It doesn’t take genius to see the woman in the next bed has been without the advantages that have made my life what it is. She lies there with only the Complan in the beaker to look forward to. Her nightdresses are shocking, bright robes with no shape and ridiculous pictures on them of bears in space rockets, or dancing carrots in the arms of manly leeks. Her slippers are big furry cows’ faces, with a pink curly tongue poking out of the front of each one, and rolling eyes – the scared-soppy eyes of creatures in cartoons. Not feminine. No self-respect. She can’t wear the slippers, but she has them. Now, what is the point of that, to have something you do not need? All around her bed is clutter, most of it useless. There are chocolate bars in disorderly piles, and other confectionery including special-occasion boxes with large bows on them. There are always flowers, invariably in want of rearrangement. The magazines look no better than they ought, with ‘true love’ stories printed so large on the pages you could not help reading the words from here where I sit, even if you were not forced to listen while one of the interminable daughters or grandchildren reads to the old object in the bed. They turn her and stroke her and dust off the biscuit crumbs they have made on her as they shout and munch and giggle and coo around the bed. They talk to her all the time. It’s pointless, naturally. I could tell them that. They make a great operation of drawing the curtains round her bed – it’s a cot really – and changing her nightgown for another unsuitable creation. They hold her hands and kiss them, not on the back as foreign men do in the films, but on the knuckles, sometimes once for each knuckle. Well, it’s not my way. The overuse of kissing has not escaped my notice as a general trend. It has at least doubled, and that is among the merely acquainted.
What need has she in the next bed for privacy? She surely has no pride. She knows nothing of her present circumstances. All that old woman can have left to her is her memories, and a soft shapeless little bundle they must compose.
We’ve open visiting hours here. All day they are at it, the family of the dying old woman, as though they can introduce themselves to death when it comes and make it part of the family.
I shall be alone when we meet, up and dressed, like the bride of the century, than which I am younger by a year. I shall give back the parcel that I have to pass. It is not light at all. How ever I carried it I do not know. And I did so alone. I have never had that much use for other people.
Around the bed of the old woman who does not move sit the members of her family, in dark coats and with bare heads. Some of them have handkerchiefs that are white like letters. The narrow bed is heaped with boxes, wrapped in glowing paper tied with ribbons that seem to shimmer. Light is coming from them in this meanly lit room. There is a warmth like sunlight, not like fire. I cannot tell you where it comes from.
We have open visiting hours here and I see that I have a visitor. We have not met before, but I feel that I know him at once. So distinguished a person cannot have come for her before me. I am scented and ready. My back is straight. I have something to hand over to him.
With the excellent manners you might expect from him, I see that my visitor is stopping awhile by the bed next to mine. Let him come to me soon. The weight of this parcel is killing me.
Tact comes easily to him, that much is clear. He has seated himself discreetly among those who surround the bed and is taking the hands of the old woman in his. The four hands lie still, in a clasp as loose and strong as a heavy chain, among the heaped parcels, which seem, like the light thrown by coloured glass on pale stone, to be fading as the room grows darker. Can it be that the visitor has forgotten me?
‘We have open visiting hours here,’ I remind him. But he does not look up.
Here comes the tea woman with her heavy trolley. The large kettle on it is a two-hander, but even with two hands it is hard to control. She pours the tea into the mugs without stopping between each one, like a gardener watering well-rooted bulbs in pots from a watering can without a rose. The upper tray of the trolley is awash with tea. No one has thought to ask me whether in fact I do take milk, so I receive it.
Something appears to be bringing the old woman in the next bed to life.
The tea woman puts the mug of tea upon my table with care. It is considerate of her to avoid slopping it. She is very deaf. Too late, I see her putting sugar in my drink. I look up to remonstrate with her, but she is saying something.
‘Sweets for the sweet,’ she says.
