had gone on; drunk every bloody night. I took a risk, see; I gambled on him. One morning they had a fight in the dressing-room, him and that bloody Irishman, Lonnon. Lonnon gave him a black eye, and by the time I’d heard of it and went down there, they’d gone; they’d gone to bloody Dougald’s house for dinner! I wanted to suspend the two of them, but the Board wouldn’t have it, so I took ‘em both down to Fulham for the Saturday and Dougald broke his bloody leg.’

     He wouldn’t be in the sanatorium long — he was sure of that, and so was I. ‘Lie on the bed, do this, do the bloody other. I said to the sister the first day I was here, “Look, bugger off,” I said, “you can ask me,” I said, “you can’t bloody well tell me, nobody can.” Then he comes round the other day, the little one with the big nose, the patients’ committee. He says, “You’re up now, you’re delivering papers down this corridor.” “I’m bloody not,” I said, “not if you put it like that. If you ask me properly I’ll do it; willing. Started off selling papers in Newcastle, I don’t mind going back to it now.”’

     Even Dr Cowley was wary of him, playing him carefully and respectfully, like some angler who has inadvertently hooked a shark. ‘All right today, Marshall? Temperature still on-side?’

     And Marshall, looking at him, cautious and impassive, ‘Ay, all right, doctor. Just tell me the day I can go. that’s all.’

     He had a posse of friends. Northerners, like himself, who would emerge from their nooks and crannies — from lofts, from chalets on the hillsides — to surround him for a steady grumble, for mutual rough consolation: Jack Grace, with his bald head and his insinuating chuckle; little Dave Oliphant, with his auburn moustache, his bent shoulders and his grinding omniscience; Ernie Jacks, who was sixty, a Yorkshire leprechaun, living in a private and inaccessible world. ‘The doctors? Booger the doctors!’

     ‘Ay, but you can’t bugger them all, Ernie,’ said Marshall.

     ‘He can!’ chuckled Grace. ‘Can’t you, Ernie?’

     They were all polite to me, but I wasn’t one of them, hadn’t the common experience, the years, the vernacular, the responses and reactions. I was cautious with them when we were together, glad they seldom joined us on our walks, some because they were still largely bed-ridden, others because we went too fast and far. ‘Mad boogers, the pair of ‘em,’ Ernie would say.

     Sometimes, as we walked, Marshall would ask, ‘What am I doing here?’ echoing the question that was in my own mind. What, indeed? ‘Never a day’s ill health; never a day. Two cartilages out and a broken leg; that’s the only time I’ve ever been in hospital.’

     ‘Then how did you get this?’

     ‘How? I don’t know; buggered if I do. I asked the doctor at home; he said, overwork. Overwork? I said. I’ve worked like this for twenty years. He said, ay, but you’re not young any more. Well, I’m not old, I said; I’m not so bloody old.’ I could see, at that moment, that in his own eyes he would always be young, and it was this that made his wife seem older than he, this that enabled him to keep the auburn girl, with her big breasts and her nascent sensuality. ‘I’ll be out in a month,’ he said. ‘Two months and I’ll be running the bloody club again. I told ‘em.’

     In the meantime he went to the clinic once a week, ‘to get pumped up’— or for his ‘AP refill’, as the other patients called it. But Marshall never acquired the sanitorium vocabulary; ‘thora’, ‘APs’, PPs’, ‘refills’, ‘strep’, ‘PAS’. It was as though, by rejecting it, he somehow denied the reality of his illness, his involvement with the rest of us.

     The next time his wife came, she brought their son. He was a lively, fair-haired child, with sturdy, plump pink knees; he climbed on the bed in his excitement while behind him, his mother uselessly exclaimed: ‘David, don’t crawl on him! Get off the bed, will you?’

     ‘He’s all right,’ Marshall said, grabbing the boy and rolling him on his back. She watched them without more protest, almost with resentment, as if she knew that she would always be excluded.

     ‘I were in the school team, Dad! I played and I scored three!’

     ‘You’re coming on, you’re coming on.’

