Marking Time (34 page)

She looked in her driving mirror: Jessica was close behind her as she turned into the drive.

‘All the same, I don’t really like the idea of you being in London.’

‘Darling, it’s perfectly all right. They’ve got a whacking great air-raid shelter in the basement, and we all get popped safely into it if there’s the slightest
danger.’ She put out her hand, and Hugh took it. ‘You’re such an old worrier.’

‘Well, with any luck, I’ll have you home far sooner than you think. I’m seeing the Great White Chief before I leave here, and I know that if you have a good nurse he’ll
let you go.’

‘That’s very grand of you. How did you manage that?’

‘I arranged it last week. He told me that this was his day here and that he’ll be free when he’s finished operating. If I get him to agree, the hospital can’t keep
you.’

He smiled down at her, and she realised how exhausted he was. If it made him feel better to have her in the country, of course she would go . . . although, at the moment, even the thought of
getting out of bed made her feel shaky and tearful from weakness. And with everybody moved into Home Place, she could not imagine where a nurse could sleep, even supposing they were able to get
one. He was saying that he thought he’d better go, he did not want to miss seeing Mr Heatherington-Bute, and although in one way she didn’t want him to go, seeing
anyone
for
more than half an hour made her desperate with fatigue.

‘Goodbye, my darling girl,’ he said. ‘Mind you eat that smoked salmon; it will build you up. I’ll give your best love to Polly and Simon and Wills,’ he added,
anticipating her. ‘And I’ll ring tomorrow.’

Then he was gone, and she was left with the litter of gifts he had brought: not only the smoked salmon, but two novels, although she did not feel up to reading, the pink roses that she must ring
for a nurse to put in water, the large bunch of black grapes – he never came empty-handed. I’ll call the nurse in a minute, she thought wearily, turned her face away from the door and
fell asleep.

Half an hour later, he let himself out of the huge black door and walked down the steps from the hospital, and then across the road to his car. His mind was curiously blank, as
though it had temporarily absented itself from his body, which none the less knew how to put one foot before another, how to open the car door and lever itself into it.

When he was sitting, fragments of what the man had said to him occurred but in no coherent order: ‘Your wife is doing very well – as well as can be expected.’ ‘I’m
afraid I have to tell you that of the two tumours we removed, one was not benign.’ ‘Operation itself a complete success, so all should be well.’ ‘Felt you should be put in
the picture.’ Then he had stopped talking and offered him a cigarette. ‘But she’ll get better, won’t she? A complete success, you said.’ That seemed unanswerable, but
it wasn’t. Every time he screwed himself up to ask a direct question, the man answered in such a way that he felt none the wiser – neither terrified, nor reassured. There was every
chance that she would show a steady improvement. He could see no reason to be unduly worried. The only point on which he seemed unequivocal was discussion with the patient herself. ‘Oh, no,
no, no,’ he had said, his rather heavy, plum-coloured jowls shifting uneasily from side to side, and this
did
relieve him: above all else, he did not want her to be worried, and Mr
Heatherington-Bute had enthusiastically concurred. Nothing was more injurious to patients – particularly
women
– than anxiety.

On this note, he had found himself leaving: Mr Heatherington-Bute had risen, had extended a white, fastidiously shaped hand, a series of ever-widening smiles – like the ripples on a pool
– were regularly disturbing his face, and he was imploring Hugh to get in touch with him whenever he felt inclined.

Hugh realised that he had not asked when he might take her home which had been the question at the top of his list, and the inclination to get in touch with Mr H. B. there and then occurred, but
he quenched it. Obviously, she wasn’t up to coming home
now
, and he could talk to Matron on Monday about dates. He had realised when he had been talking to her that she was actually
feeling pretty done up. Her skin had that translucent, milky quality that had been coloured only by the small bruising marks of fatigue, minute fronds of viridian veins lacing her eyelids, which if
she had been well would have been invisible, and the dusty shadows under her eyes, her hair still done in two plaits for the operations and still not loosened, and her mouth still blistered from
the fever she had had for a couple of days afterwards. Thinking of her mouth – and the still irresistible way in which she drew in her upper lip with her teeth when she was thinking hard
– he remembered with a pang that he had not kissed her when he had left. Would she have minded – would she have noticed even? Suddenly he was overcome by a longing for her – to
hold her in his arms, to watch her breathing, to hear her small soft voice, to reminisce, to chat, to gossip with her of nothing important, except that it had been shared, that their knowledge was
equal, their responses sometimes delightfully different . . .

No, to go back and see her now might worry her. She might think that he had had an awkward time with Mr Heatherington-Bute – that there had been some bad, or difficult news. When, in
reality, it hadn’t been at all like that: he was very pleased with her, she was making jolly good progress, the operation had been a complete success . . . In rehearsing how he would tell her
what had been said, he began to feel relief himself – naturally these professional chaps had to cover themselves, would never stick their necks out a hundred per cent . . . It was quite right
not
to go back again to see her – never mind how much he wanted to – it would do him good to think of others for a change. He lit a cigarette and started the engine. It seemed
very odd to be driving to Sussex,
away
from her, when always it had been the other way round and Fridays had been the best day of the week, but he’d soon have her home. He’d
talk to Rachel about finding a really good nurse, because then she could come home sooner.

