by Weldon, Fay
Mr Khan shakes his head reproachfully. ‘Mr Lear should not have told lies. There is nothing to be ashamed of in cosmetic surgery. It is natural for employers, in these dismal times, to want their employees to look young and handsome and fresh, and to inspire confidence in others. A man often looks older than he feels: in such cases to have a face-lift is not conceit, merely sensible.’
Pony has heard him say such things many times.
‘So that’s the wife!’ he says. ‘Mrs Lear! She seems a higher type than the husband.’
Pony hasn’t heard him say this before, and she doesn’t much like it. She feels rather tired, and thinks perhaps she’ll go home to her parents’ house in the country, for the weekend, and weed their flowerbeds.
Esther, at the door of No. 341, turns on her followers and forbids them entry.
‘Hermes, Freddo,’ she says, ‘you stay out of here.’
‘You’ll only have a row with him,’ says Freddo in his succulent young voice, with the slight over and under tones of Irish (Southern) mist and charm.
‘We are far more likely to have a row if there are witnesses,’ says Esther, briefly. ‘You should know that by now.’
‘I’m coming in with you, my darling,’ persists Freddo. ‘The bastard will only upset you.’
There is no stemming the flow of his goodwill, his desire to look after and protect, his Lancelot complex, as Esther describes it. So Esther diverts the flow. How skilled she is, after years of family life, in inter-personal relationships!
‘Freddo dear, I need you to stay here and look after Hermes. She should never have come in the first place.’ Hermes darts her mother a wounded and recalcitrant look. ‘This is between her father and me.’
‘Now you are accusing me of tagging along,’ says Hermes, tears rising.
‘See, Freddo,’ says her mother, ‘she’s in no state to be left alone.’ So Freddo stays, with his quasi stepdaughter. They sit beneath a palm in an upholstered alcove especially designed for surplus visitors, thus caught short by family passions. Hermes sits sulking, putting as much space as she can manage between herself and Freddo. Freddo stares at himself in a little gilt mirror and observes some slight slackness beneath his own chin, and experimentally lifts it. He now has a Chinese look.
‘I spy Chinee with a lace lilt,’ he says.
Hermes looks down her small, straight, perfect nose, and pretends not to belong to him.
Alan sits up in his hospital bed, his bandaged face turned listlessly towards the wall. Beside him books stay unread and orange juice undrunk. Esther sits herself beside her husband, her nearly ex-husband – the final decree will be in only a couple of weeks – and takes his hand in hers, and feels it grow tense.
‘I didn’t mean it to go so far,’ she says, being these days someone who likes always to put the general before the particular. Women in domestic situations tend to do the opposite. ‘I didn’t mean it to come to this.’
‘It hurts to talk.’ He won’t meet her eye.
‘It always did, darling,’ she observes, and leans over to adjust his head bandages. He shrinks, and wants her to know that he does. He doesn’t trust her. She has come here for some sinister motive.
‘The bandages have slipped! Let me help you. What do the nurses do round here, except stand about and chat up the doctors? You can hardly see at all.’
‘I don’t want to see.’
‘But, darling, it’s Spring outside. Look out the window. Daffodils.’
Alan says that he doesn’t like daffodils. They are too common and too yellow and Esther says no doubt he has seen too many Springs turn into too many Winters, which sounds rather more like the Esther he knew, or of late has come to know.
‘At least,’ he concedes, ‘you didn’t bring your lover. I suppose we must be grateful for that.’
Esther is glad he has raised the subject. She loves talking about Freddo to Alan.
‘He’s waiting outside,’ she says. ‘He wanted to come in to protect me from you, but I said since you were a sick man, I’d probably be safe, for once.’
‘I don’t want to hear about your lover.’
‘You brought the subject up,’ says Esther, ‘and I think you should hear, because you might make a new relationship yourself one day and you won’t want it to collapse like all your others. Freddo is always kind and considerate. He never finds fault with either my body or my mind. He accepts me: he admires me. He makes me happy. You must remember what it’s like going round with the young and amorous and uncritical. You did enough of it, when safely married to me. But young girls do seem to prefer married men, don’t they. They can put in practice without risking involvement. But there is something very sad and unwanted and defeated about a heterosexual man unmarried in his middle years. Don’t you think?’
