by Anne Peile
‘Yes, I noticed the books; who have you got there?’ Olive leans forward so that she can read the titles on the spine.
‘There is nobody else here. I live here on my own.’
‘You do seem to like a wide range of work, Susie. It must be something you’ve inherited; I suppose you can inherit such things.’
I suspect that she will confront me as soon as Bonnie Jean leaves us alone together. I wonder if she carries a picture of Jack in her head; righteously, holding it up for me to see, like the banner of a protest demonstrator or a statue on a Holy Day. I hope not. Strictly speaking he belongs only to me, she should be told that. I am his one and only, now and ever shall be. But inside I was becoming less pugnacious and more panicky. Silently I began to abjure her, whimpering please do not have a picture of my father inside your head, make it anyone else, a random stranger, the better man you could have married. Please, not him.
Olive, with or without her mental placard of righteous indignation, had got up and was walking around my room. She paused by the window, I might have supposed that she was being considerate and discreet in looking away, in case Bonnie Jean had to perform some personal or undignified task upon me, but she wasn’t.
She turned and made her move, ‘There’s an awful lot I’d like to say to you, Susie, if I may.’
Seeing that I could not get up and run away and save myself from Olive and her head pictures and the awful awe full words she had stored up to say to me I did the ostrich thing instead. If you cover your eyes and face with your raised arms it keeps people out quite effectively. If your left arm is incapacitated by bandaging and splint you can still manage somehow with one; it is, after all, a desperate measure.
‘Come on, ostrich’ Trevor always says, ‘I know you’re in there somewhere.’
‘I don’t think she’ll be up to much more today,’ said Bonnie Jean.
‘I understand. I’ll come another day, Susie, if that’s all right.’
Sister Anna Maria, the library trolley nun whose eyelids flutter like trapped moths, says that only God can sort things out. So far I do not pray because I could only form the plea to have Jack back and if God cannot do that then what chance is there that I will ever be able to believe.
That teacher, Mrs Bartlett, who taught the foundation of languages in the first year at Clapham County, devoted one lesson to the role of myths and legends. A mere thirty-five minutes from drilling bell to drilling bell, but I recall much of the content, particularly Herne the Hunter. A being who can turn cows’ milk to blood is not likely to be forgotten. ‘Some of you might have visited Windsor Great Park with your parents,’ she said, ‘Herne the Hunter was believed to stalk the Forest of Windsor.’
‘You may think you can carry on indefinitely like this, Susanna, but I can assure you that you cannot, we are arranging for you to see a neurologist about your arm, you’ve caused a great deal of damage to yourself,’ says Derrick Hearn.
When I am able to answer him back I can feel again, just for a moment, the Kings Road pavements beneath my feet; and, tasting the sweet angelica trace of Pimms No 1, I can flick my long hair and curl my glossy lips and remember that I was once a victor.
‘Where do you live, Windsor?’ I asked him.
‘No, but staff do not disclose their home addresses.’
I nearly said, ‘Why, are you afraid us loonies will give you a heavy breather?’ but it was only ever personalities like Alison who could carry off such cocky ripostes and anyway I must try never to let him hear me utter any sexual reference.
When I was taken back to my room there was an envelope lying on the bed cover.
‘What’s this?’ I asked the auxiliary who worked with Bonnie Jean. She said that she was sure she did not know and taking up the linen she had changed she left me on my own.
Postmarked Suffolk, it was a large envelope, very like the one that Jack, guilty and elated in unequal measure – probably the ratio being 1:3 – had once despatched from a Sloane Square dawn to his wife in that county. Now that she had tracked me down at last, I saw that Olive, in an elegant symmetry of recriminative impersonation, was having her revenge. Perhaps the content was exactly the same; no accompanying letter; though the guilty lecture notes and carefully annotated slides being message enough for me to understand her meaning, shuttled back across the postal service. I know who you are, I know what you did, shouts the coded message from within his careful script, pause for slide, Jan Steen.
