The Silent Treatment

by Abbie Greaves

  As for Oxford, well, I felt at home in a way I never had before. I made great friends, many as socially inept as I was, and no one at the back of the lecture hall shouted you down for sitting in the front row or taking too many notes. I did worry that I hadn’t made quite enough of it, though. In my mind, my time there should have been spent smoking cigars on the rooftops or attending parties with women called Camilla or Cordelia or something else that sounded suitably exotic to me until the sun shot through the curtains and took us all by surprise. In reality, the only place I pulled all-nighters was at my desk. That was my version of a good time. Until I met you.

  I was looking forward to that evening, a Christmas party of sorts, only the budget didn’t stretch far enough for any sort of planning to have been required. Instead, the two supervisors had come and put a fistful of notes in a glass for us to buy rounds. I wonder what would have happened without the departmental Dutch courage? If I could have focused on the merriment on hand instead of mooning at your table, reading into your mad hand gestures and facial expressions as if I were at a mime performance, not in a pub garden?

  You are, naturally, the center of attention, a habit, I will come to realize, holding court and magnetizing all eyes to you. To your left, a man with sandy hair and a tweed jacket hangs on your every word, laughing a little too loudly and a beat or so before the rest do. There is some distance between you, though, and I write him off as another acolyte, in thrall to your charms.

  It doesn’t take long for the boys to cotton on that my mind and attentions are elsewhere, Piotr nudging me in the ribs and delivering the sort of crude remarks that make me thankful the last four years of his doctorate haven’t entirely thinned out his Polish accent. It is Jack, our lab technician, a man who dedicates forty hours a week to breeding newts, who makes the only sensible remark of the night.

  “What have you got to lose, eh, Frank?” he says. “Another night in a cold single bed?”

  When I see you stand up to get your round in, I know it is my chance, and the boys aren’t going to let me lose it. The moment you are up, squeezing yourself off the bench and holding the empty glasses precariously between your fingers, I am sent in with what is left in the kitty.

  The pub is warm inside, and my glasses steam up quickly. I curse my eyesight and almost wish I had taken the risk of leaving my frames at home. I’d tried that once before, on the sole date I’d managed in the last two years, with a research assistant over from Glasgow. Let’s just say Fiona wasn’t too pleased when I came back from the bathroom and sat down at another woman’s table.

  I blot the lenses on my jumper. It is one of Mum’s finest creations, a Christmas-tree scene, and the little glittery threads from the knitted baubles keep catching on the screws. Finally, I manage to clear away the condensation, but my resolve seems to have dissipated with it. I suddenly feel ridiculous—what was I thinking, hoping a girl like you would cast your eye on me, let alone agree to a date? I am about to concede defeat and send Jack for our next round when Piotr enters, en route to the loo, and he is as unsubtle as ever when he slaps me on the back, enough to turn me back around and, in the tight squeeze of bodies by the bar, knock me straight into you. For a second, there is terror that your stack of empties will fall, and I stick my hands out blindly, catching one, then steadying myself just in time to save some face.

  “I’m so sorry—” My face flushes as red as my hair, my words pouring over one another. Blessedly, you cut me off.

  “Thank you!” you shout over me. “I am always biting off more than I can chew! Here, can I get you a drink—token of my appreciation and all?”

  “No. Thank you, though. I mean I’d love to, but”—I jangle the coins in the pint glass as a weak explanation—“I’ve got to stand my round!”

  “I admire a man with principles.” You smile. I cannot tell if it is my imagination or if you are taking a step toward me.

  Before I can analyze you any more, you turn around and make your order, winning over the barman, who laughs at something you say while you peruse the ciders on tap. As your drinks line up, it is on the tip of my tongue to ask if, actually, we could postpone that drink—another night, after Christmas, just us?

  Instead, I burn up, my cheeks on fire, my palms sweating. In a bid to calm my flaming face, I think of the evolution and gene-mutation paper folded in half and rammed in my back pocket. “DNA Mutations in Xenopus Toads,” I seem to remember. But no data set or scatter graph on adaptive change is sufficient distraction from my crippling embarrassment. Not for the first time, it strikes me that if I carry on at this rate, it will be a biological marvel if I survive my twenties and have any chance of reproducing.

  All too soon you have your drinks, and a tray this time too. You look up at me, pushing your curls behind your ear. “Well, thanks again . . .”

  “Frank,” I offer. “‘It’s Frank.”

  “I’m Maggie,” you say. “Margot, really, no thanks to my mother. It seems so old-fashioned, and besides, I’m not French, no delusion of being either.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “What? The not being French or the not being deluded?”

  “Both, I’d say.”

  You smile at that. “And how will I remember you?”

  I am not imagining it this time. You take a step toward me, so close now that the lip of the tray brushes my chest.

  “Frank, the man of principle. Despite what this jumper might say to the contrary.”

  The garish metallic baubles flicker under the harsh light overhead. You laugh, head thrown back, and for a second there is nothing. The roar of the pub dulls to silence. My peripheral vision goes blurry. You become my foreground, background, and everything besides. This is my chance to ask, but it feels almost sacrilegious to break this moment.