Change of Use
In the pantry at the back of the long house, Mary shifted back a little on the edge of the stone sink, as she had done since these Thursday rituals began. She wanted to balance so she could drift off into her own thoughts without falling in or letting Mr Charteris know that she was not fully with him as he pushed away at her with his hands wringing one another on the rattling taps behind her back. She had given him green beans for lunch for a change, instead of peas with the Thursday shepherd’s pie. She could smell the blackberry and apple she was making for his dinner cooking away under its crumble in the low oven.
‘Tell me your name again, my dear,’ said Mr Charteris.
‘Dorothy,’ said Mary, to liven things up.
Overwhelmed by this unanticipated new companion, Mr Charteris shook sadly as though to rid himself of dust, buttoned, sighed, pushed Mary aside like a curtain and washed his hands under taps that quivered as the water promised to arrive, held off and then gushed out, hot and chalky, through the aged piping into the sink where tonight’s potatoes eyed him smugly from the colander.
He dried his hands while Mary set the kettle to boil. Upstairs the house slept, as it would for another twenty-five minutes.
He felt astonishingly well, astonishingly.
He smelt the tea as she spooned it from the red-and-gold caddy, saw her skin it seemed to him glow with the new life Thursdays must bring her, felt the sunshine as it came in slabs through the barred deep windows of the back of the house that looked on to lawn and shrubs and finally thicket, copse and wood. No one knew the house as he did. He had been a boy here and would die here. Each room held its story for him.
Mr Charteris sat down and rested his forearms on the kitchen table.
Mary brought him a tray of old silver, some cloths and the tin of polish.
‘The lid’s hard,’ said Mr Charteris. ‘Got stuck. When it dries this stuff’s like glue.’
‘I’m sure you can do it,’ said Mary, pouring water on to the tea leaves from the heavy kettle off the stove. She kicked herself for not having tested the lid of the polish tin. This part was as important for him as what had gone before. She was sure that these Thursdays didn’t take life from him but put it back. Maybe the care she was offering him was not orthodox, but it was natural.
‘There. Done it. Nothing like experience,’ said Mr Charteris.
She hoped he wouldn’t look too closely at the silver on the tray. Not much of it matched and not all of it was silver. She’d brought some deliberately for him from other places she worked at.
‘This tea’s just the thing,’ said Mr Charteris. ‘Polishing dries out the tubes.’
She looked over at him from the lower oven where she was testing the crumble with a spoon. Her overall was getting tight. She shut the heavy door and bathed in the heat of butter and sugar burning together. It all made her hungry, she couldn’t help it. She was hungry all the time now.
‘Yes, and that is thirsty work too,’ said Mr Charteris, supposing he should now pat Mary’s bottom to go with the words, but not bothering to get up and go over to her actually to do this, because now came the reliable pleasure of his afternoon, the creaming and dipping and rubbing and the revelation of the silver. The distinction between his younger days and these later years was this for him: then he had been blind to the beauty of habit; now it was a luxury, a conscious indulgence as irresistible as yawning, stretching, surrendering to sleep.
Habit had become his bride, his chosen ravishment, his companion elect. It was simply that his wish to share his habit with
just one other person at a time was not encouraged by the new masters here.
Mary was wondering how to keep the room empty for long enough to let Mr Charteris be through with his polishing. She relied upon the herd instinct, the set of rules that kept the rest of the residents of the house hung about their routine like a beard of bees.
He was holding up each knife to the light, checking each fork for speckles of erosion, the bruise of tarnish. To the left of the tray on the silver cloth he set the cleaned utensils, to the right lay the unpolished. The whole collection shone about as much as a dish of sardines and vinegar on toast. Still it made him so glad that she guessed he saw a shine not visible to her.
She heard the stomp and waltz of the polishing machine start up on the ballroom floor above. Along the kitchen ceiling ran wiring and pipes that made abrupt changes of direction. From hooks along the wall hung clutches of keys. A plastic fire extinguisher in a glass case sat above its predecessor, a heavy metal torpedo that said on its side ‘Last Date of Service: June 1956’.
