by Weldon, Fay
Oriole couldn’t remember waiting like this, on previous occasions. She’d been shown immediately to her room, undressed, settled down, been weighed up by the anaesthetist and gone straight into surgery. She felt obscurely that the wait was Daisy’s fault.
Oriole flicked through the current week. She had managed to adjust her appointments to keep not only this afternoon free but tomorrow morning as well. Body and mind might need a little time to recover, to adjust to a change in state. She reckoned to feel low for a week or so in any case. The sooner the operation was done the better. Hours counted. This particular hour was somehow dripping uncontrolled out of her life, thanks to Daisy.
The pale girl and her suitcase were taken away by a nurse whose name-tag said ‘Audrey’. Daisy and Audrey, the girls who worked at the clinic. Audrey smiled a great deal, showing broken teeth. Audrey’s smile was worse than Daisy’s unsmile. Were the Serena Clinic forward-looking, it would have had Audrey’s teeth capped. Or not employed her at all. The sense of things rotten or bad or missing in such a place as this surely had at all costs to be avoided.
‘Will it be long?’ Oriole asked Daisy, rashly.
Daisy looked back at Oriole and thought unspeakable things or so it seemed to Oriole. Oriole was, quite determinedly, not looking her best. She wore no eye make-up. People went either way at funerals, she noticed. They either looked their best or their worst.
‘Enjoy it while you can,’ said Daisy.
Oriole had worn her best to her father’s funeral: her worst to her mother’s. She wondered why. She hadn’t grieved over-much when either of them died; she thought perhaps because she loved them, and so felt little guilt, and their deaths were after all timely. Her father had gone suddenly, through a stroke. Her mother lingered on in a kind of passive shock for less than a year, then had cancer of the liver diagnosed, and died promptly and painlessly almost of her own volition. They’d been in their seventies, and neither had enjoyed it. They were accustomed to being active, and were not so short-sighted they couldn’t see the litter on the floor, the bits of stick and wrappers that the dog chewed up, which they were now too stiff to bend to pick up; they had to wait for the daily help to arrive to see to it. Old age was no way to end a life. If you had a diary for a whole life, all the appointments would be crammed near the beginning: getting fewer and fewer as you flicked through, until the pages were all but empty.
Oriole felt tears in her eyes. She knew Daisy would misconstrue them. Daisy did. Daisy said, ‘Sometimes people change their minds –’ but she said it unpleasantly; judgementally, Oriole thought, she who had been named after a bird, to soar and sing and rejoice. The kind of women who end up in this waiting room of mine are feckless and hopeless, Daisy implied: the kind who change their minds and put me and my computer to endless trouble.
Oriole smiled coolly at Daisy and made no reply.
Oriole thought, well, this is really not time wasted. Thank you, Daisy. This is thinking time, reflective time. Everyone needs this quality time. In progressive businesses such spare time is built into timescales, just as free periods were when we were at school. No doubt that particular free time was the result of timetabling inconsistencies and inadequacies. Never mind: we students, being ignorant, interpreted it as a gift, a kindness, from a benign authority and were the happier for it.
Seven weeks from her last period. She looked that up in her diary too. There was the little tick. Regular as clockwork; predictable as the moon. Was the moon predictable? She supposed so. The moon came and went, waxed and waned, without Oriole noticing. What was the point of noticing the moon, if the moon took no notice of you? ‘Oriole,’ her mother once said, ‘life is not all give and take, tit for tat: you do this and I’ll do that, watch my back and I’ll watch yours. Other factors intervene.’ But what? Love? Her mother loved her father and she, Oriole, had intervened by being born. And even love ended in death, in silence. In strokes and cancer of the liver.