  It’s Piotr who breaks it. “Frank! Frank, get the drinks, eh?”

  “You’re being called!” you shout over the din of some drunken carolers who have just arrived and slam their palms down on the bar. “Better get the round or they’ll worry where you’ve been.” And then, more quietly, as if it is a secret, just for us two, “Merry Christmas, Frank.”

  And just like that, you were off, back to the garden. I’d missed my spot at the bar and I’d missed my chance.

  What should I have said, Mags? Well, asked you on a date, that’s for sure. But that wasn’t enough. You would have had other men chasing you, I knew that as good as certain. I wanted you to know that how I felt was different. How, when my glasses steamed up, I knew exactly how far in front of me you were because there was something about you that felt programmed into me. I knew then that you were it, that you were my Forever Girl. I wouldn’t have said that then, though. I didn’t want to scare you away. But I knew then what I have always known. You were my Forever Girl, Mags.

  Chapter 3

  After our first meeting in the pub, there weren’t five minutes that went by when I wasn’t thinking about you. That magnetic smile, your easy charm. And to think there was just a tray between us. A day later, still kicking myself for losing my opportunity, I went back to Guildford alone, much to my parents’ disappointment, although Chessie had brought her fiancé, and that diverted the spotlight somewhat, even if she is two years younger than me.

  Regular as clockwork, all the relatives asked in turn, “Is there someone special? A lady you are going steady with?” and I brushed off their inquisition brusquely, pretending to be reading for my next paper or doing battle with the crossword. My perpetual singleness had always been a great source of amusement at home. I’d yet to bring a girl home, and in between bouts of concern, there was plenty of fodder for their entertainment as they mimicked me trying to analyze patterns in flirting on a scatter plot and applying them to my own chaotic attempts with limited success.

  How on earth was I meant to explain that I had met the girl of my dreams and had let her slip away into a smoky pub garden without so much as asking for a date? I imagined you there, with my parents, on our Box
ing Day walk, staying over in my childhood bed and sharing the single duvet, generating our own heat when that didn’t suffice. I tortured myself over the turkey with images of you with another man on New Year’s Eve, ringing in the New Year with a sparkle of your infectious laugh and a sparkler on your ring finger too.

  Try as I might, I couldn’t get you out of my mind. Back in Oxford, the boys from the lab didn’t help matters, refusing to let me live down my failure to launch. That January was grueling by anyone’s standards; I barely slept, barely ate (although a researcher’s stipend made that practically a prerequisite), and was barely surprised when I developed a hacking cough.

  Eventually the father of the family I lodged with packed me off to the doctor, more from his own frustration than from kindness, I imagine. And so it was that I found myself in a walk-in clinic in Jericho—wheezing my way through the appointment with enough vigor to warrant a prescription for antibiotics and a firm warning to take good care before it developed into something worse.

  I was ushered out of the consulting room and into the reception area, which had packed out in the past ten minutes. I could hardly see where I’d entered for all the sick: mothers jiggling their fussy babies, a couple with matching plaster casts on their wrists, teenagers with glazed eyes and restless feet slumped against the wall when there wasn’t room for them on the waiting-room seats. As I was squeezing my way past, muttering my apologies, the attention shifted to the front of the room. From the community-nursing office, a voice emerged, a voice I would remember anywhere.

  “All right, all!” you say. “We’ll be seeing you all individually, so please do make yourselves comfortable until then. I’m a newbie too, so be kind. You have been warned!”

  In an instant, I am back at the Rose & Crown: the same studied irreverence and the same ability to disarm and win over any audience with that self-deprecating charm that had sent my head into a tailspin.

  I know it is now or never. I’ll never know how I summoned up the courage, but the word is out of my mouth before I can overthink it.

  “Maggie . . . Maggie!”

  You stop in your tracks, rising onto your tiptoes to survey the room and find the source of the voice. By this time, I have reached you. “Nurse Marbury, rather,” I manage, quickly assessing the name badge on the breast pocket of your pinafore and ensuring my eyes don’t linger too long.

  For one cruel second, I suspect you can’t place me. Then you exhale, beaming. “Frank! My man of principle. What brings you here?”

  With impeccable timing, the rattle in my chest rises up and I find myself coughing a chunk of phlegm straight into my hankie, crumpled from overuse and a few days spent stuffed at the bottom of my pocket. I don’t think I have ever been so grateful for a cough before or since. I tell myself it is fate, that this is meant to be.

  “Ah, well, I might be able to guess that one.” You smile, placing your hand on the top of my arm. The spot where your hand rests tingles, and in that one gesture I realize just how hungry I am for touch, your touch.

  I imagine we are being watched, and you are careful not to cause a scene. “Take good care of that cough, Frank, lots of hot chest compresses, tea every hour . . .”

  “Look, Maggie, I wanted to ask you something. And not about the cough.” I haven’t much of a voice left after weeks of coughing, but what little there is comes out with uncharacteristic decisiveness. “Maggie, would you go out with me sometime? Just the two of us?”

  Our interaction seems to have attracted an audience. I can sense the row of patients behind me leaning just an inch forward. In the far corner, the receptionist peers suspiciously in my direction, one minute away from tapping her watch at me, if she gives it even that long.

