“Mainly before. Years before—always, really. We’d be alone in the house and she’d cry buckets. Horse troughs. Oceans. So,” he said, with a soft bleakness, “I’m used to comforting.”
She looked up. “You mean … this, it would be when your father was with Emma?”
“Where else?”
“She always appeared—I don’t know—so self-possessed.”
“Yes. Of course, the tea bags helped. The cucumber slices. And the fact that she’s got a nice sort of flippancy, my mother, a sort of veneer of stupidity. So you wouldn’t know—why should anybody know? Emma broke my mother’s heart.”
She took his hand. After a while he said, “Brandy, that’s the next thing. Can you drink brandy? It will warm your heart, Anna.”
He gave her a glass. It did warm her, stealing through to feelings, levels of comprehension, she had not known were there. “It would be nice to get drunk,” she said. “I don’t think I ever have. I see the attraction, though.”
“The bottle’s at your elbow.”
“One doesn’t know … one doesn’t know other people’s histories at all.”
“No, of course not. Not the half of what goes on.”
“I feel I have been stupid.”
“You were misled. People do mislead you, don’t they, they have an instinct to cover up the mess. It’s how we’re taught to live. I’ve always thought, or rather my concern is, that history shouldn’t repeat itself. I’ve thought, I don’t want to marry some poor girl who I’ll end up leaving for Kit.”
Anna tried to answer him, but the effort was almost beyond her. “I’m exhausted,” she said flatly.
“It’s emotion. It is exhausting. I dare say that’s why we try to get by without it.”
He helped her up. Her legs were jelly. He took her into the little spare room. “The bed’s made up. Do you want anything?”
“I’ll be fine.”
He touched her cheek. “You should know, Anna, that Kit’s going to Africa. She had a letter, she says, this morning. Some volunteer project has accepted her. She wants to see the place where she was born.”
Anna shuddered.
“I know,” he said. “Emma’s put me wise.”
She looked up. “Wise. And Kit? Has Emma put her wise?”
“That’s more than I can say. In the circumstances it would be very wrong of me to make assumptions about what other people know or don’t know.” He paused. “I think, Anna—for what it’s worth—that you are a very brave woman.”
She shook her head. “My heart failed me, Daniel. I had to be rescued from myself. And my kindness has failed me, many a time. I’ve harbored such thoughts—I couldn’t tell you, thoughts that there are no ordinary words for. Only this thing—with Ralph—I don’t deserve it. I know I don’t.”
He left her to put on her nightdress. She promised that if she could not sleep she would come for him. We can see the dawn together, he said. She eased herself into the narrow bed. He had put two hot-water bottles in it, one for her feet and one for her to hug to herself, burning her ribs, slapping and washing itself against her. The Red House is empty, she thought: for the first time in years. And she had not slept in such a little bed since she had been in prison.
There was another skylight above her, its glass containing the night. Oh, Daniel, she breathed, I might see the stars. She was afraid she had spoken out loud; but she was past that, too tired to have a voice at all. Her heart hammered, but then lay still: obedient creature. She turned on her back. The blankets were heavy; she pushed them back a little, to free her chest with its great weight of misery. The air was clearing, it was true; still, she was looking up through a veil of water. She saw two stars, then more. Very faint, old stars: light attenuated.
Kit woke her. She brought a tray with a glass of orange juice and a pot of coffee.
“Daniel promised me cucumber slices.” Anna said.
“You need them. You look awful.”
“What do you expect?”
“It’s ten o’clock. What would you like to do?”
Anna pushed herself upright in the bed. “What are the choices?”
“You could go home. I understand if you don’t want to. Daniel had to go and see a client, there was an appointment he couldn’t break. You can stay here, you’re welcome, he says. You can go to Emma. She’s very worried about you.”
“I seem to be homeless.”
“Not at all,” Kit said. She thought, it’s everyone else who is homeless, waiting for what will occur.
“Robin will be back, you know? Maybe five or six o’clock. He won’t know what’s happening.”
