Maddie

by Claire Rayner

  ‘Big of you,’ she said, still savagely, ‘seeing the whole thing is now in my name, anyway. Braham’s is mine, and what little you did for it wasn’t worth a row of beans –’

  He bridled at that, and the sulky look came back into his face. ‘Hey, I know you’re mad at me, but there’s no need to be wicked about it! I worked damn hard there in London – and what for? It’s like dealing with a bunch of pussycats, they’ve got so little get up and go. Christ, what a country! What a bunch of layabouts. Useless, the lot of them –’

  ‘Useless?’ she murmured and her eyes narrowed. ‘Not so useless. Just you listen to this –’ and she began to tell him of all she had done while he had been here in Boston, of the new clients, the big new development, the creation of Braham Construction Ltd, the share of the new distillery in Ireland, all of it, and he listened with his eyes bright and alert and then, when she had finished, laughed, throwing his head back with real pleasure.

  ‘You see what I mean?’ he crowed. ‘A bunch of layabouts, to let a woman, one woman on her own, put that sort of stuff over on them! Oh, Maddie, why are we arguing, for Chrissakes? You and me, we’re both cut out o’ the same piece of cloth. We understand each other. What do you care about nuptial masses and the rest of that stuff? What if I do this? It won’t make any difference to us, you and me and the kids, any more than it would if I had an affair with the woman! I don’t give a damn for Gloria Costello, whatever she thinks of me. It’s just her father I care about, believe me–’

  ‘Have you had an affair with her?’ she said and held her breath waiting for an answer.

  His eyes slid away from hers. ‘Aw, come on, Maddie, what’s the sense of –’

  ‘Have you?’ Her voice rose, became more shrill and someone at another table turned and looked and he frowned and leaned forwards and spoke softly, as though dropping his own voice would make her do the same.

  ‘Listen, Maddie, what do you expect? The girl’s got the hots for me – and you know me. I’m no monk. It’s something that matters to me, as you know better than anyone – and here I was, and you weren’t – what do you expect?’

  ‘So while I was breaking my heart over you in London, alone and bloody lonely and working my guts out, you were screwing yourself stupid here –’ Her voice was still high, and he looked uneasily over his shoulder again. But no one was paying any attention any more. Just another marital spat to them, she thought drearily. What do they care that my life is being shredded before my eyes, that every bit of the solid ground I stand upon is melting away beneath my feet? What do they care that I’m dying?

  ‘So what if I was?’ he leaned back now, looking sulky. ‘It’s not as though I was doing anything different – I’m the guy I am, Maddie. I’ve always been the guy I am and I’m not about to change. I married you because you – do I have to tell you? Remind you? You wanted me and boy, did you make sure I knew it! You laid it on the line twice over and more for luck and couldn’t see that that was what made me – well, it worked for you, so it does for other women too. It’s not as though I never came back to you. I always did, didn’t I? You’ve never had any cause to complain; I kept quiet, behaved like a gentleman, which is more than a lot do. What more do you want?’

  She was staring at him with her eyes hotter and wider than ever. ‘Are you telling me that you’ve had affairs before – since we were married, before this bitch now and –’

  He frowned sharply. ‘Calling her names won’t get you any place. Sure I’ve had affairs.’ He lifted his chin now and stared at her challengingly. ‘What do you think I am, for Chrissakes? Caspar Milktoast? I’m a man, goddamn it all to hell. I’ve got needs, so I deal with ‘em. I did in London and I do here. Big deal – but I always came home to you, right? Did I ever see you go short of anything, you and the boys? Haven’t I been all a husband has to be?’

  ‘That red-headed girl –’ she said, and her lips felt stiff. There seemed no need now to speak loudly any more and her voice was dull and with no resonance in it at all.

