London Transports

by Maeve Binchy

They didn’t stay long in Olive’s little hotel, and she made them uneasy, asking where they were from and what they did.

  “Sure the police wouldn’t ask me that, ma’am,” a man had replied to her once when she had asked some simple and, she thought, courteous question about his origins.

  Then she had the con men. The charmers, the people who were expecting money shortly, who cashed checks, who told tales. It was an apprenticeship, she was learning. Soon she thought she was ready and she advertised again. By this time she had the hotel the way she wanted it. Not splendid, nothing over-awing, but comfortable. There wasn’t a hint of boardinghouse about it, no sauce bottles appeared with regularity on stained cloths. She arranged a weekly rate which included an evening meal, with no refund if the meal was not taken. She knew enough about her future clients to know that they were the kind of people who would like to be expected home at a quarter to seven. They could always go off out again afterwards.

  She implied that those she was accepting were people of good manners and high standards. This was done very cunningly and without any hint of appearing restrictive. Whereas her mother would have said, “I want no drink brought into the bedrooms,” Olive said, “I want you to consider this house very much as your home. I know you don’t want to be in the kind of place where people have bottles in bedrooms.”

  She chose the guests carefully. Sometimes after several interviews where she always gave them tea and managed to explain that it was simply a matter of having promised the place to somebody else who was to let her know by Thursday. It took her a year to build up to twelve and she sat back satisfied. They were right. They were the correct mix. They depended on her utterly, they needed her, and for the first time in her life she felt fulfilled. She felt she had got what other people got from teaching or nursing or maybe the priesthood. People who needed them, a little flock. She never included marriage and children in her list of fulfilling life-styles. She had seen too many less than satisfactory marriages to be impressed by the state. And anyway she was too busy. You didn’t run the perfect hotel without a lot of work.

  There had been a question of marriage two years ago. A very nice man indeed. A Scot, quiet and industrious. She had met him at a hoteliers’ trade fair, when she was examining a new system of keeping coffee hot. He had told her that it didn’t really work, he had tried one in his own hotel and it had been wasteful. Their friendship got to a stage where her twelve guests were rustling and ruffled like birds in a coop fearing the intrusion of an outsider. Alec came to tea so often on Sundays that there were definite fears he might either join the establishment or else spirit Olive away. The ruffled feelings were balm to Olive, the ill-disguised anxiety among those men and women who paid her hefty sums of money to live with her was almost exhilarating. Olive kept them and Alec in suspense for some weeks and finally sent Alec away confused, wallowing in the luxuriating relief and happiness of the civil servants, bank clerks, bookkeepers, shop assistants, and bus driver who were now her family.

  She finished her list of entries in the ring file with the information that Judy O’Connor, the nice girl who worked in the chemist shop, had a brother who was a missionary and that he was coming back from Africa and through London on his way home to Ireland for Christmas. Olive thought it might be a nice occasion to have a Mass in the hotel.

  Well, why not? They were all Irish, they were all Catholic. Even the three little Spaniards, José, his wife, Carmen, and her sister Maria, they were Catholics, they would love a Mass in the dining room. It would make it all much more like home. She must start putting it in Judy’s mind soon. Olive was careful for people not to think that all the good ideas came from her. She let the guests think that it was their idea to strip their own beds on Monday mornings and leave all the dirty linen neatly ready for the laundrymen. The guests thought that they had suggested pooling fifty pence a week each to have wine with Sunday lunch.

  Hugh O’Connor was absolutely certain that he had broken off his engagement to that rather forward hussy who had no morals and wanted to come in and share his room saying that it was perfectly all right since they were engaged. Annie never realized that it was Olive who suggested that she should break her ties with Mayo, she thought she had done it herself. The guests thought that it had just come about that they all stayed in the hotel for Christmas, they saw nothing odd about it. Olive had carefully managed to distance herself from those who had been rash enough to go to relations or friends. They had felt lacking in some kind of spirit and had felt deeply jealous when they returned afterwards to hear about the wonderful turkey and the presents and the carols by the Christmas tree and the Pope’s blessing in the morning and the Queen’s speech in the afternoon—a combination of what was best about both cultures.

  The last thing that Olive did on her List day was to write home. Her father was in hospital now, her mother almost crippled with arthritis. She sent them regular small contributions with pleasant cheering letters. She had no intention of returning home. They were nothing to her now. She had a real family, a family that needed her.

  Stockwell

  * * *

  Mona had vomited when the news was given to her. It was the last thing she had expected would happen and she was very ashamed. She helped the doctor and his young aide to clean the carpet, brushing aside any of their cries that she leave it alone.

  “I wouldn’t hear of it. These things have to be done quickly. Have you any borax? Good, and then I find a quick squirt with a soda syphon is good. I really am most frightfully sorry.”

  The doctor finally got her to sit in a chair again. Gave her a glass of water, a pill, and his hand.

  “I didn’t put it well. I probably gave you a far worse impression of the situation…you must excuse me, Mrs. Lewis. I have been very crass.”