     Marshall was beginning, now, to agitate. When Dr Cowley came round in the evenings, he would say, ‘How about a date, then, doctor? My temperature’s still down. I’m gaining weight. I feel well.’ And Dr Cowley would reply, ‘Not yet, not yet, it won’t be long.’

     ‘Ay, but how long? Two weeks? A month?’

     ‘Softly, softly catchee monkey,’ Dr Cowley said, and disappeared with his crooked, self-conscious smile.

     ‘I’ll give him monkey. We’ll be up for bloody re-election by the time I get out.’ For his team wasn’t doing well, in that Northern Section where the names fell like dry ice on the heart; Barrow, Rochdale, Tranmere, Accrington. It was Accrington, indeed, who beat them 6-0, after they had failed to win one of their last four home games. ‘I wrote to them. I told them they’d get a hiding there, if the wing-halves carried the ball. Both of them go up together, the others break away and they’ve got the whole park in front of them. And they send missionaries to Africa . . . . .’

     Autumn turned to winter. It snowed, and the snow dropped slowly from the pines and lay thick upon the hill, with its pink roofed chalets. The little red flags of the putting lawn rose here and there above the snow carpet like buoys in a white sea. We would spend hours together in the recreation room, playing a game called Disc-Bat Cricket; a game at which I always won.

     ‘Makes his own bloody rules!’ he would shout, calling on all present to bear witness. ‘Two fielders inside the circle; he can do it; you can’t!’ And sometimes I would lose my temper, shouting back, forgetting that to him a shout meant as little as a shrug, and must never be taken at its face value.

     The draw for the F.A. Cup was made; by chance the Rovers, ‘Bloody Stewart’s’ club, had been drawn to play nearby, at Norwich. ‘I’ll be there if it does for me,’ said Marshall. ‘I’ll be there if I go in a bloody ambulance.’

     The auburn-haired woman came again, and this time, I was able to go out of the room and leave them. An hour later, returning to go back to bed, I found she was still there. Marshall had already got into bed, and she sat there as she had before, her hands in his. ‘I’ll go out,’ she said, but before she could move there was an eager pattering in the corridor, the door was hurled open, and Marshall’s little boy appeared.

     ‘Hallo,’ said Marshall, looking up. ‘Clash of fixtures here.’

     The women, confronted, gave each other one pregnant glance — shock and detestation on the one side, guilt, resentment and a covert defiance on the other — then there was silence. The three of them might have been frozen by a Gorgon’s head, with only the little boy bewildered and alive.

     ‘Well,’ the younger woman said at last, ‘I’ll be going, then.’ She climbed off the bed, pulled her dress down with a crisp defiance, said flatly, ‘Get better soon, then, Bill,’ exchanged tight-lipped goodbyes with Mrs Marshall, and left the room. As the door began to close Marshall found his voice, roaring after her, ‘Look after yourself, now.’

     ‘She’s always done that,’ his wife said, with low intensity, while the little boy cried, ‘Who’s that, Dad? Who’s that lady? Why did she go?’

     ‘Just a friend, that’s all,’ he said. ‘She was passing through. She was going to Norwich.’

     Lying on the next bed, I feigned that I could neither see nor hear, sharing their agony, wondering how long his wife would stay, what they could find to say while she did. But it was the little boy who saved them, busy with his questions, so that Marshall could talk to him while his wife, still sitting there, withdrew, till such time as she could decently leave him. I sensed in her hostile farewell to me that I was included in her indictment, that simply through being here, when she was not, I had somehow conspired to betray her.

     ‘These things happen,’ Marshall said, when she had gone, ‘you can’t help them,’ but within half-an-hour, resignation gave way to good cheer, and he was telling me about Fred Westgarth, the manager of Hartlepools, ‘he’s a rough diamond. Fred, a rough diamond. I rang him up once about fixtures. He said, “When shall we play?” I said, “New Year’s Day.” He said, “New Year’s Dee? New Year’s Dee? When’s that?”

