Paradise Lodge (21 page)

Mrs Longlady was going to bring the famous secret recipe, Longlady Chocca-Chocca cake, which I knew the patients would hate. They weren't as keen on chocolate as the next generation and they hated silly names. Gordon Banks had promised a Dundee and I was going to buy some mini Bakewells.

The improvements and the open day—and in fact everything Sister Saleem had been striving for—were all about happiness, she told us one day.

‘It's
all
about happiness,' she said, with her arms outstretched.

This was a Sunday and she always talked like this on a Sunday because she'd have been to church and it was her way of spreading the Lord's joy. Not to miserable St Edmund's or St Nicholas in the next village—where you'd be gloomy as hell afterwards and just relieved to have it over with for another week—but a happy-clappy church by the brook where they sang modern songs and acted out being happy for an hour, even though they'd made total idiots of themselves, grinning and waving, clasping each other's hands, clapping and singing childish songs. We knew all about it because one by one she'd asked us to go. ‘Just see what it's like,' she'd said. And we had and none of us had ever returned.

It was nice to hear, though (that everything we were striving for was about making the patients happy), it made sense and seemed the right thing and better than it just being a business to make money for the owner and his nieces—or whoever would inherit.

‘I want to see the ladies and gentlemen laughing and singing and never, never crying,' said Sister Saleem as she tucked into her roast lamb that day. The roasts had been reinstated due to the cook agreeing to come in on Sundays to do them—on the condition that she was paid up front and got to take the leftovers home for her husband who'd got a disease and couldn't digest shop-bought food.

The ladies did seem happy. They laughed a lot and they never cried, even when they were sad. You sometimes wished they would. I mean, even as Miss Mills had lain on the linoleum with a fractured femur saying, ‘I'm a goner, Fanny-Jane,' she wasn't crying, as such. She was just saying. And Miss Geltmeyer hadn't cried when the chiropodist slipped off his stool and almost had her toe off.

Matron was the one female who seemed unhappy—even Sally-Anne had a bright future, albeit with twin-shaped ghosts forever lurking. Matron was the most likely to cry. She'd often hark back to her childhood or early adulthood and tell all sorts of sad tales and quite often she'd cry, even when the others had stopped listening. She'd be telling a story in which she was the victim of an injustice—from 1920-something—and she'd have to go scrabbling around in her pocket for her handkerchief at the memory of it. She'd made me cry once. Her mother had forgotten to pick her up from the dentist, or never intended to. Matron (though she wasn't a matron then—not even a bogus one—being only seven or eight years old) had caught a horse and cart into the nearest town, which I think might have been Dublin or Limerick, and had had a whole load of teeth taken out by a cruel old dentist who just pulled out people's teeth for money and didn't even try not to. She'd been given the cocaine gas and was all woozy and upset and walking home with bloody dribble on her chin. She'd had enough money for the horse and cart but was too woozy to be sensible. The memory made her lips tremble and her hand came wavering up and she dabbed her hanky under her spectacles and the whole thing was too sad to watch. A dalek would've cried.

It was difficult to tell with the old men, crying-wise, mainly because the obvious ones always had watery eyes all the time and the less obvious ones were just lying there not awake enough to be crying or not crying. The only unhappy male was the owner, who had been diagnosed with a sprained heart (and alcoholism). The owner having a sprained heart proved the theory I'd heard a few times—that a break is better than a sprain. A sprain leaving a weakness forever, whereas a break mending and leaving only a hairline scar—imperceptible except by X-ray. A sprain just keeps spraining, just as you trust it to be strong and you put weight on it, it goes again and you're on the floor (that's a sprained ankle, but it must be the same with a sprained heart). Unlike Matron, though, the owner would never dream of crying. He was one of those posh folk who speak in slurred baby talk and pretend everything's jolly and walk around with ice cubes clanking around in a chunky tumbler. Like my mum used to be, except she never had ice cubes.