So little time to think. Too tired to think when she got home: and for holidays she’d go to health hydros where she’d starve and exercise herself into somewhere between a stupor and a high. Too tired to talk. And who was there to talk to, even if you could formulate the right words to echo the bizarreness of your thoughts? By the time you’d said too often to too many friends, when they rang to suggest lunch, or an outing, or a holiday, ‘Just a moment, I’ll get out my diary,’ and then, ‘Sorry, I can’t make it,’ they’d lost patience, moved on, thought you valued something more than them. Which in a way you did, so you could hardly blame them. Men in business had wives to live their lives for them: remember birthdays, arrange dinners, have their children: Oriole only had herself. She’d been married once: but it hadn’t outlasted a year. He’d been an air-traffic controller: he knew exactly where not only he but everything and everyone else would be, ought to be, at a certain time: in the end the uncertainty of her hours, the sudden crises, the middle-of-the-night phone calls – some of her clients were Australians, and just didn’t seem to comprehend that their glorious midday was someone else’s exhausted two in the morning – had defeated him. ‘We’re heading for a crash,’ he’d said, panicky, and so of course they were. He wanted her to be at home when he was, waiting, coming into existence when he opened the front door, blanking out of it when he left. Well, of course, she wanted him to be the same. There when she wanted him: not when she didn’t. Francis, her husband.
She’d felt bad about failing to meet his demands, and confused by his expectations. She couldn’t concentrate, she’d quite forgotten to look in her diary. Francis had been the one to point out that she hadn’t bled for two months. She was three months gone by the time she got to the Serena Clinic. That had been really horrible. And when she got back four days later there were two significant messages on the answer-phone: one on Monday asking her to be a fill-in speaker at the Toronto conference – and she knew her promotion depended upon it – and one on Wednesday from Francis saying he knew she would go to Toronto, not stay at home, and so he was going off himself. Where? Anywhere, just somewhere else, away from her. And so he had. Now he was married to a nice boring little stay-at-home and had two children. The elder one had been born with some disorder which made its head swell up with water – Oriole somehow felt it was her fault, though of course that was absurd. But she’d been upset. She’d loved him, this man who had the flying machines within his care and control – this dextrous male. If he’d given her time she could have broken the addiction, because that was what it was, an addiction to her diary. Subject to diary. The diary that kept you forgetful, so busy you were being reminded. Forgetful of what?
She couldn’t remember now why she’d felt obliged to get rid of the air controller’s baby. Some necessity, some need, some fear? Perhaps his. Or had she just been putting motherhood off to some more convenient time? If that had been the reason, she’d been wise enough. If she looked through past diaries it was clear there never had been, never would be, a convenient time.
Speaking the unspeakable. Daisy was punching up names and numbers on her computer. She could say to her, ‘Daisy’ – such an advantage to the anonymous, the habit of putting name-tags on the humble – ‘Daisy, why do you pluck out your eyebrows but leave your lip-hairs alone? Shouldn’t it be the other way round?’ But you couldn’t say that. Not just because Daisy could pull a string or two, make sure Oriole’s anaesthetic was too light, expose her to the risk of septicaemia and other foreseeable things as well – the humble had all kinds of amazing powers – but because it was not done to say things to people which would hurt in the short term though help in the long. A pity. She searched for something friendly and companionable to say to Daisy, but failed.
What could she say? ‘I am an important person; please treat me with courtesy’? No. Any woman with her legs apart and some tearing, rending instrument up inside her as she slapped nature in the face was pretty much of a muchness with the last one on the table, the next one to come.
‘You are here on
the computer,’ said Daisy, ‘if Green’s your maiden name?’
‘Yes,’ said Oriole. Maiden name. How sweet and naive it sounded. She wondered what kind of girl she’d been. How could one ever know: you could only see yourself from the inside out. She thought she probably hadn’t ever had much brain, only competence and a kind of soaring sensuality. So how had it gone wrong? Was it mood, a kind of generalized feeling tone, or nature, or just the chance events of a certain day which had led her to this point: forty, childless, unmarried. Not a bad point to be. Nothing wrong with being forty, or childless, or unmarried, except that spoken all together they sounded too final, too unwanted for comfort.
‘The first time you were here you let it go three months,’ observed Daisy, ‘and there were complications. Still, it hasn’t affected your fertility.’
