How It Was

by Janet Ellis

  The nurse scuttles towards me; she has her coat on and knots a scarf dotted with sequins round her neck as she travels. She wears a short-strapped navy handbag across her chest, riding high on her bosom. For a moment, she looks disconcerted to see me, as if I shouldn’t be here without good reason or her permission. ‘Oh, Mrs Deacon,’ she says. ‘I’m off. Night Sister will be with you soon.’ The sequins wink and flicker. They are too small to protect her from me, they are only a fairy’s armour.

  A woman appears, peering at each door’s label and reading them aloud. ‘Deacon,’ she reads, stopping at Michael’s door. ‘Where on earth is Ward C?’ she says, annoyed, as if the nurse and I are hiding it from her. We both point towards the far doors. She hurries away with renewed vigour and an admonishing tut, as though time matters more to her than to us. She is sharply outlined against the paintwork, the way that visitors to a gallery are defined by the bright lights. The clicks of her footsteps reverberate against the hard surfaces, as scattered and frequent as if she had more than two legs. A notice flutters on the wall in her wake. I have no one, and nowhere, to hurry to.

  ‘I’m back,’ I say to Michael’s sleeping form. ‘As if I never went away,’ I say to myself. I seek out a particular letter from the bag, one I need to see. A palliative. Here it is, thank goodness. Its eau-de-Nil envelope and that familiar handwriting. I won’t read it yet. I am picking up my memories like knitting from a basket, recognising their colour and shape.

  I am trying to remember Philip’s voice. The scattered fragments of our time together re-group themselves, the way the coloured pieces inside a kaleidoscope rearrange themselves into a new pattern when the dial’s turned. There were songs, of course. The way he would catch one thumb and curl it back to touch the arm behind it, without thinking, as he spoke. There was a tin of meatballs he’d reheated on the Baby Belling. The tiny sketch of me he’d done while I was pretending to sleep. A conversation about how he hoped to inspire just one of the little boys he taught to really appreciate art. He’d said he wanted them to ignore the big picture to start with and concentrate on details. On brushstrokes. That was the way, he said, that they’d begin to understand about composition, form and colour. I had changed the subject, only too aware that the idea of the pupils in his class reminded me of the child I’d left at home. My child, whose pleas to me not to leave her I had willingly, easily ignored.

  ‘Somebody telephoned earlier,’ says the nurse, coming in to Michael’s room. ‘I think it was your daughter?’ Her voice lifts in question, as though the caller might just have impersonated a relative.

  ‘Sarah,’ I say. Michael is awake, listening. I don’t meet his eye.

  ‘That’s it,’ she says brightly. ‘I told her Mr Deacon was sleeping. I asked her if she’d like me to wake him, but she said no, no, she’d call back. There was an echo on the line. It was very distracting.’ She shakes her head as if she were still hearing her voice repeated back to herself.

  I’d been tempted to email Sarah, but I couldn’t frame my greeting or how I would sign off. Instead, I left a message for her, which only needed to begin and end perfunctorily. The spoken word was less dismissible. I’d never grown used to the twang of her answerphone’s message, its flat, neutral Americanese. I always had to ring back, once I’d rehearsed what I was going to say. It’s knowing I’m being recorded that unnerves me. I’d told her only the rudiments of this part of Michael’s story. Pneumonia. His heart. Not long. I’d imagined her listening to it, pausing for a moment to absorb the implication.

  Above the rim of his mask, Michael’s eyes signal a query: Is she coming? ‘She’ll be here soon,’ I ought to tell him.

  ‘Wake him if she rings again,’ I say.

  The nurse nods.

  I catch the scent of boiled sweets as she passes me, some sort of indeterminate, sweet fruit. Her nurse’s uniform clings to her as if she’s upholstered. If I snipped at it, I suspect she’d leak horsehair. It’s exactly what I used to think about Sheila Turner. I haven’t thought about her for years, but now she bustles into my thinking, her head still swivelling for information to be squirrelled away. She had a way of looking at a point just below my neck as though I had a mark there, something unpleasant like a fleck of the crusted yolk of an egg or a dob of sauce. Even thinking about her now makes my hands go involuntarily to my collarbone, checking and smoothing.

