The Mask and Other Stories

by Nesta Tuomey

  Before marriage Claire had been a photographic model; vibrantly, healthily attractive, even beautiful at times, her face smiling confidently from the covers of glossy magazines. In those years her looks were something she had taken for granted, like her skill at tennis or her ear for music, then suddenly they were gone.

  Her vision blurred, Claire stared out at the elegantly dressed shop windows and the equally stylish young women sauntering past. Women on whom good skin was surely wasted, she thought, like youth is wasted on the young. The one, like the other, was a gift which was never fully appreciated while you had it. In two years Claire felt all joy had gone out of her life, two years of attending doctors and clinics, trying first one treatment, then another. A time of raised hopes and false diagnosis, robbing her of confidence and making her into a woman who kept her eyes down and covered her mouth when she spoke.

  The taxi slowed at traffic-lights. On a hoarding high above the pavement a fashion poster caught her eye, seducing and saddening her at the same time. I’ll never look like that again, she thought, For me those days are gone forever.

  In summer her condition was less obvious. The blotches might have been mistaken for bad sunburn. She knew Michael’s manner eased considerably when people came to that conclusion. Sunburn was after all socially more acceptable than whatever she had. But it was winter now, the worst time for it. Cold winds and overheated rooms left her flushed and disfigured, like someone in the grip of some monstrous allergy. ‘Got it all over, dear?’ a woman once asked her in the lift of a department store and, shocked by the directness of it, Claire had found herself carried beyond her floor. She burned whenever she thought about it. Clearly once you had some infirmity you became public property and were no longer entitled to privacy. She had noticed the familiar, even cruel way, small children treated cripples and the mentally-impaired. She found it humiliating each time she went anywhere to find she was being freshly assessed and found wanting. She thought she would never get used to it. One day she began to cry and couldn’t stop. ‘Claire,’ her husband had said, ‘Pull yourself together. Stop pitying yourself. It’s not that bad. It just seems worse to you that’s all.’

  Did he still believe that, she wondered, conscious of his brooding figure at the far side of the taxi. She supposed at that earlier stage she hadn’t been so bad. Make-up had helped in a small way to tone down the hectic flush. But as her condition worsened cosmetics only coated and clogged the tender pitted skin, until the aggravated areas stood out in ghastly matt relief. It was why she was convinced today’s expedition was doomed to failure.

  The taxi gathered speed as it left behind the fashionable streets and nosed its way through narrower, meaner thoroughfares. Litter blew about on the pavements and men lounged at the entrances to the tube stations. What Claire remembered most about those early days was a feeling of guilt. Her husband was a man to whom appearances were all important, by losing her looks she was made to feel she had somehow let him down. ‘I’ve always had an eye for a beautiful girl,’ he’d said aggrieved, as if she’d deliberately tried to discredit him. It came as a shock to Claire who had not realised that something so personal to her as her own face could be seen to reflect on anyone else. But of course, when she thought about it, she found herself better able to understand his attitude, for if the type of house and car a man owned could be considered extensions of himself, why not his wife? And if in some way they, or she, did not measure up, then surely his judgement was in question? Her own feelings, she saw, did not really enter into it.

  Why else had he become so agitated the night she had unthinkingly worn a red dress to dinner at his boss’s house? In her nervousness she had compounded the lapse by drinking too much wine and her face had flamed hotter than ever. ‘I suppose you never stopped to consider how it might affect me,’ he had reproached her afterwards in that sorrowful voice she had come to recognise as the prelude to an unpleasant scene. Later, it had developed into a blazing row. ‘You let me down dressed like that, acting as you did. With a condition like yours you can’t afford to wear such colours.’ Red dress! Red face! What folly his sighs implied, openly astounded at her naivety in thinking herself like other women. After two years, he conveyed, she should have had more cop on, more sense.

  Wounded Claire supposed she never had much of either or she wouldn’t have so easily fallen under his spell. He had been a high-flying financier when she met him, already talked about in banking circles at the age of twenty-seven. ‘You’re holding me back,’ he had said after that fiasco of an evening. ‘For God’s sake, why don’t you do something! Try a faith healer, anything, to help yourself!’

