I Was Dora Suarez (9 page)

Once I was Dora Suarez, but even before I die I am not her any more; I have just become something appalling. Looking at myself naked in the mirror, I see that I have lost the right to call myself a person; what’s left of me now is barely human.

I am marked with a cross; I just have this pause between now and my end. Here at Betty’s I have this last short freedom; I have no more real time. I accept that at thirty I am going to die. I don’t want to be parted from my body – what has happened to it is not its fault. But it says it wants to go.

I don’t know what I should have done if it hadn’t been for Betty. I was in Kensington by chance the day we met, having left my suitcase at a girlfriend’s not far off who had no room for me because of her boyfriend being there – and besides, my illness made her afraid – and I passed Betty going in the opposite direction along Empire Gate, and seeing that she was having a hard struggle against the north wind with her shopping, I don’t know why, but I stopped and gave her a hand with it, meaning to go on south over the river afterwards to see if I could find a cheap room down there somewhere with people who weren’t too nosey. But it ended up with Betty saying, when we got to her street door, wouldn’t I like to come indoors with her for a moment and get in out of the wind? I didn’t want to be with any strangers, just on my own – still, it was bitterly cold, so I followed her in the end and found myself in this strange, dark flat crammed with clocks, broken-down furniture from another age, and boxes and cases stacked up to the kitchen ceiling. She went out to the kitchen presently and made us a cup of tea. She brought the tea and sat me down in the other chair opposite her by the electric fire. The place was in a dreadful state and smelled the way an old person’s place does smell; but strangely, I soon found that I didn’t care. Besides, I was very tired; it was one of my bad days.

After about an hour she started asking me about myself, something I usually don’t like – only she didn’t do it in a stupid, pressing way, but mixed up with stories of her own past, taking my hand and stroking it absently while she talked. She spoke softly, in a low Highland voice that reminded me of fine rain; and later on she brought some whisky and a plate of cakes to make it a social occasion. She had a quarter glass herself, and before she went to bed in the kitchen under the window sang snatches of Highland songs in Gaelic as though she had forgotten that I was there:

‘Take me to the house with many windows

And I will stay with you forever …’

She had the high, glorious voice of a young girl.

In the course of the evening I said: ‘I really must be getting on, Betty – I’ve found nowhere to sleep yet, and it’s getting dark.’ Betty said: ‘I wish you’d stay with me here, Dora; I’ve been so lonely since Reg went.’ And I said at once: ‘I will, Betty’ – and that wasn’t just because it suited me, or because I felt ill and tired; at that moment I didn’t really know why I was so happy to stay, but I know now, of course, that it was because she offered me peace.

I had long ago forgotten what it was like to be treated so gently, so that in the following days, whenever she took my hand and looked into my eyes, saying: ‘Now you’ve your place here, Dora, and it’s such a wonderful thing for me that you’re here, you’ll stay on awhile, won’t you?’ something jagged came up into my throat. But I could not tell her much about myself, with her aged eighty-six. All I said to her one night, after a few whiskies, when she asked me: ‘Where do you think you’re going to live in the end, sweet?’ and I answered: ‘Wherever I can hide,’ she took my hand and squeezed it hard, saying calmly: ‘Well, whatever you’re hiding from, you know you can always hide here’ – without ever once going any further, never wanting to know anything I couldn’t tell her.

She’s pure gold.

The other day, though, she got up from her armchair by the electric fire, took me by the shoulders and held me away from her a little so that she could focus me properly. She said: ‘You know, I don’t like the look of you, Dora, you don’t look right to me.’ I wanted to cry and tell her everything, but I didn’t and just said: ‘I’m perfectly all right, Betty.’ She said: ‘Dora, I’ve this bit of money, now I want you to take it and go to the doctor’s just for a checkup. You could go to my doctor, Doctor Mathers; he’s ever so kind, and his surgery’s only just round the corner.’ But I said: ‘No! No, no!’ and only stopped myself just in time from telling her that I was beyond the help of doctors. All I said was: ‘No, Betty, I really am all right, you know, I swear it. I’m
young.’ She didn’t believe me, of course; but, seeing the kind of person she was, she just turned and went into the kitchen for the whisky and the hard little cakes she liked, and she never mentioned the subject again. All I said to her during that period was: ‘Betty, do you believe that apart from you, somewhere beyond all the people who only seem to be people, there truly are still some people left, real people?’ And she said: ‘Ah, you darling pretty woman, don’t you know that my Reg, though he’s been gone so many years now, still comes in to see me quite often to know if I’m all right? It’s true he drank hard, Dora, but he was always a gentleman – even in drink he was nearly always collected and correct, and there could never have been any other man in my life but him.’ She was silent for a time, staring at the floor, then she looked up at me and said: ‘As I think of it, have you no more luggage here than what you’ve brought?’ I started to cry and said: ‘No, I’ve only my heart, Betty, and that’s heavy enough.’ After she had comforted me in her frail arms she said: ‘For you know, Dora, I’ve all sorts of clothes here, in the boxes in the kitchen, and though they’re old and out of style, I know, they’re all handmade, for Reginald was a major in the war, and so I had to dress correctly for the officers’ mess on ladies’ night.’