‘Esther,’ says Alan, ‘I didn’t ask you to come here. I didn’t want you to come. Would you kindly go?’
It is somewhere in Esther’s nature to accept rebuke.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, in a small voice, quite like the old days, when she had apologised for everything, including the weather, and had weighed five stone more. ‘I’ll behave.’ And she looks at him with true sympathy, but not for long, just long enough to ask:
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Yes,’ says Alan.
‘It’s not supposed to,’ she says. ‘You’re probably imagining it. When I heard you were in hospital, and what for, I rang up the BMC and made enquiries. They were very helpful. They said you might experience discomfort, but they didn’t mention pain.’
‘It hurts,’ he says. ‘There is pain.’
‘They also told me,’ she remarks, ‘what it was likely to cost.’
‘Did they?’ He’s vague, too vague.
‘They assured me you’d look ten years younger. I said what a pity it was there were some parts the surgeon’s knife couldn’t improve.’
‘Potency,’ says Alan, declining to take offence, ‘is a matter of self-esteem.’
‘Poor Alan,’ says Esther.
‘It has all been a great humiliation,’ he says.
‘I know what those feel like,’ she says. ‘You taught me.’ He lets that go. She tries again. ‘Your daughter Hermes is outside, keeping Freddo quiet. She’ll come so far to show her sympathy, but not quite all the way.’
‘Perhaps she’ll run off with Freddo,’ says Alan, hopefully. ‘How much of my redundancy money have you paid him?’
‘It isn’t your redundancy money, it’s mine. The Court awarded it to me, taking note of your despicable behaviour during the last years of our marriage. Only a couple of thousand, to start him up in business. He has a nice little shop now: it keeps him busy and happy all day. So when you sell the house over my head, as you so often say you will, and kill yourself, as you so often say you will, there’ll be someone able to look after me.’
‘When did you ever need looking after?’
‘Oh, once, once,’ she says, sadly. ‘I am what you’ve made me. Alan, I didn’t come here to quarrel with you, I only came to ask how you got the money for this really very expensive and perfectly unnecessary cosmetic surgery, when Hermes’ Cordon Bleu classes have to be paid for and the roof is leaking and your solicitor’s fees must be enormous, because you keep insisting on going to court over trivial issues, which I always win, and there is no one in the world to care whether you look young or old. How did you pay?’
He is silent for a little and then he says, ‘I took out a second mortgage on our house.’
It is her turn to be silent. And presently she says, with ominous calm, ‘I don’t believe you. You’re trying to upset me. How can you take out a mortgage without my signature?’
‘Mostly in these offices,’ he says, ‘they’re on the husband’s side. They’ll stretch a point or so.’
She believes him. Believing him, she shrieks and flies at him, belabouring his bandaged head with quite powerful fists. He is already poised for escape having, after all, been married to her for
many years and being able to predict her reactions – but gets his foot trapped beneath too-tightly tucked hospital blankets and can’t slide out of the bed as easily as he has imagined. He shrieks for help and she shrieks abuse. Hermes and Freddo come running in. Hermes will not intervene physically but cries out to anyone who will listen, ‘They’re always doing this! I’m so ashamed! No wonder I’m so neurotic!’ And Freddo tries gently to restrain his lady love, crying, ‘Oh my darling gentle lady!’ but she elbows him savagely aside. It is left to Pony to restrain Esther with a cunning neck-lock from the martial arts in which she is trained, and by the time Mr Khan has arrived, in response to his bleeper’s urgent alarm tweet, some kind of order has been restored. Esther is brilliant-eyed but quiet in the corner of the room, with Freddo stroking her hair and regarding Alan with a curled lip, and Hermes is weeping quietly, and Pony is adjusting Alan’s bandages.
‘It’s all right, Mr Khan,’ says Pony, ‘I don’t think any of your wonderful work has been spoiled.’ And she mutters, ‘Visitors!’ under her breath, but quite loud enough for Esther to hear.