  I’d seen Sheila that day, the day of seeing-not-seeing Philip. Hurrying, my eyes blistered with tears, nearly on the homeward path, I noticed her standing across the road, by the pond. She was in conversation with someone I didn’t recognise, whose back was turned, but when Sheila saw me she stepped sideways from her companion and waved, mouthing ‘Hel-lo,’ in an exaggerated way. ‘Wait a moment,’ she gestured, holding up her hand with the palm flat to halt my progress.

  Weighed down by my cargo of potatoes and bread and clutching my stiff handbag, I could only smile and shake my head, indicating that much as I’d love to chat, I really must press on. We were separated by a good twenty feet and a road.

  ‘I’ll pop round later,’ Sheila telegraphed across the divide.

  I was glad she was detained or I’d have had her alongside me all the way home, practically to the front door, as we lived so close to each other. I sped up, walking away without looking back and defying her to follow.

  I walked carefully along the footpath, a rutted, uneven space next to the fences and the wall, speckled with stones and puddles. There was a quicker route, a flattened swathe across the middle of the field, but ever since I’d found a large beetle unexpectedly attached to the front of my shoe after I’d crossed there, I’d chosen the other way. You could see where you were putting your feet if you walked on stones. I’d screamed when I saw the bug, shaking my foot wildly to dislodge the thing. It took some doing – how did they cling so hard? – but eventually it fell off. I’d panted afterwards as if I’d fought a tiger and kept glancing behind me as I walked on, as though it might follow me home. Later that day, I’d realised that although I had screamed loudly – and probably more than once – no one had heard me and come running.

  What time was it? I did a rough calculation. It must be about half past two. I didn’t mind missing lunch. I always found it hard to decide on what to eat anyway, and it seemed extravagant to rustle up something especially for myself. Besides, it was better to go hungry and to feel the waistband of my skirt loose about my waist. In an hour and a half, Eddie and Sarah would arrive home from school. Later there’d be peeling and chopping and stirring. I wished I could make them all stand at the fridge in turn and take food straight to their mouths with their bare hands.

  Chapter 15

  The bedside clock announces 20.02. It flips its numbers at the last possible moment with one second to spare. Michael searches in his memory for what he used to say, as a child, to separate seconds if he needed to count them up to the minute. Madeira, was it? Madagascar? He feels a jolt of relief when he remembers Mississippi. He’ll never forget how to spell it, either. His teacher, Miss Polder, her necklace swinging against her bosom, chants again in his head: Mrs M Mrs I Mrs S S I. He can’t remember her face but her large, forbidden breasts are unforgettable. None of it matters any more. The time of day certainly doesn’t. Somewhere, in places he’s never visited, people have read his news and changed their plans. He imagines the emails hovering above a large atlas, the sort displayed on his classroom wall, before they swooped and landed. Pinned like coloured flags, they announced his departure and could not be removed. He is folding in on himself, shutting the world out, but it’s a peaceful process and he doesn’t feel the need to hurry it.

  He regards Marion from underneath barely closed eyes. He is amused by her impatience at his slow demise. She is short with the staff; you wouldn’t think she’d been in their ranks herself. He’d never asked her about that choice of career, but one of her friends did once. It might have been that big woman – Bridget, was that her name? The one whose hairline started high on her head,
in the manner of a Restoration portrait. She’d asked why ever had Marion become a nurse? She was probably watching her manhandle a child into a coat or brush away the suggestion of a stomach ache. She was always robust in her treatment of childhood ailments. Marion had shrugged, as if the answer were obvious. ‘I needed somewhere to live,’ she’d said.

  He likes it best when she is out of his room on some errand or other. He knows she is occupied, and she tells him where she’s going. This is a change for the better. That was always the problem with Marion. Even when she was actually with him, he didn’t really know where she was.

  The very afternoon he’d met Marion’s father for the first time, the old boy had told him to propose to her. She’d only been out of the room for a few moments when Stan issued his unexpected command. ‘Look,’ he’d said, ‘I don’t know what you’re planning, but if you can’t see any reason not to, I think you should marry my daughter. She’s a nice girl.’ Michael had thought he might have had more to say about her than that, but he seemed to think he’d said enough. ‘No need to ask me for her hand now,’ the old man said. ‘Job’s done.’

