‘Damn it all, Annie, when will you stop being so full of yourself!’ Joe’s voice was low and controlled but the anger in it made her blink and jerk backwards as though he’d roared at her.
‘What?’ she said stupidly.
‘I told you, it won’t be for long – a few days is all I need to find somewhere to get rid of her for you. She’s served her purpose for you, hasn’t she? Given you something to amuse yourself with while you got over the worst of your depression, but now when it’s time to give her something in return you don’t want to know –’
‘But it isn’t like that!’ she said, protesting, needing him to know how wrong he was. ‘I wasn’t refusing – I just –’
He stared at her. ‘You were shaking your head,’ he said.
‘Because I couldn’t imagine her there. The place is so – it’s so cold and miserable.’ She needed him to understand, wanted his approval in a way that amazed her. She who had never cared for anyone’s approval, to need his, of all people’s?
‘But you’ve got central heating.’ He sounded genuinely puzzled. ‘I saw the radiators – and I told you, we can cover the cost if that’s a problem, though I didn’t think it was, actually.’
She waved a hand to dismiss that. ‘Of course it isn’t. And I didn’t mean physical warmth like that. Of course the heating’s Acre and it’s often too hot because I keep it turned up – no, it’s just that it’s so dull and dismal. I couldn’t see her being anything but worse there with only me –’
He was red now, obviously embarrassed and he put out one hand and touched her shoulder.
‘Oh, God, what is it about you? I feel like the proverbial ass who finds his foot in his mouth every time he opens it. I’m sorry. So you will take her?’
‘I can’t,’ she said after a long moment. ‘I daren’t. I wouldn’t know how to cope if – if she was like this, and wouldn’t eat and –’ To her horror she felt her face crumple. ‘What would I do if she got worse?’ she said piteously. ‘I’d be so afraid that she’d – I know I looked after Jen, but that was different. I knew her when she was well, and anyway she wasn’t like this. She wasn’t – it was an illness she had, a physical illness. She wasn’t like this, hiding away from whatever it was that happened to her, hiding away so deeply that she’s fit to die of it.’
She hadn’t noticed when it had happened but he had his arm across her shoulders and that felt comforting and she let her own tense shoulders relax and let her head sag a little so that she could rest against him. That felt a good deal better than she could ever have imagined.
‘She won’t come to any harm with you,’ he said gently. ‘Quite the reverse. It’s places like this that make people ill.’ He lifted his head and stared down the long ward with its tall windows and the red-blanketed beds between them. ‘Look at the place –they built it a hundred years ago and it hardly looks any different. Being here would make anyone ill.’ Now he looked down at her and lifted his other hand to touch her cheek, and then seemed to think better of it and dropped it again. ‘Being with you will be good for her – believe me.’
‘But how can I help her if she won’t talk?’ Annie said and lifted her head and tried to pull away a little, suddenly embarrassed at the childishness of her posture, it’s all right here, I can get her chattering away here – or at least most of the time I can.’
She moved forwards now, hiding her embarrassment and intention to escape from his side behind concern for Maddie. ‘Look at her! What went wrong, for heaven’s sake? She was so different – but now she’s even worse than when I started. She wasn’t stiff like this, then. And she did eat and –’
‘Look, if I can start her talking again this afternoon, will that make a difference? If I can get her over whatever it is that’s blocking her now, will you let me take her home with you? I’ll keep a close eye on you both afterwards anyway – I’ll visit you on my way in here each morning and probably come in the evenings too. Just to be on the safe side –’
She flashed a glance at him over her shoulder. ‘Would that be the only reason for coming?’
He was silent for a moment and then smiled at her, rueful and oddly shy. ‘You know damned well it wouldn’t, don’t you? You know I like you?’
She turned back to Maddie. ‘Yes,’ she said and then burst out, ‘I can’t think why.’
‘Neither can I, sometimes. You make it very difficult – look, do we have a deal? I’ll see what I can do to restart her engine, and then we’ll decide about whether or not you take her on at home after that?’
