by A. P.
It’s heartrending. Had it not been for the jealousy I might still have done something, though I’m not quite sure what. Pushed myself forward, for example, stuck by her, gone with her, refused to be supplanted. But jealousy was there, a minor evil among the bigger ones, doing its sneaky work. I saw Sabine turn from grey-pale to green-pale and sway a little and put out her hand, and Roland step forward like an attentive swain and clasp it, and instead of feeling sorry for her something inside me gave a tiny snap, like a little phial, releasing bitter fluid. Not that I thought she was shamming; I didn’t. But I had the impression that she didn’t shrink from him either; on the contrary let herself kind of droop in his direction, definitely not in mine.
In a trice they were all over her, the vultures. All four of them, and on a sensitive recipient at such close quarters, four can create quite a toxin. I can see them now, acting in concert, giving one another their cues. Mais ce n’est rien. She’s coming round already. Just a little fainting spell, that’s all. Too much émotion – smile, smile and slithery innuendo from the Marquis. Nothing to worry about. No, no, Ghislaine, you must stay. Just a little bit longer, stay. Let Roland take care of her, let him drive her home. You can follow afterwards. Sometimes it is good to leave the young ones to themselves. They make such a handsome pair, no? We thought so ourselves when we saw them on the dance floor. Tellement beaux, tellement bien assortis.
Poor Ghislaine, the flattery is too much for her: both de Vibrey parents practically throwing their son into her daughter’s arms, or the other way round. And now Roland himself comes forward with that panzer-troop smile that flattens all resistance, canvassing on his own behalf. No, really, he would love to take Sabine home, he’ll drive carefully, he promises. Look, he is taking his shoes off right now: safer that way, these once belonged to his grandmother and he’s not that accustomed to heels. And Sabine, not showing any enthusiasm exactly, still too dazed for that, but not protesting either, which is a weirdness in itself. Poor trusting Ghislaine, it’s the sort of scenario she must have dreamt about since Sabine’s birth pretty well, but never dared hope for while awake. What a coup it would be: her daughter, with her funny boyish ways, landing the only really good catch in the region. Silly to entertain the thought at this early stage, it was only a dance and a drive, but sillier still to stand in the way and lose maybe the chance of a lifetime. On what grounds, too? Sabine was basically so strong and healthy. The others were right: it was simply the heat and the excitement. She was looking better already, although still worryingly pale. Very well, then, she would give in to the general pressure, let the two young ones go on ahead, and then follow on in her own car in about ten minutes. Say a quarter of an hour. Or say half, because … the night, the stars, the moonlight, and that fetching pirate moustache – odd how pretty it looks … on ne sait jamais.
Yes, Ghislaine is neutralised by flattery and hope, and I by jealousy and despair. Leaving them an open field.
Oh, I know it’s stupid to try and pin down causes in a situation like this. Nothing more poignant and nothing more pointless than dissecting the event into little snippets and saying: There, that was the one I screwed up over, that was where I should have acted differently, that was where it all went wrong, all dogwards from there on. All the same, I can’t help it. I have the scene in front of me, chopped up like film footage into so many tiny stills, each one slightly further ahead in time than the last. Closer and closer to the disaster point, which I can never see but can imagine all too well. Ghislaine stepping hesitantly forward with her hand bent at the wrist, as if she’s having second thoughts and wants to check Sabine’s forehead for fever. Aimée catching the hand and drawing her back, chattering her head off to distract her. The Marquise fiddling around in a little beaded sachet of a handbag for the keys to the car, and then holding them up and twiddling them. The darts of light from the overhead chandelier bouncing off the keys and playing over Sabine’s face, picking out little beads of sweat. Émotion or just exertion? Curse her for either, curse her for both, for feeling émotion on Roland’s account, and for dancing with him in the first place. I danced with other partners too but it was different; I was waiting for her. She was not waiting for me, anything but. Look at her, the traitress, she has put her hand in his without sparing me a glance and is drifting away from me like a sleepwalker. All that talk about power and self-reliance, and the first presentable man who shows any interest in her: Oh la la, a fainting fit and the vapours. Let her go, let her go and neck in the car with the pantomime dame, because that, now I see him in close-up, is what he looks like. The principal boy and the dame, that is what they both look like and good luck to them.
