The Daughter of Lady Macbeth

by Ajay Close

  ‘Hello, Freya,’ Lilias said in an accent located somewhere north of Inverness.

  Behind the hospital smell of bedpans and disinfectant, I caught another, more troubling scent.

  Addressing my mother, the nurse’s voice gained a note of affectionate reproach. ‘I was just saying, Missus, we’ll need to get you on CCTV, make sure you’re not putting the ward to rights the minute my back’s turned.’

  Lilias twinkled at her.

  ‘Don’t give me that butter-wouldn’t-melt look, I know what like you are. The tea trolley’ll be along in a minute. You’ll have a cup of tea and two biscuits.’ She wagged a finger. ‘And no giving them to you know who when you think I’m not looking.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’ I murmured, when the nurse left us alone.

  ‘Nothing, darling.’

  ‘Then why does she think you’ve spent your life waiting on me hand and foot?’

  ‘Does she?’ Lilias examined her painted toenails.

  ‘Apparently I’m falling apart at the thought of life without you.’

  She looked up. ‘And aren’t you?’

  It was rare for Lilias to take me so completely by surprise.

  ‘You’re indestructible,’ I said.

  The nurse returned with a dressing gown that had once been white but was now semolina grey. The name of the hospital was embroidered across one pocket. She draped it over her patient’s shoulders, tucking the collar around her neck, while Lilias snuggled in to the towelling.

  ‘Can’t have you catching your death in hospital, can we, Missus?’

  ‘No, Grace.’

  There it was again: that Highland lilt. I was used to vocal leakage when she was working, but she hadn’t had a sniff of a part since the one-woman show fell through.

  The nurse touched her cheek with the back of one hand. I watched Lilias move towards the caress, as a cat will rise to meet stroking fingers.

  ‘No wonder you feel the cold, Missus. There’s not a pick of flesh on you.’

  ‘Oh I’ve always been slender, even when I was pregnant with Freya. I wore a mini-skirt till the day I gave birth. It caused endless misunderstandings with men who saw me from behind. Of course I had to be slim for the cameras.’

  Nurse Grace looked confused.

  ‘My mother is an actress,’ I said.

  The girl’s face lit up in the usual way. ‘Were you famous?’

  Lilias gave a shrug that came across as charming modesty. ‘I suppose I was. It seems such a long time ago now. Another lifetime. Of course acting was completely different then, you really had to learn your craft. Slave labour they’d call it now, but you knew Larry and Rex and Dickie had done their time, so it was a badge of honour.’

  There was a routine Lilias used with star-struck civilians, a summary of her career that glossed over all those matinees playing to the half-price nodders from the council retirement home. She gave Nurse Grace the edited highlights. The day she voice-coached Vanessa to say ‘a pint of mulk’. Beating Judi at ping-pong dressed in crinoline and stays. Rescuing Ralphie when he dried. There was an art to doing it so they couldn’t tell in the stalls.

  ‘Forty years ago being a stage actress meant something. It wasn’t a sideline for resting soap stars then.’

  ‘You’ve done your share of TV work,’ I said, ‘even then. You just said, you had to be slim for the cameras.’

  ‘Oh that. It was only a cameo in The Protectors. Everyone did them. Charlotte, Donald, Christopher, all the character actors. They cast me as a Parisian parfumeuse. I had to flirt with Robert Vaughn and meet a sticky end, blown up by my own distillery. I could have had some fun with it, playing against type, but the director was rather a literalist. “Come on lovey, put a bit of oo-la-la into it.” I told him, if he wanted that sort of sexy he should have hired Babs Windsor. He got his own back in the end, of course.’ She made a scissoring motion with her fingers. ‘I could spit when I think of the repeat fees.’

  ‘He cut you out?’ The nurse was shocked. I knew such things happened, but I too felt a dislocation at the news.

  ‘He was very lucky the script still worked. The shooting schedule was unbelievably tight, virtually as live. I suppose I shouldn’t say it was him − I don’t really know. It might have been Nyree Dawn Porter. I was lovely in those days, all the more so with being…’ Delicately she touched the flat of her hand to her stomach. ‘You know that glow pregnant women have.’ For an eloquent second they both looked at me. ‘Well, sometimes.’

