by Alan Bennett
To be fair, the children, as Mrs Donaldson thought of them, were not unconcerned about their own fecklessness. They did not want to be reported to the lodgings syndicate still less thrown out and Laura had made up her mind to speak to Mrs Donaldson just at the time Mrs Donaldson had determined to speak to her.
Laura got in first taking the older woman’s hand.
‘About the rent,’ she said.
‘Yes?’ said Mrs Donaldson.
‘What’s this, what’s this?’ said Andy coming into the kitchen. ‘Holding hands?’
‘I was just telling Mrs D. We’ll get there in the end. With the rent.’
Andy took her other hand.
‘Yes. We’ll work something out.’
Mrs Donaldson didn’t think there was much to work out. They owed her money. It ought to be paid.
But Laura had made her a cup of tea and Andy volunteered to change the Hoover bag so the moment passed.
Mrs Donaldson’s next session at the medical school was with a duodenal ulcer, a complaint which she had no need to read up on as Mr Donaldson had suffered from it for most of his adult life. She knew all the symptoms, the site of the pain and what brought it on, which, in the case she was presenting, she decided was stress from her job as personal assistant to a captain of industry. What had brought it on with Mr Donaldson she couldn’t think; herself, she wondered sometimes, but if so he had never let on.
These were the first year and the diagnosis involved some inexpert kneading of her diaphragm, the students so vigorous in their application that Mrs Donaldson’s cry of pain when they hit the spot was scarcely feigned at all.
Ordinarily Dr Ballantyne would have been quick to protect the proto-patients against overzealous interference by the students if only because it was almost a ritual opportunity for heavy sarcasm (‘Has difficulty in swallowing, Mr Horrocks? Hardly surprising when you’ve got your fist down his throat’). Today, though, it was different as he was wholly taken up with a new weapon in the clinical armoury, a camcorder with which he was recording the proceedings.
Ballantyne insisted on wielding it personally (‘It’s a therapeutic tool. One needs to know where to point it. A camera to me is like a knife to a surgeon’). That he often pointed it at her notwithstanding, Mrs Donaldson thought it more of a toy than a tool but this was because her husband had been prey to similar passing technological fancies which were equally jealously guarded. The lawnmower had been a proscribed area, the CD player and even the electric carving-knife, all of which his death had liberated for her promiscuous deployment, one of the several joys of bereavement being that she no longer had to play the little woman.
Mrs Donaldson was also sceptical of the filming process itself since she felt the camera brought out the worst in the Simulated Patients, tempting them to dramatise and show off, an assessment with which Delia tended to agree.
‘How can you be natural with that thing poking up your nose?’
There was Terry, for instance, who that afternoon had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Now whenever he felt the camera in the offing he looked into the middle distance as if contemplating his tragic future and the coming beyond.
Miss Beckinsale, though never one to underplay, was in this instance unimpressed. As she pointed out to Mrs Donaldson she was no stranger to the camera, as her presentation of dementia was so highly thought of she had even done it ‘on a proper camera’ in Glasgow and taken it to a case conference in the Isle of Man.
As it was, Mrs Donaldson’s scepticism over the camcorder seemed fully justified. The following Thursday she had Crohn’s Disease but by this time the instrument had lost much of its appeal and seemed no longer to be the vital weapon in the fight against disease it had been the week before.
To be fair, this was not due to Ballantyne’s light-mindedness. He thought highly of his little troupe who were in their way pioneers. But when he came to review the material he had shot Ballantyne was depressed to find how unconvincing so much of it seemed; it was lengthy, flat and wholly without form. Presentations which at the time he had found real and natural, on tape seemed stagey and contrived.
Some of this could be put down to the inexperience of the patient simulators where the camera was concerned but in fact all that was wrong was that the tape needed editing. With nobody to put him right Ballantyne gave up on the whole experiment and since he could scarcely explain or account for this to the group it seemed to confirm Mrs Donaldson’s unkind presentiment at the start.