It all flashes by so quickly – frame after frame. Their backs now are what I see, growing smaller and less distinct as they cross the ballroom, hand in clasping hand, and fuse with the other guests. Their costumes fuse too, until I’m no longer sure it’s them my tear-blurred eyes are following or a shepherdess and a cossack, a ghost and a musketeer …
Gone now. Gone Sabine, and gone the last chance of saving her. The real Cleopatra would never have let herself be filched of a lover in this way, you can bet your eyeballs. She would have rolled herself into the foot-mat of the car and stowed herself away in the back seat and leaped out at the crucial moment to reclaim her own. She had southern passion, she was a hair-tearer. The fake one, which is me, just has stuffy wounded Nordic pride. I toss my hair instead of tearing it, to show the world at large, and Aimée and company in particular, how little I care, and spin round in search of another partner. Four can play at this game.
The last image, as I am whisked away by God-knows-who, is that of Roland’s two discarded satin shoes, lying on the parquet floor. Still life with pumps. What whopping feet his grandmother must have had.
X
Illness
Post-haemorrhagic Anaemias – 3: Chlorosis
Post-haemorrhagic anaemias, as we have seen above, can conveniently be divided into two basic categories: acute and chronic. Chlorosis, also called the chlorotic syndrome, or chlorotic anaemia, is generally regarded as belonging to the latter category. However, rare cases have been described of such severity that some recent authors (see Sharnack, Horwath and Thibault) have preferred to place them in the former, under the differential name of acute chlorosis, or acute chlorotic syndrome, or acute chlorotic anaemia.
Stuff Sharnack, Horwath and Thibault, says Sabine with all the force she can muster – not a great deal nowadays – and bids me go on reading.
Definition: The term chlorosis (from the Greek χλωρóζ, meaning green) indicates a particular dystropho-regulatory syndrome, composed of disorders in the psychic, neurovegetative and endocrinological systems, combined with haematic and vascular alterations, exclusively affecting young women at or around the age of puberty.
Snort.
The anaemia which the syndrome typically presents is hypochromic, normochilic, non-haemolitic and hyporegenerative, and is characterised by a pallid greenish skin colouring, particularly evident in the face. It is this last to which the syndrome owes its name. (For further description, see Van Boorden, Markovich, Robeck, etc.)
She looks in the little mirror she keeps by her bedside and drops it limply on the floor: the green is there OK. Stuff Van Boorden, Markovich and Robeck too.
Symptoms: Besides the anaemia and the greenish pallor, which are the prime symptoms of the disease, the most commonly observed flanking symptoms are: asthenia, anorexia, irregularity in the menstrual cycle, irascibility of temper, virilism …
Virilism? Virilism? (This really rouses her.) Stuff the lot of them, Dr la Forge first on the list. They can take their virilism and their latinism and their total, total, absolute, irredeemable cretinism and shove them up their rectums. Recti. Recta. Rectis, rectorum, or wherever. They haven’t found the cause of the blood loss, they haven’t fucking found where I’m fucking bleeding from. And until they find out that and put a stop to it, all these iron pills and tonics and things are worse
than useless. It’s written there, I think, a little further on. Under ‘Therapy’. Look, try page 1151. The one with the sexy photographs.
Like her hand, the joke is limp, but at least she can still make one. I locate the spot she is seeking and read on:
As is the case with all anaemias of this type, the first therapeutic steps must be directed at: 1) locating and arresting the haemorrhage; 2) repairing blood volume; 3) treating the patient for shock and/or collapse; 4) restoring globular volume by means of …
Yeah, yeah, I thought so. It’s one, see. It’s step fucking one. Not two or three or fifty foutu five, but one, and they still haven’t got round to taking it.
