George had come from the room and had joined her on the veranda of the little hotel, wrapping his arms around her body and kissing her lovingly on the side of her face. They had stood together, watching the evening close in. In the gentle light of the sky, a stark white swollen Mexican moon had appeared, as though it had been switched on. And as the moments passed, they had stood and watched the sky grow darker and the milky rays of moonlight grow more intense, until their shadows were black and their skin was painted in lines of wet silver. Our honeymoon. I have never seen anything like this before, she had thought to herself.
And so it had seemed the most natural thing in the world to do.
She had turned her body around to George and had looked at him with the openness of a child. The long sigh she had given had signaled that she had felt within easy reach of herself. She had stroked the side of George’s face with the back of her hand and then, smiling at him as though she were slightly drunk, she had talked quietly and sweetly to him.
“George,” she had said. It had all seemed so perfect. “George, I want to tell you something.”
George had raised his eyebrows softly to indicate that he was listening to her.
“George, I want you to hear what I have to say. I want you to understand. I . . .”
“I’m listening.”
Their faces had remained close. They had held their gaze on each other and the swollen moon had continued to bathe them in its generous light.
She had smiled. The moment to redeem herself had come.
“George, while we were engaged . . . I have to tell you that . . . well . . .” It had felt as though there was a bubble of air in her throat. “Well, you see . . .” The bubble broke. “Well . . . you see, George—I was in love with someone else—I had fallen in love with someone else—I—”
George looked puzzled. “What did you say?” he asked as though he had misheard her.
“George, it’s important that you understand that this has nothing to do with us now, with what we have together now,” Katherine said, trying desperately to compose herself.
George remained silent, watching her. His face still held a questioning look.
After a few moments, Katherine spoke. “It’s something that has passed, is over,” she insisted. “It’s something that had meaning, but I know now . . . it doesn’t mean . . . .” With this, she slowly ground to a halt. She looked up at George. For a moment, George stared back at her and then he said quietly, almost imperceptibly, “Fallen in love? While we were engaged? Engaged to be married? In love with who?”
“I want to explain . . .” she continued, hardly knowing what to say.
George slowly repeated his words in a feeble attempt to assimilate what he had heard. “What in God’s name—”
He rocked slightly back from her, his face fixed in a grimace, his arms still enclosing her, his eyes searching her face. But from the polite, quiet way in which he had spoken, from the way in which his words had been hinged with disbelief, she realized instantly that she had made a dreadful mistake.
“In love with who?” he insisted. She could feel his body tightening beside her. “What—Katherine—in God’s name do you mean?”
“George—it’s not what you think. It’s—”
“And what am I supposed to think? While we were engaged? What kind of thing is that to say?” George loosened his hold on her. “So what does that make me, then? Eh? What does that make me? Some kind of—bloody—some goddamn—bloody—fucking—joke! What have our years together meant!” George eyes blazed. “Who was it, for Christ’s sake?”
She began to backpedal then, tears streaming down her face, talking fast, trying to dilute the effect her words had had on George, and it was all ugly, every syllable of it. She was not even sure what she was saying anymore—gushing apologies, thin explanations, trying to make George understand. She shook her head in complete despair, more tears coursing down her face. “Someone I met—a tailor who—when I was playing Carmen—he died—he died George—he drowned—I couldn’t stop thinking about him—I’m so sorry—I tried, but I just couldn’t stop—but we’re married now, George—we’re married and it’s all different and—”
“Are you over him?” George’s voice had a vicious edge to it. “Are you?”
“Yes, George,” she said weakly, “of course I am.”
“I doubt that.”
It was an impulse she should have checked. An unguarded moment she herself should have understood. Rooted in the selfish desire to release herself from her guilt and eased forward by the heat and by the gentle thrill of her new surroundings, she had sensed a new beginning. She had wanted to put everything behind her. She had wanted to forget Tom. She had felt herself opened and lightened and, as a consequence, had foolishly thought that George would somehow understand all that and see something new in her to love.