‘Mrs Lear,’ says Mr Khan, in his mellifluous voice, ‘will you come with me to my office? I think we should talk. It is true that in normal times physical violence can release tension in a helpful way, but these are not normal times for your husband. He needs your love and support. The cheek scars are safe enough, but I have raised the epicanthic folds, and they are particularly vulnerable.’
He pronounces his v’s as w’s; Pony loves it. Wulnerable! She sighs her admiration. Mr Khan preens.
‘He should not, for instance,’ Mr Khan goes on, ‘laugh too much.’
‘My father,’ remarks Hermes, ‘was never a great laugher. He should be safe enough.’
Mr Khan sends Hermes and Freddo down to the canteen to wait for their mother, and desires them to choose herbal tea rather than coffee. Coffee, he says, can break the fine capillary nerves in the cheek, and righting them can be quite a business. ‘Some things,’ he tells the silenced, desperate assembly, ‘our patients can’t help. Such as the passage of time, or the inequities of a natal fate. Things like coffee, alcohol, over-eating, over-indulging in sex – people wrinkle up the face quite drastically – they can help, but usually won’t. You do not,’ says Mr Khan sadly, ‘meet the finest and best of mankind in this particular wing of the hospital.’
Freddo and Hermes, much reduced, go for herbal tea, resolved to abjure coffee, Esther accompanies Mr Khan to his office, and Pony sits on the end of Alan’s bed, to calm him and soothe him in the interests of the proper knitting of tissue. The process was known to Sister Tutor as ‘chattering on’ and she was a great believer in it, and Pony was an adept pupil.
‘Friends,’ says Pony, curling her little slim legs, ‘are all very well at visiting time, but if it’s nearest and dearest out of proper hours, then there’s nearly always trouble. I think hospitals should be kept for the patients, don’t you? Sister Tutor always told us that hospitals are sanctuaries: and that the mind must heal before the body can, and what most patients come in for is peace and quiet. A broken leg, she’d say, is a plea for help: and what the nurse must do is find the source of the inner pain. Go easy on the pain-killers, she’d say: most patients need pain to assuage their guilt. When in their own estimation they’ve suffered enough, the pain just goes. Pain-killers merely confuse the patient and drag the healing process out. Sharp and short, she’d say, or easy and long, and in these days of cutbacks and queues for hospital beds, easy and long is plainly immoral. Sister Tutor is a wonderful woman. So wise!’
Alan isn’t listening: he is tenderly moving his jaw, beneath its bandages, and is alarmed by the degree of movement the bones now seem to have.
‘Do you think something’s given?’ he asks.
‘No, no,’ says Pony, soothingly. ‘You just began to use your jaw properly. Shouting “you bitch, you bitch” the way you did, you really exercised your mouth. Sister Tutor was a great believer in catharsis. Now you’ve got what you really wanted to say out, you’ll find speaking much easier! Isn’t that wonderful? Good! I think we’re really on the way to recovery!’
And she slips off the bed and does a little dance about it. Alan can scarcely believe his improvement merits so extreme a response.
‘Everything’s going so perfectly,’ says Pony. ‘And now I’m pregnant too!’
‘Good heavens,’ says Alan, gloomily.
‘Why, don’t you like children?’ She’s anxious.
‘Not much,’ he says. ‘No one seems able to cook them properly.’
She looks at him blankly, not taking the joke, and he is ashamed of having made it: she is very bright and pretty and rescued him from his wife’s fists. He responds properly, as she deserves.
‘That’s wonderful!’ he corrects himself. ‘I didn’t know you were married.’
‘You’re so old-fashioned,’ she says. ‘But I soon will be! It’s Mr Khan, you know.’
‘I might have known it. Only yesterday he showed me photographs of his wife and children.’
‘He feels he ought to, that’s all. She looks all right in photographs, but she’s terribly boring. She’s a brain surgeon. He can’t possibly love her, except in a conventional sense.’
‘Is there another sense?’
‘Oh yes!’ breathes Pony. ‘But how could someone of your generation understand?’ And she speaks of the passion which melts her bones, and the feeling of the heavens uniting, and the sense of destiny, of the ultimate fortune, the great adventure! Herself and Mr Khan! He from so far away, spirited into this very hospital: and she having done her training here, almost by accident: and thus they’d met. Fate has led them together. How else to explain it?