  ‘It would be no good,’ was her protest. ‘I don’t have any faith. It wouldn’t work.’ She never forgot his answer. ‘In my position I can’t afford people saying I neglect my wife when the truth of it is you refuse to help yourself.’ As if, just to spite him, she had deliberately chosen to stay the way she was. ‘Don’t you want to get better?’

  Of course she did. She had never wanted anything so much in her life.

  ‘In my position,’ he had begun again aggrieved, making her dig her nails deeper into her hands. Yes! Yes! She felt like screaming. She would go to a blasted faith healer, anything to satisfy him.

  She had felt tormented, fed-up with the endless arguments, worn out trying to live up to his expectations, of thinking ahead before choosing a garment or a place to sit. Weary of wearing insipid shades when brilliant mauves and tangerines had always been the true expression of her personality. And a lot more besides. Claire was not a vain woman but she knew if she were to join a contemplative order and live until she was ninety, she would still be devastated by how she looked. But what was the use of saying so! Anyone with a jot of sensitivity would know her whole life was afflicted by this skin ailment, her self-image a mottled travesty of what it should have been.

  Her mood swung suddenly lower, and she felt swamped by the self-pity she was not allowed to feel. It’s all his fault, she thought. If only he could accept her, blotched and disfigured as she was, she wouldn’t have cared quite so intensely. For it was through his eyes she saw herself, and always had. And because he felt threatened - his pride, she thought with sorrowing contempt, she no longer rated as a person, but merely a face.

  Michael turned from his window to say, ‘It shouldn’t be much longer. Another few miles at the most,’ his eyes resting briefly, speculatively, on her.

  Claire glanced away, familiar with this game of trying to see her as a stranger might, observing her with almost clinical detachment , and making her want to scream, ‘Go on and leave me then, why don’t you!’

  The taxi was stopping. She climbed out and stamped her feet to keep warm. The breeze was like a bellows on her inflamed skin, fanning it to fiery discomfort. She laid on cool hands protectively, an involuntary gesture she was scarcely aware of. Following her husband’s well-tailored back up the bare stairway, she stumbled in the gloom.

  ‘Funny place for a beauty parlour,’ he spoke doubtfully over his shoulder. ‘You would think there would be a light.’’

  ‘I suppose it is the right place?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ he said shortly. ‘I checked the address.’

  Of course he had. He never got directions wrong, that sort of thing he left to her. Claire leant against the wall, breathing hard. It was too late, she supposed, to make a stand and declare she didn’t after all want to be made-over. There was the sound of a door opening and a woman stood silhouetted at the top of the stairs, the electric light glinting on a crust of golden curls.

  ‘Mr. and Mrs. Hayes, isn’t it? My, aren’t you punctual. I wasn’t expecting you just yet.’ She was plump and artfully made-up, a red courtelle dress accentuating the ample ins-and-outs of her body. In contrast to her dowdy surroundings her appearance seemed to affirm, ‘Yes! Glamour is my business!’

  She led the way into a room full of cardboard boxes, stacked one on top of the other, almost to the ceiling. ‘I see what yo
u’re thinking,’ she said, her expression comical. ‘But it’s only temporary till we get our new offices. Any day, they say, but you know how it is.’

  Claire hesitated beside a padded chair, throne-like dominating the small space. ‘Shall I sit here?’ she asked shyly.

  The woman oozed contrition. ‘Whatever am I thinking? Of course, luv, take a seat. It’s big enough anyway.’ She laughed in a bubbling way, inviting Michael to share the joke as she cleared boxes off a bar-stool and pushed it forward. ‘Sorry,’ she shrugged, seeing his dubious glance. ‘They make no provision. I have told them.’

  Claire felt an irrational guilt sitting at her ease while her husband balanced with tortured expression on the ricketty stool. ‘Don’t blame me,’ she wanted to say. ‘You are the one who wanted to come here.’

  The woman tied a band round her forehead and leaned close. ‘Quite a bit of damage to your veins,’ she said. ‘Looks hot. Is it dear?’