     As the day of the Cup-tie approached, he talked increasingly of ‘Bloody Stewart’. ‘He’ll be surprised. He’ll never reckon on seeing me there. And I’ll tell him in front of the lot of them. I will.’

     We stood by the mill pond, beneath the silent windmill; three swans floated motionless, haughty and serene. ‘I’ll wake ‘em up,’ said Marshall, ‘sitting there like they own the place.’ He beat his stick hard and fast against the boards skirting the pool, and at once the three swans turned and made towards him in a menacing glide, quick and effortless, the mean little heads extended at the end of their long, white, powerful necks. ‘I’ll show ‘em. Break their bloody necks I will.’ For the moment, they were Stewart-surrogates.

     The first swan hissed and struck, and I backed uneasily away, but Marshall merely stepped aside and nudged it with the flat of his stick. ‘I should leave them,’ I said, ‘they’ll be out of the water.’ But he took no notice, defiant, just as in past days he must have defied a packed defence.

     ‘Go on! Get off, you buggers!’

     With a flap of wings, a second swan climbed out of the pond, but again Marshall side-stepped, pushing it away, until the three of them confronted him, hissing and dripping, he motionless, the stick extended. The tableau lasted for perhaps thirty seconds, then all at once dissolved as the swans, one by one, turned and scuttled back into the pond. ‘There you are,’ said Marshall, ‘I told you. Stand up to them. That’s all you’ve got to do.’ And somehow the whole incident seemed characteristic of him, not only for his defiance, but for the aggression which had made defiance necessary.

     At first, Dr Cowley did not want to let him go to Norwich; to deter him he assumed his ‘ruthless’ tone. ‘If you really want to get pleurisy, you can go, so long as you don’t expect me to look after you when you’ve got it.’

     ‘I don’t expect anything, doctor; I never have, never in me life.’

     And so we went, the two of us together, went by taxi, with two tickets for the directors’ box. ‘He’ll get a shock,’ Marshall kept saying, as we sped over the snow-powdered roads, past the dappled fields, past the villages, with their neat Tudor churches. We ate at a Norwich restaurant, full of rowdy, red-faced men, wearing the green and gold favours of the City, shouting in the broad, quick Norfolk accents, ‘Up the Canaries!’ and from time to time burst-into song: ‘On the ball, the City! Never mind the dan-ger!’

     Beyond the ugly railway siding, down the mud track, past the bleak canal, the stadium was a vacuum pump, sucking the city dry. The air was crisp and very cold, and there was movement everywhere; the fans were bowling along together, side by side, as though to a family occasion.

     ‘I’ll give him bloody relegation,’ Marshall said.

     A commissionaire showed us to the boardroom, afume with whisky, beer and cigarette smoke, but the sanatorium had conditioned us and we sheered away, making for the open air. Beneath the directors’ box, the stadium surged with colour and expectancy. The Norwich mascot was a tall, gaunt man with an umbrella, dressed up to look like a canary, with a great artificial beak, a mass of green and yellow ‘feathers’ and a bell which — together with the nose — completed a sinister resemblance to The Bellman, in the Duchess of Malfi.

     When Stewart climbed into the directors’ box, Marshall greeted him with, ‘Now then, Tommy!’ and Stewart recoiled, as far as his short, plump figure would allow him; a little, round-faced man with silver hair and quick, pale, cunning eyes. ‘Never thought you’d be here, Billy.’

     ‘Ay, I bet you never did.’

     ‘Heard you’d been ill,’ Stewart said. It was one of those voices which had begun in the North, to be planed and deracinated by years in the South. ‘Getting better, are you?’

     ‘None the bloody better for seeing you,’ said Marshall, while the directors’ box filled up, each newcomer pausing to observe the cameo, astonished, interested or wary. ‘Just tell me how you won that last match, eh? Just tell me how you kept out of the Second Division. That’s all I’ve come to ask you.’

     ‘I don’t know what you mean, Billy,’ Stewart said, looking away from him.

     ‘That last match at Frinton Park. You know.’

     ‘Fair and square, Bill,’ said Stewart, ‘we won it fair and square. I’m surprised at you, complaining.’