Again she was silent and then reached out and touched Maddie’s shoulder. It was still unyielding, and still the round shapes of her eyes could be seen staring ahead through the eyelids, unmoving. And then she said unwillingly, ‘Yes. All right. If she talks.’
He sighed softly, a faint movement of air that was hardly perceptible but she heard it and turned back to him and said with her chin up, ‘But I want to come and listen to what she says.’
‘What?’
‘This abreaction session – when you give her the injection. Can I be there and listen?’
‘Don’t you trust me to tell you what happens?’ He tilted his head slightly and looked at her, almost smiling but not quite.
‘Oh, of course I do! But it’s not the same, being told what someone says and actually hearing it yourself. I want to hear it. It’s more like living it, then –’
‘Are you living what she says?’ He sounded surprised.
She was surprised herself; she hadn’t realised quite what she had said and she pushed her mind back to think about it and then nodded. ‘I rather think I am. She starts to talk, and she goes round in circles a little, and repeats herself, but it doesn’t matter, because I don’t just hear it all. I see it happen. When she told me about being in the ship for the first time, when they made love in the lifeboat –’ She went a sudden rich crimson. ‘Well, other times too. When she told me how she arrived at Back Bay Station in Boston, with Daphne and the boys, and he met her, I could see him walking down the station platform towards her and – he was madly good-looking, you know.’
‘Was?’
‘Hmm?’
‘You said was. As though he were dead.’
Again she was surprised. ‘Did I? I don’t know. She hasn’t said so. It’s just that –’ She turned and looked at Maddie again. ‘Even a bastard like that couldn’t leave her here for so long in such a state if he were alive, could he?’
‘He might if he didn’t know she was here,’ he said. ‘Maybe he’s still in the States? Maybe he didn’t know she came back –or why? And there are the children too. The little boys. From what she told you they must be men of – how old are they now?’
‘How – I’m not sure. They must be –’ she did a fast computation and then laughed. ‘It’s odd to think of. I just see little boys – awful ill-behaved little boys, too – when she speaks of them. Nice-looking babies with chubby knees and dirty faces. But they must be well into their thirties, older than I am. Buster – Timothy Three – must be around thirty-six or so –’
‘And is probably in the States. With his father. We’ve still got a lot to find out, haven’t we?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Such a lot to find out – so I can come and hear?’
‘Yes,’ he said after a moment. ‘You can come and hear.’ He turned his head then and looked down the ward. ‘Staff Nurse!’ he called and the woman came bustling up, all efficiency and apparent willingness.
‘I’m taking Mrs Kincaid to the old ECT room this afternoon. Do me a tray please, with sodium pentothal – and put on an ampoule of amytal too, will you? I’ll decide later which I’ll use. You needn’t send anyone down with the patient from the ward. Miss Matthews will help me.’
The staff nurse looked singularly wooden. ‘Oh. I didn’t know Miss Matthews was trained staff.’ She stopped then and added pointedly, ‘Sir.’
‘She isn’t,’ Joe said cheerfully and grinned at her. ‘But she’s next
of kin, so to speak, and she can help take notes perfectly well. I’m quite capable of coping, you know, with just one patient.’ And he too paused and then added firmly, ‘Staff Nurse.’
The woman sketched a shrug and went away to get the tray and together Annie and Joe lifted Maddie into a wheelchair – a task that took several effortful minutes, for without any cooperation she was a dead weight – but by the time the nurse had come back with the tray, covered with a dressing towel, they were ready to go.
And Annie followed Joe as he pushed the chair out of the ward wondering a little nervously what the hell she had let herself in for.
32
July 1987
She had tried so hard, and had failed. And she didn’t know which caused the most pain, the fact that she was forced to remember, or the fact that she had failed to forget.