  ‘Yes, a bit.’ Out of the corner of her eye Claire saw Michael opening his newspaper and felt relieved. Intolerable if he were to sit there watching and judging, she thought.

  ‘I think a spot of number one for shading,’ the woman suggested, consulting her chart. ‘Perhaps light for foundation. Your skin’s fair despite your dark hair.’ Concentrating on small areas at a time, she set to work, patting and massaging the white tacky substance into Claire’s face, as thoroughly as though laying a permanent foundation.

  Claire relaxed, giving herself over to it. The woman’s touch on her skin reminded her of the consultation in Harley Street. The specialist was a tall man with white hair brushed sparsely over a pink scalp. He had caressed her skin between thumb and forefinger as though testing a rare and delicate piece of fabric, then pinched up slack here and there, to scrutinise it through his magnifying-glass. Seen from the other side, his eye appeared absurdly elongated, fishlike.

  ‘Yours is a fairly common condition, Mrs. Hayes,’ he’d said at last. ‘Mainly psychosomatic and triggered originally, I would say, by some kind of emotional disturbance.’

  His words slid Claire back in time to that dreadful moment when she had opened the bedroom door to find her baby cold and lifeless. Barely two months old, a beautiful, apparently healthy child, she had bathed and fed him only an hour earlier. A cot death the doctor said. The term meant nothing to Claire. That death had occurred while the baby was in the cot was obvious but why it had happened at the particular moment and not any other she was unable to understand. He was the healthiest, most advanced of her children. ‘Why did he die?’ she kept asking. ‘What went wrong?’ No one had been able to tell her. Medical science had not progressed that far. Four weeks later her skin had erupted in a mass of sores.

  Claire’s mouth wobbled suddenly out of control as she remembered the nights of waking suddenly, imagining she heard again the frantic new-born mewling sound which tore at her heart and allowed her no peace.

  ‘Not hurting am I?’ the woman asked, wiping her hands on tissue. ‘Feels a bit strange I shouldn’t wonder.’

  Claire shook her head, reminded of the dentist’s chair once the tube was inserted rendering conversation impossible. Her face stung but the discomfort was no worse than she had expected. In a way, after the first tingling contact, there was an aching, exquisite relief.

  ‘Want to take a peep?’ The woman held out a mirror, sweat gleaming on her upper lip like dew on the skin of some exotic beige fruit. ‘Now don’t take fright,’ she warned. ‘As I always say it’s early days yet.’

  Anything but reassured Claire gazed at the white-faced apparition that was her. Sans eyebrows, sans lips, sans everything. She was reminded of a film caption, ‘I’m dead but I won’t lie down,’ and fought hysterical laughter. Thank God, Michael was not watching, still absorbed in his newspaper. It would have been the final indignity.

  The woman applied the colour foundation with light birdlike movements. ‘Fantastic stuff this,’ she enthused. ‘Blots out any mark, no matter how bad.’

  Was it really that effective? Claire wondered. She could have done with it the night Michael’s tipsy friend had pulled her into the glaring porch light. ‘Good Lord!’ he’d exclaimed. ‘What happened you?’

  ‘He was drunk,’ Michael excused him. ‘Don’t keep going on about it.’

  But she couldn’t let it alone. ‘It’s all right for you,’ she stormed. ‘You don’t know what it’s like, people staring and whispering. Now even your friends are passing remarks.’ Casting his eyes upwards as though she was too incredibly stupid to live, he’d groaned, ‘Oh, God! He was drunk I tell you!’

  ‘So what! The truth emerges when people are drunk. That’s when they tell you that your face is red and pimply.’ She had made so much noise she had awakened Jeremy. They had looked up to see him swaying on the stairs.

  ‘Oh, Mummy,’ he cried, coming down and clinging to her. ‘I like your nice red face.’ At that she had broken down completely. ‘Even the children are beginning to notice,’ she wept. It had pierced her like nothing else. It was not then, but in the following days when despair followed and quickly turned to resentment, that she had agreed to visit Harley Street.

  ‘Which lipstick?’ the woman was asking. ‘Hot tangerine? Saucy pink? Wild strawberry? Go on and choose, love. Perhaps the pink?’