  ‘Who? Who – oh, yeah, her.’ His lips curved reminiscently. ‘Yeah, her and one or two others. So what? Has it hurt you? Of course it hasn’t. Any more than this will hurt you. Listen, Maddie –’ And now he leaned forwards again with that confidential smile of his and looked deeply into her eyes. ‘Let’s not make big dramas out of this, what do you say? I’m a lousy husband. No better than my old man. He screwed around all his married life and never cared what it did to my Ma. He’s only stopped now because he’s a dried-up old prune. That’s why she’s so religious, if you ask me. But I won’t treat you the way he treated her. I’ll do the decent thing by you, always. You’ll never go short. You’ll get your Dad’s business, of course – and good luck to you. We can do some nice deals together maybe, who can say? Costello Kincaid Braham – it sounds good for a subsidiary, hmm? We’ll talk about it. But like I was saying, you have the business, we get a quiet divorce, Gloria gets her wedding and Cray is happy. I’m happy, you’re happy, so we’re all happy –’

  ‘You amaze me,’ she said after a long pause. ‘You really think I’ll be happy with this sort of arrangement?’

  ‘Why not?’ He gave her that blazing boyish grin that was usually so good at twisting her chest into knots. ‘Why not? Okay, we won’t be married – but we’ll still be us. We’ll still have a great time. You and me – we’ll be the affair, not the boring married couple we’ve turned into. We’ll see a lot of each other, we’ll have fun, we’ll find out what loving can really be like. Let her have the headaches of being married. You and me, we can do better.’ He looked deeply into her eyes, and smiled again. ‘And you’re a great lay, Maddie, you know that! There’s no one like you. We can have a hell of a good time, you and I, as long as you see the sense of this –’

  ‘And the boys – how do they see the sense of it? Do they become an affair too?’ Her voice was scathing and he made a face at the sound of it.

  ‘It’ll make no difference to them, I told you. They’ll get all the money they need, all the education they need –’

  ‘But not a father who is married to their mother.’

  He shrugged. ‘So? It’s no big deal, not these days. Every other kid on the block has a divorced dad and mom and stepmothers and stepfathers galore. It’s nothing special – they’ll never give a damn. They’re so young they’ll never remember it being any other way by the time they grow up a bit.’

  ‘But I will, Jay,’ Maddie said. ‘I’ll never forget.’ And she pushed the chair back and stood up, moving very carefully to make sure her legs would obey her. She felt curiously lightheaded and her muscles seemed not to be interested in working as they should.

  He looked alarmed. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’m going to bed. I’m very tired, and I’m going to bed. Goodnight.’

  He jumped up and followed her as with a control she would not have thought herself capable of exercising she walked out of the coffee shop and into the broad lobby of the hotel towards the elevators banked on the far side. ‘Hi, Maddie, so what do we do? Do you agree? You see the sense of it?’

  ‘I can see nothing,’ she said and walked into the elevator as the doors sighed open. The boy who operated it stood aside to let Jay in and reached for the button as she murmured, ‘Eleven.’ Jay stepped forwards to join her, but just as the doors began to close she put her hand in the middle of his chest and pushed hard so that he almost fell backwards. The last she saw of him was his amazed expression as he regained his balance and the doors finally closed and she was alone in the elevator with the operator. Who, well trained as he was, stared woodenly at the blank doors as they travelled upwards so that he wouldn’t have to notice that she was crying.

  31

  July 1987

  Maddie was sitting bolt upright in her chair by the window and had her eyes tightly closed. She wasn’t asleep, however. That was very clear both from the stiffness of her posture and the way the shape of her eyes could be seen behind her lids, steady a
nd fixed. Annie had noticed that and shuddered slightly; it was as though Maddie were able to stare through the opacity of her own eyelids and could watch her, Annie, while being unobserved herself. A silly notion, a downright stupid one, and she shook herself slightly and turned her head to look at Joe.

  He had been crouching in front of Maddie for some time now, trying to rouse her, at first with words and then with touch, applying first a slight pain stimulant with a pin he took from the corner of his jacket lapel and which he used to prod gently at the back of her hand, and then the deeper pain stimulus, pinching down firmly on the flesh between her thumb and forefinger. But she had responded to none of it and now he pulled himself to his feet a little stiffly, and stood staring down at her with a frown between his brows, his lower lip caught contemplatively between his teeth.

  ‘You say it happened suddenly?’