  The nurse was sitting in a vacant cubicle eating a Kit Kat, tucked away behind the half-drawn curtain.

  ‘She’s asleep in the chair,’ I said. ‘I’ll be off.’

  Nurse Grace nodded. ‘Did you ask her, about moving in?’

  ‘I don’t think it’d be good for her.’

  ‘It’s just what she needs.’

  ‘Not if I stab her with a bread knife in the first twenty-four hours.’

  She flapped a hand at me. ‘You’ll be fine.’

  ‘Your grandmother,’ I said, ‘was she a Highlander by any chance?’

  She looked at me in astonishment. ‘From Dornoch, aye. How did you know?’

  I couldn’t tell her. To explain Lilias was to be implicated in her tricks, or suspected of making them up.

  ‘She’d rather sleep in a cardboard box than live with me, whatever she’s told you.’

  The nurse’s face turned grave. ‘She’s your mum. You only get one. Talk to her about it.’ She chewed her lip. ‘I shouldn’t be saying this but, do it today. It’d mean the world to her. Mr McCaul’s a brilliant surgeon, but you never know. It’s a big operation for a woman your mum’s age.’

  ‘Operation,’ I repeated dully.

  ‘The mastectomies, tomorrow.’ I saw realisation dawning in her eyes, just as she must have seen it dawn in mine. ‘Did she not…’

  ‘She told me she was in for tests.’

  The canteen was empty of customers, the serving hatches shuttered. I sat down. The woman pushing the floor polisher gave me an odd look. After a minute or two I realised I was cradling my breasts. Mine look just like yours. Pale nipples, a girlish upward tilt. Mine were bigger now, but it was reasonable to assume hers, too, had once been this size. Ruth only had to kiss Kenny to spurt with milk, a party trick I longed to ask them to demonstrate (but for Kenny’s sake could not). I thought of Lilias aching, holding out until the source ran dry, seeping those precious antibodies every time I cried. There are women who bottle-feed out of embarrassment, but I couldn’t believe she was among them. One of my earliest memories was Lilias in a see-through shirt. White organza, stiff and a little scratchy to the touch, fastened with oddly formal covered buttons. Young as I was, I grasped the mixed messages: the invitation to look but not touch, the way its weave caught the light so you had to stare to make out the rosy snub of nipple and the crescent-shaped shadow on the underside of each breast. One night, teased beyond endurance by this garment, a bearded stage manager poured a pint of lager down her chest and she slapped his face so ringingly that the party stopped, until her laughter turned it into a joke.

  I found them together when I got back from the canteen. Lilias was staring at the floor while the nurse wrote in a blue cardboard folder.

  ‘Ma,’ I said.

  The nurse looked up, startled, but Lilias already knew I was there. ‘Yes, darling?’

  Love me.

  The words were so loud in my head I half-believed I’d said them, but the nurse’s expression did not change.

  ‘You’re doing the right thing,’ I said.

  She frowned. ‘I’m not sure I…’

  I moved my eyes towards Nurse Grace.

  ‘Oh.’ A throwaway syllable, unabashed by her failure to keep me informed. ‘Well it’s nice to know you approve, darling.’

  The nurse sent me an encouraging glance.

  ‘You’re getting rid of it,’ I said, ‘that’s the main thing.’

  ‘You mean my breasts?’ The word had neve
r been so perfectly enunciated. ‘I’m getting rid of my breasts?’

  I met her eye. She wasn’t being fair, and she knew it, but I understood the impulse to pass the misery on.

  ‘Once the plastic surgeon’s finished with you, you won’t know the difference,’ I said.

  The nurse’s eyes showed alarm. ‘Reconstruction’s not usual with someone your mum’s age.’

  ‘She’s not your usual seventy-year-old.’

  ‘Actually, darling, I don’t think I’ll bother.’

  I looked at her, the hideous towelling robe, the defeated slope of her shoulders. Yet still I sensed some fight in her. Those scarlet toenails. The tension in her neck. And then I grasped what Lilias’s consent to surgery actually meant. Not the wish to enjoy a long life, not that at all. Her body had betrayed her so to Hell with it, let the surgeon butcher it. The more bloodily the better, as far as she was concerned.

