He thought he heard the horn of a river barge. Now and then he would open his eyes and see faces. He knew when it was Eleanor’s face, and Tom’s face, but others he didn’t know at all. Often there came a face with an efficient smile; her breasts rested on him when she leaned over to adjust his sheets, and a man with a copper-wire beard who put his face very close and shone a light right into his eyes. He had no sense of time. He felt the tube in his arm being checked and a dressing being changed on his upper left side. His one constant sense was of Eleanor always nearby. Sometimes he could sense her crouched next to him, her head almost on his pillow, and this made him feel calm, safe. He slept most of the time.
A morning came when he could see clearly again, when his eyes remained open, and the sister fetched the man with the copper-wire beard. The blanket was folded down over his chest. He couldn’t touch his upper left side. The burning itch of a major incision. A brown rubber tube led from his bandaged arm to a saline drip. To his left, a window gave a view across the river, framing the length of Westminster, all its pinnacles and parapets like an eroding black cliff on the opposite bank. The sky wore a heavy haze.
‘You’re very fortunate to be alive, sir,’ the man with the beard said, observing him over a pair of half-moon glasses. He had a genteel Scottish brogue.
‘How long have I been here?’
‘Four days. Your spleen was damaged, but the main rupture was delayed. You had heavy internal bleeding when they rushed you in. I performed an emergency procedure to stanch the flow.’
Denham closed his eyes and nodded, fighting a feeling of nausea.
The pain in his shoulder, the dizziness, and the blurred vision were symptoms, the man explained, of the spleen being starved of oxygen.
‘That’s quite a beating you got. I take it you reported the incident to the police?’
Denham gave a faint smile. To think he was in a country now where the police were on your side and the criminals didn’t wear uniforms. If the rupture had begun in Berlin, he realised, he would have bled to death at Rausch’s feet. He started to thank the surgeon but was overwhelmed by a series of hacking, dry retches.
He dozed again and was roused only by an altercation near the door of his room. The sister’s voice was saying, ‘Certainly you may not.’ A slight scuffling sound, and there was Rex, holding a bunch of carnations and a paper bag bulging with grapes, with some bare stems at the top.
Denham wanted to laugh. ‘Flowers? I’m not dead, man.’
‘Brought you a bottle of Bass, too, but that harridan just took it off me.’
He leaned over and offered Denham a skinny hand. ‘How are you feeling, old chap? You look all in.’
‘Don’t make any jokes, Rex. I may actually split my side.’
Rex’s face became earnest. ‘Dashed over like billy-o when I heard. Came yesterday as a matter of fact, but you were in no state. It was David Wyn Evans who informed me.’
‘You know him?’
Rex busied himself for a moment putting the carnations in a vase. ‘It’s, ah, confession time.’ He sat down slowly and lifted the creases of his trousers off his knees. ‘Evans reports to me. I’m his officer.’
David John
Flight from Berlin