Grievous

by H. S. Cross

  Under the original holiday plan, Owain was to join them after the first fortnight, but since Meg didn’t mention him, John felt it was safe to assume he wasn’t coming. She didn’t explain what happened between them, and John didn’t ask. The subject was bound to be bad for her health, and in any case, he decided, it would be a perverse waste of their holiday to spend even one hour of it puzzling over that père Karamazov.

  John’s own timetable revolved around Meg’s need for rest and her appointments with her physician. The attending in Cambridge had provided introduction to a colleague in Paris, an eminent man of medicine by the name of Monsieur Chose, premises rue Pascal. For the first consultation, they had gone all three together. M. Chose had taken Meg into his consulting room, and John had spent the hour trying not to snap at his goddaughter, who was behaving like a third former who had eaten too many sweets, pacing the waiting room, examining every object, peppering John with senseless questions about said objects, riffling through French magazines and leaflets, interrupting his own reading with requests for definitions, opening and closing the window, inventing stories about those she observed in the street below, and otherwise continuing her ongoing campaign of Uncle John? When you were in France did you…? (eat coq au vin, ride a tram, try marmalade like this, have a duvet…). When Meg emerged from the examination, her daughter dashed to her side. The doctor, Meg announced, had requested that she return tomorrow at the same time. When John weighed the strain of sitting with the girl again against the moral peril of her lunching with the Americans, he chose the latter, which had the benefit of cheering the girl up and making her cling less to her mother.

  After the second consultation, Meg announced that she would be returning regularly for the next fortnight.

  —But what’s the treatment? John asked, baffled.

  Meg could only say that Monsieur Chose employed a variety of modern techniques and was firm in his conviction that he could diagnose her condition after a rigorous program of observation. Thus, she had agreed to a fixed schedule of bedtimes, meals, light exercise, and resting. Each day, she was to write in her petit carnet, a folded grid with details penciled in, less like a notebook than the tic boys had to have signed—Ça suffit!— Even more paramount than his decision not to ponder Owain was John’s resolution to leave the Academy on the other side of the Channel. He had not looked forward to this holiday so long, so secretly, and with so much yearning to waste it mentally imprisoned at St. Stephen’s. He would be remanded there soon enough, but until then … liberté, égalité, fraternité!

  Three mornings out of seven, he accompanied Meg on the metro to rue Pascal. Her skirts and blouses hung looser than before, and when she took his arm, he could feel her bones. The skin beneath her eyes looked paper-thin and dark where once it had crinkled with wit. At the hospital in Cambridge, she had declared everything overblown; she had only been tired, she said. Her physician, a young man trying to look older by growing out his beard, had disagreed sternly. She had frowned to show she was listening, but once the lecture finished, she began to joke with him, and John saw that she had taken the man in as she did them all.

  The Frenchman’s consulting room was inviolable, but one morning as John made to hold the door for her, he saw that the room where he’d glimpsed her buttoning her blouse at the end of the first visit was dim and that she was passing through a sliding door to a chamber that seemed more furnished drawing room than physician’s premises. John tried not to let his imagination run away with him, but before the next patient arrived to the waiting room, he removed his shoes and approached the sliding door.

  —Je vous vois venir, Monsieur Chose.

  She spoke with impeccable accent. She was no stranger to medicine, she said. She had seen a man in Harley Street, and he had been mistaken about everything. She had come to the Continent for a modern diagnosis. She had put herself in his hands, and she had perfect faith that together they could solve the mystery. John could not make out the man’s reply, but he could hear the tone, which said he’d been conquered.

  She’d never told John about Harley Street, and he didn’t know if she’d been keeping things from him or if she was lying to the Frenchman. Each day he asked how the appointment had gone, and each time she declared it satisfactory, even when she emerged with red eyes. If he ever asked what M. Chose had said, she would beg him not to speak of it.

  If he were her husband, things would be different. He would demand an audience with the Frenchman. He would accompany her, pay the bills, and insist she tell him everything. They would keep nothing from one another, and under the covers there would be no pretending; they could undress against the world, know and be known, defend each other against every threat to body and soul. If he were her husband, Cordelia would be his. She would listen to him and flush when he summoned her, as boys did when he called their names across the cloisters. Of course, she’d never fear him—why the need?—but she would feel for him the kind of awe she felt for her mother, but more so because he would be her father. Unlike her real father, John would never abandon her. He would never rage against her mother or wound her with dalliances. If John made a promise, he would keep it.

  Twice something came over Meg—her eyes flickered, and for a time she couldn’t hear him. When it stopped, she couldn’t remember what had happened, and her head ached, and she had to lie down. But aside from those episodes—which sent his mind to desperate prayers—she was either abstracted or gay. When they visited Versailles, the day was warm and bright, and Meg sat on the terrace while John and Cordelia toured the palace. She couldn’t imagine a more perfect day, she said. To do just as she pleased, and to see the two of them so happy. Such declarations had the contrary effect of making John feel irrelevant, as if he were in Paris solely for a holiday whose chief aim was pleasure.

  An outside observer might accuse him of making believe their life was his own, that they were blood kin rather than friends. Such an observer might advise him to tend to his own family, though what was that? His own father had married and seen eight children buried by his age; John was a widower in name only, lacking even grief.