“I can intercept him. Don’t worry about that.” Kit seemed impatient. “Worry about yourself. What do you want to do?”
“What do I want to do? With the glorious prospect that stretches before me?”
“Dad rang. Last night. Said he was calling you but you wouldn’t answer. He was very upset, very concerned about you.”
“A bit late for that.”
“Melanie’s going to be okay, they’re pretty sure, but they’re keeping her for a few days, because she still won’t say what it was she took. Dad spent the night at the hospital.”
“At the hospital, did he? That was blameless, at any rate.”
Kit blushed. She looked stern, set. “How can you?”
“What?”
“Make these weak sarcastic little jokes?”
“I don’t know how I can. Do you happen to know your father’s schedule for the day?”
“He’s got a lot of calls to make.”
“He’ll want his office, then. To be at home.”
Kit sat down on the bed. The tray wobbled; she put out a hand to steady it. The coffee cooled in its pot. “You think we’ve let you down, don’t you?” she asked. “By not telling you?”
Anna didn’t reply. Kit said, “We would have told you. But it was too difficult. We couldn’t think of the right words.”
“Yes, I understand.” Anna sounded sad, remote, resigned. “It explains some things, though. This summer we’ve had.”
Some things, Kit thought, but not that uprush of strange fear. Who knows where a crisis comes from? The world should be more predictable. “Let me pour your coffee,” she said.
“I’d be sick,” Anna said. “How can you ask me to eat and drink?”
“Look, you must fight for him.”
“What? Like a dog with a bone?”
“No, but you must let it be known—let it be known that—” Kit pushed her hand back through her hair.
“Oh, Kit,” Anna said. “Don’t talk about what you don’t understand.”
“What will you do?”
“Go and see Ginny,” she said, unexpectedly.
Ginny’s house was a low, sprawling complex of buildings—boat-houses once, no doubt—by Blakeney Quay. It had been built for Ginny and Felix by a local firm, and its additions and extensions had been crafted with reverence for the vernacular; but its most startling feature was a huge picture window of staring, blank plate glass, which looked out over the creek to the invisible sea.
This window was one of the great acts of Ginny’s life. Some women die and leave only their children as memorial; but Ginny, like some anointed saint, would have a window. It represented a moral choice, an act of courage. Some would shudder at it, though secretly they would crave the vista. Questions of taste would cow them: questions of vulgarity, even. Ginny simply said, “Why live at Blakeney, if you don’t have the view?”
Midmorning, Ginny began to issue large drinks. When her hands were unoccupied, without a glass or a cigarette, she rubbed them nervously together, so that her rings clashed and chimed: her engagement ring with its gray solitaire, her broad yellow wedding ring, the “eternity rings,” studded with chips of sapphire and ruby, that Felix had given her at a constant rate through the years. She was never without these rings; perhaps, Anna thought, she used them from time to time to deliver a scarring blow. But Felix had neve
r appeared scarred. She remembered his handsome, bland, betraying face.
“I’ve heard,” Anna said, “of women who came home to find a note on the table. Until then, they had no inkling.”
“Had you an inkling?”
Anna smoothed her hair back. It was very smooth already. Ginny thought, she seems to be the one in charge here.
“As I see it,” Ginny said, “you have three courses before you. When you choose which to take, you must bear in mind that this affair of his will very likely not last.” Anna raised an eyebrow. “Oh, you know my situation,” Ginny said. “It was different with me. Felix and Emma, they were old flames.”
“You don’t have to talk about it.”
“Why else are you here?” Ginny lit another cigarette. “Really, Anna, I don’t mind. I know you’re here because—well, whatever did Daniel tell you?”
“He gave me a version of your life that was different from the one I knew. I’m sorry. It is an intrusion on your privacy.”
“Bugger that,” Ginny said. “It’s a relief to talk about it. More gin?”
“Why not? Ralph’s not here to see me.”
“He stopped you drinking?”