We talked about crying at the kitchen table over the roast. Nurse Eileen told of her aunt who had never let herself cry, even when awful things happened, which they did a lot, but the aunt just got on with life and in the end she'd exploded with pent-up grief. Not exploded like a bomb but like a rancid Kia-Ora carton. And had ended up in The Towers for a spell. She was taught how to cry after that, by a special crying therapist who would shout at her, ‘Cry Nora, cry!' And the aunt (Nora) would cry. And she became like any normal person, crying at the Hovis ad and so forth, and when very good or very bad things occurred in life or on telly.

My wedding present to my mother and Mr Holt was that I was turning over a new leaf attendance-wise at school. I hadn't told them about it in case it came to nothing. Anyway, I'd gone into school with a clean shirt and even had my sister's smart satchel-type bag. I looked as if I meant business.

My first lesson was double French but I was advised by Madame Perry to go instead to the European Studies class—the
CSE
alternative.

‘
Quoi?
' I said.

‘
Tu es dans la classe inférieure
,' said Madame Perry, looking sorry.

I went to see Miss Pitt.

‘I seem to have been moved into the
CSE
classes,' I said.

‘Yes, correct, you have been,' she said. ‘You can move into the “O” Level groups as soon as I've had another meeting with my stepfather.' She said it straight out.

‘But I arranged a meeting—it wasn't my fault the milkman brought him back to Paradise Lodge.'

‘Ach!' she clicked her fingers. ‘It was the milkman, was it?'

‘Well, I don't know, I heard it was,' I said, kicking myself.

‘Get me that meeting, in church, at a concert, in a tea room, it's up to you. Just do it, and then you can move groups, do you understand, Lizzie?'

‘Yes,' I said, ‘I'll try.'

On Miranda's sixteenth birthday Mike gave her a C60 cassette of himself singing Paul McCartney's ‘Silly Love Songs'. It was the most wonderful, romantic, heartbreaking thing I'd heard, sadder even than the Purcell. Miranda played it on the owner's Panasonic at coffee break. I felt she should have kept it private.

I gave her a card and a bamboo back-scratcher that I'd got from the Very Bazaar on Silver Street. Everyone had a little go with it. It was generally agreed to be blissful and everyone wanted one.

Sister Saleem gave her a copy of
The Diary of Anne Frank
which, she said, every teenager in the world should read and ponder on their good fortune. (Unless they lived under siege or hostile occupation.) Miranda was thrilled to get
The Diary of Anne Frank
. She turned it over and over in her hands.

I could tell she'd never even heard of Anne Frank because she said, ‘I can't wait to read Anne's adventures.' And when she got some looks she deflected them by saying, ‘Bloody hell, Anne Frank's the spitting image of Lizzie.'

And that caused everyone to look at the photograph of Anne Frank and then at me and then back at Anne Frank. It was awkward because no one wanted to agree—because of her tragic fate and not wanting to seem shallow talking about Anne Frank's looks—but it was undeniable.

I regretted giving her the back-scratcher and wished I'd only given her a card.

Sally-Anne came looking for me one day. I was in the laundry folding ladies' dresses. She told me Matron needed me urgently in Room 9—Mr Godrich's room. I trotted up there hoping they were going to tell me the three of them—Matron, Mr Godrich and Rick—were planning to run off together at the end of his convalescence. But when I got there Matron was clanking about with ghoulish instruments and a kidney dish, in desperate tears. She needed me to help her lay out Mr Godrich, she said. I wasn't sure what it meant.

‘What do you mean, lay him out?' I asked.

‘I mean, he's dead, he's gone and fucking died,' she said, pointing to the bed, ‘look.'

And there he was—dead.

‘So, we've to lay him out,' she said.

‘I don't think you should carry out this procedure in your current upset state,' I said, firmly. Also, I didn't want to do it. I'd never laid out a dead body before (and don't even know if it's laid or layed) and I really didn't want to do it or be part of it—even under normal circumstances.

Soon Matron was sitting on the bed—squashing the deceased—and telling me all about how she and Mr Godrich had been planning to move out to his home in Stoneygate where she'd be his companion-cum-cleaner-cum-cook-cum-dog-walker. And it had been thoroughly thrashed out and they'd been on the brink of telling Sister Saleem and the owner and handing in her notice when she'd got the call from Nurse Carla B that Mr Godrich looked funny and she'd dashed up the stairs and into his room to find him dead and with his little travel case packed and Rick the Yorkshire terrier trying to revive him with little yaps and digging frantically at his bed sheets. She said it in one long breath and then collapsed down beside the dead man.

