“Oh . . . so you think maybe Bonnie’s got it too . . .”
“Well, there’s a good chance. The doctor said Gillian would have been infectious for the past three or four days.” She clicked her tongue. “What a damn nuisance.”
“When shall we know—about Bonnie . . . ?” I wasn’t very well up on mumps; I’d never had it myself and when Lucy, Davie and Sam had caught it I’d been in hospital being operated on for appendicitis. By the time I’d returned home they’d all recovered.
Kate said:
“Apparently, according to the doctor, there’s a fairly lengthy incubation period. He says we won’t know for another two or three weeks.”
“And Bonnie’s going to stay with Mrs. Taverner all that time?”
She shrugged. “Well, yes. Unless you can think of a better idea . . .”
I couldn’t. And the last thing I wanted was an attack of the mumps.
Kate went past me and I followed her into the kitchen where she filled the kettle and plugged it in.
“Mrs. Taverner’s so good,” she said. “As soon as I told her the situation she insisted on keeping Bonnie there until the danger’s past.”
“Yes, she’s very kind . . .”
“The doctor was there at the time. And he said it was a good idea if she could manage all right.”
“But it’s so long, darling. Two or three weeks . . .”
“Well—it can’t be helped.” Efficiently she set the tray for our tea—our ritual. “And it’s either she stays over there or you go somewhere else. And we can’t have that. Anyway,” she concluded, “I can go next-door and see her any time I want to, and Mrs. Taverner can always come and get me if I’m needed. Bonnie’ll be all right. Don’t worry about her.”
After tea, Kate went over to see Bonnie. Lucy stayed behind with me. She fed the one-legged pigeon who hopped hungrily along the window-sill, and then continued with her work on a little pink mouse she was making from scraps of felt. I helped her to attach his eyes. They didn’t go on quite straight, and we laughed at his comic, wall-eyed expression. I’d have re-fixed them, but Lucy said no, she liked them that way. It was a very cosy, homely hour we spent, yet somehow it seemed strange without Bonnie’s chatter and bustle. It was odd to think she wouldn’t be back for at least a fortnight.
“She’s getting on just fine,” Kate said when she returned. “I told you she would.” Apparently she’d been able to make Bonnie understand the necessity of staying put for a while. “And she knows it’s not going to be too long.”
That night was the first night for ages that we weren’t disturbed by Bonnie’s crying. Well, it’s an ill wind . . . I told myself. For the first night in weeks Kate and I were alone together in our bed, able to make love, able to sleep with our bodies touching, as we’d used to. I wondered, briefly, how Bonnie was getting on next-door; whether she was crying there and, if so, how Mrs. Taverner would cope.
The next day when I saw Mrs. Taverner on the stairs I asked her whether Bonnie had cried during the night.
“Never,” she said emphatically. “Not so much as a murmur, the dear little thing.”
“So you see,” said Kate, “we were right to take precautions.”
We sat opposite each other at the supper table. Lucy, having eaten earlier, had just gone to bed. Bonnie was still staying with the Taverners. It was exactly two weeks since she had gone into her temporary exile, and Kate had phoned me that morning with the news that Bonnie was showing the first symptoms of the illness. The doctor, calling in the afternoon, only confirmed what Kate and Mrs. Taverner already knew.
“Yes. It’s a good thing you acted quickly.” I yawned, sighed heavily. Kate looked at the food I had left on my plate and frowned.
“Aren’t you hungry?”
“No, not really.”
“You’re tired, though.”
“Yes.” I was. And I was disturbed too, by my routine being upset. Every evening for the past fortnight Kate—and Lucy as well—had stayed over at the Taverners’ until Bonnie had gone off to bed. I, in the studio, hating the thought of returning to an empty flat, took to staying on to work, sometimes not getting back till after eight or so. Today I felt dead on my feet. It had been an exhausting week. Thank God it was Friday.
“How much longer will she be away?” I asked.
“A while yet. Another eight or nine days at the very least. Ah, you should see her. Her little face all swelling up. And it looks so painful, poor dear. She keeps asking for you. But I keep telling her that you’re not allowed to visit her.”
