by Anne Peile
‘Translate this passage for me,’ said the Latin teacher whose name, to the deep disappointment of Alison James, did not appear in the A listings of the London telephone directory. ‘It’s an important one to know and it often turns up in the scholarship exam paper. You need to be familiar with it.’ Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangent.
‘The tears in what?’ I asked her – in things, circumstances, deeds, possessions, facts… But, ‘You choose,’ she said, so sure was she of my ability and my judgement. I am very sorry that I let her down. That day I chose deeds; now I would choose things.
There is a young gardener. He has close-cut dark hair like toy plush and a perfect sun tan. On hot days he removes his shirt, he has the narrowest hips in his washed blue button front Levi jeans. I am sure that girls admire him very much. When I know that he is out working I keep away so that he does not have to see how ugly I am.
Bonnie Jean, finishing the plum from her packed lunch, says, ‘Time to freshen yourself up, darling.’
It isn’t because it is early afternoon, not the hour for morning or evening ablutions.
‘Am I going to get a visitor again?’
‘Apparently, she telephoned, Mrs Owen, is it, Olive? Face, come on,’ she wipes across it firmly with the flannel in her small strong hand.
I live my life in the passive subjunctive. Mrs A explained it one day, arranging a special extra lesson for me during her morning coffee break.
Olive has brought a canvas holdall, she puts it down and it sits and stays on the linoleum like an obedient dog. ‘How are you, Susie?’
‘Okay.’ In fact I am afraid. I fear the confrontation she will have with me but worse than that, she will drag things into the light. I will have to remember and worst of all there will be noise and alarms and notes taken and I will have to admit that I remember to Herne the Hunter. Better if she would strike me and stone me.
The bag must contain garments that I left in Oakley Street so long ago; a pair of vintage jeans, shipped in one of Uncle Herm’s container loads, musty yet astute; a T-shirt patterned with stars. Olive puts to one side the batik print scarf which must still be warm from her powdery pale neck and flaps her face with her hand to cool it. Sometimes Jack used to pick up some article of clothing I had just removed; the first time I thought he was going to tell me off for being untidy but it was so that he could cradle it to his face or chest like a kitten. It’s all right, I tell myself, I am cunning, we know that; I am expert at hiding my secrets within secrets, I always was. In the wash bag, my family’s present to me at Christmas, I collect the bedtime tablets. I have a substantial quantity saved up inside the pastel cotton wool balls, pink and yellow, white and blue. I manage it rather cleverly, holding the tablet inside my cheek and letting the nurse witness me in the action of swallowing, grimacing and twisting my mouth with obvious distaste. Someone in the Chelsea Potter told me I had BB lips. I asked a boy I knew what it meant and he explained Brigitte Bardot and then he said, ‘You have, too.’ When the medicine trolley has moved on I slide from bed and add it to my cache. It will be more than sufficient unto the day.
‘That’s good, I hoped that we could talk a bit today, if that’s all right.’
If it was my clothes in the holdall they may not have been laundered since. There would be traces of me and of my father on them. Sometimes semen smells like mushrooms I observed. ‘Yes,’ said Jack, ‘yes, I suppose it does a bit.’
Olive said, ‘Susie, tell me to mind my own business if you like but why exactly are you in here?’
‘I’ve done stuff. Sometimes I hurt myself.’
Both solicitous and lascivious. ‘Does it hurt you when I do this to you?’ my father inquired and probed. ‘Does it hurt you, Susie?… Tell me if it does, best beloved, and I will stop but it’s… er… it feels awfully good… ’
There is a scale of hurts and pain; the worst not necessarily those experienced physically. You were old enough to have known that for yourself, Jack, and by the way it barely registered, amid all my joy at your enjoyment.
‘Do you remember anything about your father, Susie?’
‘I don’t remember anything, ever.’
‘Did you get the postcards?’
‘I don’t know. Have you been on holiday?’
‘I’ve come to talk to you about your father,’ she said, ‘my husband, Jack. Perhaps you know of him as John.’