‘He died, Lizzie,' she said, all muffled.

Rick lay on a cushion in the window seat with his frilly little ears pricked up, alert.

‘I know,' I said, of course I knew. To be honest I was worried about poor Rick but knew not to say so.

‘And now I've to lay him out,' she said.

The thing was, Matron usually quite liked laying people out. It was a known fact. Not that it was morbid (apparently), she felt it was one of life's rituals and an honour and all of that kind of thing that people might have actually thought in olden times. The staff used to call her ‘Mrs Gamp' behind her back. To begin with I thought it was because she always carried an umbrella—even in drought weather—but I found out later it was because she had a penchant for laying out the dead like the grim midwife from
Martin Chuzzlewit
. Anyway, however much of an honour and a privilege the laying out was under normal circumstances, Matron was very sad at this particular laying out and could hardly keep her composure. But she began it anyway. She seemed bad-tempered and it felt wrong. It's best that I don't go into detail except to say that Mr Godrich's mouth wouldn't stay closed and Matron got very cross and swore at him and in the end she put a bandage round his head and tied it under his chin in a great big bow. He looked like Baby-Face Finlayson.

‘We were that close, he and I,' she said, holding her gloved finger and thumb close together.

Matron blathered on about what a total let-down it all was, her high hopes for a decent recovery—their talk about a possible cruise around Asia Minor.

It was less awful than I'd imagined—the laying out—it being a preliminary thing rather than the actual real undertaking procedure. But it was still affecting and gave me cause to imagine it being my grandmother, mother or me lying there all creamy with chubby little Matron clanging around, swearing and forcing cotton-wool balls into my cavities.

Finally, she chucked the instruments into the kidney dish, signalled me to close my eyes, and muttered a prayer. In the quietness, we could hear Bruce Forsyth's voice—or was it Val Doonican's?—drifting up from the telly, which was always on high volume because of the hard of hearing, and Matron sped up a bit, said Amen and sloped off to catch the end of whatever it was. On my own with Mr Godrich I tried to feel the importance of being beside a dead person without being silly, but the feeling of wanting to watch the telly took over, like it had with Matron. I picked up Rick and trotted off too.

Later that day, Matron—in a very sad mood—told us all about a life-changing incident. It was the early 1960s when she was recovering from a disease that had ‘pained her beyond endurance' and her parents—themselves quite elderly and decrepit—had gathered all their money and bought her a telly. One of the very first tellies in her village (it was so early I don't think they even called it a telly). And they wired it up and got the aerial sorted so Matron could watch it from her recovery bed, even though there wasn't much on—it being so new—except the news, and the odd cartoon. And that one day when she had nipped out to see the doctor—because it was cheaper than the doctor calling in—and returned and was getting her nightie back on, she realized someone had burgled her telly.

It was bad enough losing the telly, but what made it a life-changing experience and so deeply affecting was that the burglars had simply thrown the telly into the river. They hadn't wanted it for themselves—they'd just not wanted
her
to have it. And not only that, the local council had charged her father to have it removed from the river.

‘That's awful,' we all said and meant it. I thought it a rather good and thought-provoking story and a cut above her usual lies and fantasies.

Later Matron seemed a bit better and we chatted in the kitchen.

‘What are your plans now, vis-à-vis leaving to take up a live-in companion job?' I asked.

‘Oh, I'm looking in
The Lady
magazine, and keeping my ear to the ground,' she said. ‘And if you really must know, I'm thinking about Mr Simmons,' she added.

‘
NO
!' I said. ‘You can't. He's got that horrible stepdaughter, you'd never inherit, plus, she'd make your life hell.'

I didn't want Matron getting involved with Mr Simmons while I was still trying to secure my place in the ‘O' Level group. I was struggling with
Animal Farm
and now Matron was going to lure Mr Simmons away from me luring him away. I couldn't see how it was going to end well—either thing.

Matron looked at me for a moment, saddened.

‘I'm sorry,' I said, ‘it's just that she's my Deputy Head at school, I know her, and she really is a total cunt.'