And she could not undo what she had done. She could not unsay it. What had she been thinking? How was it possible that she had thought for one instant that George would not be decimated by her words? How cruel to cause him such pain. If she could have had that moment back again, she would have sealed it all in. She would not have opened her stupid mouth.
They stood for a few more moments on the veranda of their hotel, both of them silent and altered, and the night sounds surrounding them—a shutter being noisily closed, the complaining bark of an old dog, the clicking of some insect somewhere.
But George had understood, he said, he had understood what she had said to him, and he did not want to hear anymore. Then he turned away from her and walked slowly back into the bedroom.
Don’t walk away from me like that.
It had been the casualness of her impulse to confess that had hurt him deeply. She knew this. The terrifying ordinariness of her opening tone, she knew, had crushed him beyond belief. It was as though she had been telling him about what she had just seen, a lizard in the courtyard below, among the bougainvillea, under the swollen moon.
Elsa has never been inside a hospital. She had only ever been in the hospital car park at the time when Stephen was born. Stephen had developed jaundice, and so Elsa, Maureen, and Elizabeth hadn’t gone into the hospital, they hadn’t even gotten out of the car, but instead had pressed their faces against the car’s back window, waiting expectantly for their new baby brother to appear. George had gone into the hospital to tell Katherine that the girls were out in the car, and moments later, although it had seemed like an age to Elsa, mother, baby, and father had stood framed in the hospital window. The girls had waved excitedly at the vision. Mother was mother in a white robe. Baby was a little yellow Pope in knitted skins, his face the size of a yo-yo. Father had his arms proudly around them both.
Now Elsa has brought a comic with her. It is an old edition of Twinkle but there are at least two stories in it which she could certainly read again. She likes the story about the vet’s daughter. She would like to be a vet when she grows up. That’s why, Elsa is saying to her father as they walk together from the car park, the hospital will be an interesting place to visit, because doctors are a bit like vets, only people can talk to them and tell them what is wrong with them and animals can’t, and that really means that to be a vet, you’ve to be even cleverer than a doctor, because you have to work out what is wrong with the animal yourself.
George holds Elsa’s hand and listens to her chatter as they walk through the main doors of the hospital. The doors in the hospital corridors are made of a heavy semitransparent plastic. Nurses busily flap through them on the way to Emergency, trolleys push against them, and doctors casually feel them yield under their touch. The plastic doors surrender to the traffic on either side, like the epiglottal folds on a giant throat.
But the smell of disinfectant and excrement frightens Elsa, and now she stops talking. George takes over the conversation, explaining to her where they have to go to find Katherine’s ward. People are passing Elsa in the corridor. Patients are walking forlornly in their dressing gowns.
>
They find Katherine. Elsa looks at her mother only briefly, feeling, for some reason she cannot explain to herself, that it would be rude to stare at her. Her mother is a gray shape in the bed. Her head is tilted back and her eyes are only slightly open. Her hair is different—there is less of it, or maybe it has just been brushed back. The sides of her mouth are caked a little with creamy saliva.
As George takes Katherine’s hand, she begins muttering and her head lolls from one side to the other. She looks like an old woman. She looks like an old drunk woman in the bed, her body drinking bitterly from a nearby drip.
George kisses Katherine’s forehead gently and pulls over a chair for Elsa to sit down on at the side of the bed.
“Your mother’s just a bit tired. She’ll say hello in a minute,” he says gently to Elsa.
Elsa sits on the chair and opens her comic. She stares at the pictures and listens to the particles of conversation between her father and her mother. When Katherine speaks, she does so in clumped phrases with a rising pitch, which makes her sound as though she is whining. The words are disconnected in short, intense bursts. George’s tone is always reassuring.