     ‘Bought it fair and square, you mean!’ cried Marshall, while a hubbub of voices rose to drown his own, and Stewart cried, ‘You be careful, Bill! I can have you into court for that, it’s slander!’

     ‘Have me, then!’ Marshall shouted. ‘Have me if you bloody dare! And have your bloody centre-half, as well! The one with flyers!’

     Forgetting, once again, the special nature of his violence, I wondered whether he was going to hit Stewart, and then, what I would do if he did. For he could not be allowed to do anything so self-destructive, so reckless of the sanatorium code of careful preservation. ‘Billy,’ I said, taking his arm, but he paid no notice to me. Stewart was very still and quiet, like some hunted animal which seeks escape through stealth and self-effacement — his eyes turned slyly away. Below the directors’ box, spectators were standing up and looking round, and indeed, all over the grandstand clumps of people were rising to their feet, heads were turning curiously towards us. How the scene would have ended I don’t know, but it was destroyed in a moment by a sudden, surging roar, a roar taken up all over the stadium — ‘Up the Canaries!’ — as the Norwich team, in green and gold, ran on to the field.

     ‘I told the bugger,’ Marshall said, and sat down, evidently satisfied.

     At half-time in the boardroom, people were chary of us, but Marshall was heartily at ease, greeting those he knew, sweeping them into conversation despite themselves. In any case, one saw he was a popular man, and apart from Stewart and the Rovers’ directors, whom he now ignored, they all seemed glad to let reserve be demolished.

     In the taxi, on the way back to the sanatorium, his vitality abruptly seemed to leave him. He sat silent, breathing a little heavily, unwontedly withdrawn, as if he were at last coming to terms with the treason of his body. ‘I wish I had your energy, Brian.’ Once, he began to cough, and the coughing grew, feeding on itself, raucous and resented, louder and louder, as though he were fighting against each new eruption. He pulled out a large, drab-green handkerchief, bending his head to it, and the bitter, private battle went on, till he relapsed, with an exhausted sigh, in his corner.

     ‘Are you all right now, Billy?’

     ‘I’m all right,’ he said, in a ghostly wheeze of a voice.

     In bed that evening, his temperature had gone up to 100, but he marked it on his chart as 98.4.

     ‘Well, did you both shout yourself hoarse?’ asked Dr Cowley. ‘Did the best team lose?’

     ‘Ay, it did that,’ said Marshall.

     ‘You look a bit pink,’ said Dr Cowley. ‘No double whiskies with the directors, afterwards?’

     ‘Never touch it, doctor. Haven’t touched it since I’ve been ill.’

     ‘Temperature down?’ asked Cowley, taking the chart.

     ‘Same as usual, doctor.’

     His coughing woke me in the night. I opened my eyes to the dim effulgence of his bedside lamp and saw that for the first time ever, he was using the abominated sputum mug.

     ‘Can I get you a drink of water, Billy?’

     ‘What?’ he said, with a quick, covert turn of the head, ‘you awake then? No thanks, boy, I’ll be all right.’

     Next day, instead of getting up for lunch, he stayed in bed. His temperature had not gone down; this time he did not record it at all.

     ‘I told you what would happen,’ Dr Cowley said, at last in a position of command. ‘Your temperature’s up, you’re getting sputum, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve got pleurisy as well.’ Yet he spoke without recrimination, as though it were sufficient for him to be proved right.

     ‘Ay, I should have listened to you, doctor,’ Marshall said, in a slow, reflective voice, and he stared out across the room. ‘I’d no right to go.’

     ‘Perhaps it’s taught you a lesson,’ Dr Cowley said. ‘You can’t play about with this disease, even if you’re a footballer. Perhaps you’ll take my word for it when it’s time to let you go home.’

     ‘I will that,’ Marshall said, half-audible.

     His friends came to see him in the afternoon: Jack Grace, Dave Oliphant and Ernie Jacks. ‘What’s the matter with you Billy? Shamming? Don’t you want to go home to the wife, then?’