I had to put it in the strongest terms, talking to Matron.

‘I'm desperate, Lizzie, I need a job and a home. This place is going to go to the dogs, Saleem doesn't believe in me, and what'll become of me?' she said. ‘I'm sixty-five.'

‘Sixty-five?' I said. ‘Crikey, I thought you were at least seventy-five.' It was the new straw-coloured hair, it made her look ancient.

‘I'm going to have to try for Mr Simmons,' she said, ‘I've no choice; there's no one else.'

Early one morning I went to the cemetery with Mr Simmons in his Rover. It was a thing he really wanted to do—it being his late wife's birthday—and the others were too squeamish to go. I thought it'd be a bit of a skive. The normal thing to do, apparently, was to drop the patient off at the warden's post with a few details and wait in the car. I could have let Miss Pitt know about the outing, I suppose I was contractually obliged to, but I hadn't the heart on this particular day.

Mr Simmons' driving was awful and I had to keep saying, ‘Keep to the left,' because he constantly veered over into the middle of the road. I realized he really shouldn't be driving when he turned into a gateway for no reason and had to reverse out again and couldn't see in the mirror because he couldn't move his head in that direction. When we finally arrived at the cemetery I could tell the drive had stressed him too much for me to simply dump him with the warden—especially as the warden looked quite grumpy.

‘We're very popular today,' said the warden, nodding towards a group of visitors. And he offered us a map of the graves. Mr Simmons said he knew the way but he took the map for reference.

We walked along a few paths and it did seem to be busy. Clusters of people and single figures stood beside graves and sat on benches and the place was alive with activity.

We reached Mrs Simmons' grave. I expected Mr Simmons to lay the flowers down and cross himself but he stood and looked at the stone. I lit a fag, more out of self-consciousness than actually wanting one, and walked away a bit in case he burst into tears. But he didn't, he spoke quite formally, his feet planted on the tiny, gravelly garden with his hands by his sides. I didn't hear it all, only, ‘… I didn't make you happy, but I remarried, you know.' It was quite conversational, and like a play where people say things they'd never say in real life just to explain to the audience what's going on.

‘… and I was happy. I think you'd be pleased about that.'

And then he saluted the stone and began to walk away. I thought we were going back to the car but Mr Simmons said, ‘No, hang about, I need to see my other wife.'

‘How many wives have you had?' I asked.

‘Two,' he said, and we chatted as we strolled. His first marriage had been twenty years of mild misery. His second, only three of near bliss until his wife had died stupidly from flu because they'd not realized how bad she was and not wanted to bother the doctor. And now Miss Pitt—who he barely knew and had seen probably twice all the time his wife had been alive—had swooped in and spoilt his already broken life with her voice, her bossiness, her leotards, her awful taste and a mirror with a rainbow surround that made him sick to look at.

He was all tangled up with her now because the will pretty much made him a caretaker—until he died, when everything became hers—and she would badger him about the state of the paintwork on the window frames. ‘She doesn't want to inherit a wreck,' said Mr Simmons.

We had some difficulty locating the second wife's plot on the map and when we worked it out (K45), it was quite a walk up a long slope and past the baby graves which were little toadstools and bunnies and I couldn't help wondering whether or not Bluebell had qualified for a toadstool or a bunny or whether he'd been too premature. And by the time we got to K45 Mr Simmons was exhausted and we both felt wretched. It was obviously a less expensive plot with no view—except of a grey stretch of the railway just before it reaches the station—and no trees, no benches and no glassy green gravel, just the dead stems of something in an ugly square vase in a rectangle of stubbly grass, and a hundred similar plots. It was where the newest graves and most of the visitors were and it felt strangely crowded and desperate.

Mr Simmons started speaking to K45. Here his hands, rather than hanging by his sides, flapped around expressively as he spoke. I walked away again so as not to hear. But caught this.

‘Well, happy birthday, lovey. I've been to see Floss and she's fine.'

And I saw his hanky come out and suddenly understood why no one else could face coming here. I lit another fag and watched a train stop for a signal and, turning to see if I could make out the university, I saw a figure rushing towards us.