I shook my head. “I only wish I could.” I really missed Bonnie, and I’d be very glad when she could come back home again.
“One thing she found it very hard to grasp,” said Kate, “was how it’s all right for me to go and see her, but not you. I tried to explain to her, and I think, in the end, she understood . . . I don’t know.”
“She can’t possibly understand,” I said. “She’s much too young.”
“I’m not so sure. Don’t underestimate her intelligence.”
“Oh, she’s certainly got brains, all right.” I yawned again. My eyes felt prickly from the long hours working by less-than-perfect light. My back ached.
“You’ve been overdoing it,” Kate said. “You must be exhausted.”
“Knackered is the word.”
When the dishes were cleared away we listened to the radio for a while and then Kate put on some records. La Bohème. It was our favourite opera. But I couldn’t concentrate; any sympathy I felt for poor Mimi was just swamped by my own tiredness.
“Go on to bed,” Kate said. “It’s Saturday tomorrow. You can sleep late.” She cut Mimi off in the middle of her Farewell and put the records back in their box. “I shall join you very soon.”
I looked in at Lucy as I went to bed. She was sound asleep. So would I be—in a very short time.
It can’t have been much later when Kate came and crept in beside me. I surfaced for a few seconds, feeling her warmth as she snuggled up to me, heard her voice dimly, from a long way off—“Sleep well, darling . . .”—felt the touch of her lips brushing my ear. I grunted sleepily, mumbling, “Yes . . . Yes . . .” And slept.
I awoke briefly as she stole away from my side the next morning. When I opened my eyes she said, “Go back to sleep. I’ll bring you some coffee later . . .” I spread out my arms into the warm part left by her body, thought for a second that I, too, should get up, and then drifted off again.
Later I sensed her bodily warmth against me once more. And a light kiss, kisses, on my lips, but I was only briefly, vaguely aware, comfortable, accepting all, the reality just drifting on the rim of my consciousness. Again I slept.
When I awoke fully it was to her voice as she stood in the open doorway, a laden tray in her hands.
“Oh, dear God . . . !”
At my side, so close, giving me the warmth I had taken to be Kate’s, lay Bonnie. She was sleeping soundly, her arm across my chest, her mouth against my cheek.
THIRTEEN
“Don’t be angry, darling,” Kate said. “She wanted to be with you. That’s why she did it.”
Hours had gone by since the incident with Bonnie, and the anger was still in me, quieter now, but nevertheless there. Anger, and some other emotion—I didn’t know what—simmering away just below the surface of my mind, giving me a feeling of unrest. And it wasn’t due solely to the fact that I’d been exposed to a virulent—and possibly, in my case, particularly unpleasant—disease. It was something else.
Bonnie was gone again now. She had been snatched from the bed and very quickly re-lodged with Mrs. Taverner. But the damage, by this time, I thought, had very likely been done.
“I don’t know how it could have happened,” Kate said, “without my hearing something. But I just didn’t. I’d left the front door on the latch so that Lucy could get out without disturbing me and get back in without ringing the bell and disturbing you—”
“The front door-catch is t
oo stiff for me,” Lucy cut in. “I can’t manage it. And I wanted to go downstairs to play with my friend, Monica.”
“I was in the kitchen,” Kate went on. “The radio was playing. I didn’t hear Bonnie come into the flat at all. I had no idea. When I asked Mrs. Taverner later, she told me she had just left their front door ajar while she slipped out to the shop. When she got back she thought Bonnie was still in Gillian’s room. She didn’t even know she had gone until I took her back again. She was busy—you know how it is . . .”
“Yes, I know how it is.”
I was sullen and ungracious, and thought I had cause to be—though it was unfair to take it out on Kate. It wasn’t her fault.
And really, I didn’t know how it was. Perhaps, after all this time, I was only just beginning to. Perhaps . . .
Kate pressed my arm. “I’m sorry, Alan. Truly.” She smiled reassuringly. “And please—there might be nothing to worry about. You’ll probably be okay.”