     ‘I got a cough going to Norwich, that’s all there is to it. Cough and a bloody temperature.’ But from the strange lack of emphasis, I knew he feared there was more to it than that. He was still coughing frequently, and whenever he had to use his sputum mug, he would turn his back towards me.

     ‘He’s had the last laugh, then, Bloody Stewart. If I have got pleurisy, I wouldn’t be surprised. I wouldn’t. When I cough I can feel it there.’

     ‘Come along to the clinic and we’ll have a listen to you,’ Dr Cowley told him. He was in their hands now, an acquiescent body to be sounded, drained, painfully rehabilitated; no better than the rest of us.

     ‘I have got it, then,’ he said, shuffling back into the room, in dressing-gown and slippers. ‘I can give this season up, the whole of it. They’ll have to stay off the bottom without me.’

     ‘Oh, they will,’ I said, ‘they won’t have to be re-elected.’

     ‘I wish I was as sure as you are.’

     He was entirely confined to bed, now, fretting the supine days away, dabbling now in a book, now in a magazine; now putting earphones on, to listen to the radio. He spent two hours one morning in the clinic. ‘Sticking this in me, sticking bloody that in me,’ he said, kicking off his slippers with subdued disgust. ‘They turned me into a bloody dartboard; I thought they’d never be done. Honestly.’

     The following evening, Dr Cowley came in and said, ‘Your sputum’s positive.’

     ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I’ll be here with you for life, then, doctor.’

     ‘You might be,’ Cowley said, with his diabolic grin, and he was out of the door.

     In the weeks that followed, Marshall displayed a restless stoicism. It was, as he told his wife when next she came, ‘me own fault, no one else’s. Except Bloody Stewart’s, maybe, and you can’t blame him, really. You can’t.’

     His wife sat with him in melancholy silence, a double reproach in her eyes. Once, I heard her say, ‘You shouldn’t have gone, Billy. You know you should never have gone.’

     ‘Ay, I know, but it’s done now. I’ve learned me lesson.’

     He was eating less, pushing his meals away with a disgust directed at his own lack of appetite as much as at the food itself. ‘I can’t get interested, staying in bed the whole time. It’s not natural.’

     The ritual weighing, which took place each Monday morning in the hall of the sanatorium, now became a ceremony as important to him as to the rest of us. The matron would sit beside the weighing chair, slender and pretty in her white cap and narrow, blue, archaic dress, surrounded as always by an aura of bitter-sweet unfulfilment.

     ‘Well, Mr Marshall, is the centre-forward still carrying too much weight?’

     ‘Too little, matron,’ he replied, drawing tight the sash of his red silk dressing-gown, and grimly climbed into the chair. His face remained set during that silent hiatus in which the weights poised and chinked in her narrow fingers, then at last she said, ‘You’ve lost four pounds.’

     ‘Wasting away, matron,’ he said, shaking his head and heavily getting up. ‘There’ll not be any of me left, soon.’

     Looking at him closely, in our room, I could see his ruddy cheeks had withdrawn a little, yet I could never imagine the face being anything but robust and full.

     Later that week, I was moved out of the room, to a chalet on the hillside. It was fresher there and less oppressive, a great step towards ultimate release, and yet I felt I was deserting him.

     ‘You go, lad; good luck,’ he said, pushing my apologies aside.

     ‘Come out soon and join me.’

     ‘I’ll try, I’ll do me best.’ But now he seemed to speak without optimism.

     I visited him every day, and knew that he was grateful; there was a sentimental core to him, however vigorously disguised: it showed obliquely and occasionally. ‘If you’re looking for a film, The Barretts of Wimpole Street; that’s the one they ought to show. Everyone would enjoy it. Honestly.’

     Once, climbing the steps to the sanatorium, I met the auburn-haired woman coming out. I think she would have liked to glide past, but I stopped her, anxious to show I did not judge her. ‘What do you think of him?’

     She looked away, saying at last, ‘He’s not good, is he?’

     ‘He’ll get better quick enough.’ I was convinced of it.

