Tony: Rushton title discussion

[Edward – Rushton’s younger son.  Bamburgh Castle – on the coast of Northumberland]

The hospital ward was getting crowded.  The clock ticked its way past four o’clock.  Rushton watched Pamela and Edward from his bed as they squeezed their way out past incoming visitors.  Before she was through the exit door, Pamela turned, and looked again towards him.

What was in her look?  Uncertainty?  Concern?  Breathlessness overcame Rushton again, and he fingered the oxygen mask, as he lay back.  He examined, as so often, the ceiling above him.

He had seen that look of hers before, and the slight smile of enquiry which accompanied it.  He remembered the seashore and the wide morning sky, years before, walking under the ramparts of Bamburgh Castle, one July.  Edward was walking ahead, as usual, immersed in some reverie of his.  And he, Rushton, had been immersed, in a quaint thought which had struck him.  The strong wind was battering at their coats, flapping their sleeves.  Pamela had turned around, and waited for him.

“What is it?  Are you worried?”

“No!”  He had laughed softly.  “I was just thinking of what you were saying last night.  Supposing he did write about us,” (and he motioned his hand towards Edward’s distant, striding figure).  “What would he call the book?”

“Unlike you, to bother about such things,” she had answered.

It had been unlike him.  Lying today on this bed, it was as if he walked again on that wide shore, wondering where life would take him – him and all of them.  Edward had graduated that day – he had walked, with his absurdly long hair, up the steps to receive his degree.  And he, Rushton?  What had he been doing, and where was he going?

The questioning of that far-off year was with him again.  Every once in a while, life caught you full in the face, as it were, and asked you to stake your claim upon it.  You walked out of the common round of days, and found yourself on a sweeping shore of sand, the waves racing away, the distant Farne Islands crisp on the horizon, the clouds far out over the glimmering bay.

“Edward had thought of ‘The friendly years’”, Pamela had said.  “It sounds a bit odd to me.”

Was that title still worth thinking of, twenty years on?  Needless to say, Edward had never written the book.  Rushton was tired of romantic notions of far journeys and destinations.  He would rather have things concrete, graspable, measureable.  Besides, lying here on this bed, nothing seemed distant, as he watched a nurse opposite checking the blood pressure of a patient.  His life was shrunk down now to a jostling ward where peoples’ names were written out by marker pens on a white board – Mark Lane, John Rushton, Sarah Bennett.  A frightening familiarity held people together here, as they waited for the doctors to pronounce judgement.

Had the years been so friendly?  He supposed they had.  Pamela, her hair blown back in the wind, had walked along that shoreline twenty years before.  He had answered her then,

“We’ll have to see how friendly they are ...”

She had taken his hand and they had walked together, as Edward, almost lost in the bright morning sunshine, had turned towards them questioningly.  The sands stretched far ahead, riddled with streams and pools from the outgoing tide.  Those twenty years, friendly or otherwise, had run their course now.  Yet still she had turned her head towards him in the hospital today - to see where he was, to see how he was doing, to wonder if she had better stay.

He would rest here now.  Pamela and Edward would return this evening.  He would lie here and wait.  It was all he could do.  But the years would wait with him.