  “Yes. Yes, I’d like that.”

  I haven’t given much thought to being taken up on my offer. I feel very much out of my depth but manage to relax my face into a smile that I hope says how delighted I am, without putting you off. It works. You offer up your availability as if you have spent a lifetime arranging dates.

  “I’m off a week tomorrow, which should give you enough time to clear that cough. You can pick me up outside the surgery at two thirty. I’ll leave the rest up to you.”

  And with that, you call your next patient.

  I stumble out into the fresh air, relieved to be away from the smell of stale human bodies and its unconvincing antiseptic mask. On the cycle ride home, I am elated; I have found you again and convinced you to go on a date. What were the chances? Surely that was fate in action? And it was on my side for once too! It isn’t until I get into bed, the duvet pulled right up to my neck, that I realize we haven’t even hit the hard part yet.

  Our first date rolls round quickly enough. I arrive horrendously early and do laps of the nearby streets, hoping there aren’t any residents hovering at their net curtains, primed to call me out on my suspicious lingering. You are true to your word, perfectly on time. From a hundred yards away, I catch a flash of your bright red skirt. Hardly your usual uniform and more likely to cause a cardiac arrest than cure it, I find myself thinking, feeling my own pulse surge with each step you take toward me.

  “Hi, Frank,” you say, your face flushed. From cold or nerves? I wonder. “Where are we off to, then?”

  “I thought we could go to the Ashmolean? There’s meant to be a good exhibition there at the moment, Japanese screen paintings . . .” I trail off, suddenly not so sure of my romantic sensibilities or my ability to plan anything remotely “fun.” I sound thirty years older than I really am and cringe, scouring my brain for last-minute alternatives.

  “How cosmopolitan, Frank. That sounds wonderful!”

  For a cruel second, I think you are mocking me. Then, from nowhere, you link your arm through mine, and suddenly I don’t care. I know I have got something right, and the warmth of your enthusiasm floods through me.

  At the museum, you are keen to pick my brain on the exhibition, which is, mercifully, empty. I’d had visions of schoolchildren watching me floundering from their crocodile formation; worse yet, the students I supervised making use of their university discount on a weekday afternoon. There is something about the way your face lights up when I impart a titbit of information, your head cocked to one side, looking up at me from under the curtain of your fringe, that makes me want to impress you.

  I overreach myself. Before I realize it, I am an expert on the Edo period. I provide all manner of observations on the shogun’s favorite ceramic vase, the screens saved from the battle of Osaka. I pray you don’t know enough to see straight through my invented tales, which grow ever more extravagant in my bid to light you up, to sustain the glow and glee on your face. For the first time in my life, I feel confident. Calm, at ease, not aching with the overwhelming desire to be someone, anyone, else. You are here, freely, with me. For some unfathomable reason, you seem to be very happy about that too.

  At the final case, there is an array of fans, painted silk with bamboo handles, each one decorated exquisitely. On the table beneath, there are some less antique equivalents for school visitors to practice their own fanning, or to hit each other with, whatever might buy their teachers more time. Picking one up, I extend its cheap gauze across the lower half of my mouth and look down at you with a gaze that I hope looks coquettish.

  “And how did the empress like the exhibit?” I ask.

  You laugh, your head thrown back, your neck bare and beautiful. It has been a risk worth taking. When you gather yourself, you take a step closer to me.

  “Oh, you are an odd one, Frank,” you say. “Oddly brilliant too.” You fleetingly cast your eyes left and right before pushing the fan aside and placing a kiss on my lips.

  I knew then that I loved you, Mags. I have loved you since that moment on and in every minute since. I should have told you then. I worried that it was too early. We had all the time in the world to grapple with our emotions, for me to admit just how deep you ran in my veins. Only now, when we have used up that time, can I see my mista
ke. I see them all. These past six months, I haven’t been your clown, and I certainly haven’t been your samurai. Forgive me, Mags, please?

  Chapter 4

  I can’t help but think how much Maggie would hate all this fuss. She could fuss with the best of them when it came to others, but herself? That was out of the question. When I arrived this morning, I started counting the staff who come in to assess the monitors, her vitals, and whatever else might go awry while she lies there, as still as she has ever been, still utterly unresponsive. I counted six nurses then stopped. I figured my attention was better spent elsewhere.

  At least I have, to some extent, begun to open up. I am speaking. Slowly—yes. Sticking to the good bits—yes. But speaking nonetheless. There is nowhere to hide when there is a bedside I need to be at. There is nowhere else I could be either. I cannot retreat to my study, bury myself in some papers or lock eyes with the cryptic crossword to avoid engaging with the gulf between us. How has it come to this? I never thought I would be saying the things I should have said for the past few months—hell, for a lifetime—to a face that has not moved an inch in forty-eight hours.

  “You’re staying, then?” Daisy asks as she takes over the rearrangement of Maggie’s breathing tubes from an assistant who seems to be shadowing her.

  “Pardon?”

  “Here. You’re staying, then?”

  “I can’t leave. I can’t, Daisy.”