She at least had come over well on tape, or so the doctor thought, while at the same time aware that he looked on her with a kindlier eye than he did on any of her colleagues; if the truth were known he was also slightly afraid of her. Had she been aware of this she in her turn might have felt kindlier towards the doctor, but, as it was, all she and Delia saw was that the toy of the week before now spent much of the session confined to the top of its tripod where it surveyed what went on with its single Cyclopean eye.
‘And then they say they’re underfunded,’ said Delia.
At home the matter of the rent remained unresolved with the young people now four weeks in arrears. Cyril would never have put up with it, she told herself, though he would never have had lodgers in the first place and her own resentment made her feel both a bore and a spoilsport. Still she determined to speak out.
Actually she hadn’t seen them for several days, both keeping out of her way she imagined, but coming in from the hospital one evening she found them together in the kitchen and it was as if they had been waiting for her.
Andy made her a cup of tea. (That was the way they were good, she thought, though knowing that Gwen would just tell her she was naive.)
‘What did you have today?’ said Laura.
‘I presented with another boring duodenal ulcer but there was some suggestion from Guess Who that it might be a hiatus hernia. Heartburn anyway.’
‘Worry?’ said Laura.
‘Probably,’ said Mrs Donaldson, ‘though the most recent research suggests that it can be bacterial.’
‘That’s right,’ said Laura. ‘I’m supposed to know that. About the money.’
‘It’s four weeks,’ said Andy.
‘Is it?’ said Mrs Donaldson. ‘I’m not sure,’ and pretended to count. ‘Yes, it’s four weeks.’
‘We’ve got one week,’ said Andy and put an envelope on the table. ‘We can’t manage any more right now and the thing is we wondered if we could come to some agreement about the rest. Do something…’ and he examined the inside of his teacup, ‘in lieu.’
‘You do so much for us,’ said Laura. ‘We wondered if we could do something for you for a change.’
‘In lieu,’ said Andy again.
Mrs Donaldson’s thoughts were running to housework, gardening and even painting and decorating, none of which she needed help with and certainly not to the tune of three weeks’ arrears of rent.
‘We talked it over in bed last night,’ said Laura ‘and it occurred to me that having seen you down at the hospital demonstrating we wondered if you would like it if…’
‘We put on a demonstration for you,’ said Andy. ‘In lieu.’
Mrs Donaldson did not immediately understand.
‘A demonstration? What of?’
Andy took out his diary.
‘THIS USED TO BE OUR ROOM,’ said Mrs Donaldson, ‘when Mr Donaldson was alive.’
‘We like it,’ said Laura.
It was a few nights later and Mrs Donaldson had just drawn the curtains and with as much care (though for a different reason) as her mother would once have drawn the curtains in the blackout.
With regard to what was on offer Mrs Donaldson was still having difficulty bridging the gap between her first misapprehensions on the lines of bob-a-job and the something more…grown-up that was now in active preparation. She was far from looking forward to the prospect but was finding it hard to put off these well-meaning young people without seeming ungrateful.
‘Have yo
u ever seen anyone making love?’ said Laura.
‘To tell you the truth,’ said Mrs Donaldson pretending to cast her mind back, ‘I don’t think I have.’
‘Oh good,’ said Laura. ‘We were bothered it might not be much of a novelty.’
‘Oh no,’ said Mrs Donaldson, ‘it would. It would.’ Though given the choice she still wasn’t sure she might have preferred marigolds. ‘No, I’ve never done anything like this before.’
‘We haven’t either,’ said Laura. ‘We’ve done it with other people around obviously, the way you do, at parties and so on, but never by prearrangement. Not…not…’
‘Formally?’ suggested Mrs Donaldson.
‘Formally, that’s it.’
‘Oh it won’t be formal,’ said Andy coming in only in his shirt and underpants and with a bottle of water. ‘It’ll be very relaxed. Though I wouldn’t want you running away with the idea we do anything particularly adventurous. It’s good wholesome stuff, nothing…esoteric. We’re not into that, are we, Lol? Not yet anyway.’
