The Sunlight on the Garden Read Online Free

The task done, I had to find some excuse to leave the room and first brush myself down with panicky movements of my hands and then hurry into the cloakroom, where I soaped and scrubbed them.
    â€˜How did these nails get so long? It can’t be more than a week since you last did them.’ He looked up at me. ‘Did you know that nails continue to grow on a corpse.’ He smiled. ‘True.’
    I nodded. Having reached for the file on the table beside me, I smoothed a rough edge. Then, suddenly and surprisingly, I felt an annihilating tenderness that I had never felt before when doing his nails. I looked down at the cruelly distorted hands and then up into the even more cruelly distorted face. I felt an ache in my throat, as though some indissoluble object had lodged there, and a sudden fullness of the eyes.
    Since his disability had made him hypersensitive to other people’s feelings and thoughts, whereas in the past he had been entirely indifferent to them, he must, I now realise, have intuited my feelings. When I had finished the job, he said ‘Thank you’ in a barely audible voice, using not the hated ‘Mouse’ but (something that rarely happened) my Christian name. ‘What would I do without you?’
    â€˜Oh, I’m sure you’d manage very well.’
    Fred and I took it in turns to wheel the chair to the cricket ground, beyond the church. Fred propelled it effortlessly along the narrow up-and-down path, as though it were no more than a pushchair with a baby in it. I struggled at every bump and twist and soon began to wheeze and sweat. Eventually, with none of his usual contempt and impatience when I showed my ineptitude, Hammond said quietly: ‘You’d better give up, Mouse. Let Fred do it. We don’t want your asthma to ruin the day for you.’
    â€˜No, no, I can manage. Really.’
    But Fred was already moving into position, edging me aside.
    I had hated cricket at school, not merely because I was so hopeless at it but also because it proceeded so slowly and interminably. But all that day, as Fred and I sat out on the grass beside Hammond in his wheelchair and his parents reclined in deck-chairs brought out to them by one of the organisers of the match, the local butcher, I felt inexplicably happy. From time to time I would look up at Hammond, as he stared out eagerly at all the activity – or, as I saw it, dearth of activity – on the field before us. At school, he had been the captain and hero of the First XI, just as he had been an athlete often tipped to be the first man to achieve a four-minute mile. He was keeping up a running commentary: ‘ Oh, Christ, what a shot! … Idiot! Couldn’t he see that that was a googly? … Oh, good, good, good …’
    Soon Sir Lionel was pouring out shots of Scotch into silver tumblers that fitted into each other like Russian dolls. When, finally, he came to one for me, I shook my head. ‘ Not for me. Thank you.’
    He scowled at me. ‘Oh, come on! Be a man!’
    I again shook my head. I took pleasure in defying him.
    â€˜Well, please yourself. Perhaps Lady Hammond can spare you some of her coffee.’
    Shortly before the lunch interval, Hammond asked me to wheel him to the lavatory behind the pavilion. As the chair bumped from tussock to tussock, he said: ‘ You poor chap! I ought to have asked Fred to take me. But by now you know the drill and he doesn’t.’ The ‘drill’ had always repelled me. But, amazingly, for once it did not now do so.
    As I took the bottle from him – when he went out, it always went with him in a canvas bag – he pointed: ‘Is that blood?’
    I peered in horror. Through the glass, what looked like lengths of scarlet thread were gently wavering in the orange urine.
    â€˜Oh God, don’t say I’ve started the bleeding again!’
    I had never known him to bleed while I had been with him.
    â€˜Do you want