  His hand tightened on hers and his kind brown eyes were filled with concern. Mona Lewis looked at him gratefully.

  “Dr. Barton, I can’t thank you enough. You have been exactly what I needed in every way. You could not have been more supportive. It’s not your fault that the diagnosis was so bad. You must realize that I am completely in your debt.”

  The doctor took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. He looked at this handsome woman in front of him again and marvelled. He had told her that she had inoperable cancer of several glands. In response to her calm question, he said that he had been told it was a matter of months and probably not as many as six months. It was when he had added “before Christmas” that her stomach muscles had reacted even though her face had not.

  How could he have been so heavy-handed, so thick-skinned, so leaden? Why did he have to mention Christmas to this glowing woman? Why remind her of the one most emotive date in the year and let her picture a family scene without her? He could have cut out his tongue.

  But she encouraged him to talk calmly. She had talked calmly throughout their whole odd professional relationship. She had come to him four months previously saying that she was staying with friends in Stockwell and giving a local address. After her third visit, however, she explained that she really lived in a different part of London, it was just that she wanted a doctor far away from her friends, far away from people who might know her business. Mona Lewis lived in Hampstead and all her friends went to the same doctor. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him, of course she did, but if what she suspected was wrong with her was indeed true, then she didn’t want his pity, his sympathy, his concern, until she knew how she was going to cope with it.

  It had seemed reasonable. He had referred her for all the tests, he had liked her breezy matter-of-fact ways. He had even had nice little chats with her which were rare for him to have with patients, since his was a largely immigrant practice and much of his work seemed to him to consist of trying to understand worried young Indian mothers who could not come to see him on any matter without the husband there to interpret and act as chaperone. Mona Lewis with her lighthearted sense of mocking him was a special treat.

  She had told him
that her fingers were simply itching to repot the tired busy lizzies and ferns in his waiting room. She had even bought him some plant food and left him a book on simple plant care which he had read to please her. Even when she had gone for the biopsy she had remained cheerful. He had got her into a local hospital.

  “Where does your family think you are this week?” he had asked, worried.

  She had mentioned a husband and twin daughters of sixteen.

  “I’ve told them I’m on a course.”

  “Why?” he had asked gently. “Why don’t you tell your husband? He’d want to know.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Dr. Barton, nobody would want to know that his wife was having a biopsy. Come now, that’s not worthy of you.”

  “Very well, let me put it another way. He would like to share these things with you, if they have to be undergone, he will want to be part of them.”

  “I want to go through the first bit by myself,” she said. “Later, later I’ll talk to the others. Please let me do it this way.”

  He hated having to give her the news, but there was no ethical way he could involve anyone else. He was, as she said, being supportive.

  She finished her glass of water, examined the damp patch on the carpet, and shook her head ruefully, as if a favorite puppy, not herself, had made the mess.

  “I am sorry again about that, Dr. Barton, very shaming. Now, can I just settle up with you as usual, and then I’ll leave you to the rest of your waiting room.”

  She had established early on that she would like to be considered a private patient even though she always came in surgery hours and she paid in cash. He hadn’t liked the whole arrangement, and particularly as her diagnosis looked worse and worse. Today for the first time he was adamant about the money.

  “Please, Mrs. Lewis. Just pause and think about me as a human being, not just a doctor with a hand out for money from a private patient. I have given you distressing news today.”

  She looked at him politely, her hand already on her wallet.

  “It’s quite bad enough for me to know that a charming and vital woman like you has a terminal disease and it is doubly hard to have to be the one who tells you this, can you please let me have the dignity of telling you and seeing you to a taxi or telephoning your husband, or calling a friend for you, without having to take your goddamn bank notes?”

  She snapped her bag shut.

  “Of course. And how considerate of you. I didn’t pause to think. But no, I’d prefer to walk. I usually do walk around here, when I come to you. And take buses. I’d like to do that today. Please.”

  As he shook her hand, and she assured him that she felt perfectly fine, he knew he was seeing her for the last time. She would not now come back to him. She didn’t want to discuss remissions, radium treatment. She wanted to know nothing of drugs or palliatives. She implied that if anything were to be done, it might be done back in Hampstead.

  “You have been exceptionally good to me. I know that professional people hate things to be irregular, and you have been wonderful at hiding your irritation that I didn’t go through the more conventional channels.”

  The doctor didn’t know why he said it but it was uppermost in his mind so it just came out:

  “People often try to…you know…beat it, get there first. It’s not a good idea. They bungle it, and even if they don’t…well…you know, nature does it in its own rotten way. It would be a pity to take your own life…”

  “Oh no.” She smiled at him. “No, I agree it would be a mess. Anyway, why would I go to all these measures to find out if I were going to do something so feeble as take a bottle of pills and a bottle of vodka?”

  “I’ll keep feeding those plants in case you come back to see me.” He grinned, taking his tone from hers. She liked that.

  “Of course I’ll come back to see you.” She smiled. “One day when you least expect it, when all the shoots need to be trimmed.”

  He watched until she had turned the corner, then he pressed his buzzer and saw a malingering workman who claimed he had a bad back, and barked at him so fiercely that the man left in terror demanding to know when Dr. Barton’s relief doctor would be on duty.

