The Abominables

16 Ambrose Gives Up

The hospital they brought the yetis to was a very famous one in a quiet London square. The nurses were kind and skilful, the doctors clever and comforting and the matron wasn’t the starched and stuffy kind but a sympathetic person who let Con and Ellen stay with the yetis all day long, because she knew that people can’t get well if they are separated from those they love.

The yetis had become very famous after the children’s protest outside the palace and the rescue by the seaplanes of the British Antarctic Territory Research Station, and the nurses were kept busy shooing journalists and cameramen out of the wards. Perry had gone down to Somerset to look for his pig farm, but Con and Ellen had to have a police escort when they went to and from the hospital because of the newspapermen dogging them. And every night on television there was a bulletin about the yetis, and when it was on the streets emptied, as bicycles and footballs were abandoned and children all over the country went inside to watch the news.

At first the news was grave. Lucy was very ill with pneumonia and Uncle Otto’s wound was so deep that he had to have a long and difficult operation to remove the bullet. Both his and Lucy’s bed had the curtains drawn round them while doctors and nurses hurried backwards and forwards with syringes and trays of medicine and thermometers.

But slowly they both got better. They could tell that Lucy had turned the corner when she asked the nurses for a mirror and started worrying about the state of her stomach. “It’s my pigtails,” she murmured groggily. “They’re all undone.”

So the nurses, neat as only nurses can be, made her two lovely plaits all ready for Queen Victoria if they found her again. After that Lucy managed to say “Sorry” to a plate of soup which the ward maid brought her. The next morning she said “Sorry” to three boiled eggs, some grilled tomatoes and the bunch of marigolds in a vase beside her bed. After that she was reckoned to be out of danger.

Uncle Otto’s wound, too, healed well. Soon he was walking on crutches, looking somehow very manly and distinguished as people on crutches are apt to do, and it was now that something very nice happened to him. The clever doctors had found something to rub into his bald patch which wasn’t toothpaste or honey or cream cheese but a real medicine which someone had just invented to make hair grow. And almost day by day, as he lay in bed reading the books the kind library lady had brought him on a trolley, they could see the soft, dark down which covered his domed head grow steadily longer and stronger.

Grandma, of course, loved being in hospital. Being old, she had quite a lot of interesting things wrong with her like heartburn and fibroids and wind, which everybody in the hospital took seriously instead of just saying, “We must expect a few troubles as we get older,” like Lady Agatha had done.

A lot of doctors came to see Clarence too, and put electrodes on his brain and tried to make him read things. But when the others explained that Clarence’s brain had been damaged when he was little and that he was very happy as he was and that they all loved him, they very sensibly left him alone.

With everything going so well, with messages coming in that the Hunters had been turned out of Farley Towers and the proper owner was coming back, with Mr Bellamy phoning to say that the children could stay as long as necessary, Con and Ellen should have been as happy as could be. In fact, they were worried sick.

And what they were worried about was Ambrose.

In the hospital, when the yetis first came, they hadn’t taken too much notice of Ambrose. He didn’t have pneumonia like Lucy, or a gaping wound like Uncle Otto. He wasn’t old like Grandma and bits of his brain weren’t missing like Clarence’s. A bit of rest and warmth, thought the staff, and Ambrose, who was young and strong, would soon be himself again.

But Ambrose didn’t get well and strong, and Ambrose wasn’t himself again. When Con pointed out to the nurses that he wasn’t eating — wasn’t eating at all — they told him not to worry. “Young people often go off their food, especially after a shock. Just take no notice.”

So the children tried not to make a fuss as Ambrose sent away trayfuls of egg and chips, of castle puddings and banana custard. They tried not to worry when Ambrose lay there with his blue eye dull and sunken and his brown eye glazed and staring at the ceiling. They tried not to worry when Ambrose wouldn’t even look up at the telly, though they were showing a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

“Shall I tell you a story, Ambrose?” Con begged.

But Ambrose just shook his great, shaggy head and sighed.

From the first moment she had found him, wall-eyed and crumpled and desperate to be loved, Lady Agatha had known that Ambrose wasn’t quite like the others. “I really think you could kill Ambrose by thinking unkind thoughts about him,” she had said to Con in the valley of Nanvi Dar. Since then, Ambrose had seen people come over the ice with guns; he had seen his uncle shot; he had known hatred.