The auxiliary brought me vegetable soup which I knew would taste of the tin. I left it on the tray and she retrieved it at three o’clock. I was pretending to sleep which was difficult because I had to curve myself around the envelope that I did not wish to touch.
He had completed the notes for the lecture while I lay and watched him. Although I recovered rapidly from the penicillin episode, Jack’s anxieties persisted; he said that I should not return to work.
‘I would rather go back,’ I reasoned, ‘you have to be away anyway, you are giving the lecture.’
‘I wonder… ’ he said, ‘I wonder if I could arrange something… maybe… Anyway, your strength needs building up.’
He went out and bought Brand’s Essence of Chicken in a jar from the Venice is sinking chemist. He made me drink cups full of it dissolved in boiling water. I complained incessantly about taking it so that he would fuss over me all the more; in fact I quite enjoyed the taste.
He did not mention the lecture again that evening. During the night I sensed that he had got out of bed and left me long before it was light. I saw that he was back at the desk, arranging the numbered pages and the slides and putting them into a large envelope. The desk lamp illumined his lined face and his upper body. I wish that I could paint a perfect picture of him; otherwise you cannot ever know what a beautiful man he was. When he realised that I was awake he looked across and smiled, ‘I’ve thought of the solution. Olive will be mildly furious but I think that this is the easiest course… and it means I won’t have to be away from you until I am sure that you are quite recovered.’
I was feeling that adolescent’s need and suckling greed for sleep, I pushed my face back into the pillow. I heard Jack talking to himself. During the day I would have found it amusing, both the fact that he should be doing something eccentric and also the unfamiliar tone of his voice and words: ‘… do so hate confrontations… really would rather avoid it if one can… so very disagreeable… ’
There was an urbane distaste about his monologue; he seemed to have reverted to some fastidious caprice of his youth. Once he told my mother how he had always insisted that his socks for evening wear must be made of black silk. Also, for a short time he had owned a Bugatti sports car and a Dalmatian dog named Jazz.
Some time later I woke again because he was preparing to go out. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Only up to the Post Office in Sloane Square, there’s an early morning collection from that box. If it goes first thing it won’t get held up so she’ll definitely have it by tomorrow, the day of the lecture. It will give them time to find somebody else. Have some more sleep, Susie, I will be back beside you before you know it, I promise.’
‘No,’ I remembered that there had been some reference to Olive being angry and in my fuddled state I thought that she must be at the Post Office and that she would somehow persuade Jack away. ‘Wait, let me come with you.’
He stood watching me with both fondness and impatience while I clumsily pulled on clothes. He strode off down Kings Road as though it was Kinder Scout and my sleep hobbled limbs had difficulty keeping up with him. I saw that he was elated by the decision he had made; he pushed back his hair and smiled at himself in the silver metal façade of the Chelsea Drug Store which gleamed in the darkness. Catch him seeing his own reflection and you could be certain he had always known the effect that he had upon women.
‘Great stuff, Susie, great stuff… do you know the last time I played truant must have been on Clifton Downs. I had a bar of Fry’s chocolate and I
planned to hide out for months, like a woodsman.’
‘What happened?’
‘They’d found me by eleven o’clock in the morning; then I was beaten for it, as usual. I was always getting beaten for something or another.’
We reached the Post Office and Jack surveyed his package with satisfaction. He had stuck a great many stamps upon it to make sure it met all possible postal charges. When he attempted to post it through the slot in the bronze metal panel it almost stuck.
‘Bugger it, cussed thing… I don’t want the bloody slides to bend inside… ’ He shoved the end again and it was received into the box. ‘Now then, sleepyhead, we’ll just go and sit in the square and make sure the van comes.’
He led me across the road and we sat side by side on a bench like office workers in their lunch hour. I dozed a little and then I saw that a component of the air, filmy as a gauze panel before a ballet performance, was lifting and that the daylight had come. Two pigeons sidled on a windowsill above W H Smith’s. My head rested heavy on my father’s shoulder and from time to time he nuzzled it in an animal mother way. ‘Won’t be long, then we can get you back to bed.’