But I told her I had all I needed. Later I said: ‘Betty, don’t you find it’s funny how when someone isn’t there with you, the least thing they’ve ever sent you, a postcard, a photograph, assumes an importance that you wouldn’t think twice about if the person were there?’ She said: ‘The people who loved you never go away, Dora.’ I said there was one case where I hoped she was wrong there, without going any further.

‘I’ve never really loved anyone in my life like you loved Reg,’ I told Betty, ‘I never have had.’ But Betty stroked my cheek and said: ‘Oh yes you have. Because you’ve got me now. I’m here with you now and I always shall be.’

I said: ‘Betty, don’t the 1980s feel strange to you?’ ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘for I live more in the past, and my memories are wonderful – imagine how fine it was the evening Reg first arrived in our village in the spring of 1940; he walked up from the way station looking so mighty grand in his uniform, posted to Argyllshire for a reason he must never name even to me, for fear that if I were caught by the enemy, I should be hurt. Oh, it was very exciting for me to know he was so important – girls half my age were mad with envy of me, and women were such romantics then. I can see now, Dora, how our eyes met as he turned to look at me as I passed him the first time he ever strode up our one street with his batman carrying his big officer’s valise to the McGrath house where he was billeted, and how my heart sang at once, for I knew I was in love with him, though I was never beautiful. Ah, but that didn’t matter, Dora, girl, and wasn’t the whole village amazed when the banns were called by the minister and we took each other in marriage, and myself already thought an old maid, since I was born in ’04? I tell you, love is so beautiful; besides, there was a great deal of drink after we came away from the house with windows – even the minister tottered towards the evening in the front room – ah, that was one day we forgot the war.’ ‘Don’t you ever feel that we’re all of us just mirages, Betty?’ I said. ‘No, never,’ she said. ‘I’m a Scot and too hardheaded.’ I said: ‘I want to talk about something else, Betty – the rent. I can’t go on staying here like this with nothing said or settled, but I have to tell you that I haven’t any money right now.’

‘You silly, darling girl,’ she said: ‘Don’t you understand? Just stay here with me, and I’m forever repaid.’

Betty is very frail and I know that her heart hurts her all the time; she often groans in the night and I hear her immediately every time and go to her where she has her bed in the kitchen under the window. I fetch her her pills then take her to the bathroom and afterwards sit
with her to talk on the side of her bed and soothe her, with an eiderdown over my shoulders till she sleeps again.

Yes, Betty is the only person who loves me, or ever has. I never thought that love would come to me in that way, through her. But there it is.

No, it had never occurred to me that love would come to me through Betty. My former lovers paid for my face, thighs, hands, breasts and sex, then entered me. If I said anything for the sake of the ritual, they were shocked; for to them my lips existed as nothing but an encouragement to fuck me. One told me I was too beautiful to think, whereupon I turned my back on him and watched him in the mirror anxiously washing his prick in the bathroom. I accepted him in my arms when he cantered down the room towards me because I had to – a thin, hoarse man of sixty, rich, mean and gone in the hams. Sparse hairs curled without elegance round his crushed nipples, and in the morning, after a cold shower, I lay in bed watching him don a pair of pink-and-white striped knickers three times too large for him. When he was dressed, he left at once to catch his plane back to the Midlands; he was cold and didn’t speak except to remind me as he shut the hotel room door behind him that everything had been paid for. He had had his orgasm, but the closest I could get to mine was by bursting into tears. At dinner the night before in a medium-priced restaurant off Leicester Square he had said to me: ‘I’m going to leave my wife for you, Dora!’

Going to? Going to?

Ha! Going, going! Gone!

‘What will you do for money, Dora, for when you’re short?’ Betty said to me one night, at some nameless hour. ‘For I’ve drawn my pension and there’s a hundred pounds under my cushion here if it would help.’

‘No, Betty,’ I said, ‘never. That’s not how it works at all.’ It was very quiet in the flat that night; there was just the slow beat of the hall clock, the remote night traffic, and the two of us.

She said: ‘It’s only paper, after all.’

‘No, Betty darling,’ I said.

‘But how will you manage if something happens to me?’

‘Nothing will, Betty.’

But she had a sudden crisis then and there and clutched her heart. I caught her, laid her down and covered her up warm; she turned her face to me and said, crying: ‘Don’t leave me, Dora!’ I said: ‘As if I would, heaven. Are you better? Do you need your pills?’

‘No pills,’ she said slowly, smiling, only half-conscious, ‘no pills.’

Later she said: ‘There’s much that’s dark in you, Dora, much in you that I can’t see; I love you and I worry for you.’

I said, ‘You mustn’t.’

‘If only I could help you.’

‘You’ve done everything for me,’ I told her, ‘far more than you know, you’ve been an angel to me.’

She said: ‘Dora, please don’t leave me now.’

‘I’ll never do that,’ I said. ‘I can only be taken.’

‘What do you mean?’ she said.

‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter. Now you must rest.’

She took my arm and stroked it till she fell asleep.