‘Clearly not,’ said Oriole. The second time she’d been only six weeks’ pregnant: that was Hassan’s baby. She remembered well enough why she’d let that one go by. Hassan had been beautiful, beautiful, but married: he didn’t think, or reason, or plan: he couldn’t organize anything: he was a gardener: he loved all living, growing things except, it seemed, Oriole’s baby. She didn’t want to lose him so she’d lost the baby instead: she never even told him. She lost him anyway. He worked for the Parks Department, nine to five, and the complications of her unsocial hours and his getting away in secret from his wife had quite worn out the romance. Lovers looked silly in diaries: their initials softly pencilled in. ‘I will meet you, my darling, my darling, subject to diary!’ Men could do it: women couldn’t: that was the problem.
‘An expensive form of contraception, if you ask me,’ said Daisy.
‘I didn’t ask you,’ said Oriole.
She could see this was her last chance. But how did you have a baby by your PA and go on working in the same office with him? Stop work and live off what? With him? Off him? On his lower salary? He wouldn’t get much further up the ladder: she wrote his annual report: she knew it well enough. Oriole Green, a source of scandal and mirth! Oriole? Oh, Oriole the high-flyer: flew over a volcano, got her wings burned, plummeted, died. Babies got into your heart and twisted knives of guilt and obligation. Babies killed you: everything in you that wasn’t totally female, at any rate. That flourished, to the detriment of the whole. ‘Sorry I spoke. No need to snap,’ said Daisy. ‘Everyone snaps in here. It’s the stress.’
And what you knew you grew to need, couldn’t do without. The luxury of her bedroom: with its view over the city: the sense that it honoured you, found you special: the routine of early morning: the private, leisured silk, carefully chosen, against the skin: the softness of pale carpet; again yet softer, paler feet as you searched with your toe for your slipper, warm and safe inside while wind and rain and nature pattered against the pane. She didn’t want to give it up. Other people, men, babies, intruded into the eroticism of solitude. Perhaps you had to get married before you were twenty, have babies before you were twenty-five, before you knew what there was to miss.
‘Are you really nearly forty?’ asked Daisy, looking across from her computer screen, ‘because you don’t look it.’ Oriole smiled coldly; perhaps this impossible Daisy was a temp: filling in for someone who must surely know how to behave, and understood without being told that the personal information now freely available about everything and everyone to any girl with a computer at her fingertips had somehow, in the interests of the social niceties, to be referred to but at the same time tactfully overlooked.
‘Mind you,’ said Daisy, ‘we get people in here up to fifty, but mostly they’ve got six already and it’s medical. Lots of women have babies at forty.’
‘More fool them,’ said Oriole shortly: she would have stayed silent if it weren’t for the sudden flow of words from Daisy’s hairy mouth which filled the pale-pink room in a dangerous way, and might break the silence for ever if they were not somehow stilled. It didn’t work.
‘There are tests for Down’s Syndrome,’ went on Daisy, ‘if that’s what you’re worrying about.’
‘I hadn’t even considered it,’ said Oriole. Nor had she. A non-child cannot have Down’s Syndrome or, if it does, can hardly suffer from feelings of inadequacy on that account; not during its brief putative existence.
‘Lots do,’ said Daisy. ‘You’d be surprised. It isn’t a nice job, this: but if I don’t do it someone worse will.’
‘It seems perfectly reasonable work to me,’ said Oriole. ‘I imagine there is a high degree of job satisfaction. You’re working in the community, with people, in a healing environment, meeting very important human needs.’
‘Is that what I’m doing?’ asked Daisy. ‘It seems to me I’m working for a crew of murderers and not even getting danger money.’
‘What sort of danger?’ asked Oriole, startled.
‘Being hated,’ said Daisy. ‘People just sit where you’re sitting, waiting, beaming out their dislike.’
‘Perhaps it comes from the babies,’ said Oriole, before she had time to think. ‘Perhaps the hostility comes from them. They can hardly thank you for what you’re doing. Well, not doing. But for helping organize the doing. That is to say the doing-away-with.’
‘Oh thank you,’ said Daisy. ‘That’s a real help. Ta very much.’
She swung her swivel chair so that her back was to Oriole. Her hair was greasy. There was a yellowy stain down the back of her white coat.
