Recycling, she thought. Phil would say, “Very laudable.” If he spoke. But it seemed he had decided not to. She understood that they wouldn’t, either of them, mention this dire start to their winter break. She cradled her wrist. Gently, gently. A movement of anxiety. A washing. Massaging the minute pain away. I shall go on hearing it, she thought, at least for the rest of this week: thud, thud, thud. We might make a joke of it, perhaps. How we froze. How we let him get on with it, what else could we … because you don’t get vets patroling the mountains by night. Something rose into her throat, that she wanted to articulate; tickled her hard palate, fell away again.
* * *
THE PORTER SAID, “Welcome to the Royal Athena Sun.” Light spilled from a marble interior, and near at hand some cold broken columns were spotlighted, the light shifting from blue to green and back again. That will be the “archaeological feature” as promised, she thought. Another time she would have grinned at the exuberant vulgarity. But the clammy air, the incident … she inched out of the car and straightened up, unsmiling, her hand resting on the taxi’s roof. The driver nudged past her without a word. He lifted the tailgate. But the porter, hovering helpful, was behind him. He reached for their bags with both hands. The driver moved swiftly, blocking him, and to her own amazement she jumped forward, “No!” and so did Phil, “No!”
“I mean,” Phil said. “It’s only two bags.” As if to prove the lightness of the load, he had gripped one of the bags in his own fist, and he gave it a joyous twirl. “I believe in—” he said. But the phrase traveling light eluded him. “Not much stuff,” he said.
“Okay, sir.” The porter shrugged. Stepped back. She rehearsed it in her mind, as if telling it to a friend, much later: you see, we were made complicit. But the taxi driver didn’t do anything wrong, of course. Just something efficient.
And her imaginary friend agreed: still, instinctively you would feel, you would feel there was something to hide.
“I’m ready for a drink,” Phil said. He was yearning for the scene beyond the plate glass: brandy sours, clanking ice cubes in the shape of fish, clicking high heels on terra-cotta tiles, wrought-iron scrollwork, hotel linen, soft pillow. Call no man happy. Call no man happy until he has gone down to his grave in peace. Or at least to his junior suite; and can rub out today and wake tomorrow hungry. The taxi driver leaned into the car to scoop out the second bag. As he did, he nudged aside the tarpaulin, and what she glimpsed—and in the same moment, refused to see—was not a cloven hoof, but the grubby hand of a human child.
HARLEY STREET
I open the door. It’s my job. I have a hundred administrative tasks, and a job title of course, but in effect I’m the meeter and greeter. I take the appointment cards the patients thrust at me—so many of them never say a word—and usher them to the waiting room. Later I send them along the corridor or up the stairs to meet whatever is in store for them: which is usually nothing pleasant.
Mostly they look right through me. Their eyes and ears are closed to everything except their own predicament, and they might just as well be steered in by a robot. I said that one day to Mrs. Bathurst. She turned her eyes on me, in that half-awake manner she has. A robot, she repeated. Or a zombie, I said brightly. That’s what our doctors should do, make a zombie. That would cut down on their practice expenses, give them less to complain about.
Bettina, who takes blood in the basement, said what do you mean, make a zombie? Child’s play, I said. You need datura, ground puffer fish, then shake up a herbal cocktail to your family recipe. Then you bury them for a bit, dig them up, slap them round the head to stun them: and they’re a zombie. They walk and talk, but their will’s been taken out.
I was talking on airily, but at the same time, I admit, I was frightening myself. Bettina watched me for signs of madness; her pretty mouth parted, like a split strawberry. And Mrs. Bathurst examined me; her lower jaw sagged, so that the light glinted on one of the gold fillings done cheap for her by Snapper, our dentist.
“What’s the matter with you two?” I said. “Don’t you read the New Scientist these days?”
“My eyes are poor,” Mrs. Bathurst said. “I find the TV is company.”
Of course, the only thing Bettina buys is Hello! She is from Melbourne, and has no sense of humor: no sense of anything really. “Zombies?” she said, articulating carefully: “I thought zombies were for cutting cane under a hot sun. I never associated them with Harley Street.”
Mrs. Bathurst shook her head. “Beyond the grave,” she said heavily.