She had dug the deepest hole she could in her mind, lying there stiffly, forcing herself to see the great gaping space inside her head into which it was all going to be buried, the pain and the anger and the sick desolation. She was going to make it the deepest hole there ever was, and put all the hateful feelings in and weigh them down with great rocks and then fill in the hole and get on with living. There was the business to run. There were the boys to look after – there were the boys and there were friends to be made and other men to be found and loved and –
But she failed. As fast as she dug the hole so did its sides fall in. As hard as she pushed the bad feelings down, so did they ooze up all round her to engulf her again. The rocks she wanted to use for weights turned into soggy pastry which slid through her fingers and then crumbled into dryness and finally dust which blew away, and her fingers themselves became brittle fragile sticks with which she could do nothing. And all round her the darkness throbbed and heaved like a sullen black sea and she felt so sick and so ill she wanted to die, to disappear for ever into that black hole and leave the miseries outside. Just to be buried and to die – it would be peace and comfort and no more pain at all and – but remorselessly the memories came and pushed up at her from beneath, thrusting her up and out and back into the middle of it all and she opened her mouth in the darkness and shrieked her fury and her hurt at whoever was there to hear.
‘What is it?’ Annie whispered, staring at Maddie’s sweat-scattered face and her wide staring eyes which clearly saw nothing that was in this chilly little room with its elderly couch and its battered trolleys and chairs. ‘Why is she so – she looks terrified – what’s in that drug, for God’s sake?’
‘It isn’t the drug,’ Joe said, never taking his eyes from Maddie’s face. He was sitting beside the couch on which she lay, her right arm held firmly across his lap so that her hand was under his arm and the big syringe nestled in the crook of her elbow. He was easing off the tourniquet on her upper arm with almost imperceptible movements of his left hand as he let the drug drip very slowly into her vein. ‘It’s what is already there inside her. The drug just lets it free. Maddie.’ He leaned closer to her. ‘Maddie, where are you? Tell me where you are, Maddie. Maddie, where are you? And what are you doing? What are you doing, Maddie?’
August 1953
The blackness thinned, flattened and became a square of dull light that made her squint, and she peered out through her swollen eyelids, trying to collect her thoughts. Where am I? She’d heard it inside her head, deep inside, muffled but clamorous. Where am I? What am I doing?
Somewhere she heard the children shouting and then there was a long wail from Danny and a shout of fury from Buster and she dragged herself up on one elbow and peered round the room, and as she stared at the unfamiliar furniture and the wide window with the blue curtains through which the sunlight outside glowed to make patterns on the strange carpet she felt a great wave of fear, because she had no idea where she was, or why she was, or even for one crazy moment who she was.
And then as Danny shrieked again it all came back in a vast wash of memory and she fell back on the pillow and managed to put her hands up to her head and press hard on the throbbing temples.
She had drunk three glasses of whisky last night. She, who hardly ever used alcohol, had come into the quiet suite with the scatter of half unpacked luggage across the sitting room and the sound of Daphne’s heavy breathing coming from the room she shared with the boys, and had sat down and quite deliberately swallowed three glasses of whisky. How she had done it without being sick, she didn’t know; she disliked the taste of it even more than she loathed the smell, yet she had pushed it down and then gone to her room, to that big double-bedded room that she was to use alone, and dropped her clothes where she took them off and crawled into bed, unwashed, the taste of the whisky rank around her unbrushed teeth, to try and sleep.
And somehow had, after weeping furiously for what had seemed like hours, but had dreamed and dreamed, and she tried now to get hold of what she had dreamed, to expunge the bad feelings the dreams had caused by recalling them, but it was impossible. They were gone like the night itself and she opened her eyes again and stared round at the unfamiliar and therefore unfriendly room and felt fear rise in her once more.
He was leaving her. He said he wasn’t. He said he was going to marry Gloria just for practical reasons, that he would still love her – but what did it matter what he said? He was leaving her, leaving her, leaving her –
Somehow she pulled herself out of the bed to stand swaying a little beside it and then pulled at the counterpane and wrapping herself in it, awkwardly, went padding across to the door on the other side of the room. She needed a bathroom badly. A bathroom offered a lavatory to be sick in and a shower and perhaps some aspirin for the agony of throbbing pain behind her eyes.