They stay for a while together, sitting like three points of a triangle. Katherine is saying something now about a wig and beginning to cry a little, her eyes still half-closed, her head still lolling from side to side, and Elsa pretends to read while she eavesdrops on her mother dying.
There are other people in the ward. They sit as disparate shapes. The patients are in their nightdresses and dressing gowns, pale and gaunt. They look as though they are wrapped in cloth, half-mummified. They are stripped of the everyday. They are patients now and their job is to wait, wait for biscuits and analgesics and the knowing nods from a passing consultant, to whom they routinely nod back, having understood nothing of what he has said.
The visitors sit waiting with the patients who are waiting. The visitors wear clothes that allow them to go out into the wind. They hold grapes and newspapers, and all their voices blend together into one low rumble, which vibrates across the damp sheen of the hospital walls.
Elsa hears a trolley clacking along the corridor, the occasional high rattle of cups, and the shrill peal of a nurse’s laughter. Elsa looks around the ward.
On the bed next to Katherine’s sit a mother and daughter with noses of identical shape and size. They are the younger and older version of each other. As they turn to look at each other, they create a perfectly symmetrical space between them. Across on the other side of the ward, a patient sits alone on her own visitor’s chair, looking at the empty bed. She now dips her head and begins rummaging in a plastic bag. Every so often, she quickly pops something small into her mouth from the bag, gnawing at whatever it is like a wily squirrel with an acorn. Her bed jacket has fallen open, revealing a thin slice of breast. At the bed nearest the door, a group of young men in white coats are surrounding the slim shape of a sleeping woman covered with a blanket. They are talking cheerfully, as though they are at a luncheon and are eagerly waiting to see what they will have to eat.
George reaches over to touch Elsa on the shoulder.
“Would you take out the things for your mother from the bag, pet?” he says, attempting to coax Elsa to engage with her mother. Elsa lifts the bag up onto the bed. Out of it she lifts some fruit—two apples, two bananas—a neatly folded facecloth, a magazine, and Katherine’s mule slippers. Elsa hands them to her father. George places the fruit and the magazine on the bedside locker and then, pulling open its creaky tin door, puts the slippers and the facecloth in among Katherine’s spare nightclothes.
“Has Vera been up to see you, Katherine? Or Frank?” George is tidying the contents of the locker. Katherine groans in response, lifting her head from the pillow and looking past both her husband and her daughter into the air beyond.
“Elsa has just come from swimming.” George continues calmly, as though there is a conversation. “Monday already. And we got Mass yesterday at St. Mary’s, you’ll be glad to hear—we haven’t all become heathens since you’ve been out of the house!” George turns to Elsa with a smile. Elsa bends her head and pretends to read her comic.
Suddenly, Katherine pushes herself up in the bed, pressing her fists into the mattress to raise her chest, her arms like thin stilts.
“Swimming,” she says clearly.
George turns to Katherine, surprised at her voice.
“Yes—swimming on Monday.” George’s reply is cautious. “Tell your mother about the swimming today, Elsa.”
Elsa says nothing.
George reaches over to help Katherine settle in the bed. She arches her back in distress. “Where?” she asks.
“The Templemore Baths, Katherine, with the school,” says George.
“Yes. Yes, I know.” This time, Katherine’s voice is a calm day. She looks kindly at Elsa and then slides through George’s hold to rest back on her pillow. George fixes the blankets around Katherine and turns to pour water into a glass from the jug on the locker.