‘I know no Johns. You sent me a lot of postcards, in the big envelope.’
‘Yes, I did, it seemed right that I should send them to you. Susie, I felt that I needed to talk to you, about Jack, and to sort things out. You see, they’ve found that I have this heart problem; it may mean nothing, I may go on for years, but whatever happens, I don’t want to leave unfinished business, not like Jack did.’
I am so good at being Mistress Crazy, sometimes I roll my eyes and I fancy that I resemble Judy Garland, crisis stricken, in The Wizard of Oz. That was a film my mother lauded. She took me to a special showing at the Granada, Clapham Junction. I did not like to tell her that I found it terrifying. It was something about the quality of the colour, I think, also the amateur costuming of that inept triumvirate, straw, tin and up-on-hind-legs lion; had they been slicker then perhaps they would have seemed less sinister.
‘I think I told you, it’s been a merry dance, trying to find you. He always believed that you were in Australia, you see.’
Not always, Olive, not quite always, was it?
‘Who did?’
‘Your father – that is, my husband, Jack. My solicitor has been helping me to trace you. He found your sister, Belinda, first of all… ’
‘I haven’t got a sister.’
‘Susie, I think you have.’
‘There is Sister Anna Maria, she is the nun with the books on wheels.’
‘No, Susie, you have a relative, a sister named Belinda. I gather she was quite anti, she did not want any contact made at all, apparently she told my solicitor so in no uncertain terms… anyway, we carried on looking and then we found you. I’m glad that we did, Susie, there are things I need to tell you, if you’ll let me.’
‘You could tell me anything and I wouldn’t remember. I don’t have a memory, that’s really why I’m here.’
‘Susie, it might help us both if we could talk about him.’
I shook my head rapidly; it was difficult for her to decide, I expect, whether I was shaking my head or shivering. Certainly my teeth were chattering.
‘Susie,’ Olive had placed her hand upon my right hand on the bedcover, ‘Susie, I know it’s all very difficult, I know that only too well… ’
The trouble is that I am too good at this Mistress Crazy lark. I forget sometimes what I know and what I cannot tell and what I cannot know, there are occupied rooms and filled cupboards in my mind, all quite tight shut. Once upon a time there was so much space to spare within, all that was accommodated there being the tiny ammonite curled form, with buds for limbs, of that baby my sister had killed. Nowadays we are full to bursting in these places and I must tell myself to be sure not to lift the latch for fear of what falls out. Jack told me the rhyme his mother used to chant to him:
Lift the latch, peep in,
Open the door, walk in,
Take a chair, sit by there,
How are you today, sir.
Full to overflowing with things, circumstances, deeds, possessions, facts… If ever they all come tumbling out I can tell you it will surely be a flood. Mind yourself, do.
I am of course to an extent crazy but not in my entirety, not so far as I lead them to believe I am; only in the way of one who, both blessed and fallen, bides their time in purgatory. But now I must be tired so that I misunderstand what my father’s wife is saying because I am sure with firm press of kindness on my hand she said that she was sorry to tell me that he was dead. Mind yourself. Or did she only say that she was sorry that he was dead.
We sit for a while in silence and with what serendipity do I remember Jimm
y and his day in court and that suave barrister character with his ruses. I see that I must establish whether she knows all of it or some of it and that I must be ready, gauging how she will frame her accusation. How high will she construct the arguments for my guilt? She has let go of my hand which may mean her opening gambit is imminent. I think she is too solid, too practical to shout and make panache with her gown. I wish that she would kill me and make it simpler although I have somewhere for forgetfulness appointed and I do not want it to be in this place instead. She is clever at disguising how much she must hate me. Perhaps her next ploy will be simply presenting my guilty Kings Road fait accompli garments – exhibits one and two, patterned with passion spent. Nowadays, given the glittering and over-stimulated transience of that happy thoroughfare, they would for sure be hopelessly out of fashion, perhaps almost ready to come round again on the carousel. In the end I can bear the wait no longer.