‘F U C,’ she wrote laboriously, ‘fuss?’

‘Fuck. It’s got a k at the end.’

‘Oh, well, you didn’t say that.’

‘You write so slowly,’ he complained. ‘The next one’s easy. Bugger. B U G G E R.’

Lydia licked her pencil and went on writing.

‘Ready?’ Neville said. ‘Balls.’

‘Balls? I really can’t see anything rude about them. This is getting a bit boring, if you ask me.’

‘Shut up! Shit! Spew – gloomy blood!
Soixante dix
!’

‘How on earth do you spell that? It sounds foreign to me.’

‘It is. It is a foreign position – probably the rudest in the world.’

‘Get into it, Nev – let me see!’

But he was not to be caught out. ‘Have you written the others down?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Well, get on with it, or you’ll forget them.’

‘I won’t. What was the first one?’

He told her. As a long-term plan for getting rid of her in what he decided had become
his
bedroom, it was proving laborious. She simply forgot the words – on the other hand she
never failed to ask him awkward questions about what they meant. And it was going to be difficult to get her to launch into a proper display of rudeness in front of everyone at mealtimes, if she
had no idea what she was talking about. Sometimes, he had to admit,
he
didn’t know, since it was the fashion at school to pretend to know everything anyway, which cut down
everyone’s chances of acquiring new information.
Soixante dix
, for instance: for the life of him, he couldn’t think of
any
rude English position at all let alone a
foreign one. What he was trying to be was what they called a bad influence – so bad that they would remove her from the bedroom. He’d get a wigging for it, but it would be worthwhile:
they might even move him in with Teddy and Simon! If horrible Judy came, which had been mentioned as a possibility, then they easily might, and poor old Lyd would be left with the goody-goody. But
if Teddy and Simon refused point blank to have him, he might end up alone, and what he found about being alone was that although he often thought he would like it, it usually made him sad. At
school you were never alone – even the lavatories didn’t have walls from the floor to the ceiling so that other people could hear everything. The other worrying thing about being alone
for him was when he had an asthma attack. If nobody was there, and he couldn’t find his sniffer, he could feel pretty awful. Lydia had always been decent about that: she sat up and read to
him until he felt better and she shut up about it the next day. Also, when he was alone, he could not help thinking about things generally, and they all seemed to be bad. The war
wasn’t
turning out at all like he had thought it would; far from being exciting, it seemed simply to make things that used to be exciting either impossible or dull, and dull things
duller. Then there was the question of Dad which he found he couldn’t think about at
all
. How
could
Dad go off like that and leave him and Clary with nothing? Because he
certainly wasn’t counting Zoë and that horrible baby she’d deliberately had. There had been too much death in the family for its own good, he thought. His mother becoming dead at
the beginning of his life; and now Dad, just disappearing without warning – Ellen would be the next to go, he shouldn’t wonder. He felt the need to be alone coming over him now, and
watching Lydia’s head bent over her exercise book, he wished he hadn’t started the whole thing; he couldn’t see a particularly good end to it whatever happened.

‘. . . gloomy blood just sounds disgusting,’ she was saying. ‘I can
spell
it, but I don’t think I’ll bother. I’m really only interested if it’s
breathtakingly rude.’

‘Naturally, I know a lot of far ruder things but you’re not old enough for them.’ He was becoming bored with the whole thing.

‘I’m catching up with you nearly. I’ll be nine in November.’

‘But the fact remains that you’re only eight now.
And
a girl.’ Escaping from her meant leaping out of the very, very old car on the stinging nettle side, but he was so
bored it was worth it. He ran, with smarting legs until her wails of dismay had become merely funny. In the orchard, he found dock leaves and rubbed his legs until they were streaked with green.
Then he lay in the long grass and wondered what to do with his life. Do a bad deed, if he could think of one. He and Hawkins at school had made a pact about seeing who could collect the most bad
deeds throughout the holidays, and the person who won would get half the other person’s pocket money for the term. In order that there should be no argument, they had constructed an elaborate
points system. A small bad deed would just mean that people got cross and told you not to do it again: one point. A better bad deed would mean that you got a punishment: two points. The best of all
was if you did something that
had not been done before
and for which you were punished: three points. This last was surprisingly difficult, but the best of all was doing something really
bad that had not been done before
and
was not found out. You got five for that. ‘How will each other know that we did it?’ he had asked, and Hawkins said that there was such a
thing as honour, and that if real friends betrayed one another they would go to hell. ‘That’s just a matter of fact,’ he had said. He was six months older with bright ginger hair
and in summer the freckles all ran into each other over his nose so that it looked yellow. He had been bitten by a snake and had not died and had been to the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds
in London where he said he had seen some terrible things, in fact the only boring thing about him was his conjuring tricks that you could always see how they were done, but he kept on practising on
anyone who would watch and, of course, as Hawkins’s best friend Neville had had to do more than his share of that. Otherwise he was wizard fun. A bad deed popped into his mind and he went off
to do it.