And now he turned his face to the wall and prepared to die.

In a week or so the doctors and nurses became worried too. There was talk of force-feeding and intravenous drips and things which made the children’s blood run cold when they heard of them. And on the news bulletins, now, it was announced that though the other four yetis were improving steadily, there was slight concern about the youngest, Ambrose the Abominable.

After a few more days the “slight concern” was changed to “serious concern”.

At night, the doctors made Ellen sleep in a spare room, she was so exhausted from the strain. But nothing could shift Con. He sat by Ambrose’s bed murmuring to him, telling him jokes, begging him for Lady Agatha’s sake, for Father’s sake, to make an effort — to eat something, to get well. But Ambrose just said, “People are not my brothers,” and grew steadily weaker and more lifeless and ill. Until a day came when the television newscaster looked out of the screen in a very serious way and said: “It is feared that there is little hope for the youngest of the yetis, Ambrose the Abominable, now seriously ill at Park Square Hospital, London.”

In the silent hospital, Con sat by Ambrose’s bed, trying to believe the unbelievable. There was no hope. It was going to happen. Ambrose the Abominable was going to die.

All day, children had thronged the square outside and stood silently, their faces turned to the hospital windows, waiting for news. Now it was night. Out in the corridor the sister on duty sat in her glass cubicle guarding the white and disinfected room where Ambrose lay.

Inside the room there was no sound — even the soughing of the ventilator had ceased. Ambrose’s eyes were closed, his breath would not have stirred a feather. It could not be long now.

Suddenly in the corridor outside there was a scuffle. Then a voice: high and sharp and bossy, saying, “Let me go! Let me go at once!”

The door opened and a girl came into the room. She was about Con’s own age, with long, fair hair and grey eyes. She was wearing faded jeans and an old sweater and a haversack hung over one shoulder.

“Is that Ambrose?” she said, still in that loud, high voice, pointing to the bed.

Con nodded, frowning at her to be quiet. Where on earth had he heard a voice like that? And why was her face so familiar?

“Who are you?” he said.

“I’m Aggie. I came as soon as I heard. They’d walled me up in some beastly boarding school in Switzerland and I had to get back.”

She went over to the bed and stood looking down at Ambrose.

“He’s bad, isn’t he?”

“Yes.” Con had stopped trying to think where he could have seen the girl before. What did it matter? What did anything matter?

Aggie put down her haversack. Then she bent over Ambrose and still in that high, clear, governessy voice said: “And what, pray, do you think you are doing?”

Con glared at her. No one had spoken above a whisper in that room for days. Yet something held him back from interfering.

“Open your eyes at once!” the bossy voice went on. “And your ear lids. You’re supposed to have been brought up as a Farlingham. Let’s see you behave like one.”

To Con’s amazement, a flicker passed over Ambrose’s face. A chink of blue appeared, then a chink of brown. The left ear lid wavered…

“That’s better. And what does one do when a lady comes into the room?”

“Stand… up,” came a thread of a voice from the bed.

“Quite right. So you can sit up for a start.”

And, unbelievably, Ambrose really did begin to move up on the pillow, almost to raise his head.

“I suppose you realize that dying is Very Bad Manners,” the relentless girl went on.

“Is… it?”

“Certainly it is. What are manners for?”

“Making… people… comfortable,” Ambrose managed to bring out.

“Exactly. Well who’s going to be comfortable if you die?” said Aggie briskly. “Sad, that’s what they’re going to be. What’s that by your bed?”

“It’s… my… milk.”

“Your milk! Standing there gathering dust! I’m surprised at you, Ambrose. Drink it up at once,” said Aggie, sounding more than ever like an old-fashioned governess.

“I… can’t.”

“Can’t, Ambrose? Or do you mean won’t?”

She took the glass and put it in Ambrose’s hands. Then she raised his head from the pillow and put her own hand under it for support. And Con, who had understood at last what it was all about, looked on, blinking back tears, while Ambrose said weakly, “Yes, Lady Agatha. I’m sorry, Lady Agatha,” and drank his milk. Every single drop.