  When John was honest, as the middle of the night forced him to be, he could confess that he’d only married Delia to please Meg. He’d lost Meg the moment Owain arrived in Cambridge, though it had taken nearly a year to realize it, but Meg loved John, she said, and wanted him happy, as happy as she was. Who could make him happier—and whom could he make happier—than her oldest friend, practically sister? John supposed he should have realized then that Meg called people family too freely. Delia, when he married her, proved less joined to Meg than he supposed. She counted Meg a friend to be sure, but she let Meg call her sister, it transpired, out of pity that Meg had none of her own.

  Still, Delia fell into quick infatuation with him. At the time, he’d considered her enthusiasm a sign that fate approved the scheme. In retrospect, he realized she would have been a fool not to pounce. As the war dragged on, the shortage of intact men grew worse than the shortage of margarine. John was healthy, tall, educated, and Convinced. Delia, whatever you might say about her, was practical.

  Despite a quick courtship, she never fully warmed to him, or (3:00 a.m.) he to her. She was unenthusiastic about the carnal side of things, and secretly (4:00 a.m.) so was he. They’d consummated the marriage, but did it count when he’d only been able to achieve … the achievement … thinking of—

  God, he was ashamed. God, it was wrong. God, he’d deserved to lose her, Spanish influenza raging through a weekend. He’d deserved to wake and find her dead, and he deserved the shame of resilient health. He deserved all that and worse, but dear Lord, had she?

  Nights in Paris had become purgatorial. He would fall asleep exhausted at a sane hour but then wake as people traipsed home in their cups, every voice and language paraded below his window. He took to closing his eyes when Meg was resting, a bulwark against foggy thinking, though of course he should have been taking his goddaughter sightseeing rather tha
n let her tag along with the Vandams to their salons and their picnics and their whatever-else he hoped he’d never have to know about. Meg, meantime, slept well, a side effect supposedly of the tablets M. Chose had prescribed. John half-jokingly suggested she let him try them, but she insisted he wouldn’t like the way they made one’s fingers tingle. Oh, but he mustn’t be distressed. She was recording every sensation in her carnet, and M. Chose had assured her that tingling was perfectly normal for her condition.

  —Do you mean to say he’s discovered what’s wrong? John asked.

  —Of course, darling. He wouldn’t begin treatment without a diagnosis!

  John couldn’t quite believe he had to ask her what it was.

  —I told you, darling, la spasmophilie.

  —You told me nothing.

  —Oh, she laughed, I’m a perfect scatterbrain.

  And what was la spasmophilie when it was at home? Spasmophilia, she told him, though wasn’t the name absurd? John said he’d never heard of it.

  —Exactly, darling. The medical profession here is head and shoulders above the charlatans at home.

  Quarter past three in the night, the direst thoughts had their way with him. Je vous vois venir, Monsieur Chose. I see what you’re getting at. She did not have the disease he’d suggested. That disease did not afflict her, she’d said. Was this diagnosis truly the product of medical reasoning, or was it an ersatz diagnosis offered after she refused the real one?

  His own mother, so far as he’d been aware, had suffered no symptoms, though seven-year-old boys were aware of so little. When his mother had fallen asleep in the middle of the Easter egg hunt, he’d believed she was only tired, but then the aunts came and stayed, and everyone was cross. His father never left his mother’s bedroom, and when they finally allowed John in, he was told to kiss her and say goodbye. He’d kissed her, but it hadn’t felt like her; he’d screamed and the aunts had boxed his ears.

  Once, after the aunts had come permanently to stay and his father had returned from a lengthy journey, John had announced over supper that he was feeling poorly. It was a lie, but he’d said it hoping his father would stay on. He was coming down with the French disease, he said. Everyone had looked at him, and he realized he’d made a mistake, that they knew he was fibbing. His father had asked where he’d heard such a thing, and then one of the aunts had dragged him into the corridor and struck him across the face so hard his ear rang. He’d been sent to bed and made to stay there the next day, only let out once his father had departed.

  It was a grim time, shameful and suffocating. That summer his father had taken him walking in Yorkshire and then to the Bishop’s in Wiltshire; in the autumn he’d been sent to school, where the shamefulness lessened. They said his mother had been worn out. Eleven children and only one to show for it. Whenever people asked how his mother had died, John launched into the explanation like an exotic tale, death by wearing out.

  When John became a pacifist, his father had turned from him, even, according to the blue-crossed letter, cutting John from his will. But although John pitied himself (and accepted pity from others), was it not a delicious tragedy? Did it not prove his stance valiant and vital? And did it not bind him even closer to his comrades-in-white-feathers and even closer to the one who’d seduced him to the cause? Meg had shed tears for him at his father’s rejection, but—2:00 a.m., 2:30—did he not savor the injustice? Freshly exiled but not yet supplanted by the Irishman, was it not the best year of his life?