‘Well the way I look at it’, said Laura, firmly, ‘is that there is plenty of time for that in due course. Don’t you agree?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Donaldson. ‘All in good time.’
‘Now, candles, candles,’ said Andy and went out.
‘Where would you like to sit?’ Laura said.
‘I don’t mind,’ said Mrs Donaldson, who was all the time thinking that there must come a point when she would pluck up courage and call a halt. ‘I can sit here if you like.’
She perched on a chair at the foot of the bed.
‘Fine, if you’re happy with that,’ Laura said, who suddenly had no top on or bra either so that seeing her Mrs Donaldson had to rummage in her handbag for a tissue.
‘Except,’ said Laura, ‘the drawback with sitting there is that you’re going to get an awful lot of Andy’s bum and not much else. I think you’d be better off here.’ And she patted the chintz-covered stool that stood in front of the dressing-table mirror on which, when she and her late husband inhabited this room, Mrs Donaldson used to perch every night to apply her cold cream.
‘If you sit there,’ said Laura, ‘you’ll see him and you’ll see me like, you know, interacting.’
She disappeared into the bathroom leaving Mrs Donaldson sitting by the bed. At which point she had (and almost heard) that slow deep pumping of the heart she had not felt since she was a girl. ‘Life,’ she thought.
Andy now came in with three candles which he lit and disposed around the room, one of them Mrs Donaldson noted in a bowl they had been given as a wedding present, but she didn’t say anything. Andy switched off the light.
‘That’s better.’
He took off his shirt though not his pants and lay on the bed, his hands clasped behind his head.
‘This is awfully kind of you,’ said Mrs Donaldson, wondering at the same time if they were going to take the coverlet off first.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Andy. ‘We’d be doing it anyway. It’s not just for your benefit.’
He looked down his flat narrow belly to his exiguous underpants.
‘Nothing much doing at the moment, I’m afraid. It’s not a problem but I’m finding that’s often the case these days. I have to wait until the dog sees the rabbit.’
At which point Laura came in bra-less as she had been before but now with no pants on either. Naked in fact. Mrs Donaldson blew her nose as Laura lay down on the bed on the side nearest Mrs Donaldson.
‘This is nice,’ said Andy, lifting up his knees and arching his bum as he slipped off his underpants. ‘There. See what I mean?’
Mrs Donaldson smiled in kindly acknowledgement of this new component of the scene.
Laura’s left hand now rested lightly on Andy’s right thigh.
‘We generally fool around a bit to start with,’ said Andy.
‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Donaldson knowledgeably. ‘Foreplay.’
Mrs Donaldson’s first instinct was to look away so that rather than frankly considering this naked young man kissing his equally naked girlfriend with his hand buried between her legs she found herself looking at the floor and wondering if it was time she had the carpet cleaned.
‘Bring back memories?’ said Laura, Andy’s face now where his hand had been.
‘Ye-es,’ said Mrs Donaldson, though the truth was it was a memory of a vase in the British Museum. In any case Laura wasn’t listening, her body lifting itself clear of the insistent head.
Other things Andy was doing had not even been in the British Museum, and Mrs Donaldson found herself leaning forward and slightly to the side in order to take in what the young man was up to and where.
Though his face was largely buried between Laura’s legs Andy’s one unoccluded eye detected Mrs Donaldson’s focus of attention and obligingly shifted his head so that it rested against Laura’s thigh, thus providing Mrs Donaldson with an uninterrupted view.
This unexpected démarche with its different angle on the proceedings provoked a series of harsh rhythmic cries from Laura coupled with violent squirming so that Andy, his application uninterrupted, gives Mrs Donaldson a thumbs up before raising himself on his arms and embarking on sexual intercourse proper with the unsignalled irruption provoking even wilder cries from Laura.
Standard sexual intercourse was a procedure with which even Mrs Donaldson was relatively familiar though pursued here with more vigour and variation than she had ever experienced herself.