“Well, I’m sure we’ll find out, soon enough.”
The days crawled by, and I was looking for symptoms long before they could possibly be manifested. There was no way of knowing, the doctor told me—Marshall, the one who’d looked after Bonnie—until the symptoms appeared. Just as there was no way of counteracting the illness. All I could do was sweat it out.
And while I waited, Bonnie came back to us, no longer infectious, quite well again, and none the worse.
She was full of demonstrations of affection for me, and I took and tried to reciprocate her hugs and kisses, admonishing myself for the anger I had felt. She was a child, a three-and-a-half-year-old, little child—how could I harbour resentment towards her?—particularly when she had acted—as Kate had said—only out of love for me.
Then, a week after her return, my period of wondering came to an end.
When the swelling began—at my groin as well as by my ears—I experienced, along with the ache, almost a sense of relief. At least now I knew. Now it was just a matter of eight or nine days—according to the doctor—and then I’d feel all right again.
Eight or nine days. Not long, and they’d soon be over.
I didn’t bargain for how I’d feel during those days, though. Marshall, examining me, observed that it was unfortunate, but I appeared to be “one of those unlucky few” who, contracting mumps in adulthood, took it along with “complications”. If, by “complications” he meant the pain I felt, then unlucky and unfortunate were the right words.
“And what about afterwards?” I asked him.
“Well, we shall see . . .”
During that long week when I lay in such discomfort, Kate went back to sleep in the girls’ room. She had to. I couldn’t have borne the slightest movement of her body lying next to mine. It was agony just to turn over, and when the girls came in to see me I was fretful and anxious in case one of them might just happen to jolt the bed; I was no fun at all; I was much better left to myself.
And throughout the time I lay alone I thought about Bonnie. I never ceased to think about her. At night I was no longer bothered by her cries as in the past—I supposed that with Kate in the same room with her she no longer felt insecure—but I was very much disturbed by her being. Long after the time when I should have been fast asleep she was still there, an enigma, preying on my mind.
I had begun to think—really think—about all the events that had taken place since she had come into our midst, the images of the incidents standing out in my mind as bright and clear as 3D magic lantern-slides. They were not new, though, these pictures. They had been there all along, every detail, every nuance. And I had ignored them, or pushed them to the back of my subconscious. Why? Because I was afraid—fearful of the conclusion to which any examination might lead me. Our lives had, over a period, begun to sail again on an even keel, and I was loath to rock the boat. But now I couldn’t help it. Now I could do nothing but let the memories and the pictures go churning over in my brain, nagging at me, refusing to let me rest.
And all my thoughts I had to keep to myself. I couldn’t tell anyone. Certainly not Kate. She would have been afraid—for me. She would have believed that such thoughts were the wanderings of a fevered brain—pure imagination.
But it wasn’t imagination. I had held Sam in my arms just after his death. I had seen his sightless eyes looking up unblinking at the sun. And I had seen the scrap of blue he held in his hand—the silk that was Bonnie’s hair-ribbon.
Yet how was it possible? Such things couldn’t be. I had read, from time to time, odd tales of fantasy and horror—stories of weird, fantastic happenings that never strayed from the realms of fiction. How then could I credit for an instant the possibility of some equally fantastic situation taking place in my own, very real, existence? I was an ordinary man, a commercial artist living in London with a wife and children who loved me. I knew it. What could be more desirable?—or more natural? Nothing. Except that my three sons had all tragically died within the space of three years. Coincidence? Perhaps. The word was coined just to cover such unlikely happenings. But it didn’t explain them . . . Not these happenings.
Perhaps, though—I hoped, clutching at straws—my thoughts, my questions were the outcome of my illness and they would all vanish as I recovered.
No. Days passed and they were still there. I lay in bed on Sunday morning and heard the downstairs clock strike two. I sighed, shifting my position. Thank God, the pain at last was somewhat easier tonight, though my head was still throbbing. Even yet, things could look different, normal, tomorrow . . . For a while I hovered on the edge of sleep. Then my thoughts, uncertain, fraying at the edges, dissolved into the jagged pictures with their sharp colours that illuminate the dreams of the sick. And I slept.