  Mona felt dangerously calm. It was a sunny July afternoon, and everything looked quite normal. Like it often looked in this strange part of London, less planted, less cared for than her own neighbourhood. Funny that she liked it so much. She was certain that Jerry would like it, too, but it was something she would never share with him. What she had to do now was go through the whole sham of tests again. It seemed silly and wasteful, but this was how she had planned it. Tomorrow, tell Jerry that she felt below par, fix an immediate appointment with Franz, allow Franz to send her for tests at the clinic, follow through, slowly and remorselessly, everything she had just done.

  And at every step of the way now she could be clear-sighted and calm because there was going to be nothing hanging in the balance, no doubts, no waiting to know. Because she now knew the very worst she could behave with her customary calm. Reassuring everyone, allowing no panic, being utterly fatalistic. She even had a little sentence ready: “Don’t be silly, darling, it’s not a question of knowing that I’m going to die, after all we all know we are going to. I just know when I’m going to die. That gives me the advantage over all of you.”

  She was going to be perfectly frank with the girls also. There was no hiding and whispering and pretending as there had been when her own mother had died. Six months of confusion, and hope and counter-hope, and bewilderment. Mona was going to be authoritative in death as she had been in everything in life. It was sad, it was obviously very regrettable since she was only forty-six. But to look on the bright side, she had had an excellent life, she would leave behind not a dependent unsupported family, but a husband whose every comfort had been catered for, whose house ran smoothly and easily, two attractive sixteen-year-olds who had always been able to discuss their future plans with their mother and who would not cease to do so now. She would redouble her efforts to get Marigold into art school, and to direct Annabelle towards a career in social work. She would see that they both had advisors, separate ones, and contacts. She would also establish a proper social life for Jerry so that he wouldn’t be left high and dry. If only she could persuade him to learn bridge. He had withstood it so long, and yet as a widower it would be his instant passport to people’s houses. Nobody would say, “We must have poor Jerry around, poor chap is utterly broken up since Mona’s death,” instead they would think more positively and say, “We need a fourth for bridge. How about Jerry?”

  Mona hated the thought of telling Sally, her dearest friend. Sally was so utterly sentimental and emotional, she could ruin everything by arriving around at their house with flowers and autumn bouquets saying that she wanted Mona to see one more bunch of dahlias or a last autumn crocus.

  She had several plans also for the school where she taught. She would explain to the principal that a new teacher must be found for the autumn term, but she would ask if she could stay on as an advisor for the first two months or so, or until her strength gave out. She also felt she should like permission to discuss some aspects of death and facing it with the older girls, since they were unlikely to have the chance again of meeting someone who was going to face it as calmly as Mona was about to do.

  And as for dear Jerry, she was going to try to explain to him how essential it was that he should marry again, lest he become eccentric and absent-minded and his whole lovely antique business fall apart. If she could find the right words to explain that posthumous jealousy cannot exist. She would be in a great sleep and nothing could hurt her or touch her. Mona realized that not everyone else felt as peaceful about facing death as she did, and she wondered whether she should give talks on the subject on the radio or to women’s groups.

  Thinking of women’s groups reminded her of old Vera North, her mother’s friend of many years, now bedridden and in a wheelchair. Mona usually went to see her once a month, but with
all the tests and waiting and examinations she hadn’t seen Vera for some time. I’ll go today, she thought. It will give everyone an explanation of why I was out all day, and should my face look a bit gloomy in spite of myself then they’ll think it was because of seeing Vera.

  Vera called for tea, she had a faithful slave who had looked after her since childhood. Mona always admired the setup, they needed each other, Vera and the old retainer Annie. She didn’t think it was shameful to have a maid, not if you were Vera, not if you were kind and considerate, and paid Annie a just wage.

  “I’ve been busy,” she explained to Vera.

  “I know,” Vera said. “You look more cheerful now. You looked worried when I saw you last. Were you having a medical examination?”

  “How on earth did you know?” asked Mona, amazed.

  “Is it a hysterectomy?” asked Vera.

  “No, lymph glands,” said Mona before she realized.

  “Poor Mona, you are so young, yet so courageous.” Vera did not look put out.

  “I am brave, but by other people’s standards, not my own. I just feel that we should take the mythology out of cancer. I mean, people are afraid to mention its name. They call it silly names, they won’t acknowledge it. Such huge strides have been made in, say, attitudes to mental illness, it seems strange that we cannot admit to cells going rogue, which is all that cancer is.”

  “I know, Mona,” said Vera gravely.

  “So as a last gesture, as some kind of, I don’t know, some kind of statement I suppose—I’m going to talk about it, I’m going to make it normal. Acceptable even.”

  She smiled triumphantly at Vera. She just got a steady glance in return.

  “You see since I am going to be gone by Christmas at least I know that there’s some end to my courage, some defined end. It’s not going to be all that hard…and it will make it so much easier for everyone else.”

  “Do you think it will make it easier for other people?” Vera asked mildly.