  When conscription began, the ambulance service took him to France, and what savaged him there—3:05, 3:10—was not horror or even shrapnel, but Graves, MRCS, LRCP, surgeon at the hospital where John first served. John was his aide, and the jokes began at once—Graves and Grieves—all the grim humor war could sprout. He and Graves always smoked together, and one slow night the subject of their families arose. John carted out the usual narrative—orphaned, disowned—but when he presented the Worn Out diagnosis, Graves had chuckled. John had felt a swirl of confusion but insisted that it wasn’t as far-fetched as the homespun term made it sound. His mother had given birth to ten children before John had finally survived. That, along with running a household and raising a child when her husband was required to travel so far and so often, would weaken anyone. Graves at first had been ironic, as if playing along, but once he perceived that John was not joking, he disabused him. Never had enlightenment felt more like assault: euphemisms did not make syphilis less deadly, to her or her children. It was sheer luck, and possibly time elapsed since infection, that John had not been born with it. John could not have conjured the term French disease from thin air. His father was not honorable. His father was not chaste. There were bombs and there were bombs.

  The war changed everyone, so when, home on leave, John had attacked Owain in the street, breaking his nose and a rib, everyone thought it shell shock. When he refused to hear his father mentioned, everyone believed it the fruits of a father’s rejection. He supposed everyone harbored scars that couldn’t be seen, and if he had in essence been formed as a man by the beastly revelation, was he so different from those thousands matured in a matter of days by the front?

  Spasmophilia didn’t sound like syphilis, but if you added up all her symptoms, subtracting the ones that might be caused by the tablets or by strife … Wasn’t there a library where he could consult some medical books? In ordinary life, if one was still awake at four o’clock in the morning, one left one’s bed and warmed milk on the hob. Their landlady had given them leave to use the kitchen, and while John didn’t think hot milk would solve anything, he chose it as a respite from his bed. The house smelled of his landlady’s perfume and, near the kitchen, of cigarettes. He found Mrs. Vandam at the table, smoking and drinking coffee sans dressing gown.

  —I beg your pardon, John said, averting his eyes.

  —Don’t tell me you’re afraid of a woman, she said.

  He would have left, but now he couldn’t. Her voice was gravelly. She blew smoke in his direction.

  —Is it true what they say about English boys?

  —I beg your pardon?

  —What they like.

  John tightened his dressing gown and refused to flinch as he passed her to fetch the milk that sat covered on the sill. She offered him a cigarette. He declined and lit the stove. She drained her demitasse and produced a flask from under her nightgown:

  —Drink?

  Again he declined, filling his saucepan with milk as she filled her demitasse from the flask. Her lips were un-rouged, her hair fallen loose across her shoulders. The gown she wore looked silk, a bilious green, displaying firm arms and décolletage. If she’d had any bosom, it would have fallen out. Her eyes smiled but at the same time looked sad.

  He sat beside her with his milk, helping himself after all to the Gauloises she’d propped against the sugar bowl. She tapped one against the table, and when he lit it for her, she looked at him with the kind of confidence one turned towards a friend.

  —Isn’t Paris a darned old town? she said. Breaks your heart and throws it in the gutter.

  The smoke warmed the space inside his throat. It had been twelve years, but he didn’t cough.

  —That kid of yours is a piece of work, she continued.

  John explained that Cordelia wasn’t his daughter, but Mrs. Vandam seemed under the impression that Cordelia was his niece, and Meg his sister.

  —You know the kid’s crazy for Randall, don’t you?

  He set down the cigarette. She wasn’t crazy for anyone, he explained, least of all Mr. Vandam. She was simply affectionate and naive.

  —Come on, honey. I know girls. I am one.

  She used the end of one cigarette to light another and began to talk about Claude, her psychoanalyst. Claude had turned on any number of lights. Randall, she said, had seemed reliable—

  —Steady, you know, like a ship.

  A ship in good repair on calm seas, but now … Tears rolled down her cheeks.

  —It’s a complex
, Claude says.

  John wasn’t clear about the aims of psychoanalysis, but this Claude seemed to have drawn out and fed the woman’s suffering.

  —Your kid, she said, follows Randy like a dog. She begged him to teach her to dance. You should’ve seen her, hanging on his arm like a jungle gym.

  John had no idea what a jungle gym was, but the woman’s jealousy was blooming. She whined in imitation of his goddaughter, mangling the accent but capturing the desperation:

  —Please, Randall, teach me the Philadelphia Swing. For my birthday.

  —Birthday?

  —Oh, Randy can’t resist an occasion. You only turn thirteen once, he said. I could’ve told him, hang crepe on your nose, your brains are dead, but forget it. He taught it to her. Our dance, to her.

  She was twelve years old, her birthday not for six weeks.

  —Electra complex. Girls fall in love with their fathers. Not you, don’t worry, but her dad must be something.

  It hurt, more than he ever thought it could.

  —Rat bastard, must be. Smooth as satin and just as cold.

  There were twelve ends in the ashtray, and only two were his.

  —She’s a nice kid, but can she ever vamp. Oh, if you could see your face!

  She laughed as if it were all a nauseous joke.

  —Don’t look like that, honey, she’s not his type. Randy likes ’em dumb, like me.

  Then she leaned across the table and kissed him on the mouth—breathing smoke into his throat and leaving gin on his tongue.

  * * *