  I grasped this, but was sufficiently frightened to pretend I had not. ‘Think about it, Ma. You won’t go to an audition with a spot on your chin, it’s a major tragedy if you break a nail. Anything less than perfection, and your life’s…’

  Not worth living, I managed not to say.

  She shrugged. ‘I just find the whole idea too vulgar.’

  ‘They’re not going to turn you into Dolly Parton. I’m sure they’ll do you a refined pair, if you ask.’

  Mindful of the patients in the other cubicles, the nurse put a finger to her lips.

  Lilias said, ‘It’s all right, darling.’

  ‘How can it possibly be all right?’

  There was a blanched pause. She looked down at the floor again. ‘Of course it’s not all right.’ Her voice was a whisper. ‘But do you mind if we don’t talk about it?’

  The nurse placed a hand on my upper arm, her chocolate-breath sticky in my ear. ‘Be nice to her.’

  Lie to her, she meant. Play it any way she wants it. The truth’s no good to her now.

  Above me, the faulty striplight stuttered on and off. The stink I’d noticed when I first walked in was stronger now. ‘What’s that smell?’

  Nurse Grace frowned.

  ‘Sort of bitter, gets you in the back of the throat.’

  ‘I think you’ll find it’s me, darling,’ Lilias said, and we laughed, my mother and I, crammed into that cubicle with her small-but-oh-so-vividly-present breasts, and my neediness, and my counter-need to succour her, and her refusal to be succoured, and her self-destructive rage, and the plump, well-meaning nurse who had no inkling of any of this. Gallows humour was one of the things Lilias and I had in common, along with our lethal eye for detail. Not much to set against our differences – her faith in display and my mistrust of it; my need for a truth beyond manipulation, and her panic at the very thought; the endearments she used so casually, and the feelings I could never name – yet it struck me then, we were like nothing so much as an old photographic print and its negative: complete opposites and, in some awful way, the same.

  The nurse finished writing in her folder and rolled up the patient’s sleeve. Lilias shut her eyes as the syringe was stripped of its wrapper.

  ‘You’re not going to make a fuss about a wee needle, are you, Missus?’

  ‘It’s the sight of blood,’ I explained, ‘she likes to believe her veins run with Chanel No. 5.’

  The nurse’s finger flicked at the crook of Lilias’s elbow. The hypodermic pierced her arm, digging around for a vein. A blaeberry bruise soiled her linen-white flesh, but nothing entered the phial. The nurse tried again. Lilias breathed in sharply.

  ‘Sorry, sweetheart.’

  Her heart pumped blood into the syringe, a red so dark it was almost black. The same stuff that ran through my veins. Or half the same. I thought about The Protectors. Robert Vaughn like a photoshopped Jack Kennedy, my mother in seamed black stockings under a shortie lab coat. A third figure entered the reverie, a tall man in an undertaker’s suit and brown brogues.

  ‘This man Smith,’ I said quietly, ‘I know you know him.’

  ‘What man Smith?’

  ‘The man who applied for a job with me.’

  Her eyes blinked open.

  ‘Nearly finished, Missus,’ the nurse said.

  ‘If I’ve learned one thing from a career in the public eye, darling, it’s that you have to ignore these people.’

  ‘What people?’

  ‘The sort of person you’re talking about.’

  The nurse removed the third phial of blood and pressed a scrap of cotton wool to the puncture mark. ‘All done!’

  ‘What “sort of person”?’

  Lilias’s eyes bored into mine. I knew this meant not in front of the nurse.

  ‘The sort of person who goes to enormous trouble to apply for a job so he can drop your name in the interview, you mean?’

  Nurse Grace wrapped a blood pressure cuff around Lilias’s other arm.

  ‘Lying about his age, concocting a fake CV—?’

  Lilias’s nostrils flared as if detecting her own bad smell.

  ‘The sort of person who’d claim to have seen you in that episode of The Protectors even though you never made the cut—?’

  The inflating rubber squeezed her scrawny arm. ‘Try to relax, Missus,’ the nurse said.

  ‘And the next time I see him he’s passing himself off as a farmer.’

  ‘He is a fucking farmer.’