‘What is in that bag?’ I asked her.
She looked up as from a regretful daydream. ‘Oh, I’d forgotten that, it’s books, art books, I thought you might like to have them.’ She fetched the bag to my bed and laid out upon it half a dozen works of reference. ‘All Jack’s, of course. I am moving soon, so I have been sorting out,’ she said.
‘Years ago, you know, he often used to say I wonder how they’re getting on, those little ones of mine.’
‘Little one.’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
Nothing at all, Olive.
‘Where are you moving to, London?’
‘No, not London. I am moving down to Cornwall, to St Ives. I am going to set up a gallery with a friend. Actually, it will be half gallery, half café, people will be able to sit and have coffee while they browse. At the house in Suffolk we have a big old outbuilding, we always talked about turning that into a gallery, your father and I, but somehow we never got round to it.’
‘What will happen to your house in Suffolk?’
‘I have sold it, Susie. A family with young children will be living there; it is the sort of place that needs a proper family, really, with the garden and so on.’
I am incarcerated in my cream painted room and within that room my left arm is incarcerated even more, in its matching cream coloured crepe bandaging and appliances. There seems to be no part of it I can get at, worry and fret over it as I might. Olive says, ‘Why don’t you look at the books for a little while, Susie, I’m just going to step out for a moment.’
I know that she has gone for Bonnie Jean; they like each other, those two, I am glad. I can hear them talking outside in the corridor. Olive thinks she might have distressed me by talking of the house move but if so she makes no sense because her reason for visiting me is surely to cause me distress. Perhaps she does not plan to do it alone, she may intend to have Derrick H in on the denouement, even my mother too, some ghastly sisterhood of women wronged.
‘Certainly it won’t do for her to become too attached to you,’ says Bonnie Jean.
Yet I do not think that Herne the Hunter is aware even of the two visits, let alone that the visitor is my father’s wife. If Bonnie Jean or one of the other auxiliaries ventured to tell him that a visitor had come to see me he would not have bothered to listen. He, as the consultant, sees himself as far superior to the ancillary staff, mainly female; he considers them mere foot soldiers. And so they are, the poor bloody infantry who cope and comfort and clean us; dodging the missiles and foul language and cadences of weirdness that we inmates hurl at them. Their efforts are infinitely more valuable than anything he could do and yet he would never deem their observations worthy of his regard. But can you just imagine the lines on which his stupid brain would run if he did know about Olive, what normalising familial tableaux his dirty mind would pretend it was inventing and favouring?
Just suppose, Susanna, just suppose you had presented yourself on the marital doorstep in Suffolk instead, one chilly afternoon of early spring. They would have taken you in, Mr and Mrs Rhys Owen, no doubt about that. They would have assumed responsibility for you; ensured your education – school and university – your pastoral care and a wholesome diet. In a matter-of-fact way Olive would have sounded out your knowledge of menstruation and of boys. They would have encouraged you to sketch and to join a local Woodcraft unit and taken you on continental camping holidays. Jack would have expected you to be bored but polite when he expounded his longterm plans for the asparagus bed. Probably he had an old ex-service duffle coat hanging by the back door. On chilly mornings he would have worn it when you and he walked into the village to fetch things for Olive. It would have hung loose and gawky on his frame and, because he was in the sole and proper role of parent, you would have wished that he had instead a sheepskin jacket or fawn car coat, like other fathers did. When you were installed at Oxford they would have travelled down periodically to take you out for meals and express their pride in you. And, when you had ’flu, Susanna, tucked up in your bedroom in the eaves, Jack would have brought honey and lemon in a pottery mug to your bedside table, having first knocked discreetly upon the thumb-latched ledge and brace door. There you lie, propped on pillows, the demure, picot and gingham pyjama’ed daughter of John ap Rhys Owen, ARA. Your father would not have presumed to stay, Susanna, nor to sit on the end of your bed, chatting middle-aged pleasantries in his sea green cardigan until you can bear it no longer and, reaching forward in some overarching ache of love, you take hold of him and with your soft mouth you drown him well and truly.