     ‘I don’t know. He’s got so thin, like.’ Seeing him each day, it was something which had not impressed me. ‘Half-a-stone he’s gone down, since I was here.’ I could think of nothing to say, and it was she who spoke again, at last. ‘I brought him a steak. Maybe they’ll cook it for him.’ Then she was off.

     After another ten days Marshall, too, was moved from the room; to a single room on the floor above. ‘I asked him, “What does it mean? Am I getting worse, then?” But they won’t tell you. I said, “I’m entitled to know,” I said. But they put you off, they won’t tell you anything.’ The next day, when I visited him, he told me, ‘They’re going to collapse the other lung,’ and a few days after that, ‘I’ve sent my resignation in. It’s not fair to the club. I won’t be ready by September, not at this rate.’

     It was a watershed, the second, just as the moment in the taxi had been the first. He was admitting, now, that he could no longer control his future.

     I went to visit him on the day they’d collapsed his second lung, but at my knock on the door a busy Irish nurse emerged, a tiny, red-haired hoyden, shooing me away. ‘He’s not to be seen by anyone!’

     He could not be seen on the second day, nor on the third. When I asked Dr Cowley for news, he responded, with his grin, ‘Complications. Nothing abnormal. You look after your convalescence, we’ll look after him.’

     Yet still I was not seriously anxious; that great strength, that inflexible will, were sure to see him through.

     On the fourth day, the nurse popped out and whispered, ‘You can go in for a minute!’ Marshall was lying on his back. His face, tilted to the ceiling seemed suddenly to have fallen away, its cheeks ravaged from within. ‘Is it you, Brian?’ he asked, in a hoarse, husky voice. ‘They’ve really buggered me about.’ He stopped then and his eyes closed, but all at once he opened them to say, ‘Rate I’m going down, I’ll be seeking re-election to the sanatorium.’ But when I asked if there was anything I could get him, he replied, ‘Nothing, lad, nothing; it’s only the after effects.’

     The days passed, and one’s visits were still restricted. His northern friends gathered sombrely in corners, my optimism too brittle and callow for them. ‘They’ll bloody finish him,’ said Ernie Jacks.

     But to me, Marshall was doubly impregnable; impregnable both in himself, and because death, at nineteen, was something which could happen neither to me, nor to my friends. My faith was untroubled even when Marshall’s wife arrived, to stay in the village.

     We met now and then, sometimes in the sanatorium itself, sometimes while I was on my walks. Her suspicion of me seemed to be diminishing; as we crossed each other at the bridge one afternoon, she said, ‘You’ve been good to him. He says you go in every day,’ and, again, ‘It’s his own doing, he knows it is. Headstrong, he’s always the same. He ought never to have gone that day; he’d no business.’ She was forever bringing him something to eat — a chicken, jellies, a Yorkshire pudding — coaxing the appetite which had grown so small.

     ‘You can’t even see him now,’ Ernie Jacks complained, coming gnome-like down the stairs, one evening, as I went up them on my way to visit Marshall. ‘God knows what they’re up to.’

     It was true; they even had a notice on his door, ‘No Visitors Without The Permission of Matron’.

     I took my walks alone, now, thinking of him lying there, alone in the room; of the hollowed face, the mottled hands which looked, resting on the sheet, like the broad skeleton of hands. I would walk very quickly, down the mud-tracks, across the fields, along the sea shore with its dead seaweed and myriad of tiny dead starfish, thinking of the stories he’d told me, all of them implicit with his vast, animal force. The paradox was too huge to reconcile. Soon — after a week, perhaps, a month — the tide would turn, or rather would be turned, by that very force. He was a footballer, and footballers like him were indestructible; I wished I could convey it to his wife, his friends, his mistress.

     It was ten days after they had made him incommunicado again that I came out of my chalet, before lunch. It was a clear March morning with a bright sun, and from the hillside, I could see far along the white road which led from the sanatorium to the village. All at once, around the farthest bend, two women came in sight, walking very slowly, side by side. It was almost a minute before I could see that one head was blonde, the other auburn, and it was only then that I knew that he was going to die.