As I became a little more awake I was concerned at what an unappealing sight I must look; mascara smudged and my skin like uncooked dough and in general stale. But Jack did not seem to mind at all.
‘Okay,’ I said and he said, ‘Okay indeed,’ and leant down and kissed my face repeatedly as though it would tear the flesh of his lips to lift his mouth away.
Surely someone must have seen us there on the dawn seat. Perhaps someone going early to sweep the empty Royal Court stage; or someone flitting a duster over the glass shelves of Mitsukiku where the kimonos were patterned like butterfly wings. If not there, perhaps a resident from the red brick mansion flats, soignée in her dressing gown, the stately widow of some admiral of the fleet preparing her early morning tea tray, cabaret service for one. Somebody must surely have looked down upon Sloane Square so early in that morning of a summer’s day and witnessed the tender nature of my father’s adoration. I hope that they did, anyway. Sometimes it is a hard burden to think that I am the only one who knows and remembers and understands.
A little later he said, ‘Here he is,’ and I saw that the van had arrived and the postman had swung open the shiny door and, with difficulty, he transferred the package from its wire innards to his sack.
‘Done,’ said Jack with satisfaction. ‘Olive will have that in the morning and we have won ourselves a whole weekend, a whole extra weekend, Susie.’
Back at Oakley Street he said, ‘We’ll shut ourselves away and we won’t even answer the phone. It will be you and me against the world, little one.’
My clothes stayed where they fell. I thought that there was still faint warmth from the mattress. Irresistible both, the heavy draw of sleep beneath me and the weight of my father’s body on top of me. ‘Now where was I?’ he pretends to ask himself, ‘where was I… I remember, yes I know… ’
Not until it was growing dark outside my room in the Springfield Hospital at Tooting Bec did I realise that the lecture notes would have Jack’s fingerprints upon them still. Fingerprints must be transferable; policemen seem to be able to lift them off things all the time. If I held the foolscap sheets against my flesh I would be transposing the ghost of my father’s touchings of me.
Olive, whose handwriting was quite like Jack’s but rounder, suggested on a single sheet of grey paper that these were things I might like to have and sent also her best wishes. It was not the lecture notes and slides after all. It was bundles of postcards, many reproductions of paintings in rubber bands. Each bundle had been labelled by Jack on a slip of green paper. I set them out on the bed like the formation for a game of patience.
For a long time I sat regarding my father’s patient work. I contemplated moving some of the piles around, red nine on black ten, Turner and Spencer, Blake and Rembrandt, Chagall and the Vorticists and Augustus John. Ace can move up. I judged that he must have sorted and wound the bands with his long hands before he ever used those same hands for caressing me. Within, without, and at that dusky skin place where the inner thigh ends; and simultaneously, his dear voice stroking the inside of my head. Years before those caressings he must have sorted and bound this collection; not, though, I think, before he made me. Probably it was during the post-alcoholic period of recovery and rehabilitation from drink, the era when Olive had been his rock. Occupations such as sorting and categorising are invariably soothing and therapeutic. Some years after he made me then; on that September night when he gave me life by convulsing himself out into another woman, just as he had done scores of times before, with many and with any number. Yet the act itself, just that once in his earlier history, was lifted above the ordinary. For on that occasion it was me he created, all unknowing, bringing into the world a girl child; a daughter purely for himself and his delight, earthy coupling to earthly pleasure.
I would never tell Herne the Hunter this but sometimes, when you remember that someone is dead, there seems to be a black space cut out and it is in the shape of their outline. Therefore it is their absence that marks their former presence. Coming to an end is the turn of the card which ensures that there was existence. In that way you can say that there can never be an end because the not being continues, in perpetuity, to prove the being. I could ask Sister Anna Maria. I think that it may be the same as they mean with Jesus sometimes but she might think I am presuming or even being blasphemous. I do not think that she would tell Herne & Co if I spoke to her of dying, so long as I did not make it too personal, but even so I shall not chance it.