“Not exactly. It was more the weight of tradition. Our families. And his uncle, Holy James, the total abstainer. Who’d seen otherwise competent missionaries go out to the tropics and be pickled in spirits within the decade.”
“Yes, I remember James—whatever happened to him?”
“He went abroad again. Back to Africa. After, you know … a year or two after we came home.”
“But he was old! Wasn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“And then?”
“He died.”
“Of course. Well …” Ginny breathed smoke. “You see, with Ralph, you’ve been married all these years, and now you’re in a position to renegotiate. I say it won’t last, because they don’t— these affairs between men of fifty, and young girls.”
“She’s hardly that.”
Ginny looked hard at her. “Comparatively.”
“Oh yes—comparatively.”
“You see, there’s a pattern to it. These men of fifty—they never fall for women of their own age, you notice. It’s always someone who makes them feel young.”
“How comforting to be part of a pattern,” Anna said. “I always wanted to be.” It struck her, then, that Ginny did not know the course of her life, not in any detailed way; that if she had ever known, she had forgotten it. “But Mrs. Glasse,” she said. “I haven’t an idea of what her attractions might be. And so, I have no idea how to combat them.” She picked up her drink. “Well now, Ginny, you said there were three courses I could take.”
“Yes. Bearing in mind that it won’t last, you can negotiate with him. You can ask him to live with you and let him see her when he wants. That may prolong the agony—it did for me. Or, you can let him stay with her for the while, and sit it out—keep your home and finances intact, and prepare for a return to normal on the day he says he wants to come back.” Ginny ground her cigarette out. “Or, of course, you can give him the push.”
Anna shook her head. “I’m not patient, Ginny. I couldn’t sit it out. What do you do, while you’re sitting it out?”
Ginny reached for another cigarette, flipped it into her mouth. “This,” she said. She flicked a nail at her glass. “And this. Alternatively, you can count your blessings. Think of people less fortunate than yourself. Cripples.” She smiled. “Women who work in launderettes.”
TEN
The child had been scraped up off the streets. She was drowsy and confused, her speech slurred, her eyes unfocused. Her mouth was bleeding. She hadn’t a penny to her name.
She remembered jabbing a fist out at some woman who leaned over her; it was a face she didn’t know, and that was enough to provoke her. Then the rocking motion of a vehicle, an interval of nothing: and a rush of light and air that hit her—like a drench of cold water—as they carried her from the ambulance into casualty. She bent her arm and laid it over her eyes, to protect herself from this brightness and cold; a nurse saw the scars on her inner arm. “What’s this?” she said. “Silly girl!”
That was how they talked to her. As if she were two years old and yet at the same time a piece of filth off the street, something they had got on their shoes. They shook her to try to keep her awake, to make her talk. They tried to keep her eyes open. This tortured her, and she didn’t know why they wanted to do it. She wanted just to slump on the hard hospital trolley, to melt into it: to give way, to give way to the covering darkness, to pull over her head the blanket of death. “What was it?” they shouted. “Tell us what you’ve taken. You silly girl! Nobody can help you if you don’t help yourself.”
Their voices were very loud and hard, the edges of their words shivered and blurred; but she could hear whispers too, nurses talking behind screens. “I never could have patience with suicides.”
Her head lolled. To buy some peace for herself she gave them the address—or an idea of the address—at first able only to describe a house set in fields, with many staircases and people, many huts and sheds and small buildings around it, so that they said, “Some kind of camp, could it be?” and for a while there was a respite. A policewoman in uniform appeared at the end of the bed. When she saw this she tried to climb out. “Your drip!” a nurse yelled, and another nurse and the policewoman dumped her back into the bed and held her there while they rearranged the stand and the tube they had put in her arm.
“Why don’t you let us help you?” the nurse said. “Just your name, my dear.” But there was no love in the words, no my dear about it.
“Where’s my clothes?” she said.
“Why? You don’t want them. You’re not going anywhere, are you?”
“That T-shirt’s not mine,” she said. “That pink top, it doesn’t belong to me. You had no right to take it.”