Oriole thought, this is me, Oriole Green, sitting in a female clinic having a spat with a greasy girl at a computer. This is where love leads you: or sex, while it lasts. And of course it wouldn’t last, couldn’t. The gap between affairs lengthened: she noticed it. Once one lover trod hard upon the heels of the last: now years could intervene: the diary of love had long, long stretches of nothingness. Last chance, last chance. She might still find someone like herself, intolerably busy, to settle down with, subject to diary, to provide a baby with a proper home but, come to think of it, she doubted it. Last chance!
‘Daisy,’ said Oriole, ‘there’s a yellowy stain down the back of your overall. I only mention it because you can’t see it, and I expect your employers put quite a price on smartness.’
‘They put a price on murder,’ said Daisy, ‘Nothing else. I could wear a butcher’s overall for all they cared. Bloodstains and all. How much are they asking you, Oriole?’ She consulted the screen. ‘Eight hundred and twelve pounds plus anaesthetic fees. Wow! Of course, you are forty. That puts the insurance premiums up. Most women get out at about six hundred. No reduction for quantity, it seems, or you’d be less. And the stains down the back of my overall will be baby sick. And my own view is if you have a baby you should stay home and look after it, but chance would be a fine thing, wouldn’t it?’
‘Chance,’ said Oriole, wings healed, spirits soaring, ‘is a very, very fine thing,’ and when the smiling nurse with broken teeth came in to take her and her overnight suitcase up to her room, she said she’d changed her mind.
‘You’ll lose your deposit,’ said the nurse, her smile simply blanking out, not even fading. ‘Your room being booked, and the operating theatre too. We can’t rebook at this late stage. These last-minute changes of mind are very inconsiderate of others. And we’ve had a whole spate of them lately.’ The nurse looked very hard at Daisy, knowing perfectly well whose fault it was, but Daisy had fallen sullen and silent again and didn’t so much as raise her eyes from the screen.
As for Oriole, she asked for a year’s leave of absence on full pay and got it, with no argument from anyone. If you do the unexpected, unexpected things happen.
I Do What I Can and I Am What I Am
There is a dragon tattoo on the back of Romula’s left hand, for all the world to see, and engraved in her heart (as Calais was, they say, in Queen Mary’s) is the phrase ‘I do what I can and I am what I am’. In Romula’s mind dragon and words are interconnected. A tattoo’s there for life, and that’s that, and Romula doesn’t mind one bit, so long as the phrase stays too.
I do what I can and I am what I am.
Let me tell you more about Romula. Last year she won the Miss Skyways Competition. She won against 82 other girls, all cabin crew – air hostesses, as we used to say – on International Skyways. She deserved to win: not just because she was pretty, and smart, and efficient, and friendly, and everyone liked her, but because she loved her job: it never ceased to thrill her: to fly the Airways of the World, to be the girl in the ad: to watch the mountains moving by below, the plains unfolding: sometimes she would catch her breath with the pleasure of it all. It was her gift, never to be blasé. Romula, years into her job, would still look out of the aircraft window on a clear day, when there was nothing else to do – which was not often, granted – and marvel at the miracle of flying. She would go forward into the cockpit with the crew’s food – different dishes for everyone, in case of food poisoning – and watch their strong male hands move amongst the instruments, and rejoice at the luck which got her to this place, this point of time, this source of power, this wonderment.
‘You what?’ demanded Liz her mother. ‘You won what? Miss Skyways? For God’s sake keep quiet about it.’
Liz Ellis was a hard-working, hard-drinking, high-thinking feminist. She hadn’t worn a skirt since she was pregnant with Romula, and that was twenty-four years ago. She’d stopped Romula playing with dolls, slapped her if she dusted, tried to give her a proper education so she could take a meaningful place in society, and look what happened. Miss Skyways. Handing out G and Ts to businessmen. What sort of life was that?
Sometimes, when Romula went forward to the cockpit, she’d catch the eye of the pilot, or the first officer. Of course she did. How could she not? Hotels in far-off places can be lonely: the camaraderie of the air is strong: tension and danger demand relief: excitement smoulders in the sky as well as on the earth: like salt on meat, passing sex brings out the full flavour of a rich life. Sometimes the sex trembled on the edge of love; never quite, for Romula.
