He knew he'd died at three'o'clock in the afternoon of Wednesday, July the 29th, 1988, the moment he woke up in the room that he'd come to hate. He hadn't left it for two months now, and he was wearily familiar not only with every object - with the thermometer in a glass beside the lamp and the heavy chest-of-drawers and the dark, forbidding wardrobe - but also with the quality of light and shadow in the room according to what time of day it was; with the way the room expanded and contracted as the ceiling joists shrank at night and swelled during the day; and how sound changed at different times so that in the morning his voice was dulled and barely reached the door but in the dark the room became an echo chamber, his daughter's name, "Joan," rebounding off the walls and returning to him from many different directions.
He was familiar with all these things but none of them interested him, as he declined in the starched sheets, propped up against a backrest of awkward, misshapen pillows that his daughter regularly thumped and plumped up with a ritualised but desolate enthusiasm, as if doing with them what she wished she could do for her father. He'd gradually lost his huge rustic appetite until it had become a torment to swallow even the soups and junkets she prepared in the liquidiser, and he lost weight with inexorable logic until the robust farmer was a skinny wraith whose ribs were showing for the first time in fifty years.
The pain moved around his body like a poacher in the night searching for a vulnerable deer in the pinewoods. It had first attacked him in his heel, reappeared in his neck, then after a six-month respite erupted from deep cover in his back, to roam up and down his spine with sporadic, intense malevolence. He knew (and so did everyone else) that it had to be lung cancer, since he'd smoked sixty untipped cigarettes a day since the age of fourteen; so why the hell didn't it just eat up his lungs and have done with it?
The pain was what had wrecked him. Joseph had always thought he was impervious to pain and his grandson, Michael, had grown up in awe of his grandfather's disdain of both the occasional accident and the regular discomfort that beset the life of a farmer. When he gashed his hand or banged his head he only bothered to use his handkerchief if the blood was making too much of a mess of everything. And when they'd unclogged the field drains the previous February, while Mike was whimpering like a child from the cold his grandfather thrust his arms into icy mud as if oblivious to reality.
But this pain was different: it gripped him in its teeth like a primitive dog, and there was neither escape nor end to its torture. He felt nauseous. He fantasised heating up a kitchen knife and cutting out whole afflicted chunks of his own flesh, that that might bring relief - but he couldn't even reach the stairs. Doctor Buckle prescribed ever-changing drugs of increasing dosage, until the pain was dulled and so were all his senses and he found himself withdrawing into a small space where there was no sense and no sensation, only a vague disgust with the faint remaining evidence of a world he'd once inhabited with force and command.
Joseph Howard knew he'd died at three'o'clock in the afternoon when he woke from an inconclusive nap and he looked around the room with a sharpness of vision that made his mind collapse backwards through the years, because he'd refused to wear spectacles and hadn't seen the world as clearly as this since his fortieth birthday. He could read the hands of the alarm clock without holding it three inches in front of his face, he could make out each stem and petal in the blue floral wallpaper, and the edges of things were miraculous in their definition, lifting away from each other and occupying their own precise space instead of merging into a dull stew of objects.
He pricked up his ears and heard a voice outside calling, and although it was too far away for him to make out the actual words he could recognise, beyond any doubt, the tone and inflection of his grandson, Mike. And even more remarkably, when another man's voice answered, from even further away, he knew that that was old Freemantle's grandson, Tom.
It was then that he realised, too, that the pain had gone. His whole body ached with something similar to the symptoms of flu, as if his body had been punched in his sleep; but it was such a contrast to the agony of these last months that he felt on top of the world. He got out of bed and stood up, and the blood drained from his head and made him feel faint and dizzy, so he sat back down to get his balance. Yet it was actually pleasurable to come so close to fainting, woozy and lost. It made him recall the one time he had ever fainted, as a beansprouting adolescent in the farmyard, the world suddenly losing its anchorage and drifting deliriously out of control.
Joseph had finished dressing and was tying his shoelaces, with an infant's concentration and pleasure, when his daughter came into the room carrying a mug of weak tea. "Father!" she cried, "what on earth's you think you're doing?" She rushed around the side of the bed but he took no notice of her until he'd finished, and then he sat up and looked her in the eyes and said: "Joan, I feels better and I'm getting up." Then his smile disappeared and he studied her face with a scrutiny that she found unnerving, taking in the crowsfeet and the puffiness around her eyes and the small lines at each side of her mouth, and he said: "You're a good girl, Joan."
He knew he'd died but he didn't care. He found his stick behind the door and went for a walk into the village. He could feel his blood flow thin through his veins and his left hip no longer troubled him. He passed two or three people on his way to the shop and they returned his cheerful greeting with manifest surprise and a certain awkwardness.
The shop bell rang and Elsie came through from the kitchen. Her large owl's eyes widened behind her thick pebble-specs, and then narrowed. "Does Joan know you's out, Joseph?" she demanded suspiciously. "She was only in yere just now."
"Don't worry about me, Elsie," he replied, "I never felt better. Only I wants some fags. I've not had a smoke in ages."
Elsie looked away, embarrassed. "I haven't got none of your sort in, Joseph. You's the only one what smoked that brand." She reached over to the shelves. "You could try some of this, they says tis a strong one."
"I'm not bothered, I'll take a packet of they," he smiled. She handed them to him hurriedly and he felt in his pockets. "Damn it," he said, "I've come out without any money. You know how much I hates credit, but can I send the lad down later on?"
"Course you can, bay," she said without looking at him, "you git on, now."
As he turned to leave, he said: "I might even bring it myself."
Doctor Buckle appeared the next day and took his temperature and checked his pulse and listened to the sounds of his insides through the dangling stethoscope. Then he declared, in a voice of scientific indifference: "It's an impressive respite, Joseph. But you're still weak. Don't overdo it."