Dr. Shinbone (first floor, second left) was passing. “Come, come, nurse,” he said, startled. “Is that the sort of talk?”
“She was alluding to the mystery of life and death,” I said to Shinbone.
Mrs. Bathurst sighed. “Not such a mystery really.”
* * *
BETTINA WORKS IN the basement, as I’ve said, taking samples for the lab. Patients come from practitioners up and down Harley Street, bringing forms with crosses scrawled on them, indicating what tests their blood must have. Bettina extracts some into a tube and puts a label on it. The customers I send her look ill, very ill. They don’t like what’s coming, but what is it? Just a pinprick. True, we’ve had some vivisectionists down there, in my time; Bettina is scatty, but skilled in her way, and she doesn’t send them out bleeding. Only once, this spring, I remember a young girl stopping by the cubbyhole where I’m housed, and saying oh: staring at a thin trickle of blood, creeping its way from the crook of her elbow toward the swollen blue veins of her wrist. She was seventeen, anorexic, anemic. Her blood should have been as pale as herself, thin and green—but of course it was shockingly fresh and red.
I popped out of my door, and put my hands on her shoulders. I had warm and steady hands, back in May. Down you go, I said to her firmly, run down there to Bettina, and ask her for another plaster. She went. Mrs. Bathurst was crossing the corridor with a kidney bowl in her hand. I saw her gape, and then she put a hand out to the wall, steadying herself. She looked winded, and as pale as the patient. “Dear me!” she said. “Whatever was the matter with that young lass?”
I had to make Mrs. Bathurst a cup of tea. I said, “If blood turns your stomach, why did you go into nursing?”
“Oh no,” she said, “no, it doesn’t usually take me that way at all.” She put her hands around her mug and compressed it. “It was just coming upon her there in the hall,” she said. “It was so unexpected.”
* * *
BETTINA IS RED-HAIRED, freckled, creamy. When she sits down her white coat parts, and her short skirts ride up and show her baby-knees. She’s adequately pneumatic and brain-dead, and yet she complains of lack of success with men. They often ask her out, but then she has a hard time to understand what’s going on. They meet up with other blokes in some noisy pub, and—well, I thought Europe would be different, she says. They talk about motorways. Various junctions, their speed between them, and interesting roadworks they may have met. Toward the end of the evening, a few drinks on board, the men say, we hate Arsenal and we hate Arsenal. The landlord wants people to leave; Bettina leaves too, sliding out by the wall from the Ladies to the nearest exit. “Because not,” she says, “I do NOT, want their dribble and their paws on me.”
Early in summer, she began to say, men aren’t worth it. The television’s better; not so repetitive. Or I curl up with a miniseries.
“All the same, you need a hobby,” Mrs. Bathurst said. “Something to get you out.”
Bettina wears a little silver cross round her neck, on a chain as thin as a thread. “That chain’ll snap,” Mrs. Bathurst said.
“It’s delicate,” Bettina said, touching it. In Melbourne, she was drilled to be delicate and sweet. Sometimes she wails, oh jeepers creepers, I think I’ve mislaid one of my samples, oh, Geronimo H. Jones! Look, calm down, I say, I’m sure you haven’t lost any blood at all. Then she counts up her glass tubes, and checks her forms again and everything’s okay. One of these days, something wi
ll go wrong, she’ll mislabel her samples and some great hairy bloke will be told he’s estrogen deficient and be invited to attend our Menopause Clinic. Still, if there were complaints, they’d just get lost in the system. The patients shouldn’t think that just because they pay for treatment they’re due any respect. Sure, it sounds respectful, the way we put it when we send out the bills:
* * *
Dr. Shinbone presents his compliments and begs to state that his fee will be: 300 guineas
* * *
But behind the patients’ backs it’s more like “Bloody neurotics! Know-alls! Have the nerve to come in here, wanting attention! Asking me questions! Me, a Barts man!”