Two days later I felt well enough to get up. The day after that I felt well enough to go to the hospital where I asked—insisted—on certain tests being carried out.
I left with my fears fully realised.
I was sterile.
That night Kate came back into our room to sleep with me. She moved against me, wanting me, I know, but I was so inhibited by my knowledge that I could do nothing. I didn’t tell her the reasons for my lack of response, and I suppose she attributed it to weakness resulting from my illness. I didn’t enlighten her. Perhaps later I would. Right now I didn’t even want to think about it.
I got up at my usual time the next morning to take Lucy to school and then go to work. As I stood in the hallway putting on my coat, Bonnie came out to me.
“Daddy . . . ?”
I looked down at her. There was a faint pleading look in her eyes; the same touch had been in her voice.
“Yes?”
I could hear how clipped the word sounded. She said nothing and I waited for her to go on. Her lips were set tight together. She drew a breath almost in a gasp, and I saw her chin quiver.
And then I saw too that her blue, blue eyes were wet with unshed tears, ready, on the instant, to fall, and I was all at once aware of how cold I had been for so many days past; of all the thoughts and suspicions I had let come between me and my love for her. I had shut her out. Completely.
I knelt, leaning forward, so that our heads were nearly on a level. She was just a child. Scared. Sad.
“What is it, Bonnie . . . ? Baby . . . ?”
The fingers she laid on the back of my hand were slightly sticky—marmalade or jam. I looked down at her hand, dwarfed by my own, then into her open, melancholy little face. “Daddy—” Her fingers gripped mine, tighter. Those eyes.
“What is it?” I said again. “Tell me.” And then suddenly, all in a rush, she said, the tears brimming over:
“Don’t you like me any more—?”
“Oh, baby . . .” I put my arms around her and drew her close to me. “Of course I do! I love you.” I stroked her hair, touching the slenderness of her neck; she felt so tiny in my arms, so totally vulnerable. I thought of my behaviour towards her. I had been unbearable.
“Forgive me,” I said. “I ha
ven’t been well.”
“Yes,” she sobbed. “Lucy said I did it. Lucy said it was me.”
Her tears were wet on my cheek. I held her nearer still—for my own sake as much as for hers.
“It doesn’t matter,” I whispered. “It’s over now.”
We clung to each other for a long, long moment. She put up a hand and wiped at her eyes.
“I was a bad girl. I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m sorry . . .”
“No,” I said. “No, baby, it’s okay. It’s all okay . . . now.”
I looked round and saw that Kate was standing in the doorway, watching us. She had said nothing about my recent treatment of Bonnie but she had, I know, been only too aware of it. Now, too, she was aware that it had come to an end.
Smiling, she came over to us, and I got to my feet and she kissed me—a little longer, a little warmer. I could see relief in her face. Hear it in her voice as she said,
“Don’t be late home.”
“No, I won’t.”
And then Lucy was there too, all buttoned up in red and white, carrying her satchel, reaching out for my hand.
“Come on, Daddy. I shan’t get to school in time.”
“Okay. All ready.” I leaned down and kissed Bonnie’s cheek. “No more tears now . . .”
“No.” She shook her head, her curls bouncing.
“What’s she been crying for?” asked Lucy.
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s nothing. Nothing at all that matters now.” I took Lucy’s mittened hand in mine, and together we went down, and out into the street.
Nothing at all that matters now, I said to myself as we walked along. All those thoughts I had had, all those insane suspicions—they were insane. I must never let them get to me again. They were just like those stories I had read: pure imagination.
A young man passed by with a girl, heavily pregnant, holding on to his arm. I thought of my visit to the hospital. Sterile. A little wave of panic surged in me. But so what? I thought. I had come to terms with real, greater griefs, and I could easily come to terms with that. And anyway, all over Britain men were going voluntarily every day asking for vasectomies. The result was just the same. Besides, it wasn’t as if I were only twenty and just starting out in married life. I already had a family. I had Lucy. And I had Bonnie, too.
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