This is the fighting stage, Sabine is in the fighting stage. She is fighting the disease and the diagnosis and the doctors all on the same front, her medical books piled round the bed like a barricade. Dr la Forge has advised Ghislaine to remove them, stealthily, overnight, a volume at a time – there is no patient more tricky, he says, than a first-year medical student – but so far she hasn’t had the heart. The books, weighty as they are, seem to be the only thing that is keeping Sabine anchored to the earth. Much of the time she is floating around Lord knows where, light-headed, slow-pulsed, swoony, with her eyes rolling back in her head like marbles; it is agonising to watch her, agonising. But the books with the long complicated words inside them that I barely understand and Ghislaine not at all still have the power to bring her back to us now and again, reeling her in from the clouds like a wayward kite.
She has summoned up enough energy now to take the volume from me, and is scrabbling through the section labelled ‘Etiology’. I’m not quite sure what this is, but I reckon it must be causes. Ectopic pregnancy, she announces with another snort. Well, it can’t be that.
I don’t know what ectopic means either and have to ask.
Means extra-uterine. Means outside the uterus. Means outside the womb, bête. Means the fertilised ovum is in your tubes, up your nostrils, wherever you like but not in the womb. Anyway, it can’t be that. Leukaemia neither, or there’d be hypochromia, and the blood test rules that out. A bust vein in the digestive tract, then? Impossible – where would all the blood go? It’d still be around somewhere, causing trouble; at the very least I’d have indigestion and that’s one thing I haven’t got. What about ulcers? A duodenal, for instance, that somehow they’ve missed? Oh, it’s crazy, if only I could dip my insides in a bowl of water, like the inner chamber of a bicycle tyre, I’d see straight away where the puncture is. Merde, this book is heavy …
And off she goes again, drifting into her private stratosphere, the effort of concentration has been too much for her. The book slips to the floor, the skin turns ashen, the eyes tilt, the breath comes faster and faster and lighter and lighter – little puppy breaths. Where is she? Where does she go when she wafts away like this? Where is she bound for? Warmth, she needs warmth. Maybe one of Dr la Forge’s special emergency injections. This fit looks like it’s a bad one. I start rubbing her hands and call urgently for Ghislaine, who is sewing in the next room.
She is beside me in an instant – catapulted by anxiety – and together, silently, we go through our usual routine. Extra blankets, hot-water bottles for the feet (there is a stove in the room with a pan of water on it, kept constantly at the boil). Sal volatile. Under the nose. On the wrists. Prop the feet higher. Chafe the hands, force the blood back into them by friction. Will it back. Will her back. Words are seldom necessary between us in these straits, we share the same thoughts and the same fears and work in tandem as deftly as a trapeze duo, each trusting to the precision of the other’s moves.
We don’t talk much outside the sickroom either. What is there to say, and in what tone? Cheerfulness rings hollow, sadness rings too full, like a knell. Besides, for all our harmony where nursing is concerned, there is one fundamental thing we disagree on almost to fighting point: him. Yes, Roland. I want him nowhere near Sabine, I want him, basically, in Antarctica, preferably frozen into an iceberg. Although I’d settle for the Arctic as a second choice. I am convinced that his visits are bad for her, and I’ve actually begun to keep a kind of chart or logbook, noting the visits and seeing if and how far they correspond to the changes in the course of the disease. Already, after only three recorded visits, I am beginning to see a pattern: he comes, she worsens; he stays away, she rallies. The trouble started with him, the night of that gruesome fancy-dress ball, and continues with him: he is its cause and its aggravant. He is noxious, perilous, deadly, the worst news ever reported. But how can I possibly get Ghislaine to accept this, when all she does is smile a forgiving smile and put my judgement down to jealousy? His company seems important to Sabine in some way, Viola, tu comprends? Seems to soothe her. When he has been gone a few days she starts to fret so. You have noticed that, no, you must have? Oh, I know it’s you she cares for most, and you she wants constantly beside her, but you must understand that too. Can’t you be generous? Make a little space for another friend? Do it for Sabine’s sake. Tension round the sickbed is the one thing we want to avoid.