You probably think I’m cynical, jaundiced. But I’ve always found Harley Street a hopeless street, very long, very monotonous, the endless railings and the brass plates and the paneled dark doors all the same. I wonder if the patients dream about it as I do, in these sticky summer dawns: as if it stretches not just through space but through time, so that at the end of it there’s not Marylebone Road and Cavendish Square, but there’s death, and the place you were before you were born. Naturally, I wouldn’t mention anything like this to Bettina or Mrs. Bathurst. For the patients’ sake, you have to try to keep cheerful during the day.
Our premises, though, are not designed to lift the spirits. Even if you’ve never been to Harley Street you’ve probably got a picture in your mind: leather chesterfields, brass lamps with deep green shades, repro yew coffee tables stacked with Country Life—on the whole, an ambience that suggests that if you’re terminal you’re at least departing in style. Our waiting room is not like that. Our armchairs are assorted types, and greasy where heads and hands have rested. We’ve even one kitchen chair, with a red plastic seat. As for reading matter—old Shinbone brings in his fishing magazines when he’s done with them—What Maggot?, that sort of thing. I forget now why we call him Shinbone. Usually we name them by their specialities, and he’s not in orthopedics. It must be because of the way his patients look—thinner and thinner, sharpening and sharpening. We see them come in the first time, bluff and flushed, walking bolsters in tweed and cashmere: then we see them get too weak to make it upstairs.
By contrast there’s Gland, the top-floor endocrinologist. Gland is a woman who wheezes as she walks. “Make me normal,” her patients plead: as if she had any grip on that condition. She treats women for the premenstrual syndrome and for change-of-life upsets: gives them hormones that fatten them up. They come in drawn and wan, hands trembling, very slightly violent and insane—and a couple of months later they’re back again, drunkenly cheerful, rolling and puffing, double chinned, ankles bloated, mad eyes sunk into new flesh.
I dwell, as I’ve said, in a small cave, which has an opening into the hall, a kind of serving hatch. Bettina says, it’s like Piccadilly Circus here; she thinks the expression is original. All our time-share doctors come tramping in and out. They put their heads into the hatch and say things like “Miss Todd, the cleaning is unsatisfactory.”
I say “Is that so, now?” I reach into my cupboard, and bring out a cloth. “Doctor,” I say, “meet the duster. Duster—this is the doctor. You’ll be working closely together, from now on.”
Cleaning, you’ll appreciate, is not my job. It’s done in the night by Mrs. Ranatunga and her son Dennis, when I’m not here to supervise them. Mr. Smear the gynecologist, who is Mrs. Bathurst’s employer, is especially obnoxious if his desk doesn’t shine. They don’t want to pay out, you see, our doctors—but they still want the red-carpet treatment, they expect deference from me like they get from their medical students. Mr. Smear is an ambitious man, Mrs. Bathurst says: works all hours. He lives in Staines—quite near me, but in rather more style—and in the evenings he does abortions at a clinic in Slough. Sometimes when he comes to pick up his post from me I say, “Oh, look, doctor! Your hands are dirty.” He’ll look huffy, hold them up; but yes, there, there, I say. It’s amusing then, to see him wildly stare, and scrutinize his cuffs for blood spots. I take a moral line, you see. I’m not well paid, but I have that luxury.
Our other full-timer is Snapper, whom I mentioned before. He has his own little waiting room, where he puts his patients while their jabs take effect. His trick is to wait until he has one in the chair—a numb-lipped captive, mouth full of fingers—and then start voicing his opinions. Pakis out, that sort of thing: all the sophistication you expect from a man with letters after his name. I send his patients back into the world, their faces lopsided and their brains fizzing like bombs. Even if they had free speech, would they contradict him? He might hurt them next time.
One thing to be said for Snapper—he’s not as greedy as the others. As I said, he gave Mrs. Bathurst a cut-rate course of treatment.
“Do you have trouble with your teeth, Mrs. Bathurst?” Bettina asked: her usual tone, all gush and dote.
Mrs. Bathurst said, “When I was a girl they made me wear a brace. My gums have been tender since.” She put her hand up, as if she were blotting a bead of blood from her lip. She has long fingers, and horrible stumpy gnawed-off nails. I thought, it’s obvious; she’s one of those people who don’t like to talk about their childhood.