  ‘Yes,’ Annie said. ‘I was trying to get her to go on talking. She’d been rattling away for – oh, ages, talking about all she did before she went back to Boston with her two children and the nanny in the summer of ‘fifty-three – just after the Coronation. It was fascinating stuff, like living my own life again, and she just poured it out, like – like a rainstorm. The year before I was born, it was, the year Jennifer first started going around with Colin.’ She stopped then and after a long pause went on abruptly. ‘They met at the side of the road, in Whitehall, you know. She was working there then and had a place to see the procession and he came and pushed in and that was the start of it all. And of me – it was like listening to my own life, listening to Maddie talking about it.’

  ‘You liked what you heard?’

  ‘Not a lot,’ she said harshly and flicked her gaze back to Maddie. ‘They’re all the same, these bastards. There wasn’t much to choose between ‘em, her Jay and Jennifer’s Colin, bastards both, quite different in every way, but exactly the same. She talked about him the way Jennifer used to talk about Colin, thinking she was saying only good and not knowing how his hatefulness showed through like dirt on a window. He was a selfish lousy bastard –’

  ‘Jay? Or your father?’ Joe said softly, and let his gaze slide back to Maddie. He ought to concentrate on her, on the sudden change in her condition, but Annie needed him too, and was as deserving of his attention. And to make it worse, he was more interested in Annie – and he tried to put his professional self before his personal one and knew that he had only succeeded in melding them, as he heard his own voice repeat its question.

  ‘Jay? Or your father?’

  ‘I’m not rising to that again. You tried to make me talk about that before and I won’t,’ she said sharply. Tell me about Maddie. Why did she suddenly go into this state? She’s like a board, she’s so stiff, she won’t move, she won’t – she hardly even breathes, for God’s sake! She hasn’t eaten anything for the last twenty-four hours. Don’t you have to do something about that? What happens now?’

  ‘Too many questions,’ he said abstractedly as he turned back to Maddie, trying to get his ideas clear in his own head before he spoke of them. He leaned forwards to lift one of Maddie’s eyelids and the eye glared out at them both, fixed in its forward stare, the pupil so dilated that she looked almost black eyed. ‘One thing at a time –’

  ‘Well? What do you do about her? You can’t leave her like that.’

  ‘I know that perfectly well,’ he said, suddenly irritated. ‘You don’t need to nag me.’

  She opened her mouth to remonstrate and then shut it again as a staff nurse came towards them from the office at the far end of the long ward.

  ‘Dr Labosky, I Have Dr Moffatt on the phone again. He says he really has to push about this post-natal depression of his. He says she’s suicidal, that she’s already got quite severe wrist wounds that have to be dressed every day and as she’s supposed to be breast feeding and has developed a breast abscess, they don’t want to put the baby into care. So he really has to have a bed for her this morning. And this is the only one available according to Mr Gresham. So what do I tell him? He’s holding on.’

  Joe looked at Maddie again and rubbed his chin and then, as though he’d made a decision, nodded sharply. ‘I’ll come and talk to him,’ he said. ‘I’ll put Mrs Kincaid in the side ward, nurse, so if you could get a second bed in there, please. It’s only temporary. I’ll take her to the old ECT unit this afternoon to try an abreaction session. That should get her out of this fairly quickly. And then we can send her out –’

  ‘Where to?’ Annie said and the staff nurse echoed the question, but he wasn’t there to answer them, his long legs already taking him in loping strides down the ward to the office telephone.

  Annie looked at the staff nurse who was bending over Maddie and rearranging the blanket over her knees with brisk and totally unnecessary movements, for the blanket had been neat enough over those unmoving knees, for all practical purposes. ‘Staff Nurse,’ she said, ‘what is an abreaction session?’

  ‘Mm? Can’t say, I’m sure – it’s really up to Dr Labosky. I can’t discuss his patients with anyone else –’ the nurse said and Annie made a soft noise of irritation between her teeth.