She heard a rustle in the pantry.
In there, the baleful wedges of wholesale cheese lay plastic-sealed and piled on the slate shelf. Mary reached in her hand behind one and pulled out the humane mousetrap. The creature inside flustered between its perspex chambers.
How humane was it to take the humane mousetrap to the outhouse where the cats had their hideout? She carried the fretful snack and tipped it out in front of the cat she considered to be the idlest. That way, it was fairer.
Two slow frivolous bats of its paw later, the cat was happily prolonging this small local torment.
From the back door, the kitchen looked as it could have almost any Thursday afternoon of the century as Mr Charteris had by now often described it to her.
Mr Charteris polished away, his apron black, his extensible cuff-restrainers glistening, the cup of tea neglected. His hair was white as salt, his face of a kind that is no longer trained into being – unremarkable features withheld by years of emulative mimicry into an expression of checked emotion and impersonal superiority. But his eyes were a disturbingly self-willed brown, where one might have expected self-effacing blue.
Looking out from the other kitchen door facing the gates at the front of the house and up the outer stairway to the terrace, Mary saw today’s afternoon beginning. Two of the older ladies were wheeled out, a sunshade set above them, a tea tray brought. No bell had woken the after-lunch sleepers, but the windows began to show movement behind themselves; a few blinds were raised. In the main rooms, between the grave, flattened, central columns of the pediment, there was the sound of dance music, a raised voice, an insistent hard tapping.
Among the trees on the lawn, figures dressed just like Mary moved between chairs and benches, recliners covered with rugs where still bodies lay, stirring them, sometimes with a word, sometimes a touch. They seemed to be competing with one another to awaken a sleeper. Over some of the bodies, the overalled men and women shrugged vehemently, like cricketers loosening up. It was as though there were two teams, one ghoulishly dedicated to fun and activity, the other to repose. In the wide green of the afternoon, somnolence had the worst of it for the time being but could well show form later. The classical enclosure of the park suggested an eventual triumph of sleep.
The gates in front of the house’s wide face implied a fixed modesty that must prevail in the end. The house would shut itself away, a fading beauty needing sleep in order to reawaken refreshed.
Driving the laundry van in at the gates, Francis Mullard changed down at the turning off the main road, felt the cattle grid under the wheels, slowed again on turning into the asphalted back drive, and wondered if the grid kept the old folks in, too. In the back of the van the sheets were cold and heavy inside the hampers. The van had been parked in the underground car-park of the laundry, where it never got warm, even in a summer like this one.
Francis’s own grandmother was living at home with them at present. Her very active ways had knocked them for six at first, but now they were used to her walking miles in the night over their heads and bringing alarmed or desperate or boring strangers back to the house from her random samplings of different places and acts of worship.
Gran had forced Francis and Pat to get out much more.
They could not endure her pity at the start of their rare coincidental weekends off, when they were prepared to settle in to two days of doing nothing much, and she ran them through her commitments. She was a freelance indexer of historical works, and a self-appointed tidier of graves and churches, so the kitchen and living room were convenient spaces for setting out the details of a reign, a battle, a marriage or a plot.
The rubbish bin and waste-paper baskets overflowed with the things Francis’s grandmother had found unfitting in church or cemetery, gloves or cans or inspirational paperbacks, silver-paper horseshoes and ballpoint pens.
‘Don’t put down that pot!’ Gran shrieked to Pat, as he tried to fetch Francis’s tea in the morning. ‘You could unsettle the Anabaptists!’
While they were out at work, Pat at the restaurant and Francis driving the laundry around, Gran covered any space there was with 3 x 5” index cards and blue post-its. Both Francis and Pat worked shifts, so they never knew if the other had even attempted to release some space from the formation of battle at Oudenarde, the machinations of the Cabal or Ironbridge Telford’s gazetted surviving works. When they got in they either fetched something to eat and took it up to bed, or rushed out, feeling illicit and safe. Very rarely, they shared a precarious feast with Francis’s grandmother.