Still in that the basic procedure was the same this at least was familiar ground, though Mrs Donaldson never remembered Cyril even in their earliest days going at it with comparable gusto and indeed verve, and whereas Andy gave vent to occasional whoops of encouragement and expressions of pleasure, with Mr Donaldson love-making (if it could be so called) had always been a stern, tight-lipped affair.
And yet it is what people do, she thought. Except this isn’t what people did, she was sure of that. They didn’t preside as she was doing sitting on her stool at the side of the bed where, observing the contending figures, Mrs Donaldson felt not unlike a tennis umpire overseeing a particularly close-fought match.
If the whole thing was a revelation there were lesser eye-openers. At one point with Laura on her back and Andy on top of her and both of them giving harsh cries almost in rhythm Laura’s mobile went.
The cries stilled but, the rhythm unbroken, Laura stretched out her arm and took the phone. ‘Bad moment. Sorry’ – and the cries resumed.
Mrs Donaldson was surprised, though, how soon even the provocation of ecstasy began to pall. She marvelled at the undulation of the boy’s body and back, as dolphin-like he plunged smoothly in and out on waves of passion. And at how supple they both were. Laura’s legs now over his shoulders, a transition achieved without pause or disengagement.
Still, as she sat there, the witness to this spectacle, it occurred to her that she might be their mother (though whether his or hers she wasn’t sure) somehow called in to testify to the full selfhood of her offspring…a mother who was kindly and forgiving (though what was there to forgive?) but knowing, too, that watching these young people so inventively entwined in one another was hardly within mothering’s customary remit.
And then there was the money. It had all come about so easily she wondered if she was the first and if other creditors had been paid in the same tumultuous currency.
On her hands and knees across the bed Laura found her face only a foot or so from Mrs Donaldson’s. They smiled.
‘Men,’ said Laura conspiratorially as Andy pumped and panted behind her. Mrs Donaldson smiled understandingly.
Whether Andy had caught this exchange and it was this that annoyed him Mrs Donaldson wasn’t sure but he suddenly got much rougher, pulling Laura’s head back by the hair and humping her round to face the bedhead, the top of which he grasped so that it banged rhythmically against the wall; at the same time he began to shout and the girl, too, calling out with harsh expectant ascendant cries.
The Donaldsons’ sex had been largely mute (and certainly posing no danger to property), a grunt from Cyril signifying that he at any rate had reached a satisfactory conclusion. On the few nights (and it was always nights) when Mrs Donaldson had had occasion to cry out Mr Donaldson had had to stop, claiming it put him off; the truth being that his wife embarrassed him.
These days they would probably have been advised to ‘talk it through’ but the constraints that can operate between couples would have made such openness unthinkable.
There was no embarrassment about these two, though, their shouts and cries loud and persistent and always seemingly poised just on the brink and needing some final push to take them over the edge.
This Mrs Donaldson unwittingly provided when, fearing for the safety of the table lamp (another wedding present), she placed a steadying hand on the bedhead thus giving Andy the degree of leverage he needed to bring the proceedings to a noisy finale. Laura took longer than Andy to quieten down, moaning still as he extricated himself to lie down beside her, both of them ending up side by side panting and exhausted.
Their congress concluded, the Donaldsons retired to their separate sides of the bed and went to sleep. There was never any discussion or comment even. It was over until next time.
Not so these young people who if an orgasm is a little death proceeded to conduct a post-mortem in an assessment of their respective quotients of gratification and pleasure.
Andy put his arm round Laura.
‘What would be nice would be a cup of tea.’
Glad in this small degree to participate Mrs Donaldson went downstairs and since it was for her at any rate a bit of an occasion she put a cloth on the tray, used cups not mugs and opened some new biscuits. This was to some extent wasted effort as by the time she got back up to the bedroom they were doing it again but with no preliminaries this time and not much finesse, the boy heaving determinedly away, the girl lying back with her eyes closed.