But Elsa doesn’t want to talk about swimming. Talking about swimming makes her stomach sore, for every Monday Miss Fairley takes the whole class to the Templemore Baths like lambs to the slaughter. Today was just like every Monday, Elsa thought to herself. And every Monday it’s the same thing. When they reach the flat gray steps of the baths, all the girls are marshaled through the heavy stained-glass doors, which then swing tightly closed behind them. Miss Fairley orders the girls to move in a dignified manner to the cubicles. Some girls rush ahead to get the best changing rooms—the ones nearest the showers. Elsa inevitably ends up with the cubicle at the end with the broken door, so she always feels on view. The floor of the cubicle is wet and scummy and the grouting between the tiles is green and dirty. Elsa hates when the swimming teachers shout, which they do all the time. When she tries to put on her swimming cap, her hands fumble against the resistance of the rubber. It thwacks stubbornly each time she tries to push more hair in underneath it. The cap tugs at the hair on the nape of her neck and creates little spindles of pain each time she moves her head. Every Monday, she walks to join the rest of her classmates who are always already standing by the edge of the pool, a strand of her hair snaking its way down the back of her neck, marking her out as different, marking her out as the worst swimmer in the class. This Monday was no different from all the others. She had stood, as usual, cold and frightened, shaking in her little black swimsuit. So, no, Elsa doesn’t want to tell her mother about the swimming.
Another trolley clacks along the corridor and a nurse bustles into the ward carrying a tray of medication. George reads this as a sign for them to go. Elsa is relieved. She feels uncomfortable sitting at the side of the bed of a mother who seems unfamiliar to her. She folds her comic and listens as her father speaks quietly to her mother, as one would speak slowly and calmly when leaving a nervous child. He strokes her head. He tells her she has beautiful hair. Her mother has sunk into her half-unconscious self and groans as though to acknowledge their leaving. Elsa and her father make their way out of the hospital and walk back across the car park.
The sun, like a huge copper penny, had suddenly dropped out of the cloudless evening sky and was gone. Blocks of purple shadow were cast by the surrounding terraces onto the courtyard of the hotel. Fireflies flitted orange-red across the blue stones. The night grew quickly cold.
George had turned away from Katherine and, having made his way hurriedly down the wooden staircase and out through the back door of the hotel, now sat on the edge of the dry stone trough in the middle of the courtyard. As she approached him, he was a still, dark shape, his head bent low, his hands splayed on his thighs. His anger hung around him like a hungry dog.
They remained silent. She stood there, dressed only in her cotton nightdress and still barefoot, the stones giving back the daytime heat beneath her feet. Her arms and legs shivered slightly in the slim evening breeze. She stood there, not knowing what to say nor how to go about repairing the hurt she knew she
had caused George. Why had she told him? Why had she been so foolish? Would she ever be exonerated in his eyes?
After a few moments, George released a small sound, something like a groan, only thinner and tighter, as though acknowledging a point of no return. When he finally spoke, his voice was measured and low.
“I found him, Katherine.” George’s head remained bent.
“What, George?” Her voice was a tremor.
George talked slowly, deliberately, as though he was spelling out every word to her. “Your tailor. . . your lover . . . whatever you want to call him . . . I was the one who found him.”
“What?” Katherine spoke as though in a trance. “What do you mean, George?” A keen breeze ruffled the hem of her cotton nightdress.
George lifted his head suddenly, his eyes, black pools, glaring out into the night. “For God’s sake, Katherine—” A dark breathlessness was creeping into his voice. “I knew exactly who he was. I knew—you and he—had been—I had seen you both the night I waited for you—I had seen you from your mother’s parlor window—the night I asked you to marry me”—he dug the heels of his palms into his thighs as though in pain and squeezed his eyes tight momentarily as though he was trying to block something out—“and then I saw you two in town together—walking—and the way he placed his arm around you—I knew—I just knew.” He widened his eyes briefly, struggling to retain composure. “And people talk, Katherine. You know. People talk.” The darkness of his eyes intensified. He took in an enormous breath. “And then when I saw him kissing you that night—backstage—that night of Carmen—I had come to tell you I had been called on duty that night, but when I saw—I couldn’t bear it—I couldn’t bear to be anywhere near—so instead of talking to you, I wrote you a letter and I left—I wanted to deny the whole thing was happening—I thought that I would die—I couldn’t bear it Katherine—I couldn’t bear it.”
Ghost Moth Page 20