‘Ah yes,’ says Alan, turning his face back to the wall. ‘All that.’
In the meantime, Esther is talking to Mr Khan, in his large cool office. A photograph of Mrs Professor Khan and the two children, all on horses, stands on his tidy desk. ‘It is no use living in the past, my dear,’ he says.
‘Don’t you “my dear” me,’ says Esther. ‘And there is a great deal of use in living in the past. Anger keeps me going! To think how I lived! All those wasted years!’
‘Do you want to tell me, my dear?’ He gazes into her bright blue eyes with his own soft brown ones. He admires her. She reminds him of his wife – an intelligent and forceful woman, unbowed down by that necessity of being good which so afflicts English women: the sense that things must be put up with, whatever they are, and no complaints allowed.
‘Tell me why the mention of a second mortgage should make you so very, very violent!’
‘There was a time,’ says Esther, ‘and I lived through it, before the trouble started, when women were proud to be wives, and admired men, and ran homes, and loved to do it well, and the name housewife had dignity and substance and mothering was all the rage, and I mothered Hermes. And then Hermes was nineteen, and I wanted her to leave home, and didn’t at the same time, because then what would my purpose in the world be? I had reached the time of my come-uppance as wife and mother, and I realised it, and Alan couldn’t, and Hermes wouldn’t.
‘Picture the scene! Myself in my love home in the suburbs, with the roses in the front and the lawn at the back, big enough for a game of croquet and summer Sunday drinks, and serviced by myself: the wife, no matter what her talents or her aspirations were, existed in those days to service the family. And the family, without a doubt, was better off for it. Well, there’s a dilemma!
‘And then one summer evening came and I was waiting for Alan to come home. I was cooking the dinner. I am a very bad cook, but that was neither here nor there. To cook was my function. Alan liked formal meals, of the kind he took out at business men’s restaurants at lunchtime. And he was always slightly aggrieved at the food I set before him, as if feeling the lack of a menu, a choice of dishes. I was in a muddle: the mixer had spattered unhomogenised mayonnaise all over the kitchen: a bolognaise sauce was catching in the pressure cooker –
you could tell by the smell of the steam – and Hermes was writing an essay on the kitchen table, and I said, which I shouldn’t have:
“Can’t you keep your books to just one area of the kitchen table, Hermes?” And I suggested she work in her room, where she had such a nice reading lamp, a Christmas present from her father. She reminded me that it had been I who had actually bought the lamp and put his name upon it, as usual, and I explained, as usual, that Christmas was the busiest time of her father’s year, she mustn’t be upset by his apparent neglect. “It’s the time,” I said, “that the main Presentations and Conferences take place.”
“It’s the time the office parties take place,” Hermes corrected me, and went on to say that office parties were annual orgies and I went on to say she knew nothing about it, and she said she might not but Val did – Val often worked in offices – and I said, “Who is this Val? You keep talking about him,” and Hermes said, “It’s not a him, it’s a her,” and while I digested this and got ready for trouble ahead, and took out the flour to thicken the gravy, Hermes sidestepped and started in on me.
“You don’t make it less greasy by adding flour,” she said, “you just add carbohydrate to cholesterol.”
“Your father loves gravy,” I said.
“You’re trying to murder my father,” my daughter said.
“Why should I?” I asked. “Since he supports us and looks after us, and we are the meaning of his life?”
“You are a slave,” said Hermes.
“I am a housewife,” I said.
“Val says you are a slave,” said Hermes, “and what you do is unpaid shit-work, and what you cook is murder. You want him to have a heart-attack and claim on the insurance,” and I replied that all this was only a stage Hermes was going through, and she said, “What? Being a lesbian, a stage?” and since it was the first I’d heard of it, perhaps I didn’t react properly, merely asked her not to mention it to her father before he’d even begun his soup – you know how children will wait on the doorstep for the tired and weary worker, in order to spring bad news upon him – and explained to her how bad the times were, what with oil prices shooting up again and the recession and the rate of exchange – I can never remember whether a low pound is good or bad, can you? And so forth. And Hermes said:
