by Graham Joyce
‘I don’t think you will,’ I said.
‘Oh? Why’s that?’
‘Jane Louth.’
His hands dropped to the table. ‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.’
‘Linda Slipman. Julie Frost. Maggie Redman. But most of all Jane Louth.’
His face darkened. I hadn’t meant to use all that on him, but he’d pulled my tongue. It was done. He got up and came round his desk. Then he grabbed my face with his hand, squeezing my cheeks together hard, very hard. It hurt my mouth. I thought he would hit me but I stood my ground and stared back at him. I knew I could make him fear my eye.
‘Trying to threaten me, girlie?’ He pushed my head back hard before releasing me.
I left his office quickly, and as I walked across the yard I saw Arthur McCann. I didn’t stop, and he ran over to me, having to walk briskly to keep up.
‘Fern, what did you do to your hair? Have you got a black eye?’
‘I have to get out of here, Arthur.’
‘Are you all right, Fern? I heard about Mammy. I thought of stopping by your cottage again. Come and see you, like. Shit, are you all right?’
‘I have to go.’
I saw the confusion on his face as he stopped trying to keep pace with me. I felt bad, but I couldn’t stop there and pass the time of day with him after what had happened in the office. I walked out of the property of the mansion the way I came, through those evil grounds where only the rhododendron bushes were beautiful.
And the rhododendrons were budding early that year. I wondered what that meant.
25
Next day I waited outside Judith’s house for her to come home from teaching at the school. Even while she was turning her key in the door I told her what had happened with Chas. ‘What? What?’ she said. She didn’t believe me. She said it couldn’t have been possible. ‘Fern, you’re upset about Mammy. You’re not making sense.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Now I see where your loyalties lie I’ll be off.’
I made my way down the street with Judith calling after me.
On the evening of my class I left the village preparing to hitch a ride into Leicester when Chas’s van drew up. I walked on, ignoring him too. He drove a little way in front of me and swerved his van into the grass verge, blocking my path. Then he jumped out and confronted me. ‘I’ve been speaking to Judith. We need to talk.’
I brushed him aside. ‘What on earth makes you think I’d want to talk with you?’
He grabbed my arm and held me roughly. ‘It’s about what you said. What you told her.’ I looked at his hand where he restrained me. At last he released me. ‘But it isn’t true,’ he said. ‘It just isn’t true.’
I walked on.
‘Where are you going, Fern?’
‘I’m going into Leicester. Leave me be.’
‘Let me give you a lift in the van. We could talk on the way.’
I had to marvel at him. I stopped, waited for a few seconds, and then turned back to face him. ‘You really are a piece of work, aren’t you? You actually think I might climb in your van. You really do! It takes my breath away. It’s really quite staggering what you think you can do.’
‘I believe you think something happened—’
‘Think something happened! Think?’
‘I believe you think something happened. But you’ve somehow got it wrong, Fern. I think you’re so upset by what’s happened lately that you’ve got it wrong in your head.’
That was enough. I turned away and hiked towards Leicester, trying to hold back a taste of gall in my throat and a tingling fury that made me want to break something along the way. I’m sure I didn’t look an attractive proposition to stop for, with my shaved head and my black eye and my angry, tearful eyes. At the side of the road was a bench under an old elm, and I sat there for a few minutes having a blub.
I did eventually get a ride and though I was a few minutes late for my class that evening, it suited me. I pulled a scarf over my cropped hair and slipped in quietly, taking a seat at the back next to Biddy. Biddy’s greeting smile froze on her lips. ‘You all right, ducky? You look like Leicester’s answer to Myra Hindley.’
No sooner had she said it than I could see her regretting the remark. I had to think what she meant. Myra Hindley was about to go on trial for torturing children and burying their bodies on the moors. I’d heard a priest on the radio saying this was what happened in society when people took drugs and had sex and did anything they wanted without restraint.
MMM, pursing her lips and fluttering her eyelashes behind her spectacles, lectured the class on epidural anaesthesia and barely noticed me. And wouldn’t have if Biddy hadn’t started in with her usual objections. First she fidgeted in her seat as MMM treated us to the new gospel of midwifery. Then she clattered her pencil on the wooden desk. Then she grabbed a fistful of her own hair.
At last it was too much. ‘Excuse me,’ Biddy shouted. ‘Excuse me!’
‘What now?’ MMM said. By way of a digression she’d been talking about pushing.
‘Excuse me, but I’ve never told ladies to push in the second stage. Never have, never will. It’s only those who’ve got their eyes on the clock who would.’
MMM flushed. It was something she did often. Perhaps she’d hit the time in her life that summons frequent hot flushes, but with her they were visible. I knew that one day she was going to lose her temper with Biddy and her interruptions. I wondered if this might not be it. ‘Biddy, midwives, like all nurses, carry a watch. It’s regulation equipment. Why would you think we carry a watch if we’re not supposed to use it? How would we know if the birthing were going on too long?’
‘That’s not what I’m saying,’ Biddy replied. ‘I’m talking about these hospitals where they just want the patient to get a move on, so the midwife and the doctors can go home and put their feet up. These sausage-factory hospitals. I’m talking about rushing, that’s what I mean by the clock. Rushing.’
‘Have you finished?’
Biddy coloured at that. ‘Not by a chalk,’ she said. ‘I’m making the point that to get a woman to push in the second stage won’t help anyone. It may even be bad. At best it will only make ’em anxious that they’re not doing it right, and they’ll get all tense, and it’ll set you back.’
‘Yes, Biddy. We all know you have strong views about everything.’ The two women had had earlier spats over the subjects of Caesarean births and breast versus bottle. ‘But we need to crack on.’
But Biddy wasn’t having that. ‘Well, are we all here to roll over and have our tummies tickled? Is that it? If you say something, do we all have to agree with you? I know some of the other members of the class agree with me one hundred per cent about these things, but they don’t say anything.’ Here Biddy switched her attention from MMM to the rest of the class. Her eyes were shining with anger as she looked round the room for the support she knew she wouldn’t get. ‘Well is anyone going to agree with me? What about you, Dawn? Or Maria? Or you, Fern?’
I lowered my eyes.
‘That’s just it, isn’t it?’ Biddy said. ‘You want to keep your heads down and say nothing and collect your certificate. You don’t want to do what we’re here for, which is to educate ourselves, through argument if necessary. But this line you keep feeding us, this government line, as if there’s only one way of doing things! I’m not a robot. And the women we work with aren’t robots either.’
‘No one is saying they are,’ MMM said, trying to wrest back control of the class.
‘No one is saying anything!’ Biddy complained. ‘Is there not one woman in this room who agrees with me?’
No one spoke up. And yet on this issue probably all of us were in harmony with her.
Biddy looked astonished. Then she gathered up her papers and her pencil and walked out of the room. After a moment the lady called Dawn made a thin smile at MMM and went after Biddy. MMM, shaken, tried to recover.
‘I’ll not have it said that I won’t allow discussion,’ she said in a
warning tone. ‘I’ll not have it said. Let’s break off and discuss the matter, if it’s a discussion that’s wanted.’
The trouble was nobody at that point much wanted to discuss anything. There was a cancerous silence, and then the door opened and Dawn came back, but without Biddy. Though I knew she wouldn’t come back. Biddy had just walked out of the whole messy business of helping women to have their babies. Like Mammy, she’d put herself on the outside. She’d torn up her ticket and stood down from her post at the portal of life.
‘Dawn, we were discussing this wretched issue of pushing,’ MMM said fiercely. ‘If you had anything to add.’
Dawn smiled thinly again. ‘Not really.’
I heard Mammy’s words whispering in my head, so I spoke up. ‘I wouldn’t ask a mum to push in the second stage,’ I heard myself say.
Everyone turned to look at me. It was as if I’d removed my headscarf for everyone to see my shaved head. Not that I did so. It was as if I had.
‘Good,’ MMM said. ‘That’s good, Fern. If that’s your strong opinion – and it’s not mine – you are perfectly within your rights to stick with it. Why are you wearing your headscarf?’
I looked down at my desk. Someone in a previous lesson had scratched something into the wood. It said: ‘Does she or doesn’t she?’ MMM didn’t wait for an answer from me, but went back to talking about epidural anaesthesia, and the entire class took many more notes than usual.
I went home that night thinking, Does she or doesn’t she what?
26
‘Do you like an egg custard?’ said the man at the door the following morning. He took off his hat and without invitation pushed past me to get inside the house. I was so taken aback I stood aside for him. ‘Only I do so like an egg custard, and the bakers had them fresh and I couldn’t resist. It’s the wonderful smell of them, isn’t it? Cinnamon and the rest. You do like them too, don’t you?’
I said I didn’t mind.
‘I was rather hoping – and I hope you don’t think it forward of me – that we might have a cup of tea with one of these. Is that rude of me to ask?’
I said I didn’t think so, and then I said, ‘Who are you?’
‘Would it be all right if I sat?’ he asked. ‘I get terrible rheumatic pains in my legs if I stay on my feet. Age. No, I was in the neighbourhood and I thought to call to see how you are doing.’
In addition to the paper bag of egg custards he carried a battered leather case. He set the custards on the table and the case down by a chair. Then he took his spectacles off and stroked a closed eye with a knuckle. I noticed how hairy were the backs of his hands. He wore a silver ring on his little finger.
After replacing his spectacles he smiled broadly. Then he took his coat off and laid it across the back of another chair before sitting down. He picked up his case, flicked open the metal clasps, rummaged through the contents and closed it again. I’m certain he had shaved that morning because I could smell a sweet after-shave lotion on him, but he was so dark he was one of those men with a permanent blue shadow around his chin.
‘What do you mean, you ‘‘thought to call’’?’
‘Do have a custard,’ he said. ‘I’ll feel so guilty if I eat them all myself.’ And then he giggled, like a girl.
I don’t know why, but I found myself putting on the kettle. ‘Are you selling something?’
‘Good lord no!’ he cried. ‘This is merely a social visit!’
I suddenly twigged who he was. This was Montague Butts, the colleague of Bennett, the Cambridge professor. I should have guessed it by his manner of speaking, which like his chum was all soft-soap. ‘Oh! You’ve come about the—’
‘Indeed I have, Miss Cullen, indeed I have. I wanted to see how things were going.’
The kettle boiled and I made the tea. While I did so he fiddled in his case again and took out a manila folder and a notebook. From his breast pocket he extracted a heavy fountain pen, jet with swirls of amber. I handed him his tea and a small plate for his egg custard. He put them down on the floor and balanced the folder and notebook on his knee.
‘How are things going? Things are going well enough,’ I said.
‘And you’re managing all right now you’re on your own here in the cottage?’
‘It’s a struggle. But someone cleared a debt for me recently.’
‘How jolly kind of someone!’ he said with a conspiratorial grin, and I wondered if it were Bennett and himself who had paid off the arrears. ‘Would you say you were coping?’
‘Coping?’
‘With the bereavement.’
It didn’t occur to me to ask him how he knew about Mammy’s passing. ‘Everything is going to be difficult. I know that.’
‘Quite,’ he said, and he wrote some words in his notebook, grinding his teeth as he did so. ‘Why did you cut your hair, Miss Cullen?’
My hand darted to my head. ‘Oh, that.’
‘Yes, your hair.’ He looked across the top of his spectacles at me.
‘A bit embarrassing,’ I said. ‘I caught head lice. Easiest way to get rid of them.’
He was writing in his notebook again. ‘How did you catch ’em?’
‘Local children.’
‘Really? What were you doing with local children?’
He was still looking down at his notebook, but though he was trying to disguise it there was too much interest in my answer to his strange question. My skin prickled. I was suddenly on my guard again. ‘Just helping out with a local family. And of course if your heads get too close, well, they jump don’t they?’
‘Indeed they do. Do you feel people are against you?’
‘Against me? Well some of them are! What’s that got to do with it?’
‘Do you ever hear voices?’
I looked hard at him. ‘Do you mean for the book? Is this for the book?’
‘The book? It could be.’
‘What are you writing down?’
‘Oh, I’m making an assessment, that’s all. So do you hear voices?’
‘I can hear yours well enough. What are you doing here?’
‘Only a visit.’
‘Are you from Cambridge University?’
‘No, I’m a redbrick man myself. Do you have lots of visitors from Cambridge University?’
I looked at the blue shadow on the man’s chin and at the fat red maggot of his bottom lip and I suddenly felt very cold and very afraid. ‘If you don’t tell me why you are here, I’m going to get annoyed,’ I said.
‘Do you often get angry, do you find?’
‘Not especially.’
‘Got angry in the building society the other day though, didn’t you?’
‘Who sent you here?’
‘Just someone worried about your well-being. A concerned friend. I don’t know why you’re getting upset.’
‘Which friend might that be?’
‘Does it really matter?’
‘You’re a doctor?’
‘You know, I really do wish you would tell me why you cut your hair.’
Mammy, I thought. Mammy would know what to do in these circumstances. Why didn’t I have her power, to deal with these priests and doctors, what Mammy used to call the juju men. I gazed evenly back at him, regulating my breathing as he sat with his glistening fountain pen poised over his notebook, and I knew that whatever he wrote in there it could go against me. His eyes had a mesmerising strength, seeming to swim and to grow larger behind his spectacles.
‘I’d like to stay and talk to you longer but I’ve lots of work to attend to,’ I said.
‘What work? You don’t have any real work, do you now?’
‘I have plenty.’
‘Like what?’
‘I take in sewing. And laundry. All that on the lines in the garden. I have to get it back to people. Right now. So you’ll have to go.’
‘Won’t be dry yet, surely.’
‘Dry as a bone. Obviously I get up earlier than you do.’ I stood up to show him it w
as time to leave. ‘You can help me fold it if you like.’
He put his notebook back in his case. ‘No, I have my own errands to run. I’ll be on my way.’
At the door I handed him his bag of egg custards. ‘Do take these.’
He accepted the bag and bade me good day. But on his way down the garden path he stopped and, very pointedly, reached out to touch one of the sheets pegged out there. He rubbed it between a fat, putrid forefinger and thumb before proceeding down the path.
I knew it would be dry.
They were closing in.
Some time after this doctor who wouldn’t admit he was a doctor had gone I went out into the garden. There was an old stone sundial table there, with a rusted gnomon, where I often put breadcrumbs out for the birds in winter. At one edge of the stone slab, where the shadow of the gnomon might fall, I placed a black pebble for each person I thought might have called in this doctor against me. There were six pebbles. At the other edge of the stone table, arrayed against the others like draughts on a squared board, I lined up white pebbles representing anyone who might have paid off my debt. That too added up to six. Three of the six people were represented on both sides, so I replaced these with brown pebbles.
I decided to go to the police house and find out what I could.
Bill Myers’ police residence lay just outside the village. It was a curious house with two porthole windows either side of the central door. Above the door was a large black and white enamel badge of the county coat of arms: the bull, the sheep and the fox courant. Bill Myers’ wife, Peggy, whom I barely knew, came to the door. Her hair was fixed in plastic curlers and the smell of setting lotion was overwhelming. She’d taken her dentures out so her mouth was rather pursed. She knew who I was immediately. With expressions of sympathy she invited me inside, quickly refixing her dentures to tell me that Bill would be back for his dinner break in a few minutes.
I was left sitting in an untidy kitchen. The Myers had four children all of school age, and various items of their laundry were left drying around the place, hanging from a large clothes horse and from an elastic line suspended between the walls.