In a way, Gran had brought back the cramped romantic first days of their love, when they had nothing to hide because no one would have believed even if they’d written it out loud all over the bathroom mirror. They were such good friends, friends from their perambulators, more like brothers. This was the line still adopted by Francis’s mother, Kay, who hoovered between the feet of her husband as he sat in his chair, and always baked double to freeze half in case of sudden guests.
It was fortunate that Francis had always loved Pat, since there’d been no sudden guest, ever, within a cherry’s spit of their house.
Sometimes at night Pat would make a meal for Francis and Gran, picking his way between the bits of information on paper and the birds’ nests of ecclesiastical leavings. He would recreate what he had served in the restaurant earlier. Although he wasn’t yet a chef, he had the curiosity and steady hands for it; he worked so hard it was really only a matter of time before he got the promotion. He was at the stage now when you did the one thing over and over till you could do it in your sleep – if you got any, that was. It seemed oddly miniature to him to concoct meals just for Francis and his grandmother, an eccentric hobby nothing much to do with work. Himself, he ate through the pores all day and could barely stand food at the end of it. He ate smoke and drank water. When he saw Francis’s thickening waist, he was proud of it.
‘I made that,’ he’d say to Gran, who would reply, ‘Much to be proud of there,’ and join Pat outside the lean-to for a cig after whatever rich meal the boy had made.
All very comfortable, until just recently, when Kay had started on about the calls she was getting from dissatisfied authors.
‘They say Mother’s having them on. Either that, or she’s losing her accuracy,’ she said to Pat, whom she’d rung at the restaurant, sure of getting a better hearing than she would from her own son. ‘You can’t do work for other people and be inaccurate. They plain don’t like it. It shows them up.’
‘Perhaps she means to,’ said Pat, which was no more than what he thought.
‘She’s always been scrupulous about her research. She even stores her thoughts alphabetically. If you ask about the car you don’t have to wait as long as if you ask her about Francis. And if I ask about you there’s a slightly longer wait while she locates P.’
‘She’s maybe tired of sorting other people’s words.’
‘If you like it, it’s not the s
ort of thing you go off,’ said Kay. ‘I should know, I’ve never cared a fig for it and still don’t.’
Since she was not Pat’s mother, he was not as irked by her angle as Francis would have been.
He approached Francis.
‘Do you think your grandmother’s losing it?’ he asked.
‘Nope. She may have a project on, though.’ Francis had walked back from the depot where he had left the van. He was determined to do something about it before he had to change his waist size for good. He’d give Pat a surprise.
‘Try one of these. Red pepper straws. A bit of Gruyère and several dozen eggs.’ Pat had made them specially, but pretended he’d brought them from work. Gran was upstairs working on an overcrowded letter ‘V’ in a work on the history of lenses and their effect on art history, whose author was at that moment enjoying some of Pat’s cheese straws brought home by his wife in her handbag, after a business lunch.
‘What type of project?’ asked Pat.
‘I think she’s trying to get sent to a home.’
‘No one does that. It’s lonely, and it costs all you’ve got, no matter how much you’ve got. The body only gives out when it’s cried all it can and spent all there is.’
‘You say that,’ said Francis, kissing him. ‘But I think she’s being tactful. That’s why my mother’s so tactless she could perform amputations with her afterthoughts. Because her mother’s so tactful she makes everyone believe she’s the one at fault, not them.’
‘But no one wants to go into a home. Have you seen inside one? Home is what they’re not. They can’t call them what they are. Asylum is a lovely word in every way compared with what they are.’
‘Maybe she’s got some idea of going to a place where she can think it all out and then just lie down and float off. I don’t know.’
‘Bed’s that place,’ said Pat, who hated being alone and could not sort through his memories for very long without meeting Francis there, and fearing the day when they would not be within reach of one another.
Wait Till I Tell You Page 20