I am jealous, of course, I’m as green as Sabine almost, and not at all sure that Ghislaine has got it right about the order of her daughter’s affections. But she is right enough on the first point: extraordinary, hurtful, inexplicable though it is, Sabine needs Roland’s presence, craves it, and pines for it when it is denied her. Ghislaine is right about the tension as well: nothing more excruciating when you are fighting for your life than to have healthy people round you, squabbling over futilities. Who do you love best, and who most do you want with you? Blithering idiots: it’s life itself, can’t you see? It’s life I love best, and life I want with me. Go hang yourselves, all of you, you’re only sapping my strength when most I need it. Leave me in peace and let me grapple.
It’s strange, so strange, how nearly the whole of this early period of sickness comes back to me now as a happy one. It can’t have been, it wasn’t, it was anything but, and yet my memory stubbornly goes on telling me that it was. Perhaps, due to the fact that the main setting was Sabine’s bedroom, which I shared with her in that magical Easter break, I am kind of blending it in my mind with the other illness – our joint one. Perhaps over the silence I have recorded the sound of Ghislaine’s voice reading aloud to us about Milady’s perfidy and Athos’s devotion. Perhaps instead of medicine I smell the bouquet of spices in the delicious pain d’épice and creamy junket that she brought us up at night. Perhaps that is what it is: a mnemonic fakery, a trompe l’oreille and trompe nez and trompe mémoire that my unconscious mind has devised as a shield. Or maybe it’s my daft mother fixation at work again: Sabine in the grip of a deathly disease, OK, and me helpless to save her, but a pair of maternal wings still spread over us both – safety even on the brink of death. Or maybe, simplest of all, it is just because Sabine was still alive and I still innocent and the worst had yet to happen.
My days were so neat, so structured. Anguish must have been there but I didn’t let it set foot over the threshold, not so much as a toe. I would wake to the rasp of Tessa’s lighter igniting her morning fag. I would lie there for a second, wondering what it was that gave me this sinking feeling in my stomach, and then, without waiting for the answer, I would get up and dress, have my breakfast, sit through whatever lessons were on the schedule, make a note of the homework, grab my books, jump on a bike and be off.
Ghislaine would have food ready for me, but often as not I didn’t eat it. Not until I was sure he wasn’t there to spike my appetite. If he was – though this would usually happen only at weekends – I would wait in Martha meekness for my rival to leave, filling in the time by doing some housework for Ghislaine: cleaning the bathroom for her, for example, or making sandwiches for the boys’ tea. Fear had made me humble and patient. Enemy number one was now the disease. It had a presence as solid as that of a person – I think all serious illnesses do. Its comings and goings were even more pressing to keep track of than Roland’s. Where was it today? Was it in the co
rridor, shuffling off a little bit, ashamed at the ravages it had wrought? Or was it in a corner of the room, flexing its muscles for another pounce? Or was it right at the bedside, bent over Sabine already, its sleeves rolled up for work?
One look in Ghislaine’s eyes when she came to fetch me from whatever task I was busy with, and I would know the answer. Worry literally altered their colour: sea-green, and the disease had backed off, at least temporarily; pond-green or mud, and it was present and rampant. I wonder what this colour change was due to: perhaps the lids contracted under pressure and let less light in? And I wonder whether mine did the same? Ghislaine, at this stage, would sometimes train back on me the same swift but enquiring gaze, as if searching for some knowledge in my eyes that I, their owner, was unaware of possessing.
Later, of course, the day I did have the knowledge and was all too aware of it, I would shun her glance deliberately, to prevent her from reading anything, and thus spare her the extra offence. It’s bad enough nursing a desperately sick daughter, you don’t need a demented assistant by your side, registering panic at the sight of a stain on a sheet or goggling in horror at skin-punctures. One or two more injections that you can’t account for, what does it matter?
It was during a respite in Sabine’s illness, while we were washing her hair for her – she longed for clean hair again; after health, I think a shampoo came top of her wish-list – that I first noticed them, these injection marks. Two angry little dark round holes on the side of her neck, just below the hairline.
I pointed them out to Ghislaine, a mute query on my face: the less Sabine knew about worsening signs of her disease the better. It seemed such an odd place to choose for an injection. Painful. Unnecessarily cruel.