  Michael had consulted a more worldly friend and booked a table at a restaurant in town. The same friend assured him girls wanted to wear an engagement ring straight away. It makes them feel special, he’d said. Marion, thought Michael loyally, was more sure of herself than that. He’d chosen a ring anyway, just in case the girls at the nursing home teased her about its absence.

  By the time he asked her to marry him, he’d convinced himself he was doing the right thing. The thought of years of taking other women out and weighing up whether or not they were possible wives was alarming. He might well decide on someone, only to discover she didn’t like him. Marion obviously did. The eight years between them allowed her to think he was more worldly and wise, too. When she accepted his proposal, although she got the whole thing over as fast as possible and hardly looked at the ring, she seemed as relieved as he did. And she seemed as grateful, too, that they’d found each other. Was there anything wrong with wanting safety? He remembered some moon-faced man, years ago, at a party, blowing out his cheeks in feigned horror when he’d asked Michael what he did. ‘Accountancy? Wow, man, don’t you go mad with boredom?’ He’d understood the accusation; people often mistook having routine employment for a kind of punishment. If he’d wanted to, he could have pointed out all the ways in which his life wasn’t dull at all. He envied himself his former innocence, though. It had been a long time since he’d been able to imagine an uncomplicated future, stretching ahead of him like a well-signposted road. ‘Actually,’ he wished he’d said, ‘I love accountancy. It’s people like you who are dull.’ He wished, too, that he’d taken the two ends of the man’s silly thin scarf and pulled them tight.

  He is compiling a list of things that he has relished. It’s short. It includes the births of his children. A new car he’d cherished. A couple of amorous experiences that had woken him to surprising possibilities. Getting into his bed at the end of the day, reaching for that other, warm hand. His body now is merely a collection of cells, mostly faulty. Eating and drinking provide no pleasure, sleep is functional. He lives with a series of dull pains that he only registers when the next dose of medication is due. He racks his brains for a defining physical memory, some sensation that he misses more than any other. Above all, he thinks, it would be hard to top the instant exoticism of a new toothbrush.

  Chapter 16

  After Philip died, grief had enveloped me like a caul. I could scarcely eat. I didn’t sleep. I resented the fact I had to find secret places to weep, where no one could see me. I was tender and protective of myself, like a chaperone with a highly strung charge. ‘Christ, Moo, are you all right?’ Michael had said, as I’d hurled myself across the kitchen. I wanted to say, Philip has died, he is dead, he is dead, but instead I said, ‘I can’t bear this song,’ and turned the wireless off. Michael had given me a quizzical look, but he didn’t switch it back on.

  ‘You’re so lucky with Michael,’ people said to me. ‘Do you two ever row?’ I said I sometimes wished we could. Michael never challenged me. If I was being irrational or too demanding, he’d simply smile at me and wait for me to calm down. They told me I was lucky that Michael loved me so much. He’d do anything for you, wouldn’t he, they said. It felt disloyal to confess that I had begun to find his endless tolerance annoying. I tested his generosity deliberately: I’d ask him for a lift somewhere as soon as he’d settled down in his chair or suggest that he give me the very newspaper he’d opened to read, little things like that. It was more of a game than anything else (‘Let’s play When Will Michael Say No?’), but he never denied me. I told myself I had nothing to complain about. It was normal, I reasoned, to be annoyed by some aspect of your husband’s behaviour and his was hardly offensive. But it was like spotting a crack in a glass. You could keep drinking from it, but you couldn’t forget it was there and one day it would shatter. I knew that the more he met my demands with his soothing patience, the more I was in danger of sharpening the very knives I’d ask him to cut himself with. And, what’s more, I knew he’d agree to do it.

  ‘Isn’t it your choir rehearsal tonight?’ Michael had said the next week. I said I wasn’t going any more, it wasn’t really my thing after all.

  ‘I’m sorry you gave us up. You missed a lovely concert,’ our neighbour said later. ‘Of course, it was very sad. Philip’s mother cried all the way through.’