How carefully Olive frames her words when she returns. I wonder if people try harder with the spoken word, now that there is television. Do we hope that the conversation will be timed and perfect, pit pat, pit pat, each side keeping to the script within a set transmission time. She picks up the sumptuous volumes and sets them on my locker top.
‘What about friends, Susie,’ she says. ‘Are there friends who would come in and see you?’
I like Olive. I want to oblige her and so I try to imagine friendly visitors that I could have. First I conjure up Barry French the painter in the corridor; he is wearing his baker boy cap and doing the impersonation of the Dustin Hoffman character in Midnight Cowboy. He used to do it on the zebra crossing by the Markham Arms to annoy the waiting drivers. ‘I’m walking,’ he would shout, ‘can’t you see that I am walking… ’
Beyond him I can see Alison James with that Afghan hound articulated lope she used to do; her blonde curtains of centre-parted hair and her bony legs which she never intends should look so elegant. Alison ignores limping Barry and says to me, ‘Christ’s sake, girl, you don’t want to end up in here, do you?’
I do not attempt to envisage Julian; he was that boy I used to know. For a time I think I had another friend, a woman that once played cards with me.
‘I don’t have any friends just now. You mustn’t think I mind though, because I don’t.’
What an irony, what a pity that you didn’t do that. It is Derrick Hearn, muscling in again with his dreams of rural Suffolk and its pre-lapsarian vegetable gardens. He should have heard what the women at the Nine Elms wash baths used to say about certain perpendicular vegetables. But what a pity, he persists. Do you not wish it had all turned out differently?
What a pity, Dr Derrick Mr Hearn the Hunter, what a pity it is that that you are so stupid that you miss my point. Did I not say, right at the beginning, that in none of this did I ever know any doubt? I knew what I was doing, you can be sure of that.
‘Susie, I will try and come again, before the move. There are some more books, if you would like them.’
It was during the night that I realised what was confusing me. Perhaps not that night, it could have been later in the week or month. My father Jack was a kind man and, in talking to me of his death, his widow had seemed to be a kind woman. Actually I would not have objected if she had presumed to hug me. Almost, I wish that she had. If Olive had hugged me we would have formed some kind of human chain, reaching back to Jack alive and the last tim
e he had held each of us in his arms. I wonder when that was, for her.
I know well the very last time that Jack held me in his arms. It was during and after making love to me on the morning of the day he died. When he was done with gasps and moans he trailed his fingers over me at his leisure and called me his sweet thing and his dear girl and his beloved. Some in my circumstances – I mean only other lovers – might say that if only they had known it was to be the last time they would have been more ardent, more generous, more tender. I, of course, have no need to say any such thing. If I seem arrogant then I maintain that it is permissible and perfectly excusable. For I know that my responses to my father-lover could not have been bettered, ever.
Anyway, the point is, that I should try to remember her exact words: was Olive sorry he was dead or was she sorry to tell me that he was dead because if it was the second she could not know that I had known him, at the end?
I have begun to wait for the post to come, in case Olive should send me something else. I know that it is always one of the grey coated porters who distributes internal and external mail around this institution; sometimes you can see them crossing the car park with a whole trolley full. Once I was misguidedly excited by the arrival of a large envelope for me. I should have known immediately that the backward sloping blue biro could not be from Olive but I wondered if someone had done the address on her behalf and so I worried that she had been taken ill with her heart. Then I recognised the handwriting as Ron’s. Bizarrely, he must have included me on the mailing list for the new venture which he and my mother had launched, a driving school of their own. They had called it the Abba School of Motoring; presumably that was in order to be the first entry in the telephone book listings. They had had printed promotional desk calendars in red and black. It was amusing for me to imagine the earnest efforts of Ron over his list, detailing the addresses of other trades people, innocuous, decent and honest premises – wallpaper shops and repairs garages and post offices, then me, wayward deviant daughter of his co-habitee woman friend, c/o the mental hospital.