If you think that I must mind this existence then I promise you that you are quite mistaken. It was in the beginning that I minded my way of living because, try as I might, I never did belong. Only occasionally odd sections of printed pages caught and blew open the door in the wind and as it banged on its hinges I could see glimpses of beyond.
Then I had those first months in Chelsea, when I went to seek my father, and truly that time was a delight. From Sloane Square to World’s End I see it was a Mardi Gras parade, a gorgeous glorious camp and comic charivari; singing, slouch walking and cat calling, doffing and bowing to the pavement crowds. Some days I can recall individuals from that company of players, posing louche and decadent and sooty-eyed in a corner of my mind; or staggering a little on platform soles, making a charming apology for some impolite ailment of depravity. Some of them are brilliantly appointed with stars, these are the little stars of lapel brooches made in diamante by Yves St Laurent.
And then I did find him, my father. Temptation and what a fall it was. And as we fell together headlong we were as immortal as any figure in a painting or on a page who nurses the heart’s deep wounds. No absolution for my absolute. Do not ask for credit as a refusal often offends; remember, there was a bargain made.
And so the worst thing that could have happened to me did happen. What did you expect was going to become of me?
In the doldrum afternoons, if we inmates are pacified by heavy puddings or visitors or sedatives, Bonnie Jean and the other auxiliaries like to go to the small staff rest room and watch the drama series Crown Court. It is on three times a week and I gather that real people are brought in to be jurors. Sometimes I tiptoe along the corridor and watch through the open door. From behind I see Bonnie Jean, engrossed on the sofa with her companions; behind her white cap her biro is stuck through the small pompom of her bun so that she will not lose it.
One afternoon, peering stealthily from the corridor, I am thrilled to see that Jimmy, the manager from the Great Gear Trading Company, is playing a part. He seems to be the younger lover of an embezzling woman with a gambling habit. He must have been told to choose his own clothes because he is wearing the Stirling Cooper waisted canvas jacket that he habitually wore in the market. It seems to be a little tight nowadays. Of the two lawyers, prosecution is smooth and silver-haired; defence is stout and pugnacious, bearing the old pock marks of
serious acne. Silver hair is very clever, proving by immaculately tailored arguments just how much learned friend’s client’s friend actually knew and may, thereby, be implicated.
I am inordinately proud of Jimmy’s performance but then I have a pang of sadness because there is no one I can nudge and tell of my acquaintance with him. I went back to bed as pompous notes of music announced the closing credits.
I have not grown fat again; strangely, you would think that I would have done. I have very little exercise and my metabolism must be slowed by all the sedatives they feed me. Nor do I suffer from tonsillitis anymore; now that I have no wish to speak with anyone I have all the voice I could want. I asked Trevor why: ‘It’s probably all the antibiotics we have to zap you with, to stop you giving yourself septicaemia once a week, else it’s your age, you’ve just grown out of it maybe.’
‘What would happen if I got septicaemia?’
‘You’d probably have to have your arm cut off.’
I smiled.
‘I’m not joking, Susie, I am serious.’
‘I know you are.’
If they have to take my arm away I will yet be able to feel it. I have heard that happens to people who have limbs amputated. It will be the absent presence again. Sorrowing for the absence is the only way to hold on to the presence. How stupid must they be to think that they can stop me in any of what I do? Anyway, even if I wanted to I could not, there was that pact I made.
I do take some exercise. I walk in the pleasant grounds of this the Springfield asylum, formerly workhouse, at Tooting Bec. There are large flower borders in the way of a municipal park. Someone goes to great trouble to label all the plants with both their Latin and common names beneath. One of my favourites is Alchemilla Mollis, brackets, Mary’s Tears. And sure enough, after a shower of rain, drops are held in clear sheer beauty within its soft green leaves. Lacrimae rerum.