* * *
I REMEMBER THE day that Mrs. Bathurst appeared at the door, her CV in her bag: a woman of uncertain age, sallow, black hair graying, scooped back into wings and pinned with kirby grips. She wore a dark cape—which she carried well, because of her height. She’s worn it all summer though: in August, people stare. Perhaps it was part of her uniform once, when she was a hospital nurse. It’s the sort of thing that’s too good to throw away.
It was late June before she gave me a smile and said, “You can call me Liz.” I tried, but I didn’t feel easy; for me, I’m afraid, she’ll be Mrs. Bathurst forever. Still, I was pleased at the time, that she seemed to want to get on good terms. You see, I’ve had some problems in my personal life—it’s too complicated to go into here—and I suppose I was looking out for an older woman, somebody I could confide in.
One night I said, will you come out? Let’s go somewhere! I towed her along to a little French place I used to go to with my boyfriend. It’s a gem—old-fashioned, very cheap, and probably the last place in London where the waiters are authentically unpleasant in the Parisian style. I can’t say the occasion was relaxed. Mrs. Bathurst didn’t seem interested in the food. She spent the evening perched on the edge of her seat, staring at what the waiters were carrying through, and sniffing. When the next table ordered steak tartare, she looked at me: “People eat that?”
“Apparently.”
“What,” she said, “anybody?”
“If they can face it.”
“Right,” she said. She frowned. “I never knew you could get that.”
“You’ve never lived,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “I have.”
The bill came, and I said “My treat—really, Liz, honestly.” Right, thanks, she said: yanked her cape from the hook by the door and fluttered off into the night.
I wanted to like her, you see, but she’s one of those people who can’t take simple friendship where it’s offered. She was more taken with Bettina—though as far as I could see then, they had nothing in common. Bettina came whining to me: “That woman’s always hanging about in my basement.”
“Doing what?”
She pouted. “Offering to help me.”
“Not a crime.”
“Don’t you think she’s a lesbian?”
“How would I know?”
“I’ve seen you drinking tea with her.”
“Yes, but God blast it. Anyway, Mrs. Isn’t she?”
“Oh, Mrs.,” Bettina said scornfully. “Probably she’s not. She just thinks it sounds more respectful.”
“Respectable, you mean.”
“Anyway. Lesbians often get married.”
“Do they?”
“Definitely.”
I said, “I bow to your worldly wisdom.”
; “Look at her!” Bettina said. “There’s something wrong there.”
“Thyroid?” I said. “Could be. She’s thin. And her hands shake.”
Bettina nodded. “Eyes bulge. Mm. Could be.”
I feel sorry for both of them. Bettina is on some sort of Grand Tour, earning her way around the old world—she’ll stop off and take blood in various European cities, then fly home and settle, she says. Mrs. Bathurst’s own relatives live abroad, and she never sees them.
After our meal out—a disaster, probably my fault—I’d have suggested something else—film, whatever—except that, as I’ve said, I rent a flat in Staines, thirty-five minutes from Waterloo, and Mrs. Bathurst has recently moved from Highgate to Kensal Green. What’s it like? I asked her. A hole, she said. Midsummer, she took a fortnight off. She didn’t want it, she said, was dreading it in fact—but Smear was going on a sponsored conference, and she wasn’t wanted.
The day she was to finish work, she sat with me in my cave, her eyes hidden in her palms. “Mrs. Bathurst,” I said, “maybe London’s not for you. It’s not—I don’t find it a kind place myself, it’s not a place for women alone.” Especially, I didn’t say, when they get to your age. After a bit—perhaps she’d been thinking about what I was saying—she took her hands away from her face.
“Move on,” she said, “that’s the way. Move on, every year or two. That way, you’ll always meet somebody, won’t you?”
My heart went out to her. I scribbled my address. “Come over, some night. I’ve got a sofa, I can put you up.”
She didn’t want to take it, and I pressed it into her hand. What a cold hand she had: cold like an old buried brick. I revised my opinion on the state of her thyroid gland.
* * *
SHE DIDN’T COME, of course. I didn’t mind—and I mind less, in view of what I know about her now—but I very pointedly didn’t ask her what she’d done with her holiday. Her first day back, she looked drained. I said, “What have you been doing, moonlighting?”
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: Stories Page 5