  Nobody spoke. The air thrummed with expectation, like those first heightened seconds when the lights come up on an empty stage.

  ‘It’s not what you think,’ she said.

  ‘And what am I thinking?’

  I could feel the words that would change everything waiting to be spoken.

  In her most languid drawl, Lilias said, ‘I’m sure I don’t know, darling.’

  The joke was, I hadn’t been thinking anything. Not consciously. My father was an actor. My whole life had been built around this supposed fact. It explained Lilias’s first sight of him, sprinting down the stalls in the middle of the first act (a fourth-wall-busting coup de théâtre). It explained how he fell in love with her. It even explained why he left. But it wouldn’t be the first lie she had told me.

  And then I said it. ‘I’m thinking I’ll never forgive you for this.’

  She leaned towards me so abruptly that I jerked back in self-defence. In the jittery glare of the striplight her eyes were the colour of cold opals. I saw the runnel of saliva between her bared teeth and lower lip. The words came out cleanly, without any kid-on accent. ‘You can be a real little bitch when you want to be.’

  The nurse turned scarlet.

  ‘Listen to me, darling, tomorrow they’re going to cut off my breasts. After that, it’s anyone’s guess. I know you think you drew the short straw, getting me as a mother, but I’ve never asked anything of you. Until now. I want you to promise me – call it my dying wish, if you like – I want you to swear to me on the life of that thing inside you, you’ll have nothing whatsoever to do with that man.’

  1972

  Five o’clock. Lili has been in her bedroom for at least an hour, listening to the rattle of saucepans downstairs. Another meal in preparation. They really should find out if sound travels as clearly the other way, but that would take organisation. Persuading him to listen when his mother goes out, unless baritone notes carry further and she should be the one in the kitchen while he fakes their amorous moans up here. Not the likeliest of prospects.

  The yellow shade of the bedside lamp casts a softening light, kind to the bits of her body that make her wince in the mirror. She is tempted to undress, at least to her underwear, but the room is too cold for solitary nakedness, and what if Mrs S calls her downstairs? Besides, it would look presumptious. A formality governs their dealings out of bed. Her choice as much as his. They both know why he mentioned that he’d finish up when it got dark, but nothing more was said. It’s bad enough that he can look up to see the expectant square of her lighted window.

  Rolling onto her stomach, s
he returns to her book. The paragraph at the top of the page has the staleness of words read a dozen times. She flicks forward, waiting for a sentence to catch her eye so she can pick up the story further on. Ah yes, what about this: I’m not angry with you, I’m in love with you. After a page or two her spine starts to ache. She wonders how many more weeks she will be able to lie on her front. In the village the other day she saw a pregnant woman the size of a haystack shuffling along, swollen ankles crammed into fluffy slippers. That won’t happen to her, she’ll make sure of it, but there’ll be no escaping the bump, and what happens then? Is that when this stops?

  She hears the creak of the stairs, and still she jumps at his touch. His hand over her mouth. Machine oil and straw and that faint, persistent note of dung. She is used to hands that smell of soap in bed, but she would be wasting her breath asking him to wash. He hauls the jumper over his head, then his shirt. His hairless chest is still a novelty to her. Under her fingertip, the pale pancake of his nipple becomes a match-head. He catches her wrists, pressing them into the mattress. What’s the rush? she would have said in the past, but time is the one thing they don’t have. In half an hour, they’ll be called down for tea. In five months, she’ll give birth.

  It’s a kind of sex she has not had before: this rubbing and writhing, the straining erection chafing at its mark through two layers of clothing. Practically a virgin, she thinks when she’s alone, was he unlucky enough to get the girl pregnant his very first time? When it’s happening there’s no space for thought, it’s all grab and urgency. He pulls at her shirt. Even carapaced by a bra, her breasts make him gasp. A hesitation enters the air between them and she recognises the awkward moment when they must strip off, each mastering their own zips and fastenings. However guarded they remain with each other, undressing creates a punning sense of exposure. She kicks her clothes to the floor, flinching at the slippery chill of the taffeta bedcover. He spreads himself on top of her. Despite the cold, her pores open, nerves sparking. His limbs extend far beyond hers, but they are a perfect fit where it counts, and now she catches the tang of him beneath those farmyard scents.