  ‘I’m not asking you to discuss Maddie,’ she said as politely as she could, knowing how little cooperation she was likely to get from the woman if she was sweet-tempered, let alone if she were to display her annoyance. ‘I just didn’t understand the words he used. I’m not very well informed about medical things, and I like to learn. I thought you might know. If you don’t, of course –’

  The woman rose like a fish to a gnat. ‘It’s rather old-fashioned,’ she said, disapprovingly. ‘They used to use it a lot when I was a junior, but nowadays they prefer group therapy and so forth. But you can extract a lot of material, especially in very withdrawn people, if you put in some Amytal or Pentothal and then talk to them. People who knew no better used to describe them as truth drugs, but that was just silly newspaper stuff. You can’t guarantee the truth, can you? You can just try to get ‘em to talk, that’s all. Sometimes you can do it with hypnosis but you need a cooperative patient for that. This one –’ She looked down at Maddie and almost, but not quite, sniffed in disapproval. ‘This one is hardly likely to cooperate. She’s a great one for acting, of course, but she won’t act sensible –’

  ‘Acting?’ Annie shifted her gaze sharply to Maddie and then back to the nurse. ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Experience,’ the woman said crisply and then bent down to put one finger under Maddie’s wrist and lift it. ‘See that? There’s conscious resistance there. That isn’t a true catatonic state. With those they’re the same all over – in spasm, pretty well. This one, she just won’t talk. Her stiffness is uneven, I reckon. But she’ll chatter enough with a shot of something in her arm, I dare say, and that’s what he’s going to try. As long as we get her out of this ward as soon as possible, that’s what matters. It isn’t right to have one of these old chronics cluttering up acute beds like this –’

  ‘I thought you didn’t discuss Dr Labosky’s patients with anyone?’ Annie said and grinned maliciously as the woman reddened slightly.

  ‘I wasn’t,’ she said huffily. ‘I was trying to explain what it was you wanted to know. But there, some people just can’t understand whatever they’re told,’ and she went away, rustling her over-tight nylon uniform self importantly as she swung her hips between the beds.

  Joe came back after a few minutes and stood beside Maddie for another while staring down at her and then looked at Annie.

  ‘I’ll have to discharge her from the ward tonight,’ he said. ‘I really have no choice. She can’t go back to the West Pavilion, to be sure. It’s cleared of patients now, and the wards have been stripped. The bulldozers go over there next Monday. I can’t send her to a hostel – I’ll have a nurses’ riot on my hands. And there’s nowhere else.’ He turned and looked at her very deliberately. ‘Will you take her, Annie?’

  She gawped at him. It was the only word to describe what she knew to be a
n open-mouthed stare.

  ‘What? Take her where?’

  ‘To your flat,’ he said patiently. ‘You’ve got the space. I can arrange this afternoon to get a bed and linen sent over – we can lend you that for her – and if you like I can arrange a care allowance of some sort too. We still have the Greenhill Fund, and we can use it at our discretion –’

  She flushed. ‘If you think I want money for what I’m doing for Maddie –’

  He looked tired suddenly. ‘Dammit, I know you don’t. I was just trying to get across to you that we need to find the right place to send her for the time being, and that we’ll – I’ll do all I can to make it easy for you if you’ll help me by making it easier for me. You’ve done so well for her already, Annie, it’d be a wicked waste, wouldn’t it, to dump her in one of those damned geriatric units where she’ll be lucky if they clean her up when she wets herself, let alone if they talk to her?’

  ‘Take her to the flat –’ Annie said and tried to visualise it. The flat was now neat and tidy, with the boxes emptied and disposed of and the furniture arranged, and she tried to think of it as home, but that was difficult. It was a dead sort of place, with no feeling of homeness about it; the old house, cluttered with those awful hateful gewgaws that Jennifer had so loved, hadn’t been to her taste, but there had been no doubt in her mind that it was a home, a place where people lived and breathed and experienced themselves and each other. But her new flat wasn’t like that, not at all; and she tried to see Maddie melting out of her present iciness in it, tried to imagine the effect the flat would have on her and found herself shaking her head. It wouldn’t help her at all. She needed a real home, a place where there was not just furniture and a roof and warm radiators but where the breath of life filled lungs and the food of comfort filled bellies.