  Obediently, Claire leaned forward. None of it bore any relation to herself she knew. It might have been a mask for all the involvement she felt. Pink! Orange! Neither shade was right; not on the old face nor on the new. Obediently, she pointed.

  ‘The pink... that’s nice!’ The woman approved outlining the cupid’s bow and filling in with colour.

  Claire offered her mouth stiffly to the brush conscious that this was more intimate that anything that had gone before. All sensation long departed, she felt as though her flesh and the strange cosmetic had blended into one. When with a flourish the woman presented her with a mirror a white-faced geisha solemnly returned Claire’s startled gaze, like some exotic yet familiar stranger, someone she might have once known at some earlier period of her life. The eyebrows soared heavily marked in black pencil, the bow of the mouth coquettishly accentuated in pink. She felt stunned by its brazenness. ‘Just like a tart,’ she heard her mother’s accusing voice from childhood, and felt shamed.

  ‘She looks a bit different to you now, I shouldn’t wonder,’ the woman laughingly drew her husband’s attention.

  As he lowered the paper and stared at her with surprised eyes, Claire felt compelled to say something, anything, before he committed himself. ‘It’s not quite me,’ she hurried into speech, gripped by an unfamiliar shyness as taking his time, he assessed the geisha girl. Gradually, his eyes lost their startled look and into them crept another expression that Claire found vaguely unsettling.

  She waited uneasily for him to deliver the verdict but he only said, ‘Put on your coat or we’ll miss our flight.’

  In the coach to the airport Claire concealed herself behind a magazine and turned the pages with unsteady fingers, not yet over the shock of seeing herself coming at her from every angle, or so it seemed; the coach window, the conductor’s spectacles, even the sheen of her patent leather handbag, all of them reflected back an image she could not even begin to identify with. Beside her Michael was silent. Once she looked up to find him stealthily regarding her, in his gaze something of that same speculative gleam she had glimpsed earlier. A blush tinged her cheeks. His explicit look stripped away all her years of marriage and rendered her a gauche teenager again.

  When the coach came to a halt the conductor barred Claire’s way, his arm pressed familiarly against the buttons on her jacket as he made a great show of helping an old lady down the step. ‘Age before beauty, ducks,’ he called back.

  Claire stood motionless, unable to believe that he wasn’t making fun at her. Incredible to think that under the skin she was still the same woman.

  ‘Glad to have you back, darling.’ Michael’s mother bustled forward to hug and kiss him. The children
’s high-pitched cries hung on the night air. Across the hallway a crayoned banner stretched unevenly, bearing its cycadelic message of welcome. The two older children hung back waiting to be noticed.

  ‘Kiss your Daddy,’ their grandmother ordered and they ran to obey.

  Claire stood inside the door overlooked in her own house. ‘Mummy... Mummy!’ At last they turned to her but when she stooped down to draw them close the little girl pulled away in alarm and the boy backed mistrustfully.

  Their grandmother hurried to take charge, peered short-sightedly at her daughter-in-law. ‘Oh, dear,’ she said on a descending note.

  Something broke in Claire. ‘For God’s sake!’ she cried. ‘ Do you think I wanted to look like this?’

  ‘Get a hold of yourself, Claire,’ Michael hurried forward. ‘Can’t you see you’re frightening the children.’

  ‘So what!’ she shook off his restraining hand. ‘Isn’t it time they faced reality.’

  He tried to hold her but she pushed him off and ran up the stairs. Before she slammed the bedroom door she heard his mother telling the children. ‘Now, now, don’t cry, my darlings. Poor Mummy is not herself. Nana will read you a story.’

  Claire threw herself on the bed. Not herself, she thought hysterically. Who in God’s name was she then? I’ve been robbed of my identity and turned into a freak, she sobbed, burying her face in the pillow, trying to muffle her sobs.

  Sniffing and gulping, she sat up at last and wiped away tears from numb cheeks with the back of her hand. Getting to her feet she wrapped herself in a silk kimono and went out to the landing; below she could hear raised voices and the clash of crockery as preparation for tea got underway. She was not missed.