She meant to say that they had done wrong, double-wrong, taking from her what she didn’t even own.
But one thought disconnected itself, unplugged itself from the next, and her words slid out through bubbles of spittle that she felt at the corner of her mouth but was too weak to wipe away. One of the nurses mopped her mouth for her, with an abrupt efficient swipe: as if she were not aware that her lips were part of a living being. Suddenly, memory flooded her; this is what it is like to be a baby. You are a collection of parts, not a person, just a set of bones in flesh, your hands grasping and your mouth sucking and gaping; you are a collection of troubles, of piss and dribble and shit.
Her mouth stretched open for air. She was sick; she was sick and sick and sick. First on the blanket, which they dragged away from her legs, then in a metal bowl which she held herself, so hard that the rim dug into her fingers. The nurses stood by approving of this, of the awful corrosive fluid that poured out, the stained water and yellow bile.
For a time after that she lay back stiffly, her arms wrapped across her body. Perhaps she slept. Then the door opened, rousing her, and Mr. Eldred came in. He stood at the end of her bed without speaking, just looking at her. She looked at him back for a minute, then turned her head away. There was a crack in the plaster of the wall. She studied it. Eventually he spoke. “Oh, Melanie,” he said. “Whatever next?”
Sometimes she woke up and the man was there. Sometimes she slept. Sometimes she woke up and he was not there. She shouted to a nurse—her voice surprising her, issuing from her mouth like some flapping, broken-winged pigeon—and asked where he had gone, and a nurse said, “He has more than you to attend to, Miss.”
She raised her hand, the one without the drip, and scrubbed her wrist back and forth across her forehead. She looked down at her legs, lying like dead white sticks; her body was hot and clammy, so she kicked the covers off, and then, tight-lipped, they dragged them back again. “Look, I want to talk to you,” she shouted to a nurse, but as soon as she started to talk she began to cry, a wailing sort of crying she’d never done before, which hurt her th
roat and made her have to blow her nose, and made her breath stick in her throat as if it were something she’d swallowed, a bone. “Please,” the nurse said. “Do you think you’re the only patient we have to attend to? Have some consideration for others—please!”
The thing it was necessary to say was where she’d got the T-shirt from; that she’d taken it out of a basket in the bathroom, where somebody had said dirty clothes went, but that was all the same to her, all her clothes were neither clean nor dirty but just what she wore, and it seemed to her the ones in the basket were just that, clothes. When the policewoman came back, she tried to ex-plain it to her. “Not out of her bedroom,” she said. “I never went in there.”
The woman frowned. “I’m sorry, darling, I don’t know what you’re on about. What T-shirt is this, then?”
“Shoplifting,” a nurse breathed. “I’ll just bet you.”
“Look, just don’t go on about it,” the policewoman said. “All right? I’m sure it’ll just be forgotten about, if you don’t keep on.”
Behind the screens the nurse said, “As if that were all she had to concern herself about.”
“She had a bag of clothes,” the policewoman explained. “New ones. That’ll be it. Couple of hours before she collapsed somebody saw her selling them.”
“Well, where did she get them from, you wonder? And did nobody do anything about it?”
“You see all sorts of things on the streets,” the policewoman said. “The first thing you learn in this job is to expect no assistance from passersby.”
Time passed; she could not guess how much. The nights were bright and full of action, full of squeaking wheels in the corridors and the squeaking of shoes as nurses ran. Days were indistinguishable. She didn’t know the day of the week, not that she ever had. They put her in a side room, said, “I should say you’re privileged, Miss.” She heard diagnoses, part diagnoses of her condition. Can’t or won’t eat. Can’t or won’t remember. Their voices were hard and bright, like knives.
She heard nurses gossiping, talking about an abortion, one that had breathed. Her own breathing became painfully tight, as if she were trying not to draw attention to herself, trying not to take up space. In the hospital there were sluices and incinerators. She lay in the ward’s half day, half night, deciding when and how to run.
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