  ‘Who’s Philip?’ Michael had looked at me.

  ‘Young chap, tenor section,’ our neighbour had leapt in. ‘Killed in a car accident.’ She’d mouthed the last words as though they were a curse. ‘Everyone really liked him. He bought me a cider once.’ People were always very keen to claim any sort of closeness to the dead.

  ‘Did you know him, Marion?’ Michael had said.

  I said not really, that I knew him only by sight.

  ‘Didn’t he give you a lift home once? I thought you used to share a joke or two,’ the woman said.

  ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘Not me, I wonder what made you think that?’ I was relieved to have got to the end of my sentence without screaming.

  ‘Who did she mean, then, if not you?’ said Michael afterwards. ‘There can’t be anyone else there like you, can there?’

  When I was about five, I’d lost sight of my mother in a crowded shop. After only a few minutes, I saw her again and slipped my hand into hers. Except that it wasn’t my mother’s, it was a stranger’s hand I held. She’d been kind and reassuring, telling me we’d find my mother any minute. But my heart had lurched at the wrongness of her, the sour smell of her perfume and the slash of dark blue eyeshadow on each eyelid that shuttered her eyes from me every time she blinked. I knew I should hold Michael’s hand tight now, in case I was lost again. In case I reached for another hand. But this time, on purpose, I let go.

  Chapter 17

  23 September

  Things I won’t tell my boyfriend about.

  I really like opening a Crunchie bar, taking a bite, making the end all spitty then leaving it overnight and eating it the next day, when it’s sticky.

  Last summer, some of us went to the rec with big bottles of cider. Tessa Wheatley’s older brother and his friend brought them, because they’d gone to Tonbridge where nobody knew them in the offies and they wouldn’t have known they’re not old enough to drink. It was about a week before school started again. I don’t like it then, it’s when the time left is spoiled because you’re thinking how soon it’ll all be over. There were seven of us and five bottles, so I thought I’d just have to have a sip, but two of the girls squealed about going on to Guides and said they couldn’t have stinky, drinky breath. They sat with us for a while, then brushed the dried grass off their uniforms and left. Tessa’s brother said one bottle each ought to do it. He drank his very fast. His friend said cider made him randy. The other girl with us, Helen, giggled and said she knew what he meant.

  That’s when it chan
ged. It was like switching channels on the television. You’re settled into one mood then suddenly all the pictures are different, and they sound wrong. The boy kept staring at her. Tessa said what time did we all have to leave, because she didn’t want to walk home on her own if her brother was staying out. No one replied. Helen said could the boy help her look behind the shelter, because she thought she’d dropped something there. As they stood up, he looped his arm round her shoulder and pulled her towards him and squeezed her breast. When they were out of sight, we could hear them grunting and panting. Tessa’s brother squirmed as if his spine was melting. Tessa and I looked away, across the field, anywhere rather than at each other. She said they should keep it down, they weren’t in a soundproofed room, were they, but she whispered as if it was worse for them to hear us rather than the other way round. Suddenly, there was a kind of shriek. It was the most private noise I’d ever heard. It split me open inside as if it was sharp. It went right through me. It was like the joyful, yelping anticipation of pain you feel when you bang your elbow. It makes you catch your breath in gulps because you know you’ll be in agony at any minute. I wanted to be there with them. The middle of me was hollowed out with envy and fear.

  Helen emerged before the boy did. Her skirt was round the wrong way with the zip facing outwards. She looked as if she’d been winded. He followed her without looking at her and picked up his nearly empty cider bottle and swigged from it, but he couldn’t make his mouth hard enough and liquid spilled down his front. Tessa’s brother called him a dribbling baby, but his voice broke on the words. We sat there for a while until some woman came with her kids. She was giving them a holiday treat, letting them go on the swings in the last of the daylight when they should have been in bed. The little girl had her hair in bunches; they were pulled so tightly to the sides of her head it made her eyes look tilted. I suddenly felt weepy looking at her. I knew she was going to have to find out about all kinds of horrible stuff in her life. Even Eddie, who really would never hurt anyone, will have to suffer just for existing. It’s really not fair.