The door actually took her into the sitting room. Daphne was sitting at the table in the window space with the boys, feeding them, and Danny, sitting in the high chair, was banging his heels against the legs of it, with a monotonous thumping sound that made Maddie wince.
‘Hello Mummy!’ Daphne looked up and gave her a wide arch grin. ‘Well, you and Daddy did sleep late, didn’t you? You must have had a very late night – here we are having our nice dinners, and you just getting up. Say, “Yes, Mummy, nice dinners” –’ and she spooned a greenish mass into Danny, which he promptly spat out.
Maddie felt her face go grey as her stomach rose into her chest. ‘Jay’s not here –’ she managed. ‘I’m going to take a shower –’ And she moved across the room towards the other side where the bathroom door stood half open.
‘Oh, men!’ said Daphne cheerfully. ‘Don’t they make you furious? They can go and have ever such a good time and have ever so many little drinkies and wake up bright as ninepence and go off to work as usual. It’s not fair, is it, mmm? Danny, tell Mummy it’s not fair –’
Danny shrieked again and gratefully Maddie reached the bathroom door and slid inside and closed it against the din, just in time. She was going to be horribly sick and the one thing that would make it even worse than it was would be Daphne’s clucking commiseration. And she hurled herself at the lavatory basin, for once grateful for the noise the boys made, for it covered up her own.
She emerged from her bedroom an hour later, showered, dressed and carefully made up. There was still a pallor beneath the applied colour, but it helped her feel less vulnerable to have made the effort and she was able to face Daphne, who was sitting in the window, now sewing.
‘That’s better, Mummy,’ she said heartily as she came across the room. ‘You look much more tickety-boo! The boys are asleep at last – they do so hate their afternoon nap! – but I was wondering, where shall we take them for their afternoon walk when they wake up?’ And she looked over her shoulder out at the street with unmistakable longing on her face and for the first time Maddie was able to think of someone other than herself, and experienced a stab of compunction.
‘It must be very boring for you here,’ she said huskily and coughed to clear her throat. It felt raw and painful, and she knew it came from the tears she had shed last night.
‘I’m sorry –’
‘Oh, that’s all right, Mummy!’ Daphne said and turned resolutely back to her sewing. ‘I know how it is when family matters are pressing.’ And she kept her head bent studiously over her flying needle, and Maddie could feel the curiosity oozing out of her, prodding at her pruriently, aching to know why Jay wasn’t here, where he had gone, why she looked so dreadful. And the moment of concern she had felt for her shrivelled and died.
‘I hope you called down to room service for all you needed for the boys,’ she said now. ‘Just keep a note of all you order, will you? So that we can check the bill –’ She had meant to say, ‘So that Mr Kincaid can check the bill,’ to cover up the fact of Jay’s absence as though it were a temporary matter, but the words had stuck in her raw sore throat. ‘And you’ll have to do it a good deal, I’m afraid, on your own. We have – um – business affairs to deal with, so we won’t be around as much as we’d like. You can cope, I imagine? Of course we’ll pay you overtime, double time, for the loss of your off duty –’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ Daphne said, still with that dreadful adamantine cheerfulness. ‘I can’t go anywhere, after all – I mean, I don’t have any friends to go about with, and it’s no fun on your own, is it? So I don’t mind just being with the boys all the time –’ She looked up then and added hastily, ‘Though a little extra cash always comes in handy, of course.’
‘I’ll see to it you have it,’ Maddie said wearily and then moved over to the window to look down into the street. The scene there, with its chrome-dripping cars and trucks and brightly dressed people and the shouting shopfront signs and windows, looked exotic after the last years at home in England, and yet was still deeply familiar to her. It was as though she’d never really been away from Boston, as though the intervening time at home had been a dream. She felt isolated and alien, as though she did not belong here or anywhere else, and that it would be the same if she were to go back to London right now. She would feel as alien there. And she half whispered a phrase she had heard someone use on the ship to describe the sort of people who forever shuttled between America and Britain and who, wherever they were, were always homesick for the other place: ‘Lost citizen of Atlantis …’
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