From The Bin: The Death of Rozzie

On the road today, visiting grandkids. But just to show that I'm still connected, here is one from the bin:

I could not believe my eyes when I saw my poor Rozzie in the hospital, gone to skin and bones. She was not sixty, and she might have been eighty, with a folded face like an old worn-out shoe.

She had been knocked down by a lorry, and lost her leg at the thigh. “And the same day,” she said, “I heard that all my money was gone in the Mortimer Hotels crash. I heard at breakfast and the lorry got me at half-past ten, going over to the Three Crowns for my morning drop, and when I woke up in hospital, I had my best laugh in years.”

“Nothing to laugh at,” I said, for I was almost crying. But Rozzie gave a heave and a kind of laugh and said: “You wouldn’t, Sall—it wasn’t your money and your best leg. I’ve still got the bad one.”

The end of Rozzie was very sad. For when they got her well enough to go on crutches, she was still not fit to be about; and she had no money left. There was no place for her but the workhouse infirmary. Her only relation was her brother-in-law and he was in India and had his own wife and family. Besides Rozzie would never be a burden on anyone. So there she was and there I went to see her three more times, before the leg broke out again and she died of blood poisoning.

“A good thing, too,” she said, when they told her she was going. “I’ve been a fat lot of good, haven’t I? If I wonder why I was ever born—but I expect I was an accident—one at the start and one at the finish.”

Joyce Cary, Herself Surprised (NYRB Paperback ed. 1999)